Say goodbye to bad hires by adding “job fit” measures to your selection process

Hiring is difficult and the sad truth is that companies make the wrong hiring decisions more often than anyone cares to admit.

We know the costs of a bad hire are significant, with the U.S. Department of Labor estimating the dollar impact to be up to 30% of a first-year salary or up to 50% for management roles. 

Beyond these more tangible costs, is the bigger issue of potential lost productivity due to disengagement. According to current studies, as few as 30% of employees are fully engaged, 20% are actively disengaged and the rest fall somewhere in between.  And Gallup estimates this the costs to employers is more than a trillion dollars in lost productivity annually.

To visualize this, imagine your organization is entered in a ten-person bicycle race against industry competitors. To get the bike up and running well, you need everyone invested and pedalling together.  But based on current stats, that would mean that only 3 out of 10 employees are pedalling their hardest, 5 are pretending to pedal but aren’t really contributing and 2 are putting on the breaks.

With this kind of team make up, your bike will never hit a decent speed, much less win the race.

The reality is that this doesn’t have to be the case, there is a simple way to improve these numbers and eliminate potentially unproductive hires before they walk in the door and that is by adding job fit to your selection process.

Job fit is a measure of how well a candidate’s abilities and interests match with those required to be successful in the role and organization. Harvard Business Review has reported that an employee who is well matched to their job is twice as productive as someone who is not a good fit. And Gallup further estimates, that companies with high levels of employee engagement have earnings per share that are 147% higher than their competitors.

Hiring Successfully for Dummies provides insights on how to improve your hiring practices using data driven insights on fit. Click here to read a free copy.