This is the fifth article in the series about the Eight Biggest Challenges Facing Recruiters by Smart Recruit Online.

Just to get started, let’s remind ourselves of the serious dangers and consequences of making a ‘bad hire’.

Comprehensive PWC and KPMG surveys estimate that at least one in five hires turns out to be a mistake, that probably would not have happened had better screening and due diligence taken place.

To calculate the real cost of a bad hire that leaves in the first year of employment, try this calculation: Take one quarter of the annual salary package (the cost of hire), then add this to the amount of salary actually paid before the bad hire left and then double that figure (the replacement cost) and you will have a rough idea of the true cost to the business. However, if the individual was responsible for sales or if they had a toxic effect on other people within the company, then this figure could be considerably higher.

To put that into cash terms, a person on a £50k salary that leaves after 6 months, has cost the business approx. £75k.

Various surveys have proved that more than 80% of all people that leave a job in the first 12 months leave for behavioural and cultural reasons, so I think that it makes sense to start here.

We all know that recruitment is hard enough when we are just trying to match CV’s to jobs based on skills and experience, so to then include the complex assessment of behavioural and cultural alignment is I am sure a scary prospect to many recruiters.

Personally I am not a massive fan of Psychometric profiling as the reports generated by most of these companies require an experienced practitioner just to interpret the results. More recently we have seen the rapid growth in the popularity for behavioural profiling tools, where the company is required to complete a benchmark that the candidates are measured against.

What I like most about this methodology, is that you are measuring the cultural and behavioural preferences of the company against those of the candidate and thus highlighting areas of potential conflict. Once we know where the areas of conflict exist, we can then, either make subsequent decisions or embark upon further examination at interview or apply more screening.

For customer facing roles, I have also become a massive fan of video profiling. What is important here, is to distinguish between a live video interview and a recorded set of questions. Video profiling is the later, with the candidate receiving an invite to respond to questions in their own time.

Resist the temptation to ask interview questions when using video profiling tools and instead invite the applicants to talk about themselves. What you are ideally judging is appearance, communication skills and personality. This will give you something that is as close as you will get to that first 5 minutes of a face to face interview.

The final bit of due diligence to apply before making an offer should be the background check, consisting of an ID check, reference check and qualification checks. Thankfully most of us do a reference check, but you might be surprised to hear that ID and qualification checks are relatively inexpensive via established organisations like Experian.

Hopefully the evolution of recruitment systems and the integration of better screening tools, will see a shift towards more holistic assessments becoming the norm, as this will improve decision making and ensure that people being hired will perform better and stay in their jobs longer.

I guess that one of the biggest challenges in making this transition rests with the people doing the recruitment on the coalface, as they may well have a priority to get the job filled over and above anything else.

The business owners’ priority is always to find the best-suited person for the job and that objective supports better due diligence and the holistic approach.

However, until the business starts to influence the HR & Recruitment functions in the company, by measuring retention, incentivising employee longevity and making HR & Recruiters more accountable, then UK Plc may continue to be slow to change.

Skills assessments, technical tests and competency based assessments are all important factors and should not be excluded. It’s time for business owners to adopt a strategy that makes this an essential part of the recruitment process and not optional. Recruitment management platforms can integrate the full suite of screening tools and make them more accessible.

About the Author

This article was originally published on the Resource Library. Mark Stephens has over 20 years of business management experience, across Sales, Marketing, Recruitment and technology environments. Mark is a serial entrepreneur and is the current joint MD of the F10 Group and the founder of Smart Recruit Online, Ask the Experts, Websmart UK and most recently the Recruitment Alliance.