The Best Ways to Level Up your Hiring Process

Use of Resumes

Resumes are undoubtedly a great starting point for your hiring process as they provide basic information on the background and experience of your candidate. However, they should only be one piece of the puzzle when determining whether a candidate moves forward or not in your hiring process. This is because the information you get on the resume is not always the most useful or accurate, which keeps you from getting a good grasp on whether or not the candidate is the right fit for your agency. 

Here are a few challenges that you may face when screening resumes:

• Resumes often contain omissions, partial truths, white lies, and bold exaggerations. 
• Resumes are often written by professional writers or copied from resumes templates readily available online.
• Resumes don't reveal a candidate's soft skills, work styles, and motivators.
• Resumes don't reveal a candidate's needs from their professional environment. 

Once you have done some basic resume screening and found a promising candidate, your next step is to utilize Skills Assessments and Personality Tests to determine if a candidate is right for your agency. While I will not discuss it in this article, it would also be best to use Personality Tests to select the compensation model offered to a potential candidate.

Use of Skills Assessments

Skills assessments allow us to create an environment in which a person is asked to validate items they may have on their resumes. A typing test would be an excellent assessment if the resume states they can type 80 wpm. A writing assessment should be an easy assignment if the resume states they have excellent writing skills. Scheduling a Zoom meeting might be a good assessment if the individual needs to possess these skills in their new role. The goal with a Skills Assessment is to ensure that the candidate has the necessary skills to succeed in the role.

Use of Personality Tests

Personality tests give a more holistic approach by allowing us to look at the whole person. They can also help us get much more out of the interview process. With the use of Personality Tests you're able to leverage the candidate's personality data to guide the interview discussion. If you know that your agency's culture is fast-paced and assertive, then a candidate with a low assertiveness score will not thrive in that environment. If your company's compensation plan is heavily weighted on commission sales, a candidate with a low incentive score will not be motivated to perform at their highest level. 

Personality tests give us insights into many critical areas that you could explore during the interview process. Such as: 

• Persuasiveness
• Organization Skills
• Assertiveness
• Emotional vs. Logical
• Introvert vs. Extrovert
• Task vs. People Oriented
• Set Salary vs. Commission Motivated

Bottom Line: Getting to know candidates on a deeper level (pre and post-hire) will improve the candidate's experience, the agency's culture, and your long-term employee retention rates. Let's face it; we have all put a salesperson in a customer service role and a customer service person in a sales role. It just doesn't work, and it is a costly waste of our time, energy, and financial resources. So, make sure you put the right person in the right place by utilizing Personality Tests in your hiring process.