TONY ZIPPLE, SCD, MBA
SENIOR CONSULTANT, TALENT OPTIMIZATION
At a recent meeting of community mental health center leaders, INCITE consultants asked, “What is your biggest challenge?” More than two thirds of the group responded that hiring enough good staff was their biggest barrier to success. In today’s post COVID environment, there seem to be more jobs available than there are people to fill them. It makes recruitment a difficult and time-consuming chore. In many organizations, it seems to be the number one challenge for 2022.
Ultimately, companies do well when they provide a good or service for which someone else is willing to pay. Skilled staff time is the primary service provided by behavioral health organizations and the foundational building block of any company’s success. Without skilled staff time, behavioral health organizations have little of value to offer. Inability to hire enough of the right people or hiring some of the wrong people is one of the fastest ways to undermine a behavioral health organization. Without enough people, you cannot meet community expectations and even a single bed higher has the potential to do lasting damage to your reputation. While there’s no magic bullet that will fully solve this problem, there are strategies for making it better. Being more successful in recruiting great talent involves three steps.
First, you need a deep understanding of the employee characteristics that you need in each job. Too often, we think about job requirements in terms of things I resume. Experience, education, certifications, and so on may be important but these are just the starting point. Jobs requirements also have behavioral and cognitive dimensions. Does the job require someone who is competitive and independent or a person who is an agreeable collaborator? Are you looking for someone who values novelty and the unexpected or for someone who prizes consistency, patience, instability? How rapidly does someone need to absorb and use new information in order to succeed with the position? It is important to develop a detailed understanding of these behavioral and cognitive requirements of the job, and not settle for just checking off the basic credentials. Remember, if you hire someone with the right behavioral disposition and cognitive ability, you can teach them specific job tasks and they will feel like a great fit. If you someone who is a bad fit from a behavioral or cognitive perspective, no amount of training will make them a better fit.
Second, you need to develop a recruitment strategy that identifies and attracts people with the right credentials as well as the right behavioral profile and cognitive ability. All too often, job advertisements read like a dry list of credential requirements rather than an appealing invitation. When the market is tight, you need a way to make advertisements “stickier” and more attractive to people with the right characteristics. Job advertisements need to be be written in a way that catches the attention the kind of person you are looking for, not just the credentials you are looking. For example, an ad for an assertive community treatment worker might stress that the job is ideal for in “innovative, out-of-the-box thinker who is undaunted by failure” or a “confident decision-maker focused on implementing practical solutions to a wide range of interesting and changing challenges.”
Third, you need to understand the behavioral profile and cognitive capacity of candidates and evaluate them against the profile you develop for your job. All of us have had the experience of hiring someone who interviewed well but, three months into the job, looked very different than they looked during the interview. Interviews, just like a resume review, are important but in insufficient strategy for predicting future behavior. Predictions about how people behave on the job are strengthened by the use of good behavioral and cognitive assessments that are validated for job selection and a behavioral interviewing guide that is tailored to exploring the alignment between the candidate’s behavioral drives and cognitive ability and the job requirements. If you know the cognitive and behavioral demands of the job and the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of candidates, you can improve your odds of making a great hire by more than 50%.
There are good tools available for assessing the behavioral and cognitive demands of the job and matching them to candidate characteristics. The Predictive Index, used by INCITE, is one of the easiest and most powerful platforms for improving the quality of hires. No tools will fix all your problems but, imagine what it would do for your organization if you could make your hiring processes 50% better and more accurate.
In the end, our organizations are measured by their ability to do great work and deliver quality services for our clients and the community. Great work and great organizations are built one staff member at a time, one staff interaction with the client at a time, one hire at a time. Sharpening your hiring processes by including attention to the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of your candidates will take some of the pain out of recruitment and selection and help your company deliver the results you hope for.
This blog is just one part of the H.E.A.R.T series. To read the rest of the series, please visit our website.
