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.

Behavioural Screening as Part of Selection – Delivering Quick, Cost Effective Results
Much has been written about the growing staff and skills shortage facing the care sector. This is clearly a priority issue, but with staff turnover in the sector averaging 25% for frontline care roles the issue compounds, accelerating the War for Staff we are watching unfold right now. Solutions are often complex requiring a “national” response, however significant inroads can, and have been made “locally”. Many providers addressing workforce issues are finding that one of the most effective strategies available to them is also one of the easiest to implement and delivers some of the highest return on their investment.

The cost of staff turnover
The evidence is undeniable – numerous research studies (Australian and International) over the last 20 years have regularly put the cost on staff turnover at around 20% of the individual’s starting salary recruit and mobilise a frontline role. These studies include international research into the long term care sector (both community or residential settings). These are direct costs and regularly do not include lost productivity or the impact on clients and residents – a critical issue in a CDC world. That is a cost of over $7,000 for a personal care worker earning under $40,000 per annum. Even if you don’t believe the research and think the figure is inflated—cut it in half and you are still around $4,000.

Prevention is the cheapest and easiest part of the cure
The most effective, and the cheapest way to improve staff retention is to reduce hiring mistakes. We define hiring mistakes as

• employees who have been terminated, or
• employees who have resigned- but would not be reemployed by the organisation.

Poor hiring decisions are one of the most expensive workforce issues to deal with – because virtually all the recruitment, induction and staff acquisition costs are front loaded, incurred during the early stages of employment prior to confirming the employee is a “keeper”. Increased competition in the sector, funding cuts and the ongoing push for innovation and efficiency are manifesting themselves in providers looking to reduce costs in their operations. Improving hiring decisions unquestionably delivers significant reduced workforce costs and improves performance in key areas such as client and care service delivery, business efficiency, staff morale and revenue growth.

​Screening methods are common in most sectors
Methods that effectively and quickly screen candidates have been used extensively in many other sectors, at all levels, however in the care sector it tends to be used mainly for management roles. Psychometric or behavioural screening is primarily introduced into the recruitment process to assess employment suitability, including the individual's job fit with a role as well as company/candidate fit. The aim of psychometric testing is to gain an accurate “picture” of the candidate’s abilities and behavioural style, thus providing insights into their on the job behaviours. Behavioural screening processes come in all shapes and sizes however most are generic – assessing for example, leadership style/capability generally with little or no acknowledgement to the issues and needs of a specific sector.

We are all fishing in the same candidate pool
The reality is that providers are working hard to improve recruitment processes in a numerous ways. The message from this is clear. As screening improves and organisations are better able to “cherry pick” candidates, it’s not just the shrinking candidate pool, it’s also the reduced talent in that pool that providers have to contend with.

Care Advantage provides the “industry benchmark” for applicant screening in the  care sector
From front-line to middle managerial roles, Care Advantage has established job benchmarks, comparing your applicants against the profile of acknowledged good performers for almost all care related roles- for example, care and support workers, RN, AIN, hotel services, homecare workers, care managers etc. An unlimited-use Care Advantage licence ensures that providers are screening frontline candidates at the top of the selection funnel giving greater insight into job-fit, suitability and attitude even before the first interview. "Cherry-picking" at its best  - helping providers stay competitive and reduce risk in a time of significant change and disruption within the sector.