We all know the feeling when a great member of your team hands in their notice. You knew this day could come, but now you’ve got to fill their brilliant shoes with the perfect new hire.
Let’s say the hiring process goes well: You have plenty of suitable applicants, many interview well and you’ve found someone with a fantastic CV who would like the job. Lovely. How easy was that?
But what happens when they don’t meet role expectations or aren’t happy in the position or take advantage of their probation period and leave a week later? On average, it costs 75% of the employee's salary to hire someone and spend time and resources to train them. 2024 research by Spring Personelle reports that 18% of new starters are either having their probation period extended... or failing it all together. Which leaves you back where you started with a bigger hole in the company wallet, a frustrated hiring manager with a missing resource on their team, plus a demotivated hiring team who have spent months working on filling that role .
Some hires don’t work out for reasons beyond our control, but many will be down to the fact that – even after months of searching – you've simply hired the wrong person. It’s not the fault of the hiring team, it’s because the way we’re recruiting doesn’t work. It’s like handing a plumber a whisk and asking them to fix your leaky tap. Without the right tools, you’ll just be left where you started. Or worse.
Here’s the problem: We use CVs and experience to determine who should be on the shortlist – which works for 80% of hires, but in order to guarantee your successful hire rate is closer to 95%, we need to add another level. We need to be looking at the soft skills.
Forbes defines soft skills as ‘people or interpersonal skills’, which range from collaboration and time management to communication, creativity and leadership. A hiring manager will come across many CVs that list these skills. It’s difficult to prove without seeing someone in the role, but that’s where psychometric assessments come in. By asking candidates to complete assessments in Personality and Behaviour, you’re able to see which soft skills come naturally to them in a work environment. All backed by our industry-backed science.
There is a myriad of reasons as to why someone is successful in a role, and unfortunately you can’t create this perfect recipe and use it to find your next hire, but you can get close with Thomas Assess by using psychometrics to build a job profile and selecting three core characteristics that are the most important for the role. You’re able to choose from: analytical, communitive, decisive, driven, emotionally resilient, independent, innovative, process oriented and collaborative.
Once each candidate undertakes the psychometric assessments in behaviour, aptitude and personality, the hiring team will immediately be able to see who is the best fit for the role with data backed by science. And, in the event that there is a candidate with a stellar CV who didn’t quite meet the requirements with their psychometric scores – our psychologists have provided tailored questions to ask in the interview, to dig into their results and help you find the person who is the best fit.
Forbes reports that 84% of the workforce insist that candidates must possess soft skills, and it’s something we’ve been doing for a while with our own hiring at Thomas. The proof is in the pudding. In the last three years, the number of team members who left due to an "unsatisfactory probation period" can be counted on the one hand and only twenty-one employees left within the first year.
When you break that down and compare it to benchmark data,1 in 5 employees fail probation, which is 20% of hires. During that period, we made around 130 hires, so if we were tracking against benchmark data, we would have expected 26 people to have failed probation.
It's like having a superpower, and our employee retention numbers prove it.
Finding and keeping the right hire isn’t a new problem, but it is one that can be solved with our new solutions. Come chat to us today and we’ll book a demo to show you how it all works, and what Thomas Assess can do for your hiring journey.
