How to Assess Final-Stage Candidates

When you assess a candidate, ‘gut feeling’ is a common factor — but relying on gut feeling alone has a maximum 52% success rate. It’s crucial you make the right decision when choosing a new VP or Director, so your final-stage process needs to be robust.

At Fraser Dove, we use a range of candidate assessment tools to really understand the person, rather than the CV. After all, too many leaders are hired on their CV, but fail based on behaviours.

So read on as we share our secrets about how to assess final-stage candidates effectively. We’ll tackle the following methods:

• Using Talent Mapping and Intelligence Data
• Importance of Unique Assessment Surveys
• Assessing a Candidate’s Culture Fit
• Outsourcing Assessment to Specialists

Using Talent Mapping and Intelligence Data

Before you make any crucial business decisions, it’s best to have a good understanding of the current talent landscape. With sufficient intel in hand, you’re better equipped to develop an informed recruitment strategy.

Some of the information you need to gather includes:

• Competitor insights (organisational structure, recruitment strategy, key hires)
• Skill (availability, demand, diversity, geographic distribution, salary benchmark)
• Talent Pool (potential candidates willing to join your organisation)

Benefits of Talent Mapping

While Talent Mapping can take time and resources, a range of benefits makes it an essential step in your assessment process.

Perhaps the greatest benefit is that it gives you a talent pool that you can instantly tap into when the full process begins. This reduces your time-to-fill and means you can devote more time to assessing the most suitable candidate.

You can also benchmark your offers against current market expectations. Offering a salary below current market valuations can quickly stop a prime candidate in their tracks. Make sure you know the current valuation of the roles you want to hire for, and offer a salary using the benchmark as a guideline.

Importance of Unique Assessment Surveys

One element we have found brings significant success is our Assessment Surveys. At Fraser Dove, we use a data-driven platform to assess candidates and map their skills against the current team, ultimately assisting in finding the optimal match.

In order to create properly informed decisions, we have developed a comprehensive 5-stage process.

Team Analysis

Evaluate the current members of the leadership team, to develop a detailed understanding of the culture and team’s dynamics. This gives you an excellent starting point to map candidates, and see how they would fit into your organisation.

Gap Analysis

By using the insights gained from the assessment platform, you can identify critical areas where the new hire should complement the existing team.

Hiring

Using the data provided by the assessment tool, you can more accurately compare individual candidates. These potential team members can also be referenced against the Gap Analysis to further assist with complex hiring decisions.

Interview

Using data gathered from the evaluation tool, you can easily enhance your interview process and learn more about each candidate.

For instance, the evaluation tool may highlight certain topics for discussion. This can let you take the interview in a specific direction, and gain a much better understanding of each candidate’s skills and leadership styles.

Onboarding

Use insights from the evaluation tool to create personalised plans for the successful candidate. These plans will involve training and development, and should help new team members get up to speed quickly.

The more effective you make the onboarding process, the faster your new hire will get up to speed. Effective onboarding processes have also been linked to increased tenure and a greater work ethic.

Assessing a Candidate’s Culture Fit

When you’re trying to hire the right person for the job, remember that they aren’t always the one with the best skills.

In fact, professional skills can be learned and developed — but personality and cultural fit can’t. For instance, on paper someone may seem like the perfect candidate. When it comes to interacting with others though, their personality may not blend well with the pre-existing culture.

Hiring someone who clashes with your values can quickly disrupt your business’ culture, and chase away some of your best talent. That’s why it’s a much better approach to select a candidate who is more closely aligned on values.

Plus, people crave a challenge. If you hire someone who already has all the required skills, chances are they may look for a more challenging role in the near future.

Outsourcing Assessment to Specialists

When it comes to high-complexity, low-volume roles, you might be better choosing to partner with an Executive Talent Consultancy.

Without significant experience and networks, these roles can easily put a heavy strain on your Talent Acquisition team. Instead, it can be more efficient to let them focus on filling a high volume of low-complexity roles, while your chosen talent partner handles the assessment of your more complex positions.

At Fraser Dove, we specialise in solving our clients’ talent problems. If you have any queries, contact us today!