Many companies and HR professionals can become frustrated by the random elements in many hiring processes. While some companies have more formalized recruitment systems, many managers still base numerous hiring decisions on their gut feel. This situation can lead to poor hiring decisions, unhappy staff, low performance, and high turnover rates—issues that can affect company performance and take up significant time for HR professionals and managers.

With job matching technology, you can help hiring managers by providing them the solution to ensure that they are recruiting the right people. Instead of relying on a list of technical qualifications from a resumé or the interviewer’s impression, job matching is a competency-based system that can give recruiters confidence that the people that move in the selection process are the best talents.

 

What is job matching?

Job matching is an ideal form of an early screening program. Unlike cognitive assessments, which give one grade across multiple positions, you can customize job matching results according to the applicant and the role. Using this, you can screen out individuals with wide-ranging competencies who may lack the technical know-how or specialized knowledge required for a particular position.

 

How job matching helps hiring managers

Hiring managers can be reluctant to use job matching, cognitive testing, or other types of hiring technology. In many cases, they believe that their gut instinct has generally served them well before or that their selection removes many biases that can often be part of the process.

The best approach will vary from one company to another, but it is often best to present job matching as a tool to help HR make final decisions. Job matching is a sifting process designed to put better candidates before hiring managers at the final stage. They will still have the chance to meet and get to know the applicants deeper before sealing the deal. Managers can still assess soft skills in an interview. As soft skills are also essential, job matching can even help make more time for this during recruitment since it takes care of the technical subjects and skills-matching checks that can waste time in a meeting.

An HR department launching a job matching tool for the first time may also want to consider piloting it on a few roles before rolling it out to the whole organization. This allows managers to tweak the way they use the information and ensure the tools and setups chosen are suitable for the business and the intended job positions.

 

Integrating job matching into the hiring process

A job matching tool is best used as a gatekeeper before the first chat with the HR team. For major companies that receive hundreds or even thousands of applications, this can save hours of sifting each week.

Multiply this across the diverse roles that organizations are hiring for, and it’s immediately apparent how big a difference a job matching system can make to companies struggling to get the hiring process right.

 

How job matching tools help the applicant

While job matching tools are of value to the companies that use them, they also benefit applicants. First, they can avoid interviewing for roles that may not suit them. Some companies run multiple interview stages, tests, and presentations. These processes can take several days or even weeks. If a candidate isn’t right for the job, it’s better to save time and remove them from the pool early. Failure to do so leaves a negative impression on your employer brand.

A quality job matching tool also helps companies avoid the nightmare scenario of a bad hire. For example, an unfit employee doesn’t deliver the support the team should get from them. The manager and HR department will then have to manage performance and potentially exit the individual. This situation demoralizes the employee or makes them feel that they are doing a job outside their ability. And at the end of this unpleasant process, the company will have to recruit again—possibly with the same pitfalls.

 

Tool Spotlight

The Profiles Job Fit Assessment (PJFA) is a highly customizable job matching tool that measures three critical job match factors, namely:

  • cognitive ability, which is the overall capacity for learning, reasoning, and problem-solving and determines whether a person can do the job,
  • personality, which contains the tendencies of an individual to behave in a particular manner and determines how a person will do the job, and
  • interests to help identify activities that innately motivate a person and determine whether they will like the job.

The PJFA allows you to handpick specific test dimensions suited to candidates from any position or job level. You can also freely select from the preset combinations of cognitive abilities tests and choose various behavioral traits from the Big Five-based personality domain (Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Extraversion). And the RIASEC-based interest domain has a fixed six dimensions—Realistic or the mechanical career cluster, Investigative or the technical and science and technology cluster, Artistic or the creative and art career cluster, Social or the people and social service career cluster, Enterprising or the sales career cluster, and Conventional or the business, administrative, and financial career cluster.

 

You can avoid the challenges of a recruitment process that relies on instinct. You can also reduce the risk of a candidate blinding HR about the problems that make them unfit for the role. With bad hires often costing companies upwards of $20,000, save your organization from a potential money loss and stress with the right job matching tools.