The value a great candidate can bring to an organisation can be monumental. They can be the missing piece to the puzzle and help overcome challenges or capitalise on new opportunities.
From helping to contribute to effective leadership teams, to introducing new technical skills and knowledge putting the right people in the right place at the right time is central to business success.
This makes the whole process of bringing in new people into an organisation, particularly at senior level and in high stake roles, a vital process to get right.
But how can organisations really ensure they know who to bring in?
Candidate assessment for high stake roles is something we strongly believe in here at Edgecumbe. The insights and information gained from such a process can help organisations feel more confident about their hiring and recruitment strategy. We help our clients achieve more by developing powerful leaders and leadership teams. Being able to help our clients accurately assess and evaluate candidates therefore becomes a vital component.
The importance of candidate assessment
Candidate assessments help provide recruiters and organisations with important insights into the traits, attitudes and behaviours most likely to help or hinder the candidate in performing their role. This helps a recruiter or organisation understand the potential strengths and limitations of a candidate when they are placed within the role. It doesn’t matter if the assessment is evaluating an internal candidate or an external candidate, the exercise will help determine if there is a good fit between the candidate and the role.
Tips for assessing candidates
If you’d like help in candidate assessments (for both internal and external appointments), contact us today. From helping assess candidates to bring into an organisation or assessing current leaders and executives to spot weaknesses or potential risks, we can help. Learn about our approach and how we can enable your business to gain a competitive advantage.
Below are just a few things to consider when assessing candidates:
- Understanding the importance of personality – Too many recruiters and organisations focus solely on academic, skillset and knowledge to evaluate candidates, recruiting for skill over culture. Personality and behavioural tests are a crucial element of understanding the suitability of a candidate. Personality tests are a good place to start. To learn more about psychometric testing, check out the psychometrics we use here at Edgecumbe.
- Candidate drivers and motivators – If organisations don’t fully understand what drives and motivates a candidate, how will they know if they can offer the candidate a fulfilling job opportunity? Assessing what truly motivates a candidate (both consciously and unconsciously) is a key ingredient in assessing their overall suitability for the organisation.
- Cultural fit – The underlying culture and values of an organisation must be considered when evaluating any candidate. Cultural fit and having shared values allows employees to better relate to an employer and therefore become more engaged and motivated to achieve goals.
- Mitigating risk – At each step of a recruitment or candidate assessment phase, it’s important to gain an understanding of the risk factors associated with each candidate. These may be fairly obvious, such as experience gaps, but just as important and often hidden at interview, are psychological factors such as strengths that become overplayed under pressure, which can emerge just as the going starts to get tough.
- Context – Good hiring and effective candidate assessments are tailored to a specific organisation or situation. The “perfect” candidate is completely context-dependent, and this is why understanding personality and behaviour is so important in assessments. What an organisation needs now, may not be what it needs in a year’s time. And what one organisation may need, another one might not.
Recruitment assessment with Edgecumbe
As a business psychology consultancy, our expertise goes beyond candidate assessment to encompass all areas of leadership and people analytics. We help some of the top organisations in the world with leadership assessment and development, recruitment assessments, executive coaching and engagement surveys.
To learn more about what we do, discover all our services.
For help with candidate assessment, we can help you get set up with industry-leading personality and behavioural questionnaires and work with you to extract key insights for each candidate. Depending on the role, additional psychometric assessments may be recommended, such as general cognitive ability tests, abstract reasoning tests or business or critical thinking tests. By doing this, we can ensure you make excellent decisions when it comes to bringing new people into your organisation.
To find out whether we could help your organisation make tangible improvements in leadership then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
