The world of talent acquisition has remained largely unchanged for decades. Throughout, recruiters have mostly focused on the past of candidates. The assumption being past performance will inevitably predict future fit to new roles and requirements rather than human potential.
As such, recruiters scan through CVs, attempting to discern if an applicant’s past experiences align with current needs.
In this article, we discuss recent research from TTS’s best-of-breed product partner, HireVue, which describes a revolutionary new way of looking at recruitment, using AI-enabled assessments such as video interviewing, as well as a more digitally sophisticated way of preparing both employers and potential hires for the realities of a complex, digital workplace.
In addition, we show how this new approach to recruitment and selection seamlessly integrates with existing frameworks of competencies, capacities, and talent assessments, such as TTS’s capability framework.
Discontent with current hiring practices
As businesses adapt to ever-changing global dynamics such as the disruptions of technology, it is evident that traditional hiring methods have become misaligned with modern needs.
The results from HireVue’s 2023 Hiring Experience Report, which polled over 3000 individuals, describe why employers, talent professionals, and candidates are discontented about the current hiring landscape.
Respondents highlighted several key areas of misalignment:
- Feedback void: 40% of respondents felt left in the dark, with no feedback after their interviews.
- CV limitations: 30% expressed frustration at being judged solely based on their CVs, rather than a more holistic assessment of their skills and potential.
- Lack of adaptability: 37% believed that the hiring process needs to be more streamlined and adaptive to meet the evolving needs of businesses and candidates.
- Inaccurate role descriptions: 31% pinpointed a prevalence of job listings that didn’t accurately reflect the roles on offer.
Rearview recruiting: A system under strain
Traditional recruitment methods, often termed “rearview recruiting,” hinge on a retrospective evaluation of candidates. This means that rather than considering what a candidate might bring to a role in the future, recruiters are focused purely on past achievements.
Legacy HR technologies further amplify these issues. By focusing predominantly on CV screening and profile scraping, they restrict the view of a candidate to mere data points, eliminating the human aspect from human resources.
What is the result of this method? An opaque, impersonal, and extended hiring process that often leaves candidates feeling like just another number.
But more importantly, it represents a missed opportunity for organizations. By concentrating solely on past achievements, businesses may overlook a goldmine of untapped potential.
A closer look at human potential: The TTS capabilities framework
Based on the work of Bartram and others, TTS developed its own model that not only positions potential but all other components that predict eventual job success in a logical structure,
The TTS capabilities framework describes how forward-looking, backward-looking and foundational factors interact to determine effectiveness as shown below:
Starting from the bottom, foundational factors are common elements that predict success in most roles and are independent of the specific requirements of a given job. Such factors include emotional intelligence, career aspirations and engagement, and attributes like cultural agility or safety orientation.
However, foundational factors offer only one lens for answering the question of what determines effectiveness. An additional consideration is a person’s experience, skills, knowledge, and past achievements, captured by the category of backward-looking factors.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly for the current discussion, forward-looking success factors examine constructs like abilities and behaviors that influence a person’s potential fit to the role and predict their likely job performance. It is exactly here where HireVue’s research has shown that traditional recruitment practices have been absent.
While TTS has been using this model of capabilities for many years to help our clients make better talent decisions in their selection and development assessments, HireVue is bringing that same innovative thinking to the practices of the recruitment and screening space.
Next, we turn to a more detailed understanding of HireVue’s innovation in this regard.
HireVue’s vision: From guesswork to science
HireVue’s innovative “Human Potential Intelligence” heralds a fresh approach to recruitment. At its core, it champions the idea of using AI to understand a candidate beyond the black-and-white of their CV, thus giving a more accurate reading of their potential and forward-looking constructs that predict job performance.
Instead of basing decisions solely on past accomplishments, as has been the case for much of recruitment up to now, this approach aims to unearth the latent potential, skills, and interests of a candidate.
At its core, HireVue’s approach is founded on its award-winning AI-assisted video interview assessments. These assessments are ideally suited to high-volume recruitment scenarios where time and budget are both always severely constrained.
By using AI-assisted interviewing, clients can create high-volume, efficient, and rapid screening funnels for candidates, allowing for an accurate read of potential even at the recruitment level.
To this end, HireVue’s assessments have been designed to evaluate the skills and competencies needed for success— for every job at every level.
Concentrating on competencies like digital readiness, learning agility, problem-solving, and reliability helps HR teams identify new hires who can learn and adapt as their organizational needs change.
In addition, HireVue has recently augmented the above assessments with their new Virtual Job Tryout® assessment. These innovative assessments are designed for a specific job and customized with a realistic job preview to help candidates further understand the position. It goes beyond conventional cognitive and behavioral assessment by providing innovative candidate exercises that simulate the job.
The assessment also employs HireVue’s expertise in using AI to automate tools to assess candidate competencies efficiently. In this way, hiring for potential becomes a strategy with documentable results.
In the words of Madeline Laurano, Founder and Chief Analyst at Aptitude Research:
“HireVue’s introduction of ‘Human Potential Intelligence’ represents a paradigm shift in hiring. While traditional constructs fall short, HireVue’s art and science of hiring, fortified by cutting-edge AI, emerges as a game-changer. It focuses on the very essence of what makes us human – our potential and skills.”
Finding the right fit
HireVue’s innovative approach augments their AI-assisted video interviews as well as their job preview tool with an additional solution:
- Based on the acknowledgment that candidates often do not have a full view of all jobs that may be suited to them, HireVue has introduced the Find My Fit application.
This AI-powered application serves as a bridge between the talents and aspirations of candidates and the needs of employers. The power of the application lies in its precision job-matching capabilities.
This means that candidates aren’t simply funneled towards open positions. Instead, they’re guided towards roles that resonate with their unique skill sets, aspirations, and latent potential. By doing so, the application not only enhances the job-seeking experience but also holds the promise of reduced turnover rates and a more satisfied and productive workforce.
In this way, the Find My Fit application allows candidates to have full access to the range of job and career opportunities available to them within organizations. It overcomes past limitations where talented or potentially talented employees were limited to only the roles they had been traditionally associated with.
Tackling the challenges of the modern job market
The Find My Fit application, combined with HireVue’s powerful assessment solutions discussed above, addresses several challenges in today’s volatile job market:
- Empowerment: By going beyond CVs, it aids candidates in uncovering roles that truly align with their skills and aspirations.
- Facilitating transitions: In today’s dynamic job landscape, individuals often pivot between careers. The solution provides guidance, helping individuals locate roles they may excel, irrespective of their past experiences.
- Diversity and inclusion: By focusing on skills and human potential, it broadens the spectrum of roles candidates consider, fostering a more diverse talent pool.
The bigger picture: Human potential intelligence in action
Beyond the Find My Fit application, HireVue’s broader suite of solutions seeks to address systemic issues in hiring. Their conversational AI chatbot, for instance, assists candidates in finding roles based on skills rather than restrictive job titles. HireVue Assessments, on the other hand, are geared towards evaluating the skills and competencies crucial for success in each role, measuring forward-looking capacities that predict a candidate’s true potential for the role.
And, by simulating actual job tasks, the Virtual Job Tryout ensures that both the candidate and the employer have a clear understanding of the role and its requirements.
Final thoughts
The age-old question in HR and talent management circles has been: “Are we hiring the right people?” For too long, the methods used to answer this question have been suboptimal at best. But with the advent of AI-driven solutions like those offered by HireVue, we’re on the cusp of a new era in talent acquisition and assessment of human potential.
It’s time for organizations to move beyond the constraints of rearview recruiting. By embracing the power of Human Potential Intelligence, they can unlock a world of potential for their recruitment functions, ensuring that they’re not just filling roles, but shaping the future of their organization. Anthony Reynolds, CEO at HireVue, puts it this way, “Every candidate has a story, a path, and potential.”
If you would like to know more about TTS’s AI-driven solutions like those offered by HireVue, contact us at info@tts-talent.com
Source: HireVue (2023). Hiring Experience Report 2023.