Psychometric Data Driven Recruitment Vs. Traditional Recruitment

The differences between data driven recruitment and traditional recruitment are significant. Simply speaking, traditional recruitment involves relying on the data gained from a CV and an interview and using this to make a decision. Therefore, a lot of your information is qualitative and recruiters must rely on their ‘gut’ feelings and intuition to make hiring decisions. Whereas, data driven recruitment relies on tangible facts and statistics to inform your hiring decisions.

Traditional recruitment tends to focus on hard skills…

Traditionally, recruiters placed a lot of focus upon the hard skills a candidate possesses. Hard skills are skills that can be taught and have been acquired over time. These skills tend to make up the majority of a CV. Data driven recruitment, which utilised psychometric testing amongst other data collection methods, focuses mostly on soft skills, such as work-ethic, communication and personality, which are much more difficult to cultivate. It has been shown that soft-skills, including behaviours and attitudes, are far more valuable to recruitment, as any hard-skills required for a position can be taught after the fact.

Gut Feeling Vs. Facts and Data

When you are looking at the differences between traditional recruitment and data driven recruitment, you are essentially weighing up the difference between hiring based on instinct or facts. Hiring based on instinct and gut feeling is little better than rolling a dice. The chances that you will find a quality hire using this method are far less than if you were to incorporate data into the recruitment process. Simply incorporating psychometric testing improves selection outcomes by 24%. Incorporating other data (such as employee turn-over) into the mix improves outcomes even further.

Summary

Traditional recruitment vs. data driven recruitment is simply like comparing new methods to outdated ones. When the collection of data is so simple and quick, it makes sense to use this to inform your hiring process. Using data to inform your recruitment process not only removes bias, but also saves time, money and improves the quality of hire too.

Post courtesy of Big 5 Assessments and HireWorxUSA.com