Getting recruitment right is extraordinarily hard and getting it wrong is expensive.
When recruiting for a role or building a team, there are many assessment tools that help in the recruitment process. Tools that enable us to measure the skills and capabilities of a prospective new teammate – after all, it would be foolish to hire someone without having some confidence that they can do the job.
But beyond being able to do the job, what other factors drive the success of an individual once they join your team?
The biggest one is team fit. Simply, if the new individual does not get on with your team, no matter how capable they are, their motivation will drop, their application will drop and worst-case scenario, they will just leave.
Yet we spend little time assessing team fit with data.
Currently, the most common approach (well, pre-Covid) has been to take a new hire to the pub and meet them in an informal, social environment.
Whilst reviewing a new hire’s social skills and providing a forum to see if someone can gel with your team is useful, in comparison to the evidence-based approach used in skills assessment, the pub feels a little less scientific!
So how do you assess for team fit more scientifically?
Let’s start with what you are going to need. Three things:
- Data on your current team
- To capture data in the selection process on your prospective new hire.
- To be able to marry the two.
But what data specifically? And how does this work?
Ultimately, every team performs better when individuals have a sense of shared purpose, where individuals feel responsible to, and can rely on, their teammates. This is easier when teams have a common framework of behaviours, a framework of how the team communicates and a balanced set of attributes. In many ways, the process of adapting to a team for a new team member involves them intuitively figuring these things out, but wouldn’t it be so much more useful if we had some measure of how likely someone is to fit a team, or not fit a team before hiring them!
So how do we measure these behaviours, communications and attributes of your current team first?
A well-designed questionnaire or psychometric can give you the team’s aggregated behaviours and communications approach, and a personality tool for your current team will give insight into the current attributes of the team.
The same psychometric / questionnaires can also be used in the recruitment process with prospective new hires.
From there you will be looking to assess what constitutes a fit. Do you want someone to be different to the existing team? Do you want to add attributes? Are you looking for more diversity or more alignment (not that they are mutually exclusive)?
In summary, time invested in exploring team attributes and team fit will improve hiring success and reduce attrition. When seeking the right fit for your teams, look beyond skills to attributes, to enable sustainable success.
Great teams are made up of great people.