Hiring for Soft-Skills in the C-Suite

10xpsychology
4 min readApr 14, 2021

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a man and woman smile at a laptop together

By establishing the Motivations, and Personality of every candidate in the context of your organization, our accessible industry-leading psychometrics minimize the risk, and enhance the success of executive hires.

Introduction

The success of an organization relies on how well its leaders can translate their personality, motivations and skills into purposeful action.

C-Suite candidates are generally established high performers, with a proven range of relevant and role-based skills, abilities, and experiences.

When recruiting these candidates, rather than focusing on their qualifications and abilities, establishing their aptitude for leadership roles relies on having accurately delineated the key competencies and behaviors that will empower your people, and drive forward your organization.

Both 10x Hire, and 10x Talent feature our full-range of industry-leading psychometrics, including 10x Motivation and 10x Personality. 10x Personality showcases the traits and behavioral preferences of C-Suite candidates, whilst 10x Motivation can provide insights and an indication of cultural fit — together they can be used to illuminate exactly what kind of a leader your candidates could be, before you hire them.

Establishing Business Orientation

Technical skills are merely a starting point, the bare minimum. To thrive as a C-level executive, an individual needs to be a good communicator, a collaborator, and a strategic thinker — and we think the trend toward a general business orientation over a functional orientation will continue.
Harvard Business Review

Understanding candidates’ leadership potential means establishing an unbiased perspective of their ‘softer skills’, which are all rooted in their personality. Whilst interviews provide value in the recruitment process, the technique on its own is highly susceptible to bias — interpretations of personality, motivation and values, can differ between interviewers.

Using our industry-leading psychometrics, you can undertake recruitment in an empirically valid, reliable and objective way.

10x Hire has been built specifically for HR leaders to effectively discern exactly who fits role requirements, and why. 10x Talent uses the same psychometric assessments but benefits from a tailored platform built to suit Talent Acquisition Specialists in the recruitment industry.

Across both Solutions, insights and data are displayed intuitively on our dashboard with a clear, ranked list of candidates based on their assessment outcomes. Both Solutions are interview compatible, providing access to tailored interview guides and prompts based on the key behavioral traits and competencies you require, at the job level that you’re looking for. Post-interview, our dashboard allows you to merge both interview and psychometric data in a dynamic display to help you select the best possible candidate for the position.

The Costs of Getting it Wrong

Companies lost an average of $14,900 on every bad hire in the last year, and it’s a common mistake — nearly three in four employers (74 percent) say they’ve hired the wrong person for a position.
Career Builder, 2017

A mis-hire in the C-Suite is notoriously expensive, and yet is a surprisingly simple issue to amend.

Research from Leadership IQ demonstrates that bad hires can stem from miscommunication surrounding the inter-personal skills needed for a role: whilst attitudes drive 89% of hiring failures, technical skills account for just 11%.

Amending a divide between organizational and employee understanding of these interpersonal skills, starts with recognizing the person behind the candidate and clearly defining the most important behavioral competencies for the role, before starting the hiring project.

Diverse Leadership

Millennials and Gen Z working for employers perceived to have diverse workforces and senior management teams are more likely to want to stay 5 or more years
Deloitte

Despite the benefits, making a diverse hire in the C-Suite is still a somewhat contentious issue.

Whilst diversity is proven to enhance organizational practice, personal biases in hiring can limit the diversity of an organization, and the extent to which individuals are empowered and included in their day-to-day work.

The impact of a diverse executive once hired at an organization, fully depends the organization’s receptivity to diversity; to openly discussing any biases and the new hire’s resilience and aptitude to connect with their colleagues.

Our industry leading psychometrics benefit from an accessible candidate platform that enables a diverse range of individuals to effectively showcase exactly what kind of skills and motivations they have and can bring to your workplace.

By assessing every facet of a candidates’ personality, from their resilience, communication, to their motivations at work, talent specialists and hr leaders can effectively discern who is the best fit the role and organization, away from personal bias.

At 10x Psychology, we provide full candidate reports for both 10x Personality, and 10x Motivation. Once hired, new leaders can use their assessment feedback to capitalize on their strengths to motivate and sustain success both for themselves, and their organization.

By selecting C-Suite hires based on objective assessment of their personality traits and motivations, we offer an opportunity to move away from perceived biases.

Our Solutions empower organizations and talent specialists to hire based on the competencies and traits that indicate both a behavioral and cultural fit, to encourage genuine inclusion and reduce the risk of executive level mis-hires.

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10xpsychology

Founded by Professor Peter Saville, 10x Psychology significantly improves people performance in the workplace through insight, science and technology