Beyond Skills: How Behavior-based Hiring Can Transform Your Workforce

Today, organizations are experiencing a hiring and retention problem. Over 11 million positions in the U.S. need to be filled, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Though many statistics point to issues like The Great Resignation and a low supply of skilled workers causing massive job vacancies, those factors are only part of the challenge. Organizations need a sustainable and effective hiring process, and the first step to achieving it is understanding what caused the hiring problem we are experiencing today.

The Old Way: Hiring Based on Skills and Experience

Organizational hiring strategies have become time-consuming guesswork that often leads to exhaustion for the recruiting team, a considerable expense for the company, and a frustrating experience for the candidate.

A Leadership IQ study cites that 46 percent of new hires fail within their first 18 months. This “hiring roulette” leaves HR leaders spending their time and energy replacing employees rather than engaging, growing, and training their current workforce. When nearly half of all new hires inevitably leave their position, it’s easy to connect the dots between a broken hiring process and this overwhelmingly void job market.

For over 100 years, relying on skills and resumes has been the norm. While these traditional hiring methods can provide some insight into a candidate’s qualifications, they don’t give recruiters a clear picture of the likelihood that the employee will stay, and they never offer employers data that points back to the scientific probability of whether or not they are a good fit for an organization. This is the missing piece.

Employees Thrive with Behavior-based Hiring 

Behavior-based hiring focuses on understanding potential employees’ behaviors, skills, and traits rather than only considering their education, qualifications, and experience. This approach helps employers gain greater insight into how candidates will cope with certain tasks and how they will fit into the team. It also ensures that employers select the most suitable people for specific roles and that their working style is best suited to the organization’s needs.

An effective behavior-based hiring process will often include performance-based assessments requiring candidates to answer highly-specific questions. This enables employers to better evaluate a potential hire’s ability to think on the spot, stay organized and work on a team.

Leveraging a behavior-based hiring approach increases hiring success substantially by equipping organizations with the scientific probability of whether or not someone is a good fit for an organization, which is objective data. A true scientific probability is not subject to unintentional bias, often resulting from browsing resumes or seeing headshots on a job application. 

The New Way: Behavior-based Hiring for Sustainable Success

The benefits of behavior-based interviewing include reducing employee turnover, enhancing recruitment efforts, and encouraging informed decisions. This psychology-backed hiring approach yields better results by pinpointing an individual’s proven success traits and behaviors to increase the probability of successful hiring to 80-90 percent. 

Recruiters gain a more accurate understanding of a candidate’s qualifications and can better decide whether they are the right fit for the job by assessing their workplace traits and habits. Employees who are typically left wondering, “Am I a good fit for the job?” will know without a shadow of a doubt if they are a good fit before they even step in the door. 

Additionally, this hiring approach leads to overall job satisfaction, which results in a better work environment and improved employee retention. If you put someone in a job where their behaviors match what is deemed to be successful, they will be a happier employee because they are actually performing in a role where their behaviors match up to what is required for success.

By selecting candidates based on their behavior, businesses create a workforce tailored to their needs, creating a strong, cohesive team within a positive working environment that is more engaged, efficient, and confident. 

Permanently Reimagine Your Hiring Cycle with GoodJob

GoodJob eliminates the challenges in your hiring process with a tool that screens candidates against your top performers’ traits and behaviors. With a nine-minute PATH Assessment®, GoodJob surfaces high-performing talent and compares it to your company’s Job Role DNA ™ to ensure the right people in the right seats.  

GoodJob has combined 40 years of research around hiring, workplace success, and behavior psychology into a single software to produce accurate data that builds a predictive model for employee success.

Watch this short clip to learn more about GoodJob.