Why you shouldn’t recruit on experience alone

Whatever your industry, the importance of recruiting the right talent for your vacant positions cannot be underestimated. However, when it comes to employing individuals that not only possess the correct experience but also share a company’s vision, characteristics and culture, many have fallen short at least once… Recruitment professionals are well aware that companies whose recruitment campaigns can be deemed the most successful are those that embrace their unique characteristics. To succeed a business needs to not only have a clear purpose but also an identity; therefore identifying and acquiring talent that has the best experience is only part of the battle. Beyond that point, recruiters need to focus on analysing whether their skilled candidate would be able to adapt to the attitudes and working behaviours that are at the heart of that business’s fundamental beliefs. While a candidate might appear on-paper as if they possess exactly the sort of skills and experience that your team is missing, not assessing their cultural fit can lead to an inappropriate hire, wasted recruitment efforts and a loss on investment in HR. Therefore, to ensure that your recruitment efforts are as prosperous as possible, you need to ensure that you aren’t recruiting on experience alone. Let’s give experience it’s due Before we continue, please note that experience is something that simply cannot be overlooked. While that point may seem fairly obvious, it can sometimes be all too easy to be swayed by group consensus on hires. While it is undoubtedly useful to make use of second opinions about candidates, relying too heavily on this could result in the hiring of a popular but less experienced professional when a more experienced less-popular professional would have been just as suitable a cultural-fit. Therefore, before analysing a candidate’s behavioural-fit, ensure that they possess the right professional qualities. How to be successful in interviewing to assess a candidate’s cultural fit Before an organisation, brand or business can even hope to assess a candidate’s cultural fit they need to ensure that they have defined their organisation’s culture. Most organisations have already identified what their key goals and practices are and understand how these weave into the day-to-day workings of their organisation, and so would be able to do this fairly effortlessly. Other individuals may, for one reason or another, find this difficult. Perhaps one of the most efficient ways to do this is with the aid of employee focus groups. Once you begin to ascertain how each individual views cultural norms within your business you put yourself in better stead to defining the cultural operation of your business to the uninitiated. This means that everyone in your hiring team, from recruitment professionals through to people on the ground, would be able to identify individual characteristics that would complement your current cultural processes. For example, if your team identifies that they often react to problem solving through acts of spontaneous collaboration then an individual who is averse to seeking the knowledge and assistance of their peers may not be the best cultural fit. Whatever attributes you deem necessary for your hires to possess, looking beyond experience is just another step in the right direction for businesses to maximise their recruitment potential. At eRecruitSmart we use our decades of talent sourcing experience to take a fresh look at the best practices for attracting the best talent for a wide variety of industries. Get in touch today to see how we could help you…