Drowning in piles of CVs? Here’s how psychometric testing can help

Drowning in piles of CVs_ Here’s how psychometric testing can help

We all want candidates. The more the better. Right? Well, not in all cases. In this global war for talent, receiving a lot of job applications might sound like a luxury problem. However, a high number of job applicants can in fact have an enormous impact not only on your hiring quality, but also significantly decreases the time you spend reviewing each application. What happens as a result of this is that you will also get less accurate in selecting candidates that are a good fit. Why? Because your primary focus will be on screening candidates as fast as possible (because, let’s be honest, nobody has nor the time nor patience to go through hundreds of applications to find the best one, I definitely don’t). You will end up:

  • Rejecting the best candidates
  • Wasting time on unfit candidates during the interview process
  • Eventually making mishires
  • And ultimately, significantly slowing down your company growth.

Here’s why, and how you can solve these hiring inefficiencies that are putting the brakes on your growth and success. Not interested in the problem, but how we can help you fix it? Jump to the last section!


The danger of attraction

Funnel conversions are the conversions between the different stages of your hiring funnel. Let’s say you receive 20 applications on a job, and spend at least a minute per application on scanning the resume. Out of these 20 people, you invite 5 to an interview, and eventually, only one gets hired. 

Now, the thing with funnel conversions is that, in the early days of a company, you probably won’t care about them. Simply because a high volume of job applications is very unlikely if you’re a small, unknown business. The danger of not caring about funnel conversion is that you won’t act on it until it’s (almost) too late.

Although lots of companies won’t have the luxury of needing to deal with a large candidate pool, the ones who did become attractive to a larger audience can easily find themselves in a situation where the next job opening is not attracting 20, but 200 people. Now, let’s assume your funnel conversions didn’t change. It wasn’t a priority, right?. Now, you not only need to scan 200 resumes, but you also need to interview 50 people.If the average interview length is between 30 to 45 minutes, you’ll end up spending 1500 to 2250 minutes just interviewing candidates. How does that work for your calendar?

And let’s not forget that this is excluding the time you will be spending shortlisting candidates that applied in the first place. All of that just to hire one person. Do you think that this is as bad as it can get? Well, then you’re in for a surprise because that’s not where it ends…


The 4 consequences you’ll be faced with

Reality is that we only have two hands, one pair of eyes, one brain to process everything, and 24 hours in a day. So although you might try your best to be as efficient, objective and fair  as possible, you likely won ‘t succeed. Here’s what happens if your conversion rates stay the same while the number of job applications increases:

  • Candidates. First of all, candidates will need to wait longer before hearing something back, before being invited to an interview, and eventually, before getting hired. There’s a huge risk here of losing high-quality candidates, because let’s be honest – the candidates who know they are top talent, won’t sit around and wait for you to go through hundreds of other applications.  
  • Screening. As a result of trying to screen candidates faster, you will begin to act on your gut feelings and unconscious biases. What happens next? You end up hiring the worst or rejecting the best candidates, spending time on the wrong candidates during the interview process, eventually making mishires and ultimately, significantly slowing down your company growth.
  • Interviews. This is where things start to get even more tricky. If you have already spent all the time in the world screening and shortlisting candidates, you are also likely going to want to reduce the amount of time you spend on interviews. Which means that you will end up collecting fewer meaningful insights about a candidate. And yet, again, fill these gaps based on your gut feeling and assumptions of each person. Did you know that 85% of all hiring managers rely on their gut to make hiring decisions? This means that a candidate is not judged based on their skills and competencies, but on unspoken and unconscious criteria, making the interview biased and unfair.
  • Retention. And we all know how this story ends. Our biases make us hire the wrong people, resulting in decreased retention. Which means you need to hire even more. PS. Are you aware of the cost of one mishire? 

This leaves you 3 options of how you can proceed

Option 1

Spend more hours than necessary thoroughly examining all the applications. Why would you? Aren’t there other things you should be doing too?

Option 2

Take a quick glance at each application and base any further decisions on first impressions that are heavily influenced by your unconscious bias.

Option 3

Let go of traditional recruitment methods and find a new way to improve your hiring efficiency, by using for example, psychometric tests instead.


One solution to all of your problems (if you do it right): Psychometric tests

By using psychometric tests you not only eliminate bias from both the screening and interview process but also improve hiring success. But is it a more efficient process than quickly skimming through resumes and motivation letters? It may at first seem like implementing psychometric testing and using these tests during the candidate screening process is time consuming, however that is not the case.

Psychometric tests, in fact, allow you to more accurately, easily and efficiently sort through the applicants. It is the dream of everyone working in human resources – it can reduce the workload of going through large numbers of unsuitable candidates drastically.


How Equalture’s gamified assessments can help

Here at Equalture, we have developed neuroscientific games. These are psychometric tests, but in a gamified format, to help companies not only improve their hiring efficiency and success, but also to solve the problems that traditional psychometric tests, such as personality questionnaires, suffer from:

  • Social desirability (in a questionnaire, you can easily identify which answer is most suitable for the role);
  • Anxiety (traditional psychometric tests are experienced at highly stressful, damaging your Candidate Experience);
  • Cultural bias (social desirability is different for different cultures).

So instead, we provide candidates with a very fun experience, in which there’s no room for socially desirable behaviour, which makes them even forget that they are being assessed.

Curious of what one of the games looks like? Play a game yourself and find out!

A visual of one of the games that is non-cheatable and measures a specific skill/personality trait.


The proof that it works?

Well, speaking of a challenge of efficiency and quality – one of our customers, Bold, a fintech scaleup from Colombia, managed to hire 89 sales team members in 6 months, with a recruitment team of 3 people! What made it very easy for them to realise this was the fact that they knew very well upfront which Equalture game was most predictive for success, as well as the minimum score someone should have on that game. As a result of that, they could purely focus on the candidates who met this requirement. 

Here you can read the entire case study

Are you curious to see how our gamified assessments can help you turn your hiring process into your growth engine? You know where to find us. 🙂

Cheers, Anete

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