Rethinking the Real Cost of Pre-Employment Personality Profiles
How "cheap" are the pre-employment personality assessments you are using? Less than $25 per candidate? Or perhaps you have a site license where you can run unlimited personality profiles for $3500...
The real cost you "pay" for pre-employment personality assessments is not your initial cash outlay. The real cost is what hiring the wrong people costs the bottom line of your company. Few positions are as costly as hiring the wrong sales person.
A cheap pre-employment personality profile may cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars or even perhaps millions by allowing a low performer onboard.
It is an interesting thing to watch people try to "save" money.
I have watched people drive miles out of their way to save a few pennies a gallon of gas. The time and fuel it takes to drive to a "cheaper" gas station often eats up the savings yet less strategic people focus on the price of gas first.
The same is true with pre-employment personality profiles. I see companies trying to "save money" by narrowing down the field of candidates to two or three. I often ask, "Where are the rest of the candidates?"
HR usually says, "Oh, we narrowed it down to these two final candidates."
"Why only two?" I always ask.
"That is all we want to spend on pre-employment personality assessments," is the typical response.
I then picture in my mind the studies about human bias in general as well as human bias in the interview process. Human beings are biased. Most HR people are human beings. Let me clear. I have never met an unbiased human being. I have never met a HR professional who can consistently beat a scientifically sound pre-employment personality profile using their gut. Human bias in the employee selection process destroys shareholder value.
It gets worse... I then picture in my mind the cost of a bad management hire - a manager who destroys morale and/or fails to execute and the resulting loss of income and/or productivity.
I then picture in my mind the cost of a bad sales or customer service hire...
The problem is that hiring managers and human resources think wrongly about two things.
- Human beings can accurately (without bias) interview a candidate and identify Job Fit. They cannot. Multiple studies show that human beings are inherently biased - including HR.
- Money can be saved during the employee selection process by narrowing down the field to two or three candidates and assessing only them rather than the entire candidate field.
The real cost of the pre-employment personality assessment is not what one pays for the assessment itself. The real cost of a personality profile is the cost of the wrong talent getting onboard due to human bias. Unfortunately, most HR professionals do not understand this concept.
When companies try to "save money" on employment assessments, they typically lose and lose big time.
Recently, we had a Client who had a candidate re-apply for the same position for the 5th time. This was the first time the candidate was allowed to complete our pre-employment sales personality profile. The sales candidate was a potential significant high sales performer - a top 20 percentile or "Primary Job Fit". The sales hiring manager was flabbergasted. He could not believe the candidate came back with such a high score but because he had learned from experience the accuracy of the assessment tools, he believed the data and hired the candidate.
I asked the hiring manager, "What if this candidate had given up and went to the competition?"
His response was an immediate, "I am grateful that did not happen."
It is time to rethink the entire cost "spectrum" of pre-employment personality profiles.
Price is what you pay and value is what you get with validated pre-employment personality profiles.
Are you missing the opportunity to select the best possible sales people because you are trying to "save" money?
Interested in learning more about the incredible power of human bias? Check out the following Scientific American Frontier - The Hidden Prejudice. I recommend "fast-forwarding" the video 32 seconds to get past the Matt Lauer interview with Don Imus.
A resource you really need to review is "Project Implicit" - a web site the shares a test you can take to assess "your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music.
Project Implicit is a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington.
