Successful Hiring Amidst Disruption
Employers and employees are experiencing a perfect storm that is disrupting the employer/employee relationship; Tight Labor Markets, Mass layoffs, Remote Work, Quiet Quitting, Great Resignation, DEI Initiatives, the pressure to hire better, smarter and faster has become more challenging.
Gallup’s 2022 State of the Workplace report found that only 21% of employees report feeling engaged at work with 60% of people emotionally detached at work and 19% downright miserable.?The June 2023 unemployment level of 3% was a 53 year record low. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Hiring managers need to fill job openings quickly while ensuring applicants have the right experience, abilities, habits, and interests to do the job well.?
Job Fit data connects people with job roles and environments where they can thrive, contribute, succeed, and perform at their best.?
By creating consistent hiring processes that rely on objective, scientifically reliable data to help compliment experience, gut feel, and instinct—ultimately leads to better decisions more often.?
Our instinct is subjective and fraught with unconscious bias which crowds out other—more objective and valuable—insights that can lead to better outcomes.
Unconscious bias is part of the human condition and when it comes to hiring, and succession planning, they can and do get in the way of selecting diverse, and qualified candidates; and when instinctive decisions are compounded throughout the enterprise they can thwart DE&I initiatives.
Gender, Race, and Age are three common biases.
Wiley State of Hiring survey results of 5000 + hiring professionals asked to identify organizational processes impacted by unconscious bias.
Awareness training needs to go beyond a single event because—while training helps people become more aware of their own biases—they can also trigger feelings of denial, anger, or helplessness. To get past this, training needs to be ongoing and create safe environments for practice and feedback.
Fixing structural biases such as those that may have been built into screening software, or the application and sourcing processes are vital in order to create structured, data-driven practices that clearly define the hiring criteria and help interviewers conduct consistent, structured bias free interviews.
It is far more practical to debias processes than debias mindsets.
Not all assessment data is created equal. If you want to validate instinctive hiring decisions AND mitigate unconscious bias, you have to ensure the data you’re using is objective and reliable. Normative Assessments, like PXT Select, provide scientifically validated data that is without adverse impact to a demographic.
While self-reported assessments don’t measure unconscious bias, they do offer a fair and unbiased approach to gauge how a candidate’s thinking style, behavioral traits, and interests may be relevant in the workplace, helping the hiring manager control biases around demographics like age, race, or gender.
Next, conducting the assessment doesn’t ensure fairness in the process in and of itself. You must make sure all the people involved in the hiring process are following the recommendations on how to appropriately USE the assessment.
Beyond this, make sure the provider you select meets all the legal requirements pertaining to equitable access to employment. All providers are obligated to provide information supporting fairness and equity for all candidates.
And last, but certainly not least, pay attention to the potential for adverse impact by checking for adverse impact studies published by the provider. This is a check in place to ensure the assessment doesn’t unfairly exclude any demographic group from professional opportunities. See the Science Behind the PXT Select.
Data alone is not going to drive improvement. Instead, you need to create more consistency within your process so that all the parties involved in evaluating and hiring candidates can effectively apply the data to their decisions.
And when there’s consistency, there’s more confidence.?And confidence is what hiring managers need right now because only 3 out of 10 managers feel very confident in their organization’s ability to consistently hire the right people.?
Thinking Style refers a candidate's cognitive ability—how they analyze and communicate verbal and numeric information in the workplace and to determine if their skill levels comport with the needs of the job. Our Computer Adaptive Testing establishes a candidate's highest comfort level in each skill to establish an overall score or Thinking Style job fit.
The next category of data is behavioral traits—which is not “good behavior” or “bad behavior”. It’s a set of preferences and tendencies that describe a person’s strengths and developmental opportunities. It’s also a great data set to help determine behavior in the workplace. Each behavior is presented as a continuum that can be used to compare the candidate to the desired behaviors for a particular role.
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With PXT Select, there are quite a few behavioral continua offered, so I’m just going to go through a few for sake of example.
1.First, there’s Pace right here, and I like this one because it describes a person’s tendencies toward steadiness vs. urgency. Both can be valuable behaviors in a job, but depending on the job, someone who is a bit more methodical and steadier is likely to be more thoughtful and careful while someone who tends toward urgency will get things done quickly—often multi-tasking along the way.
2. Another example is Conformity. The two ends of this spectrum are strong willed vs. compliant. A strong-willed person might prefer to do things their own way while a more compliant person might tend toward following the rules and/or processes in place.
3. Judgment—which assesses how much people trust their own feelings vs. a more factual, analytical style of judgment
With all of these, you can see how different jobs might call for different behaviors to achieve peak performance. It’s a matter of getting really clear on the “ideal” behavior for the job, then comparing candidate’s self-assessment against those behaviors to help evaluate fit.?
The last category here is data that describes a candidate’s interests. And the thing with understanding interests is this… People are usually more satisfied and motivated when the job they are doing day in and day out matches their interests. Here are six different ways you might characterize a candidate’s interest.
1.First, there’s interest in being creative—how interested is someone in imaginative or artistic expression—or generating ideas?
2.You can measure Enterprising interest to understand how much someone enjoys leadership, presenting ideas, or persuading others.
3.There’s financial or administrative interest—someone who enjoys the details and processes in place that guide workers to better outcomes.
4.We have interest in people service—how much does the candidate enjoy helping others, or compromising when needed.
5.Mechanical interest describes how much a person enjoys building or repairing things and finally
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6.Technical interest is someone who enjoys interpreting complex or abstract problems and solving them.?
?How does is this data applied to create a positive impact on your organization's hiring?
Managers know who their top performers are. Our PXT Select concurrent study helps managers identify and hire candidates who share many of the success attributes of their best employees. The challenge is figuring out their recipe for success so you can find new team members who bring similar ingredients to the table. In considering the attributes of your current stars, it’s important to be sure you’re looking at people in comparable roles because—as you saw a minute ago—different traits bring different levels of value to each specific job.?
To help organizations replicate their top performers, PXT Select uses a methodology that:
1Identifies and assesses current top performers.
2) Creates a “model” for the job that paints an objective picture of the attributes needed to succeed in the role.
3)And last, evaluates candidates against that objective model by gathering and applying high quality assessment data throughout the hiring process.?
This methodology depends on an accurate “recipe” for success in the role, which—here at PXT Select—we call a Performance Model.
This model outlines the preferred range of different cognitive abilities, behavioral traits, and interests that support success for a given role, then compares candidate’s assessment data against that range of skills and behaviors to show potential job fit.?
Your first step is to identify and assess your top performers. To do this, you must Decide who is outperforming peers and gather data that is important to their success in their given role, whether in terms of sales performance, output volume, quality metrics, customer satisfaction, or other important indicators.
?To create a performance model entirely from your own specific employee data, you’ll need data from a significant sample of employees in that position. If you’ve got, say, a big salesforce or lots of IT security people on staff, you’ve got what’s needed. If not, it’s not a problem, because PXT has a library of performance models for many different roles, as well as other available methods to help you create customized models. Thus, the model you use can be composed entirely of your own employee data, data from a PXT Select library model, or a combination of the two.
Once you have assessed your performers it is time to create a model for the job. This is an objective picture of what it takes to succeed in this particular role, mapping 20 different factors that can impact on-the-job performance—much of which we reviewed just a minute ago when we talked about tapping into the value of data.
After you’ve established a performance model for a role you’ll be hiring, the next step is to assess job candidates to see how well they fit into the performance model, and how they compare with other candidates. In the PXT Select solution, candidates go through an assessment process with computerized adaptive testing. The aim is to quickly and accurately narrow down where the candidate fits on a particular measure.?And… there is a lot you can do with this information!
?First, you can evaluate a report for an individual candidate’s job fit for a specific position. You’ll get an overall fit score for that candidate and that job role, and also how that score breaks out by the three categories in the performance model. You’ll also see how the candidate scores in each attribute. That lets you identify which specific attributes are the challenge areas, places where the candidate didn’t quite meet the target range that the performance model suggests.?
?As you can see the shaded areas indicate the ideal candidate ranges and guide you through a total person review of how well your new candidate will fit the success model indicated for the job.
You can also use this report to build out your interview questions to learn more about specific aspects of the candidates thinking style, behavioral traits, or interests assisted with the PXT Select Comprehensive Report, And finally, you can use this data to enhance your onboarding experience as well using the PXT Select Coaching Report. These and multiple other reports are included with each PXT Select assessment.?
A success story about a hospital that improved hiring, placement, and retention of nurses using the PXT Select assessment.
This organization has been in the business of operating hospitals for well over a century and is a multi-billion-dollar healthcare operation. Spread over several western states, this client has over 100 clinics and several regional hospitals, including over 15,000 employees and nearly 1,000 employed provider-doctors.
This hospital network operates in several Western states, often in cities with small populations; the study location faced major challenges in hiring and retaining new nurses in the Oncology Department, which was considered their most difficult work environment. Compounding the retention challenge—a competing hospital is literally right across the street in this small city. Pirating each other’s professional staff was a time-honored HR methodology in this setting!
The hospital had not used assessments in their hiring and selection processes before introducing the PXT Select? assessment.
Prior to using the PXT Select 33% of new oncology hires in their RN (registered nurse) positions failed before their 6-month anniversary; a whopping 40% of new CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) hires failed before that point!
The hospital’s own calculations placed the cost of each failed hire at over $80,000, so the financial consequences were a major driver of an initiative to stop the bleeding.
The hospital created Performance Models by assessing RNs and CNAs (separate groups, separate models). These are the two key metrics they used to identify their top performers. First, those who worked in Oncology for two years or more; and scored in the top 25% on their annual performance evaluations.
With the performance models in place, the hospital introduced a few serious modifications to their hiring and onboarding processes. First, each new candidate for a nursing job in the Oncology Department was required to complete the PXT Select? assessment as part of the application process. Contrary to their earlier fears that candidates would refuse to complete the assessment, they discovered that only 7% actually dropped out at the assessment stage.
?Candidates for hire who were scheduled for interviews were scored on the assessment. From there, the report we just previewed was used to help identify finalists and guide interviews. Final hiring decisions were made, considering all the information available, by the same team who had always made those decisions…but included the information from the assessment and the enhanced interview process.
?From there, the hospital introduced a new onboarding process that leveraged the PXT Select Report portfolio within a new mentor program between experienced and new hires. The staff charged with mentoring duties were quite positive about having these additional tools.
These combined changes, using the PXT Select assessment to guide both hiring and onboarding processes, were utilized, and data was collected over 30 months.
The hospital experienced significantly lower turnover with early hire failure rates reduced by 50% for both RN and CNA positions. Furthermore, all the new nurses whose PXT Select assessment match results were 80% or greater were still on the job two years later.
This hospital also improved their hiring, selection, and onboarding processes with successful usage of the PXT Select Assessment in both roles for over 30 months.
?Last, and maybe most importantly was their return on investment. Assessment costs for this pilot totaled $20,000 with the hospital’s cost-saving calculation (determined by the reduction in failed hires) was $350,000, for a return of $17.50 for every dollar invested. This program focused on the Oncology Department—the operating unit with the most severe early hire failure challenge at a single hospital location. Eventually, given this success, the implementation of assessments expanded to three hospitals in the same setting.
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?? Loving this! It’s the main reason why we have built the complete list, recruiter-vetted, behavioral interview questions deck, including questions, frameworks to answer them like STAR as well as example answers https://9to5cards.com/product/the-behavioral-interview-deck/