How to Build a Hiring Process Based on Outcomes

Hiring and retaining employees is vital for maintaining a healthy and productive workforce. Still, companies also have to ensure that those employees are helping the organization achieve tangible business outcomes. This is why many organizations use pre-employment assessments to determine if prospective hires will be a good fit for their company’s culture and how they will perform on the job.

To fully leverage pre-employment assessments, hiring managers need to have a clear idea of the goals they want to pursue. These goals could include everything from increased productivity (such as the amount of revenue generated by a sales department) to reduced customer turnover to cultivating a more diverse workforce. It’s important to remember that internal outcomes such as high morale and low turnover directly correlate with external business outcomes like customer satisfaction and retention.

No matter your goals, it’s necessary to know what recruitment success in the jobs marke t looks like. This will help hiring managers produce a list of relevant employee traits and assessments capable of identifying candidates who possess those traits. When companies design their selection process to hire people who meet their specific needs and targets, they’ll build a workforce to produce concrete business outcomes that drive long-term growth.

Which Outcomes Are You Trying to Secure?

Consider all the ways companies measure their performance: growth rates, cost management, market share, customer loyalty, etc. Even when companies determine which performance metrics and outcomes they need to focus on, they often prioritize some results over others. These priorities should inform how hiring managers assess and screen candidates, and you should constantly update this process to reflect changing conditions and needs.

Once you’ve identified a set of critical outcomes, it’s time to figure out how you’ll measure progress toward them. For example, if you’re expanding your sales team, you can track the revenue generated during a salesperson’s first year and benchmark it against company averages. If your company suffers from high employee attrition, you can track turnover rates by department and team to isolate which factors lead to employee dissatisfaction.

While poor performance and turnover can have many causes, such as unattractive company culture, low compensation, or a lack of growth opportunities, it can also be related to problems with your employee selection process. By reengineering this process to account for the company’s most pressing needs, it’s possible to implement a hiring platform that will lead to better outcomes for employees and the business.

Which Obstacles Stand in the Way?

Companies have to know where they’re falling short: sluggish revenue growth, employee turnover, operational inefficiencies, or other issues. Suppose you’re experiencing high turnover rates, for instance. In that case, it could be due to a range of factors: employees leaving the job because they’re disengaged, an increase in terminations because employees don’t have the right skills, cultural issues such as a lack of diversity, and so on.

Consider the skills gap many companies confront. According to a McKinsey survey , almost 90% of executives and managers “say their organizations either face skill gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years.” Pre-employment assessments can address this problem by giving hiring managers a clear view of candidates’ skills and other relevant traits, such as their ability and willingness to learn. Assessments can also help hiring managers avoid being distracted by qualifications on a resume that may or may not demonstrate that a candidate will be capable of carrying out the job’s essential functions.

When the vast majority  of jobs in growing fields like health care and technology require a bachelor’s degree, assessments help companies broaden their pool of candidates by offering a more precise method of identifying which future employees have the skills they need. Instead of filtering candidates out based on where they went to school or the amount of experience on their resumes, companies with predictive hiring platforms can focus on each individual’s readiness for the job.

Improving Outcomes Across the Board

There are two ways companies should be thinking about outcomes when it comes to hiring: business performance and the health of their workforce. Hiring managers should never forget that these outcomes intersect. According to astudy  published by researchers from the London School of Economics, MIT Sloan, and Oxford University, there’s a “strong positive correlation between employees’ satisfaction with their company and employee productivity and customer loyalty, and a strong negative correlation with staff turnover.”

For example, diversity and inclusion play a significant role in establishing a healthy workplace culture and improving business outcomes. More than three-quarters  of job seekers say a diverse workforce is essential in deciding where to work, while more diverse companies consistently outperform  their peers. Pre-employment assessments can help companies increase diversity and inclusion by eliminating the bias  associated with traditional hiring methods like resume reviews and giving hiring managers a tool for identifying talent regardless of background or experience.

Companies have to be capable of finding, hiring, and retaining employees who will help them secure their core business outcomes and build a strong workplace culture. Hiring managers can use pre-employment assessments to achieve these goals. Still, they must first determine exactly what results they want to enable, the obstacles standing in the way, and which methods should be used to track their progress. Once your company has laid the foundation for an outcomes-based hiring process, you can build the most healthy and productive workforce you’ve ever had.

Josh Millet is the founder + CEO of Criteria.

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