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Hiring people is easy. Hiring the right person and then retaining and developing them takes careful consideration and involves utilising solutions that stretch conventional boundaries.
In person or not, there have always been limitations on the quality and the dependability of interviews. Often time-bound and squashed into calendars one after another, the interview process can be monotonous and uninspiring for everyone involved. This can lead to decisions being made purely on perceived technical competence or on an impression (aka a ‘hunch’), based more on how the person came across.
At Acre Frameworks, we use leadership assessments to provide our clients and candidates with insight that goes beyond subjective impressions, education and experience to determine a candidate’s potential fit for a role or business.
By integrating leadership assessments into interview processes and structuring conversations around the findings, we help you to:
1. Minimise the potential for unconscious bias when hiring
No one is immune to unconscious bias and no one ever will be. It is a natural mental shortcut that our brains use to help us deal with the sheer volume of data it is tasked with interpreting on a daily basis. What you can do, however, is implement strategies to ensure that it doesn’t impact your decision-making. After all, diversity drives innovation and accelerates businesses and enterprises towards their missions.
When hiring, it is crucial to find someone who fits the position, not the preferences of the hiring manager – whether you’re aware of those preferences or not. Leadership assessments provide a valuable layer of objective data to ensure that your decisions remain impartial.
2. Decrease the risks associated with hiring remotely by providing a layer of transparency and objectivity into a candidate’s strengths and development areas
Areas for development are nothing to be ashamed of and should not be labelled as ‘red flags’ or ‘blind spots.’ By fostering an open, honest conversation around development, you provide candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their self-awareness regarding these areas, and vocalise things that they’ve been working on over the course of their career to mitigate natural tendencies. Companies that do this best, are courageous enough to take the conversation one step further and discuss training interventions and support someone might need to in order to leverage their strengths and to thrive in their new role!
More importantly, discussing these development opportunities at the outset of your conversations will allow you to form an Alliance from the get-go, building trust and gaining a better understanding of how you can support each other to achieve your respective goals for the duration of your working relationship.
3. Enrich the candidate experience by providing one-to-one feedback on the findings of the leadership assessment
Embedding a leadership assessment into the recruitment process enriches the candidate experience by providing unique insights that can be explored openly together. We’ve found that a crucial part of getting this process right is by providing candidates with a 1-hour debrief on the results of a leadership assessment with one of our trained coaches. We’ve heard too many horror stories of candidates who have been required to complete a psychometric assessment or numerical/verbal reasoning test as part of the recruitment process, never to actually receive the results. This can lead to an uncomfortable power dynamic when an interview panel are privy to often-sensitive information about the interviewee who is left wondering what the panel have seen and what they might be thinking. We’ve also heard candidates report that they’ve been caught off guard by questions relating to their report results despite never having had a chance to review them.
Equipping candidates with the results of the report allows them the opportunity to speak for themselves, to ask meaningful questions, to demonstrate self-awareness and most importantly, helps to inform a fair and transparent interview process.
4. Maximise the use of your time spent interviewing to truly get to know each other
Candidates are future colleagues. In an ideal world, organisations would take their time getting to know someone properly before hiring. The reality is that time is often in short supply and the need to fill a vacancy trumps the need to dedicate adequate time to get an interview process right.
To make the best use of time, we also spend time consulting with hiring managers to better understand the information gathered from the assessment and valuable areas of the report to discuss in more depth during a final stage interview. This provides a fascinating layer of insight that can spark conversations that could otherwise take months or years to arise organically.
Recruiting is too expensive to get wrong. Incorporating a leadership assessment is one layer that can help you get it right. If you’re curious to learn how our assessments can add value to your recruitment process, visit our website at acreframeworks.com or contact a member of the team today at frameworks@acre.com.
