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Recruitment can feel incredibly risky, and it is. Knowing who will succeed in a role can feel as much of an art as a science.
Making the right appointment, especially at executive level, is vital and mistakes are costly. The cost of a bad hire is estimated to be three times the salary paid. With the average CEO salary in the UK estimated to be £4.2 million, we’re talking about a potential cost of more than £12 million for the wrong hire!
This challenge falls squarely on the shoulders of the HR department and usually the chief people officer. It’s a heavy responsibility, but there are steps HR leaders can take to reduce the risk, and the costs associated with the wrong decision.
Assessments to inform hiring decisions
In our experience, the right assessments, combined with structured interviews, offer the best chance of getting senior leadership hiring right. Conversely, ignoring the output of an assessment that advises against recruiting a particular individual has resulted in the costly hiring mistakes.
The trick is to use the right assessments. Two assessments that are proving most effective at informing the best hiring decisions look at leadership values and behaviours .
At a senior level it is not just about experience, it’s also about what motivates the leader and how they behave.
The Complete Values Profile helps determine cultural fit, growth potential and authenticity. Leaders can be benchmarked against a global database of more than 11,000 leaders and that provides a genuine insight into the right hiring decision.
The Complete Behavioural Report measures the behaviours that are the building blocks of leadership skills. In this assessment, potential recruits are interviewed and assessed against the 11 behaviours that are proven to elevate performance and deliver bottom line results.
Put together, these two assessments provide an incredibly powerful insight into a potential recruit’s suitability for the role, the organisational culture and the team they are being recruited into.
The accurate interpretation of assessment results
While both these assessments – for values and behaviours – are standardised to enable accurate benchmarking, their real value comes with expert interpretation. In advance of any assessments, a Complete consultant takes a client’s job description and a verbal brief to map out the ‘ideal’ candidate. The assessment results can then be compared to this ‘ideal’ to enable the recruiter to make an informed decision.
In the executive summary example, the dimensions of the specific role being recruited have been identified (first column) and the desirable values (middle columns) and key behaviours (far right columns) mapped accordingly. The dark blue boxes (filled with white text) show where, in the assessments, this candidate has met or exceeded the desired values and key behaviours. In this case, there are question marks about the candidate’s values in the area of strategic approach.
This potential weakness (strategic approach) is now clear to the recruiter and can either rule out this candidate or prompt further questions and investigations. It might even result in the candidate being recruited but receiving focused development once in the job to strengthen their strategic approach.
