Recruitment is the first step in the life cycle of an employee. Yet processes and outcomes are no better now than 10 years ago. With all the innovation around hiring, I often wonder why we are still reading Resumes, interviewing people with little or no real insight into potential, other than a one-hour meeting. We still draw on our own personal bias in the interview room, and we still read hundreds of Resumes a day.

To be more specific, the hiring process hasn’t changed. There are new tools like gamification, video screening tools, etc, but you still need to know how someone matches the job and you’ll likely still read CV’s. and spend time screening. 

People make judgments based on their own opinions, bringing with them, their own biases, preferences and decisions. I have personally sat in interviews where candidates got hired based on the biases and power of one person, then watched on as the wheels fell off.

Leadership used to be the pinnacle of career success, but not everyone enjoys leadership and putting an excellent performer into that sort of role could be the end of them. Leaders still get hired and promoted based on their tenure in the organisation and technical expertise, and then get set loose on people they have no heart for. 

The great buzzword about town these days is diversity. It blows my mind when I hear discussions around blind testing CVs to ensure diversity, when I know there is a better way to ensure recruitment practices are aligned to true diversity based on job fit alone.

People are often not developed for their potential because the organisation doesn’t recognise it and departments have no cohesive way to measure talent. Consider the cost of replacing people because they got fed up and left, or the cost of losing people through a change process because they were either mapped into a role they didn’t fit or couldn’t see a viable future. This cost goes further than profits or budgets and has an impact right across the organisation and beyond.

Richard Branson famously said that he prefers to hire for behaviour and potential, because you can teach skills. Behavior + Skills – Job Fit. You can use analytics to determine job fit faster and more cost effectively than having a large recruitment team paid to read CV’s. Behavior analytics also helps drive culture and enables better management outcomes.

Behavior analytics is a growing field. It saves time, money, and risk and boosts productivity through identifying and utilizing the innate strengths of the humans that work in your organisation.  The focus on behaviour is driving big businesses like Google, Cathay Pacific, MasterCard and more around the world. They use it to strategically align their talent throughout the employee life cycle. They use it to help their people realise their career aspirations, and to measure engagement in a very human way.

Bench-marking top performers and hiring to success factors creates a high performing business, whatever the size. Using behavioral data to develop people through the organisation makes perfect sense to me. I can no longer drink the coolade when I can help businesses create lasting value through understanding their people.

Organisations globally do better and operate better as a result of using key data to utilize their workforce smarter. What is stopping your business from making that leap?