Q: Can we afford to screen out candidates when we are so desperate for employees?
A: Yes. You can. And you must.
SHORT-STAFFED SHOULD NOT EQUAL SHORT-SIGHTED. Existing team members are stressed and overworked. Customers are frustrated. Business is suffering. But no matter how desperate you are for bodies, some hiring decisions just aren’t worth the risk.
Some individuals are more likely than others to:
- Ignore safety rules (possibly resulting in injuries, increased insurance rates, and even deaths)
- Steal from you (product or intellectual capital)
- Use drugs
- Harass other employees
- Expose you to viruses (human or electronic)
The possible resulting headlines from any of the above could cause irreparable damage to your company’s reputation and brand; to employees’ lives and livelihoods. While you may have to “lower the bar” in some areas, you can’t afford to do so on non-negotiables such as values.
So, how can you continue to leverage assessments and other screening practices during a tight labor market?
- Avoid the worst of the worst. Even if you feel compelled to accept some applicants that you might have eschewed before, stand firm on some criteria, such as the above. Assess for non-negotiables. Tools that assess values and attitudes are usually relatively cheap and easy to use and offer a ton of value regardless of the employment market.
- Measure potential. A smaller pipeline may mean considering applicants with a wider range of backgrounds and experiences than usual. Stop sorting resumes based on your impressions of what experience or education might predict success (there’s plenty to data to show that it won’t anyway). Instead, assess to see if candidates have the APTITUDE to be good in your roles. Do they have the ABILITY to learn? Do they have the right MINDSET? Are they driven, motivated, and passionate? If so, they may be worth investing in, even if you have to train them.
- Improve retention. You’re trying to reduce vacancies… the last thing you want to do is continue to lose the people you succeed in hiring. Use assessment results to maximize onboarding, training, and coaching. Use them to see how the person will fit with the team, and to see how to best motivate them and communicate with them. Insights from assessments may enable you to make minor tweaks in how you approach a new employee that will make all the difference.
- Keep tracking data. Worst case scenario… your organization decides to hire despite assessment outcomes. While certainly not ideal, it’s a grand experiment that may pay dividend in the long run! By hiring people that score poorly on your assessment, you’ll be able to see how that ultimately correlates with their performance and retention (and if it’s a good assessment, it WILL correlate). Perhaps when things have shifted back toward an employers’ market, you’ll have ample data to show your leadership that the assessments actually have high predictive validity and increase their confidence in the tools and processes you’re using.
More data is always better. Even if you have to leverage them a little differently than before, assessments can be an invaluable way to protect the culture and teams you’ve worked so hard to create.
