Hiring the right talent is critical for any organization, and those with a high expectation for finding unicorn candidates often need to build their recruitment process with many conflicting priorities in mind. The recruitment process can be challenging, leading to misalignment between hiring managers and HR professionals. It's essential that hiring managers align their teams on what a strong candidate persona looks like in partnership with their recruiters. Behavioral assessment tools are a valuable asset in this context, facilitating time-efficient alignment for hiring managers early in the recruitment process.

Companies with a high hiring bar, particularly at scale, face these unique challenges:

• Consistency and Quality: Maintaining consistent hiring standards and ensuring that every hire aligns with your organizations unique business challenges in this ever-changing economy and talent landscape is daunting. Misalignment on what constitutes "good" in a candidate can lead to inconsistent hiring outcomes.
• Resource Constraints: As the scale of hiring grows, recruiters and hiring managers often face resource constraints, which can lead to rushed decisions or a compromise in quality. Many HR professionals are burnt out and tasked with supporting all parts of the employee lifecycle.
• Alignment Across Teams: High-growth companies may have multiple teams with varying expectations and needs for talent, making it challenging to ensure alignment across the organization.

Prior to the Recruitment Process even beginning Hiring managers and HR Professionals are expected to align on what a strong candidate profiles consists of to ensure they meet the organizational objectives and success profiles. 

Here's how behavioral assessment tools can play a pivotal role to support this alignment:

• Objective Evaluation and Data-Driven Decisions: Behavioral assessments provide hiring managers with objective data about a candidate's personality traits, work style, and competencies. They support hiring managers, and their teams in making data-driven decisions. This data reduces subjectivity and ensures everyone is on the same page regarding a candidate's suitability. This objective information helps standardize evaluation criteria, ensuring consistency in assessing candidates across different teams while still leveraging aligned foundational expectations for what success looks like in any given role.
• Customized and Consistent Assessment Criteria: Tools such as Benchmarks can enable hiring managers to define the specific competencies or attributes they require in candidates. This customization ensures that HR professionals understand and can match their expectations across a variety of roles in an organization. These tools set standardized criteria for evaluating candidates, making it easier to maintain consistency in hiring standards across teams and departments.
• Improved Hiring Predictability: By assessing traits such as drive, sociability, and leadership, behavioral assessments enable a more accurate prediction of a candidate's potential success within the complexities of a high volume recruitment process and challenging fast paced organizations.
• Effective Team Collaboration: In partnership with recruiters, hiring managers can leverage behavioral assessments to efficiently collaborate in the candidate selection process. This collaboration streamlines communication and ensures that the right talent is identified quickly. These tools can define the desired cultural traits, making it easier to align teams on what good looks like in a candidate.
• Time Efficiency and Candidate Experience: Behavioral assessments are quick to administer and evaluate. They provide hiring managers with real time insights that support faster and more informed decision-making. As the assessment tools are more frequently used hiring managers gain more proficiency at evaluating candidates and providing best in class interview process’s thus building a strong candidate experience.
• Establish stakeholder alignment and consensus: Personality is highly predictive of on the job success with all jobs having temperamental demands. Hiring managers may have a hard time articulating and defining these important qualities, while required skills and abilities tend to be easier to define. Building stakeholder alignment early on and gaining consensus regarding what "we" are looking for will result in fewer search resets.

Companies with a high hiring bar at scale rely on the alignment of hiring managers and their teams on what "good" looks like in a candidate. Here's an inspiring testament from a leading Canadian food manufacturer, where the strategic alignment of managers at the onset of the recruitment journey has proven to be a game-changer in their high-volume hiring across diverse roles.

"Riverside's commitment to leveraging behavioral assessments during our recruitment intake meetings with hiring managers has elevated our recruitment process to a whole new level. We believe that understanding an individual's behavior is the key to unlocking their potential and selecting high-performing talent. By focusing on who they are, not just what they've done, we've transformed our hiring process into a pathway for excellence.

Furthermore, we use benchmarking to compare candidates' behavioral profiles against our existing high-performing employees and measure their alignment with Riverside's 7 core values: Teamwork, Ownership, Respect, Humility, Adaptability, Passion, and Fun. This approach ensures that we not only hire top talent but also candidates who resonate with our organization's culture and values. Our elevated behavioral interviewing techniques allow us to dig deeper into a candidate's behavioral traits and assess how well they align with our core values, making the selection process more thorough and meaningful."

Behavioral assessment tools are invaluable in this context, as they bring objectivity, customization, and efficiency to the recruitment process. These tools help maintain hiring standards, ensure alignment, and streamline the hiring process, even in high-volume recruitment efforts. As the job market continues to evolve and become increasingly competitive, organizations must leverage these tools to attract, select, and retain the right talent efficiently, facilitating their growth and success in today's dynamic business environment.