Hiring is a very crucial process for any company. Its success—or failure—impacts greatly a business’ operation. You need quality people for your organization to run and grow. That’s why, aside from good credentials and skills, it’s important that your employees are fit for their work. This is called “job match”, and it may just be the secret to your hiring success.
What is job match and what are its benefits?
According to Arlen T. Swenson’s “The New Art of Hiring Smart: Matching the Right Person to the Right Job”, job match refers to how well an individual’s cognitive abilities, interests, and personality traits match those required for success in a particular job. This means that rather than relying on instinct or “gut feelings”, which often leads to impulse and unsuccessful placements, you base your hiring decision on a talent’s compatibility with the work he or she will do for your organization.
Why should you job match?
Have you read the parable “Let the Rabbits Run”? This story tells the tale of a school for young animals that’ll teach running, swimming, climbing, and flying. The rabbit goes into the school and excels at the first two classes which are his favorites and gives him happiness—running and hopping—and fails at swimming and flying. So, his teacher advises him to focus more on swimming and flying or else he’s going to fail.
So, what is the moral lesson of this story? Obviously, rabbits don’t swim and fly. If only the rabbit was running and hopping, then he will be an excellent and happy student. But in real life, people often advise us to improve our weaknesses (which in the story are swimming and flying) while doing nothing about our strengths. This situation can also apply during work by job matching.
When you know of a person’s strengths, you can assign them to a job that will make use of those. As a result, you can help build that person’s self-esteem and help increase his job performance. Without a natural job match and thinking that training and development can overcome the shortcomings of a new hire can be compared to training a rabbit to swim instead of hiring a fish.
Taking into consideration the job match during the hiring process brings a lot of benefits such as:
- Minimize hiring mistakes;
- Identify strengths and limitations;
- Target developmental needs;
- Improve job satisfaction and productivity; and,
- Reduce conflict and absenteeism.
How can you incorporate job matching in your hiring process?
You can incorporate job match in your hiring process by asking specific interview questions or use a job match assessment.
Job match assessments are specifically developed to measure how well an individual fits specific jobs in your organization. Some job match assessments also help you further by providing you guides for the interview.
For example, the ProfileXT, which is a multi-purpose employee assessment used for pre-employment screening, selection, development, training, managing, and succession planning, is actually commonly used as a pre-screening tool to find the best-matched candidate to a job. The ProfileXT measures 20 performance indicators, thinking and reasoning, behavioral traits, interests, and aptitude of a person that will give you a more objective and unconsciously-biased overview of a candidate.
With the cost of employee turnover and bad hire so high, it’s important that you be smart with your hiring. And job matching may just be the key to your hiring success.
