Hiring the right people: Leverage this strategy and increase retention

Hiring the right people determines whether your employees are confident in their roles. When employees are able to perform well, they are less frustrated and more satisfied with their jobs. 

Unfortunately, 74% of employers believe they’ve hired the wrong person for a position. This bad hiring decision costs companies $14,900 on average.[1]

If they aren’t a good fit, a new hire likely won’t stay and can disrupt team morale. So, how do you prevent that?

You can focus on hiring the right people as a talent retention strategy by assessing candidates objectively through talent assessments. Hiring people who can successfully perform their roles and fit in with the team boosts employee satisfaction and performance.

This article navigates the nuanced terrain of recruitment and talent retention trends, helping you understand how to use talent assessments and other strategies to evaluate the skills, culture compatibility, and long-term potential of your candidates to ensure you hire the right people.

What do we mean by hiring the right people?

By hiring the right people, we mean people who can successfully do their job. That comes down to a not-so-precise equation of finding the talent with the necessary skills and cultural alignment. 

Selecting the right people for the job is often clouded by personal affiliations or the allure of a well-polished resume. It’s not uncommon for hiring managers to let bias creep in and make the mistake of favoring a friend or someone with work experience from a renowned company without evaluating their actual skills. 

Instead of letting personal biases affect your hiring decision, you should assess the skills and attributes crucial to the job opening to understand how a prospect can fit within your team and organization.

Having the right skills is the most important part, but a candidate should be able to blend in with the existing team dynamics. By assessing these aspects, you make more accurate hires, improving the employee experience and reducing employee turnover rates.

The importance of hiring the right people

Finding the right people helps your company remain competitive, so you need to be mindful of who you bring to the team to ensure every member adds value.

Investing in a winning team prevents the frustration of spending time and money on someone who leaves too soon. 

It also means less babysitting, reskilling, and fixing mistakes – making your overall talent retention strategy far more cost-efficient. 

Getting the right people on board means you’re planting the seeds for future success. Strong teams help the business grow. Good employees also understand the importance of personal development, which means that you don’t need to keep searching for talent every time a new challenge comes up.

In addition, hiring the right people for the job contributes to better teamwork and working relationships. Sure, adding new talent may cause a temporary disruption in the workflow; however, the right fit should be able to adapt to the team dynamics quickly, supporting the natural cohesion of your workforce. 

A bad hire, on the other hand, disrupts team cohesion and creates tension in the workplace.

The right hire doesn’t just benefit employers – it’s also good for employees. For example, knowing that each team member is chosen for their role based on skills and culture add fosters trust among workers.

When employees are capable of doing their jobs well and surrounded by well-matched colleagues and seamlessly integrated teams, it increases employee engagement and satisfaction. 

The benefits of finding the right people

Hiring the right people improves team cohesion, boosts productivity, and supports company growth. 

Here’s how the right hiring strategy can help your organization find and retain the best candidates:

1. Increases retention

Hiring the right people does more than fill your open positions – it’s a way to keep your team together in the long run.

According to our State of Skills-Based Hiring 2023 report, 89% of companies that used skills-based hiring experienced higher employee retention rates. This recruiting strategy has helped them find better candidates and keep them in the company longer.

Hiring the right people from the start saves the company from the financial hit of repeating the recruitment, onboarding, and training process.

Imagine two companies looking to fill the role of a marketing coordinator. 

Company A relies solely on resumes to make a hiring decision. Despite their impressive experience and track record, the new hire struggles after the onboarding process because they don’t have the right skills. As a result, the person is let go within two months.

This is an expensive mistake, and it contributes negatively to their involuntary turnover metrics.

Company B adopts skills-based hiring, focusing on the candidate’s competencies and cultural alignment. Although less flashy on paper, their new marketing coordinator aces their talent assessment and fits in perfectly with the team, becoming an invaluable asset to the company.

2. Increases satisfaction

When employees have the skills required for their roles, tasks feel more manageable, challenges become exciting, and job satisfaction soars.

Skills-based hires are better equipped to meet the specific demands of their positions. This alignment reduces stress and frustration, preventing employee burnout and supporting mental health in the workplace. As a result, employees enjoy their work and find fulfillment in their contributions.

The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2023 report revealed a few more interesting facts:

• 38% of skills-based hires report feeling happy in their roles, compared with 28% of experience-based hires

• 55% of skills-based hires in the IT and tech industries are satisfied with their job, compared with 17% of experience-based hires

Hiring the right employee makes collaboration easier, fostering a positive work environment. In addition, good employees have room for career growth, which can help them advance and transition to leadership roles in the future.

3. Boosts productivity and performance

Hiring the right people for the right roles helps improve workplace productivity and performance. They bring a level of efficiency that affects the whole team, ensuring that tasks are done exceptionally well.

Top performers are 400% more productive than the average workers.[1] So, if you want to set up your company for success, your strategy should be clear – fill your team with the right people.

What’s more, excellent employees are often creative problem solvers. They don’t just follow instructions and the status quo. Instead, they look for more efficient ways to do things, leading to innovative products and better results.

When you have the right people on your team, their dedication inspires others to improve. It creates a positive cycle where team members strive for their best, collectively lifting the entire team’s performance. As a result, your company is more likely to reach and exceed its goals.

4. Reduces costs

We mentioned that the cost of a bad hiring decision averages about $15,000. Even more alarming is the price of losing a good hire, which is almost $30,000.[1]

Why does a bad hire cost the company so much?

Hiring the wrong fit for the job affects:

• Productivity

• Team morale

• Client relationships

• Company culture

• Brand image

As a result, the organization should invest in upskilling the new employee, retraining, correcting errors, and managing performance issues. If the process results in voluntary turnover, companies must repeat the process of finding, interviewing, and onboarding new people, which could lead to considerable expenses.

This is why you need to optimize your hiring plan and find the right people the first time around.

8 best practices for hiring the right people and increasing retention

Here’s how to hire the right person for the job to ensure they stay happy and engaged.

Summary of best practices for hiring the right people

1. Perform a skills gap analysis

To discover which roles and skills your company requires, you need to perform a skills gap analysis. This strategic approach identifies the difference between current employee skills and those crucial for organizational success. 

Identifying skills gaps minimizes hiring errors, streamlines the selection, and boosts the chances of finding candidates who fit the outlined job specifications.

For example, a company looking for a good product marketing manager can use a skills gap analysis to identify crucial competencies needed for the role. 

The results show that current project managers lack market analysis and stakeholder communication skills. So, the organization uses a Product Marketing Management test to vet candidates while assessing their market analysis and stakeholder communication abilities.

This strategic approach ensures a successful hire. The new manager fits well into the role, improving overall team performance. The precise fit between skills and job expectations fosters a positive work environment – one where employees feel adequately supported and understood – which helps to reduce employee attrition rates.

2. Clarify what you need for the role

Before starting the hiring process, you must clearly define your expectations. Identify the specific skills, behavioral competencies, and cultural values crucial for the role. 

Talent assessment tests can help you identify essential skills and competencies for a role by systematically evaluating candidates against predefined criteria, providing valuable insights into their expertise. Using talent assessments ensures an accurate match between candidate capabilities and the specific demands of the position.

Once you determine what you need for a role, you should create an accurate job description to attract the right people. A great job outline establishes the necessary skills, expectations, and work culture to ensure you find the right people for the role.

It’s also important to understand what you don’t need for a given position. For example, if a four-year degree isn’t necessary for a role, don’t list it as a requirement in your job posting.

Lastly, you can construct a scoring system to assess candidates against these criteria. Rank each skill on a scale of one to 10, assigning points accordingly. Then, compare the point scores to get an objective measure of each candidate. 

3. Conduct structured interviews

Structured interviews involve asking candidates a consistent set of predetermined questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of their responses. These structured interview questions let you dig into a candidate’s skills and traits more deeply than unstructured interviews and better predict job performance.

When researchers tested the success of different hiring methods, they found that structured interviews demonstrated a 26% predictability of job performance.[3] Unstructured interviews are more susceptible to confirmation bias, making this method only 14% successful in predicting a candidate’s job performance.

Structured interviews ensure a fair and standardized evaluation, minimizing subjectivity and discrimination. They help employers gain valuable insights into potential candidates’ capabilities, contributing to a more accurate prediction of their job performance.

4. Use culture add assessments to gauge value alignment

Even the most skilled candidate on earth can have trouble performing in their role if they don’t mesh with the team. 

For the best results, their values and behaviors need to be aligned with your company’s culture.

When companies first realized how important it was that their employees share the same values, they started hiring people based on culture fit. Unfortunately, what began as a cultural compatibility test quickly became an assessment of hobbies and character traits.

That’s why companies now use culture add tests to estimate whether a candidate’s values align with the company. 

Hiring for culture add fosters an inclusive workplace by selecting diverse candidates who bring fresh ideas, different perspectives, and mixed backgrounds. This avoids groupthink and boosts innovation.

The focus shifts from uniformity in hobbies or educational backgrounds to sharing core values and promoting diversity in the workplace. A more diverse workforce helps your company to:

• Make more objective decisions

• Encourage and challenge each other

• Process information more carefully

• Innovate

• Increase profits

Our Culture add test can help you better understand how candidates might jive with your existing team, as well as the unique traits and values they can contribute to your company. 

5. Use talent assessments to find the best candidates 

Unlike the subjective nature of resume evaluation, talent assessments objectively assess a candidate's capabilities. These tests evaluate candidates based on their practical skills, knowledge, and ability to perform specific tasks relevant to the job. 

This data-driven method transcends traditional hiring practices, offering a more effective and reliable means of recruiting top talent. It enables employers to say goodbye to the time-consuming and unreliable resume screening process and embrace skills-based hiring.

TestGorilla’s State of Skills-Based Hiring Report for 2023 shows that 92% of organizations believe talent assessments help reduce mis-hires.

The great thing about these tests is that they can evaluate different criteria for a comprehensive view of each candidate. For example, you can test the key technical skills needed for their role, situational judgment, cultural alignment, and other areas you deem important.

6. Outsource your recruitment process

Outsourcing the recruitment process can help companies find the right people and save time and resources. This is particularly important when a company needs to make a quick hiring decision to fill an immediate need. 

Instead of hiring the best candidates, the pressure to make the right decision in a tight time frame can increase the chances of mis-hires.

Outsourcing your recruitment process has several advantages:

• You get immediate access to a pool of qualified candidates

• You can make faster hiring decisions

• It minimizes the risk of mis-hires

• It enables you to reach more candidates

• It ensures your staff remains dedicated to their roles

• It provides greater flexibility to scale hiring efforts

7. Consider a variety of job boards

If you want to hire great people, your talent acquisition efforts should focus on reaching more candidates. This is why you should use various traditional job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn, along with other online recruitment methods and sourcing channels. 

Casting a wider net increases the quantity and quality of job seekers and aligns with an inclusive hiring strategy. 

To foster an inclusive culture, explore specialized job boards tailored to specific demographics, such as disabled workers or women in tech. Using these platforms improves the chances of reaching a diverse pool of qualified candidates and contributes to a more inclusive hiring process.

You can also broaden the talent pool by offering flexible work arrangements. This enables you to reach more potential employees, such as those looking for remote or part-time opportunities. 

Opening your doors to flexible working options can attract thousands of talented individuals who prioritize such arrangements, bringing new skills and perspectives to your company.

Although mainstream job boards remain essential, exploring unconventional channels, such as industry-specific forums, social media groups, or platforms focused on emerging trends, can tap into hidden talent pools. Engaging with niche communities increases visibility and facilitates connections with candidates passionate about specific interests.

8. Involve multiple people in the process

Incorporating multiple team members into the hiring process is crucial for several reasons. 

A collaborative hiring process, often implemented through interview panels, introduces diverse perspectives and opinions, contributing to a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

Here’s how it can benefit your hiring process:

• Expand perspectives. Each participant can offer unique insights based on their experiences and expertise, providing a more comprehensive understanding of a candidate’s potential alignment with the organization.

• Identify red flags. A collective evaluation helps ensure a thorough examination of skills, qualifications, and cultural alignment, making it easier to spot areas of concern that an individual interview could overlook.

• Mitigate bias. One person could have unconscious preferences or prejudices that influence their judgment. Involving multiple people mitigates the impact of personal biases, promoting a fairer and more objective assessment of candidates.

• Increase your company’s appeal. Interacting with several team members gives candidates a better perspective of the company, which can influence their decision to join the organization.

• Improve decision making. Using the expertise and opinions of various team members helps organizations arrive at more informed and well-rounded hiring decisions, reducing the risk of overlooking critical factors.

3 examples of companies succeeding with hiring the right candidates as a talent retention strategy

Developing targeted approaches to find, attract, and hire good people helps companies cultivate thriving work environments.

Here are three examples that demonstrate how strategic hiring practices bring in top-notch talent and contribute to employee retention.

Summary of how companies succeed in hiring the right talent

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies describes its hiring process as searching for individuals passionate about “driving human progress forward,” putting the focus on talent. The company conducts two rounds of interviews – technical and human resources.

The technical interview focuses on assessing candidates’ skills, while the human resources interview is more interactive and evaluates the applicant’s personality. The HR interview measures whether a candidate aligns with the company’s values, their potential fit within a team, and their view of their professional future.

The company’s commitment to transparent communication enables candidates to ask questions and receive candid responses, fostering an open dialogue. The organization promises fair consideration, optimal offers upfront, and a customer-centric approach, treating candidates as valued customers.

Here are the results of this hiring approach:

• The company ranks in the top 35% of organizations that retain top performers

• 51% of employees wouldn’t leave their jobs for a better-paying position

• 74% of employees are happy to go to work every day

Google

Google is a tech giant that’s synonymous with innovation. The company has adjusted the hiring process to focus on inclusion and diversity. It emphasizes skill sets, aptitude, critical thinking, and culture add when evaluating applicants.

Following the multi-stage hiring approach common among tech companies, the organization reviews applications, conducts interviews, and employs hands-on assessments tailored to each role’s demands. The structured or semi-structured interviews aim to minimize bias, ensuring fairness in evaluation.

The company also relies on a team to make the final hiring decision.

This comprehensive hiring approach has helped the company retain and keep employees happy. In fact, 80% of employees feel satisfied with their everyday roles, and 69% believe the company is doing everything it can to retain them.

Axelerated Solutions

Axelerated Solutions is an IT and business consulting company from Saudi Arabia. After experiencing significant growth, the company needed a better way to screen their candidates. 

Their previous hiring process, which involved screening resumes, was slow and inefficient. Hiring managers would spend unnecessary time interviewing candidates who simply weren’t qualified for the job, and ultimately, their hiring decisions felt too subjective.

The company used TestGorilla’s talent assessments to improve and automate its screening, testing, and scoring process. 

Before any job interviews, applicants are asked to complete relevant skills tests for the role, ensuring that only quality candidates are interviewed. This has helped the organization significantly reduce its time to hire and improve the quality of the hires.

As a result, 100% of employees hired using talent assessments passed the probation period and remained with the company.

Hire the right people to promote organizational success

Hiring the right people supports innovation, positive workplace culture, productivity, and organizational success.

To find the most effective employee selection method, you should conduct a skills gap analysis, create accurate job descriptions, use structured interviews, leverage talent assessments, and take a collaborative approach to the hiring process.

Our personality and culture tests help measure your candidates’ cultural compatibility with your company so you can make the right hire and avoid culture clashes that lead to early turnover.

However, keep in mind that the perfect candidate may already be a part of your company. To find out more, read about the importance of an internal talent marketplace and learn how to tap into the potential of your existing workforce.

Sources

1. “Nearly Three in Four Employers Affected by a Bad Hire”. (December 7, 2017). CareerBuilder. Retrieved December 11, 2023. https://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-12-07-Nearly-Three-in-Four-Employers-Affected-by-a-Bad-Hire-According-to-a-Recent-CareerBuilder-Survey 

2. Bradley, J. Kyle; Aguinis, Herman. (February 27, 2012). “The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality of individual performance”. Personnel Psychology. Retrieved December 11, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x 

3. Schmidt, Frank; Hunter, John. (1998). “The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings”. Psychological Bulletin. Retrieved December 11, 2023. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262