Job Fit: Matching People to Jobs. And Jobs to People.

Job candidates are much more than the sum of their experiences, previous jobs and education. A person’s cognitive and behavioral traits, along with their motivational interests, have actually been found to be more accurate predictors of job success than those traditional measures. 

Today, it’s all about Job Fit. 

Cognitive and behavioral assessments are rapidly becoming an indispensable part of the hiring process. They can help ensure that your job candidates are matched to the requirements of the job as closely as possible.
And that can help both you and the job candidate. You help avoid hires that don’t work out. And you help your candidates avoid jobs they really won’t be good at.

Replicating top performers
Finding the right people for any given job begins with knowing which attributes and character traits are important for the job you’re trying to fill.
And that’s where benchmarking comes in—identifying top job performers in the field and finding out what makes them tick.
So what are these Job Fit indicators that can help supercharge your hiring process? Here are the top three:

• Thinking style. Everyone has their own way of solving problems, communicating, interacting with others and working their way through common obstacles. It’s called their “thinking style,” and it can make a big difference in how well they perform their jobs. Which “thinking style” is most likely to work best for the job you’re trying to fill? 
• Behavioral traits. Our natural pace, our level of assertiveness, our sociability, whether we conform easily, our general outlook on life, our decisiveness—these and other behaviors literally define who we are as people. There are no good or bad behavioral traits, no right or wrong ways to interact with the world. But there definitely are traits that are better suited to some jobs than others. Do you know which behavioral traits will make the ideal candidate for your job? 
• Motivational interests. A popular book came out a few years ago called Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow by Marsha Sinetar, and it outlined a theme that’s hard to argue with: people do best in the things they’re really interested in. However, many people have no clear idea what that is. So they bounce from task to task or job to job trying to “find out who they are.” If there was a way to both help job candidates truly find out what they were interested in while also identifying what types of interests would work best for your job positions, wouldn’t it make sense to tap into that? That’s what a well-designed Job Fit process does. It helps you sort out the enterprising business builders from the technical detailers, the creative spark plugs from the number crunchers, the mechanically inclined from the empathetic people servers.

Protect Your Hiring Investments
Hiring is just the beginning of the employment lifecycle, because once you’ve matched your most qualified candidates to your job and hired them, you’ve immediately begun investing in their—and your—success. 
To protect your investment, new employees must be on-boarded properly. They must be coached and developed to help them reach their full potential … and to help you reach your business goals. 

Successful companies know this. But instead of treating each employee as a unique individual, many companies still adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to training and employee development. 
Once you “know” your employees’ Job Fit; however, you have actual data you can use to develop and groom them for future opportunities within your organization.

If you know the right fit for the job and the right fit for each of your employees, you’ll be much better prepared to fit the opportunity to the person.

Gain more insights into how to ensure Job Fit by joining TalentGear on Jan. 15 for the webcast, "Job Fit: Igniting Your Employees’ Unique Skills to Get Things Done."