As hiring managers seek a solution to The Great Resignation, we must consider the science behind staff turnover and explore the factors we can use to predict these turnover events.
Hiring for a new role – or to correct for turnover – is a significant expense for any company. Using a recruiting service or an automated resume screening tool can significantly reduce the time requirements and workload for the hiring team. Still, they do not guarantee that the selected candidate will be a star performer.
Even using a conditional offer of employment or a “work trial” to allow HR staff and direct managers to assess performance after the candidate has a chance to adapt to the work environment has its limitations. Not to mention the additional expense of returning to the search process if the selected candidate does not work out. Pre-employment testing allows you to assess a candidate at a fraction of the cost of these extended work trials, but they’re only effective when you use the right tool.
The pre-employment assessments on the market most commonly measure one of three things – cognitive abilities, or “IQ,” personality factors, and values. Some assessments measure ethics, job-specific knowledge or skills, or leadership skills like emotional intelligence, or “EQ,” which have also gained popularity over the last few years.
While each of these components is well established in the academic literature as critical factors to job performance, they are only a few factors that science has proven heavily influence how long we stay at a job. Measurable factors like the length of time someone has been in a position, whether their salary is competitive for the area, or how long it has been since they received a pay raise or promotion can all be predictors of turnover. And while these metrics are valuable HR tools, they still fall short of the complete picture of turnover.
Ultimately, people quit because they don’t feel their day-to-day work experience is a good fit. This perspective is often due to a clash between the employees’ work style and the leadership style and organizational culture found at the job.
While there are many hiring assessments out there that measure personality and claim to give insight into how a person will behave in the workplace, they are all based on the same handful of academic theories. They can tell us whether an individual is more likely to work steadily on a project or leave it to the last minute, or if they will work harder for a pay raise or a plaque with their name on the wall. They can tell us if someone thrives in quiet or chaos, or if they prefer routine or respond best to dynamic situations that require innovation.
However, in the end, they have not been able to tell us whether someone will fit well and thrive in a new organizational culture. These assessments measure a limited number of factors and rely on the hiring manager’s interpretation of their experiences at the company to decide which candidates look like a good match.
Workzinga’s Culture Fit Assessment measures over three times the dimensions of traditional assessments. It compares the responses across your company to provide a unified picture of your organizational culture. Then, the same factors are measured for each candidate to have a scientifically backed, validated view of the alignment between your organizational culture and the candidates applying to your role.
Check back over the next few weeks as we dive deeper into several of the most used assessments and the science behind changing how we measure organizational culture and allow you to hire for long-term success.
Written by: Nicole Mayo, Workzinga I/O Psychologist
