The interview or pre-hire process is failing to accurately assess the personalities of potential employees, leading to 53 per cent of those who took part in the survey reporting that they had left a job because it did not suit them. With over half reporting this, HR departments are wasting a lot of time and energy on hiring and re-hiring – time that could be better spent.
What are soft skills and why are they so important? Think of soft skills as personality attributes – the things that make a person who they are. For employers and job hunters, soft skills demonstrate how a person will interact with their potential new working team.
Soft skills cover teamwork, decision making, the ability to network, problem-solving, and critical thinking. These skills are hard to measure, particularly in such a rigid environment as a question and answer interview. The traditional method of assessment, such as the interview, could be overlooking such skills in favour of harder, more job-specific skills.
Can employers or recruiters really get to know a person in a relatively short interview? We have all been there – nervously sitting in an interview, trying to make the best impression and not being truly ourselves; in fact, 37 per cent of the HireVue survey respondents said they were doubtful as to whether they were demonstrating their personality in a traditional assessment. By not assessing the right skills and the right personality attributes, employers could be setting up candidates for a fall and a resignation further down the line.
How can recruiters and employers work around this? There are many modern methods of assessment that can be used to get a fully-rounded view of the candidates. In addition to a traditional interview, employers and recruiters should include more innovative and interactive methods, such as video interviews or games and tasks designed to assess and measure cognitive skills.
Games can encourage candidates to relax and display their problem-solving and decision-making skills, while video interviews can be used to accurately measure whether a candidate actively listens and how often someone authentically smiles. While authentic smiling might seem unnecessary for a post in engineering, this particular element of a candidate’s personality is crucial for positions in retail or hospitality.
The key here is potential. 76 per cent of the survey respondents said that their potential in the new job was important to them; however, they did not feel that traditional pre-assessment methods enabled them to show this.
The potential of a candidate is their new post should be critical to employers and recruiter. What can the candidate as an individual bring to the role? With modern techniques such as these explored, the right candidate with the right personality will be able to shine through and succeed in their new role.
