By our partner Cultivate Advisors
Whether you’re just starting to expand your team or looking to add a few talented employees to your roster, learning how to recruit well is important not only for filling job vacancies but also helps prevent costly hiring decisions. And when it comes to recruiting, finding the perfect candidate is the most critical part of the process.
When looking for the right candidate to hire, there are often key characteristics that you should look for. And to identify those characteristics, a behavioral assessment might be your secret weapon.
What Is a Behavioral Assessment?
A behavioral assessment is a method used to observe, describe, explain and predict behavior. Similar to popular personality tests, including Myers-Briggs and Enneagram, behavioral assessments use questions to identify one’s behavior based on unique traits exhibited across various situations. Often, behavioral assessments will indicate whether someone is introverted or extroverted or how they make decisions. With the right information, the results of a behavioral assessment can tell you if a candidate will be a good fit within your organization and company culture.
Although there are many assessments available, at Cultivate Advisors, we’ve partnered with AcuMax Index, a unique assessment designed to help hire, engage and develop teams by identifying key characteristics that align with the role and the organization.
Recently, Cultivate CEO Casey Clark sat down with Jay Hawreluk, CEO of AcuMax, to discuss how using the AcuMax Index can help owners scale their business faster by giving them the advantage of hiring the right fit for each role based on the prospective employee’s hardwiring.
As Jay points out, behavioral assessments like the AcuMax Index can look beyond behavioral analysis, which can change over time, to focus on the neurological side, which identifies the neurological pathways deeply ingrained in each person.
Understanding the hardwiring of your interview candidates can help you hire and manage better teams. In addition to giving you insight into how an individual thinks, behavioral assessments open the door to improved communication, productivity and decision making by understanding the individual’s preferred way of processing information, communicating and solving problems.
Here are three areas of the recruiting process where you can use a behavioral assessment to make data-driven decisions to grow that lead to higher employee retention.
1) Identifying the characteristics of the perfect candidate
The first step in creating a recruiting plan is to identify who you need. Planning your recruiting strategy involves analyzing your business goals and considering how roles will need to expand and shift as the business grows. Compile an ideal profile for each role to use as a template for future hires. This includes pulling together profiles from top-performers on your team.
2) Developing a screening process
As a small business, you might not have a dedicated recruiter. Pre-screening candidates using a behavioral assessment gives you a peek into how that person is wired. This snapshot will tell you if they’re a good fit for your company culture and the role based on your ideal candidate template.
Pre-screening candidates can speed up your process by removing subjectivity and eliminating candidates who aren’t a fit for your company before you interview them.
3) Using what you learn to dig deeper during the interview process
In an interview setting, candidates will often tell you what you want to hear, which isn’t always helpful. A job candidate may have a perfect resume and skill set for the job, but when it comes to the interview process, it helps to be armed with as much information as possible to make the right decision.
With the assessment results, you know how your candidates are wired, allowing you to frame specific questions that dig deeper into any areas you have additional questions and can help you identify if the candidate is self-aware and honest in their responses.
If you’re not using behavioral assessments for pre-employment screening and employee development, you could be losing valuable time in your search for the perfect candidates. And if recruiting isn’t your strong suit or you don’t know where to start, you don’t have to go at it alone. Schedule a free two-hour session with a Business Growth Advisor to dig into your business and develop a custom recruiting plan so you can build your best team yet.
Email [email protected] to learn more.