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Your Top Talent Is Making An Exit -- Here's How To Keep Them Onboard

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POST WRITTEN BY
Ben Baldwin
This article is more than 9 years old.

One hundred percent of top employees will dump their employers for this — the chance to be more productive and happier in a different job. However, with current technologies, they don’t stand much chance of finding that.

This helps explain why more than half the people with jobs aren’t happy with them, and 70% of them aren’t engaged at work. The former stat comes from a report by the Conference Board, the latter from Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report. What might be more disturbing is that despite the billions of dollars invested in hiring innovations, employee happiness has been on a general decline from over 60% in 1987.

The fact that a job seeker can find more job postings than ever on job boards and apply to them with greater ease than at any time in history, hasn’t made it easier for them to find jobs they like, which begs the question—will the right people ever find the right jobs?

A Marketplace with the Wrong Information

To dig into that question, let’s take a look at what information is available in the hiring marketplace. On one side, you’ve got the job seeker, who lists their skills, education and experience on a resume and starts looking for jobs that advertise a need for those items. On the other side, you’ve got the hiring manager or recruiter, who screens resumes and key words for the right skills, education and experience. Unfortunately neither party is working with the information they need in order to make the right decisions at this critical first stage of the process—causing job seekers to apply to the wrong jobs and hiring managers to pass over the right candidates.

What neither has access to at this point in the process is the full picture of what makes people successful in a certain job, which includes information not visible on a resume, like cultural fit and specific personality traits such as someone’s ability to recover from a setback or to control their emotions at work and act rationally. Sometimes these traits aren’t even visible or detectable during an interview. They are also frequently counterintuitive. In fact, many hiring managers would be surprised by how little they know about which cultural and behavioral traits are required for success in the roles they’re trying to fill.

The Surprising Truth Behind Job Success

Since 1999, I’ve helped businesses from small to Fortune 500 identify the right people to hire. We’d use science—predictive analytics (before anyone knew what this even was)—to identify candidates who would behave like their current top employees. We were often amazed—sometimes shocked—by the results. We’d find sales roles where top performers had low drive. Or top customer reps with low interest in helping people. And often, it wasn’t the top sales reps who would end up becoming the best sales managers. The real critical traits would usually make sense once revealed, like a knack for problem solving in the case of top customer reps. But sometimes the success profiles remained mysterious before the data came to light. But the data was what it was. And there was always data. And there were always patterns repeated amongst top performers. We would use this information to identify candidates who shared the same behavioral patterns—the success patterns..

In the case of a pharmaceutical company, we discovered that many people who were applying for sales roles on the drug product lines were better suited for vaccine sales, and vice versa. The former required people with the right traits for selling to individual doctors, the latter for making a more complex, institutional sale to a hospital. Once the pharmaceutical company began placing applicants where they were best suited, sales went up, and so did employee satisfaction and retention.

Across most of the organizations that I’ve worked with, we’d discover that approximately a third of their applicants were looking for jobs they weren’t built to succeed at. Their resumes might show the required education, skills and experience, but they were a swing and a miss when it came to what really mattered—their overall job fit, or how they’d behave in the job once they were performing it. When companies get it right, when they match someone’s personality and motivation to the job, the likelihood of job success increases significantly, and when they don’t, job success plummets.

The problem is, this predictive data does not exist in any of the market leading job marketplaces. It does not exist at scale. It enters the hiring process too late—at the interview stage, if at all.

Which Cart is Ahead of Which Horse?

Hiring managers need information on what a successful candidate really looks like and they need to be able to search based on which applicants have what it takes. But timing is critical. Right now, a hiring manager who knows what to look for in a candidate—and some certainly do—is tasked with the impossible: trying to discern an applicant’s job fit by their resume. It can’t be done. Take a look at recruiter Aline Lerner’s recent study that revealed that recruiters can only accurately judge a candidate by their resume 53% of the time. It’s no wonder management guru Peter Drucker used to say, “50% of all hiring decisions are mistakes.” A coin toss.

Unfortunately, the only time a hiring manager can get to the cultural or personality fit side of things is during the interview stage or by asking a shortlist of people to take a personality assessment. But that’s too late for many applicants who would be most suitable for those jobs. By then, they’re in the rejected pile of resumes.

Getting Worse With Scale

In the past few years, the job of the hiring manager has actually been getting harder. Platforms like Elance-oDesk, LinkedIn and job aggregators have created a candidate inventory problem. Now there are just more and more applications with the wrong information for the hiring manager to screen. That’s the really disturbing part—job aggregators and platforms create more noise with scale, which makes the entire hiring market less effective. There are no network effects any more. Marketplaces don’t get better with each applicant and job, they just get murkier.

Disrupting the Status Quo

With billions of dollars at stake and almost everyone’s future—it’s a marketplace that’s ripe for disruption. Existing systems would fall if there were a database or marketplace with the right kind of predictive information for hiring managers and the best candidates to find one another. Is this possible? Yes. It’s inevitable. The right data exists, but it’s only been available to the kind of large enterprises I’ve worked with, who could afford it. But nowadays, data on job success is inexpensive and easy enough to bring into the entire hiring marketplace so that it’s available to any hiring manager and any candidate in any industry.

As soon as this data enters the marketplace, hiring managers will be able to instantly post a job and know which candidates are best suited for their role. Job seekers will see postings that are a match for who they really are, for what they would actually enjoy. Both parties will know whether there’s a fit before they review a single resume or review one job description. The concept of job hunting will be a thing of the past, replaced by job matching. A world where everyone has “night vision” to see the right candidates and surface the right jobs through the darkness.