Why hiring and team building like it's 1999 is sabotaging your success
Posted on May 15, 2024 by Minal Joshi Jaeckli, One of Thousands of Team Coaches on Noomii.
Let's explore how our current hiring processes are likely causing more harm than good.
Using the legacy one-sided approach with an outdated model only leads to suboptimal results and higher turnover rates! It’s time to embrace the science behind building successful teams. Let’s talk about how you can leverage the science to create the best fit, with a two-sided approach, to improve your retention rates while increasing productivity. To begin with, let’s explore how your current hiring processes are likely causing more harm than good.
1) Who gets hired?
When it comes to hiring and team building, as much as we may want to think otherwise, most of us rely on gut-feel and guesswork rather than evidence-based practices. After all, isn’t this what HR teams do? They screen resumes and select candidates on the basis of how well they seem to fit into the company culture or what the hiring manager feels about the candidate based on the interviews and perhaps their previous experiences with the individual. At each stage, adding unconscious biases.
In cases when personality assessments are used, they are fully focused on evaluating the candidates – their personality traits, strengths assessments, scores against some predictive index, etc. – rather than how they will fit with the manager, the team and with their new work environment. When we focus on getting the candidate with the “right” personality, instead of how well they fit with the existing individuals and environment, we totally fail to understand and leverage the most critical attributes of successful candidate selection. It’s like trying to find the “right” gloves, without considering the size of your hands.
Most people intuitively understand the value of assessing fit with the existing team and environment. But when we build teams or hire individuals, even those who know better, still do not follow evidence-based practices in assessing candidates for fit with the existing team and environment. How do they go about assessing fit? By inviting the candidates in the final rounds to meet the team for coffee or an informal lunch. Believing that they have that special sixth sense to gauge fit. It’s beyond ridiculous that people believe that testing someone in this way will give them some insight towards predicting successful collaboration. People enjoying hanging out together is not a proxy for successful team collaboration.
2) What is needed for successful team collaboration?
Reasonable alignment of a very specific set of attributes is required for successful collaboration. This alignment between individuals is the foundation for trust, belonging and respect. When there is a significant lack of alignment of attributes (attributes such as being straightforward, structured, punctual, etc.) then an atmosphere of mistrust develops from which neither ease of collaboration nor joint success can be achieved. All too often, people are hired because they’re good at their job but not necessarily because they fit with their colleagues. The fact that both ability and alignment are important is clear. Teams, despite having members who are objectively good at what they do as individuals, fail when working together as a group; and conversely teams whose members are less effective on an individual level can achieve outstanding group results if their personalities are sufficiently aligned. The take home point is that whether you are hiring or reassigning existing employees, assessing the fit is essential for de-risking your team building and setting you up for success.
3) What does this mean for every organisation?
Every organisation wants to hire top talent. We can help. We’ve developed a simple, yet powerful assessment platform to help select candidates who will not only bring skill sets but also fit your unique environment. The best part is that you don’t have to take our word for it. You can validate the data easily with your existing team. In just a few minutes, you get an accurate read of who works best together and where there is more friction. It’s the level of transparency you will never want to do without when hiring or team build again. Contact us for further information.
