It’s just as important to Test for Integrity as it is to Test for Competency
Posted by HRM Resolutions on August 21st, 2019
When hiring to put someone into a new role, what do you test for? Most hiring managers would tell you that they look for competency – the ability to do the job well. But how often is honesty and integrity the chief priority? Not nearly as often.
Of course you need to know that the person that you’re hiring is capable of doing the job (has the right skills), has demonstrated experience and is available to start in a reasonable time frame. You also need to know that their salary expectations are reasonable. But you may well be surprised to find that testing a candidate for honesty might be the only significant test that you need to undertake.
If you’ve got a good interview process in place, then the first couple of rounds will cover off the competency question. The application of the STAR approach will allow any seasoned interviewer to come to a complete picture about a person’s skill set, both how it matches with what’s on the resume, and anything that might not be immediately obvious from that document.
These skills are easily taught to an interviewer, and if you’ve got any issues with how to handle an interview, you can always speak to a seasoned consultant, such as HRM Resolutions, to get those baseline skills in place.
Learning whether a person can do more than just “do” the job, and will instead do the job in the way that you want to, is another matter entirely. You can’t simply ask someone if they’re an honest person, after all. Testing for honesty requires a broader set of research and analytical skills to really get to know a person.
The most obvious way to test for honesty is through reference checks. This in itself can be fraught with risk. If you ask a referee to fill in a form, then there will always be the potential that they will rush through it and tick boxes almost at random, just to get the job done. If you ring them, you might get basic information about the candidate’s ability to turn up on time, whether they take too many sick days, and the personality they bring to the office, but unless you ask the right questions, you’re still not going to get a complete picture of the person’s honesty.
In short, it’s best to supplement the references and research with psychological profiling tests, that are designed to raise red flags is a person proves less than honest. Unfortunately, while most complete psychological tests are great for gleaning a person’s honesty, these can cost hundreds of dollars, per candidate. This is where JobFit Assessments come in. These are benchmarked to the role that you are recruiting for, easy to administer, and allow you to screen six candidates that look good on paper for the price of one psychological test.
It’s important to hire the right people, for what they bring to the organisation and the team they work in. But at the same time, interviewing and reference checking is time-consuming, and the last thing you want is to get right to the end of the hiring process to discover that the person that you’re looking to hire has a glaring issue with their honesty and integrity. For that reason you should contact the team at HRM Resolutions and develop a more robust hiring practice that puts honesty at the forefront of the recruitment process.
