Making a Bad Hire: The Costs, and The Solution
Negating the role of prestige, and reinforcing the importance of ability, motivation and personality means cultivating an effective, reliable and talented workforce capable of sustained impact and development.
Introduction
Establishing Top Talent in a period of crisis means actively carving out the space for individuals from all social backgrounds to flourish. A key touchpoint for upwards social mobility is education. In particular, higher education offers a statistically higher likelihood of improved earning abilities.
Over the course of the pandemic, university rates have plummeted creating an opportunity for businesses to reconsider what top talent is and re-discover how to find it.
In this article we will present both how integral and how simple it can be to gauge top talent for an individual business, without relying on a candidate’s academic success record.
Rethinking Education
University degrees have functioned as a rite of passage both socially and professionally for decades, resulting in many job descriptions today highlighting a degree as a base requirement.
Although degrees are necessary accolades in a variety of technical occupations, providing opportunities for those who pursue alternative, vocation led paths is integral to equip workforces with diverse, effective teams.
A recent report by the Social Mobility Commission has highlighted downward social mobility to stem from disadvantage and limitation particularly within academia and social life, where those who suffer bullying or have conditions like dyslexia can “fall through the cracks”. This is in part due to a cycle of constraint that emerges as resilience falls and the impact of bullying and stress increasingly affects a person’s wellbeing and performance in a vicious cycle.
At a time where health has been fundamentally compromised internationally, many are caught in an alternate cycle of caring for relatives and working for low wages and are unable to factor in additional academic work, despite being perfectly capable.
To recover as a better, and more supportive society, we must rethink the nature of education and wherever possible, consider competency and skill over academic prestige.
Recognizing Talent
Recognizing talent starts with recognizing your own business needs and requirements to equip your organization with the right person to make an impact.
Informing a hiring strategy with the industry-leading psychometric assessments developed by us here at 10x means obtaining an objective and representative view of a candidate pool.
Neither 10x Hire, nor 10x Talent filter candidates by higher education; rather, our Solutions harness our psychometric-based assessments to understand the personality, motivations and current abilities of candidates to fully determine what drives successful performance in the workplace.
In 10x Hire, employers are completely in control of determining what skills and competencies are most important for an individual position, before our highly developed algorithms rank each candidate by how aligned their profiles are based on their performance on our suite of assessments. This ranked list can act as an invaluable source through the hiring process and provide a basis for informed, unbiased decisions.
For those in recruitment, 10x Talent acts to streamline and bridge client requirements and consultant expertise to deliver clear ranked lists according to key competencies. This tailored and specific list can then be used to make informed decisions on candidate hiring and selection for a client’s organization.
Once it’s time to hire, users in 10x Talent and 10x Hire can both benefit from competency-tailored interview guides and prompts that help to erase any potential bias later in the hiring process.
A Better Way
At 10x, we believe in a better way.
To match our beliefs with our actions, we’re dedicated to facilitating much needed change by enabling employers to embrace their key role in fostering dynamic, diverse workplaces.
Discerning just how well a candidate might perform in the future, or how perfect a fit they are for a specific role is entirely possible with 10x Solutions — where you can expect a simple and effective process to reliably inform your business of diverse, authentic top talent.
