Stephen Brennan has hired workers for sales positions for years. He’s looked over resume after resume, with usually a two-week turn around for hiring someone based off of their claims and interviewing them to confirm.
And being one of the only sales resources at Workwolf, he has a very limited amount of time, particularly to look for new employees who can help reduce his workload.
So, when the time came to look for a new sales associate who could help him manage the growing demands with Workwolf’s expansion, he knew he would have to be strategic about how to find the right candidate. This meant finding the right person who would be well suited for the position within sales, as well as for an environment that is constantly looking to improve and integrate with preexisting systems.
To find a candidate at the co-op or junior level, Stephen posted on job boards online with the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University, particularly highlighting the role for students or recent graduates.
In addition to the job description, its benefits and requirements, Stephen included a link for students to take Packfinder, Workwolf’s free career fit assessment. Although he only intended to offer the assessment as an added bonus to help students with their career path post-graduation, Packfinder ended up also providing Stephen with insights into how well they would fit into the position, particularly within sales.
As expected, many students were interested in the job, as it would lead to great connections outside of their university, and could provide a foot in the door to work in a position in their field or area of interest. But what Stephen didn’t expect was that after receiving many applications for the position, he received one application whose results of the Packfinder fit the benchmark for competitive sales perfectly. This one in particular caught Stephen’s eye for that reason.
Hiring Equitably and Effectively
You may be wondering how well an assessment can gage an applicant’s aptitude for a position, and realistically how well they would do in a position, especially without seeing their hard skills or credentials, but you might be surprised to learn that soft skills are becoming more crucial to measure than anything else in the hiring process.
Namely, hiring with only soft skills in mind—including a person’s communication, interpersonal, organizational, and self- and time-management skills—is becoming a more universally recognized method of providing candidates with an equitable filtering and hiring process. Because a person’s soft skills are those that are inherent to their personality and are not related to their race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or abilities, using these aspects of a person’s application, rather than where a person attended school, what experiences they’ve had, and what qualifications they were able to earn, the job is open to all potential candidates equitably.
And while it’s great to hire candidates equitably by working actively against discrimination in the workplace, employers still need to hire the objectively best candidates for the position to be fair to the company, all potential candidates, and even the candidate who is picked themselves. For, even if one were to hire someone for a job who wasn’t really up for the task, it would truly only set the candidate up for failure, and leave them disappointed in themselves. Let’s also not forget, every mis-hire costs time, money, and effort.
Results You Can Trust
What makes Packfinder so effective at offering equitable opportunities for potential candidates while also measuring for practical requirements that will show how well a person will fit into a position?
Packfinder was developed by experts at Self Management Group, who know exactly what to measure for in a unique job position. With years of experience building effective teams and curating personalized workplace assessments for over 40 years, Self Management Group was able to provide Workwolf with a psychometric assessment—that is, one that asks self-reflective questions that rely on reasoning and error identification—to provide candidates with an effective and reliable personality and soft skills test.
Specifically, Packfinder measures for a user’s self-management skills, motivational profile, environmental fit, comfort with conflict, people orientation, and analytical orientation. Each of these categories, when a response is given, measure where on a spectrum from one extreme to the other, a person’s skill or trait falls. And because the assessment is taken by the participant to reflect on their own abilities, there are further measures that have been put in place to ensure their responses are truthful, namely, by also measuring their confidence at the time of taking the assessment, as well as the consistency of their answers and how comfortable they were self-promoting.
With the benchmarks set to measure how well applicants would match with a position in sales, and only one candidate rising above the rest, Stephen felt confident that this was the one he would reach out to for the position.
Not only has this assessment allowed Stephen to find a perfect match for the position he’s looking to fill, demonstrating the candidate’s great potential in this role, but he’s further been able to skip checking resumes entirely.
“With weeks of time, money, and energy saved in filtering and looking through resumes—which itself would take weeks,” he says, “even with applicant tracking systems and resume reading software—Stephen swears he’ll never go back to filtering the old-fashioned way again.”
