So you’ve found the perfect sales professional. He/she has accepted your proposal, the future’s looking rosy.
But will the marriage survive the honeymoon, or will there be a divorce before the ink on the contract has dried, leaving you with hefty costs and a woeful gap in your workforce?
Statistics are not encouraging. According to the Chartered Institute of Professional Development, executive turnover is up to 30% – that’s 3 out of 10 executives lost in the first year of employment, with severe financial penalties. A mis-hire can cost up to 6 TIMES the annual salary – especially for a highly-ranked executive.
You should also consider the negative impact a poor choice can have on business generally – loss of opportunities, legal wrangles over compensation and severance, disruption and of course, a waste of valuable time, with the whole recruitment process having to be repeated.
Avoiding such headaches depends largely on careful planning from the outset. Remember, no matter how impressive the CV, it pays to look beyond mere paper claims to discern whether the candidate truly understands your operation and if they are likely to fit in with your existing team.
Recruitment is a complicated process that can leech your time and energy and there’s too much at stake to rely on ‘gut feeling’. Employers need every tool available to discern whether that promising prospect will actually stay the course.
The need to dig deeper
Despite radical advances in business practices over the last 20 years, recruitment processes have scarcely changed at all, except in one vital area – the increasing use of psychometric and behavioural profiling to determine a candidate’s suitability, strengths and weaknesses. Yet, while accepted as a proven science, profiling alone will not guarantee retention without a company benchmark specific to the role. A candidate may be well-motivated and highly-achieving, but will he or she adapt – indeed flourish – within your organisational environment?
Behavioural profiling can certainly reduce staff turnover, providing a deeper understanding of a candidate than a well-presented CV or the interviewer’s gut feeling. The proof of the pudding is, not just the sourcing but the staying power of an undoubted talent.
First impressions may count but are not always correct. An applicant may have looks, confidence and communication skills to impress, yet will they get on with existing staff? He or she may be highly qualified and experienced with all the requisite training, but will they commit themselves whole-heartedly to the job? Are they prepared to listen or stubbornly set on doing things their own way? Are they self-motivated? What are their core attitudes and beliefs? And, despite what they say they’ll do, what will they do for your company?
Our Solution
My own agency, Huntr, draws on insight. For each new brief, we analyse the client’s operation, ethos and cultural environment before identifying the key behavioural and characteristic traits required from a new executive to be successful in post. We then create a unique benchmark for our individual clients with which all candidates will be measured.
Once on the shortlist, applicants undergo behavioural assessments compared against the company’s bespoke job survey to determine organisational compatibility and future potential. Only those aligned to the client’s defined parameters go forward to the next phase.
By utilising multi-level assessment, we help to remove the guesswork and take away the ‘Gut-feel’ decisions.
Being thorough gets results. Our process has been shown to save employers substantial money in their annual budget for recruitment by getting the process right 96/100 times. In fact, we’re so confident of our service that we offer an industry leading 12-month guarantee of our candidates.
As top talent becomes increasingly hard to find – and retain – there’s only one viable solution for the hard-pressed employer: A recruitment agency with the tools to benchmark your existing team and assesses potential candidates accordingly.
The benefits of such a service is two-way, helping companies gain the best individuals to take their operation forward and guiding executives to put their career on course.