Traditionally the process of psychometric assessment for recruitment and development purposes has been reserved for senior management, or non-care employees within the Corporate sector. These assessments provide a wealth of information, are often time consuming and come with a hefty price tag.
 
There has been far less up-take of assessments for frontline roles. The reasons being that many of the tools available were not Care sector specific, were seen as costly and not suitable for volume recruitment. In addition, because of the range of education and literacy levels within the applicant pool, psychometric testing was often seen as not being applicable for frontline staff.
 
As with everything, things change. The care sector is evolving and a growing number of providers want, and need, to know more about their job applicants than work experience and education alone. The focus is shifting to soft skills, such as possessing the right personal values, work behaviours and personality. These insights combined with the traditional recruitment methods, give a more rounded picture before any employment decision is made.
 
Care Advantage is a proven, short and affordable online behavioural screening tool. With built-in benchmarks for care roles it compares your applicants against good performers in the role – be it a home care or residential setting. We have already discussed 10 reasons to use values and behavioural assessment in general. Now we’d like to discuss 5 reasons why it has become a must to use behavioural screening for frontline care roles:
 
(1) Better ways to look at new entrants to the Sector
Staff shortages in the care sector is only growing and the need to fill vacancies has extended recruitment efforts to well outside of the pool of experienced care workers. Using behavioural screening will help you find those applicants who have the right personality and work attitude for a frontline care role, but not yet the relevant work experience. A new job can be learned by training but changing a person’s personality or work behaviour is far more difficult! Start your search by comparing your applicants to proven performers in the role.
 
(2) Risk Management- Staff turnover & Duty of Care
Using behavioural screening helps to identify risks that otherwise may have been kept out of sight or are hard to discover during interview. Care Advantage’s job fit and attitude reports highlight areas of concern in behaviour or personality and provide targeted interview questions to explore these concerns in more detail. This gives you more insight to make rigorous and informed recruitment decisions.
 
A current user of behavioural screening explains it well: “If we say that we have a rigorous recruitment process in place and don’t use behavioural screening, then our system simply cannot be described as rigorous.  I do not want to be the Director standing up in front of a court trying to defend our recruitment process and having no empirical scientific measurement of an applicant in place.  I believe that it’s completely inadequate to simply say: we did a Data Base Search, took up references and had a structured face to face interview for a role as important as being a lone worker looking after lone vulnerable adults in their own homes…”
 
(3) Give Hiring managers the insights of a consistent and proven process
Many care providers are moving to centralised managed HR models providing the pre-selection of applicants where the Hiring Managers conduct the interviews. With staff shortages also in HR and the logistical challenges of a multi-site operation, HR is just not able to attend every interview. By using behavioural screening HR can now provide the site manager not only with the names and resumes of the shortlisted applicants but also with a personality and attitude report including job specific interview questions. A behavioural screening process provides cost effective tools and guidance for a more successful recruitment process.
 
(4) Reduce the time and cost spent on applicants you don’t hire
Recruitment takes time. Many hiring managers complain about the stacks of resumes that come in for certain roles. Using behavioural screening at the top of the selection funnel means that you let your applicants complete a quick online assessment as part of their applicant process. The results are used to sort the applicants by best job fit and THEN you start reading their resumes in that order. Any gems are more easily identified. Time is saved!
 
(5) Reduce no-shows at interview
How often have you prepared for a job interview only for the applicant to not show up? What a wasted time for yourself and the other people on the interview panel. Using behavioural screening adds a simple layer to weed out those applicants who weren’t really interested in the job in the first place.

Learn more about behavioural screening with Care Advantage!
 
Read the Case study where we explore if Care Advantage can predict performance of new care workers and if Care Advantage can correctly identify potential misconduct risk in applicants.
 
Ready to see for yourself? Try Care Advantage on your next frontline vacancy – assess 5 applicants at no cost – it will take each applicant 12 minutes to complete the assessment and provide real insights into your hiring decision. We will manage everything, all you have to do is send the link to your applicants. ​

Did you know…
Around 80% of Fortune 500 companies and over 80% of companies in Australia utilise psychometric profiling in recruitment. We’ve put together ten reasons why everyone should use Psychometric Assessments!
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(1) You’ll reduce hiring mistakes
The recruitment process is costly and making a hiring mistake can prove to be even more costly. Preventing just one wrong hire could save your organisation thousands of dollars. In fact, the cost of a mishire is set to be around 20% of that employee’s annual salary, which equates to approximately $8,000 for a personal care worker!
 
Assessments can help you avoid to hire someone who performs well in an interview environment but nowhere else.
 
(2) You’ll be able to understand the whole person
People are more than just the snapshot you’ll get of them during an interview and HR experts will tell you that a person’s resume isn’t always as it seems. It’s important to look at the bigger picture. A resume only tells you about a person’s work history, education and maybe their hobbies, but it won’t tell you if this person has the right values and attitude for the job. With so many new (and unexperienced) entrants coming into the sector, hiring people with the right values and behaviours over experience is more important than ever before. You may have heard the saying: people are often hired for what they know, but fired for who they are…
 
(3) The results are measurable
Quantifying human behaviour and its associated impact on the bottom line is probably the most difficult challenge facing organisations. Correlating assessment and recruitment results with outcome variables such as core job performance, employee turnover, engagement and commitment is the way for HR departments to transform their image to a business critical function.

(4) You’ll shorten the hiring process
Recruiting the right person, can take months and as we all know, time is money. Online assessment systems give you the ability to pre-screen candidates, speeding up the process, and allowing you to have someone (and not just anyone- the one!) in the job within weeks rather than months.
 
Some values and behavioural screening methods – like Care Advantage – can be used at the top of the selection funnel. Skip sifting through resumes, instead let your applicants complete two short assessments first. Use the results to then decide which resumes to examine! Instead of reading 100 resumes, you’ll only have to read 20.
 
(5) You’ll have a more robust recruitment process
Adding psychometric testing to your recruitment process helps create a standardised and robust recruitment process. Hiring managers will come to the interview with a more rounded picture of the applicant knowing better what to ask and which areas to explore further. Adding a testing layer to the process weeds out those applicants who are not really interested in the job anyway, resulting in a reduction of no-shows to interview as a bonus. 
 
(6) You’ll be making informed decisions, not assumptions
Human instinct is little better than rolling dice. Psychometric testing adds a level of standardisation and objectivity to the traditional art of recruitment by helping to remove the unconscious bias that comes along with many selection decisions.
 
Knowing how effective a certain recruitment method is in predicting the future outcome is called predictive validity where 1 is labelled as “certain”. Now that we know what predictive validity is. looking at the resume alone – work experience and education – has a rating of only 0.2. Adding to that a structured interview increases the predictive validity to 0.5, however adding psychometric assessments and validating interview questions ups this to 0.8!

Psychometric assessments are a more valid method than interviews, academic achievement & reference checks, and when utilised in combination are highly predictive of future job performance.
 
(7) There is return after selection
Once a selection is made, the psychometric results can be put to further use. By this stage we’ve gained so much knowledge which can directly feed into onboarding and development programmes.
 
Also knowing who your employees are helps knowing what they want from the company, how to motivate them and how to get them to work towards their strengths.
 
(8) They guarantee consistency of benchmarks
By using psychometric tests, candidates are all assessed according to the same criteria. This means that they are not judged based on any biases or prejudices, such as race or education. This in turn helps in taking more objective decisions.
 
As a bonus, Care Advantage has the option to create your own benchmarks so you can compare applicants against your top performers, hiring only those who fit your company’s values and culture best.
 
(9) You’ll attract better employees 
With over 83% of companies in Australia using psychometric testing as part of their hiring process candidates expect any company worth being a part of to use it. So don’t miss out!
Behavioural assessments will improve the credibility of the recruitment process and show candidates that the role, and their part to play in the company, is valued.
 
 (10) You don’t need a psychology degree
Gone are the days of complex reports where a psychologist was needed to interpret psychometric test results. Psychometric test providers are slowly adopting a ‘design first, data second’ principle. Beautifully designed, data rich and easy to read reports can now be instantly accessed online.
 
Simplified real world language and easy to interpret graphics that tell you exactly what you need to know are becoming the norm. The reports empower every hiring manager to make a well-informed decision.

Bias in the recruitment process can have far-reaching consequences, but there are things recruiters can do to minimise the chances of making poor decisions. There is no escaping the fact that however open-minded we may be, we all have our own set of in-built prejudices and biases. Our upbringings, personalities and life experiences all influence how we perceive others and how likely we are to take to the people we meet. Recruiters and HR managers are certainly no exception, but the decisions they make during the recruitment process can have a significant impact for both the candidates and the company.

The dangers of bias
First impressions matter, and more hiring mistakes are made within the first half hour of an interview than at any other time. Picking the wrong person for the job can be a costly mistake financially, but in the worst-case scenario, it can also leave a company open to legal action.
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The stereotypes and prejudices an interviewer carries with them, however unconscious, will inevitably affect the conclusions they reach about an applicant, and can influence their decision on hiring them or eliminating them from the process. Many managers and HR heads conflate ‘doing well in an interview’ with ‘doing well in the job’, when the confidence and competence demonstrated during an interview doesn’t always determine how successful someone will be once in the position.

The many forms of bias
Bias comes in many different shapes. Some people will have fixed stereotypes in mind about race, religion or gender, for example. Some may believe that all women in their thirties will be wanting time out to have children in the next couple of years. Others will fall prey to the so-called ‘halo-pitchfork effect’, whereby they are so impressed with a particular positive aspect of the candidate that they overlook all other faults.

There can also be nonverbal bias, taking to or against an individual, based on their body language or appearance. A preconceived notion that anyone with tattoos or a shaved head means trouble could see recruiters missing out on a perfectly good candidate, simply because their appearance didn’t chime with what the interviewer wanted to see. Similarly, there’s a danger of falling into the ‘like me’ trap, where an interviewer warms to a candidate, not because they’re an ideal fit for the job, but because they share similar personalities, interests, traits or characteristics.

How to minimise the risk of bias
The decisions taken after face to face interviews are, by their very nature, subjective. While we have to accept that bias is simply a part of life, finding ways to make more effective hiring decisions should be at the top of any Human Resources department’s agenda.
 
In order to select the best person for the job, you must have a structured approach to the recruitment process, with a clearly defined criteria of skills and attributes that a candidate must have. While this won’t eliminate bias from the procedure, it will minimise the chances of a recruiter making a snap decision, based on their own preferences.

One of the safest ways to curb the risk of a poor decision is through the use of behavioural and values screening (psychometric testing). These are a rigorously researched means of evaluating an individual through personality profiling, motivation questionnaires, ability assessments and reasoning tests. Taken together, these help build an objective picture of a candidate and help recruiters make a more impartial judgment on whether they are suited to a particular role.

With some of the most advanced behavioural and values assessments available, Care Advantage is a leading provider of pre-employment tests, specially designed to help HR professionals make better recruitment decisions. Check out the range of assessments today at www.careadvantage.com.au

​With help from Care Advantage, you can identify future talent, look beyond the CV and objectively improve your recruitment effectiveness.