These enduring economic conditions have had the expected effect of bringing lots of job candidates into the market through redundancies at home, and an ever growing flow of people returning to New Zealand from the EU, US, Australia and particularly Western Australia where the boom has most definitely boomed; at least for now.
Employers and Recruitment Consultants are handling volumes of potentially valuable people not seen for several years. Employers are taking a fresh look at their wish lists of staff groups that the ‘skills gap’ of the past few years couldn’t deliver as management accountants to engineers are suddenly back in the job market.
Having a choice of which candidate to select is great, so long as you understand that with choice comes risk; such as the risk of letting the best candidate slip through the net of a poor selection process. Worse still, the risk of making a poor selection decision just at the point where tough economic conditions demand every employee perform better than ever is a mistake made by many in selecting a candidate who is very good at interviews, but not little else.
Even interviews conducted by skilled and seasoned interviewers are notoriously poor predictors of success in the job. Interviews conducted by untrained and unskilled interviewers fair far worse when it comes to selecting the people most likely to perform in the job.
So, more candidates and more choice bring the need for reliable and objective candidate assessment to the fore in aiding recruiting managers to backup their interviews and reference checks with the tools designed to measure whether a candidate is likely to perform, and what a manager is likely to need to do to get them from a good to great performer.
April saw us at People Central increasing the amount of psychometric testing and assessment in recruiting staff by over 50 percent on any month in the past four years. These clients have grasped the risk of making poor selection decisions and failing to spot the most talented candidates and acted swiftly to manage that risk.
If selecting the best candidate for the role is important to your business, then give Steve Evans us a call on 06 833 6465.