DISCinsights by PeopleKeys Blog

Hire Smart, Not Hard with Predictive Hiring

Written by Coleen Kulkin | 12/10/18 9:49 PM

Hiring has always been one of the biggest challenges for any business. Every business owner and HR professional know how lengthy and tedious the process can be – from job posting, collecting applicants’ resumes, screening, reading, interviewing first time, second time and so on. Employees are often hired for their resume skill sets and interview presentation ability, and then fired due to poor performance or because they were a poor behavioral fit for either the job role or the company culture. This makes the hiring process endless, hard, and tiresome!

Hire Smart Not Hard

By now, human resource and hiring professionals should understand that behavior matters in hiring. Assessing candidate behavior has been proven to be a major predictor of employee success, so with such significance, why leave behavioral fit to chance or wait for the interview to gain insight?

Assessing behavior prior to hiring helps alleviate this retention headache. Both behavior and performance matter for retention, and leading companies, such as Google, are taking steps to hire smarter behaviorally.

What is Predictive Hiring?

Predictive hiring consists of:

  • Studying behaviors of successful managers to determine which behaviors are needed for managers to thrive on-the-job and within the company culture.
  • Going beyond the standard interview, adopting structured Behavioral Interviewing Techniques to evaluate a candidate’s future performance.
  • Prioritizing performance-based hiring over traditional hiring because at the end of the day, performance is what really pushes a company forward faster.

Certainly, behavioral interviewing is necessary to strategically get to the heart of on-the-job behaviors, motivations, and critical thinking in the candidates’ own words, but how much time would hiring managers save if behavioral insights were available in tandem with the candidate’s resume, even before the interview? How would that change the interview short-list and further refine behavioral interview questions?

Predictive Hiring + Occupational Benchmarks

These questions have been asked by recruiters, hiring managers, and corporate stakeholders who know the importance of making smarter, behaviorally-based hiring decisions. They recognize the benefits of using tools, such as PeopleKeys DISC for hiring, which is integrated with DISC insights, occupational benchmarking and behavioral interview questions to get deeper insights; providing hiring managers an efficient and cost-effective way to source superstar employees and improve retention rates.


Figure 1: Candidate predictive scoring and DISC graph with occupational benchmark for a role fit

By integrating the assessment of soft-skill capabilities along with the hard-skill requirements of the job, >hiring managers can quickly determine top-fitting candidates for the position. For those hiring managers not already using behavioral profiling with performance benchmarks, they will not only save precious time and money, but a company’s existing employees’ can be replicated with a benchmark for future hiring of various positions. Behavioral interview questions and superstar employee benchmarks, all in one report is a real game-changer for the hiring manager's decision making process.

If you currently use DISC to understand behavior for managing, coaching and team building, consider adding occupational benchmarks to provide deeper insights and discernment to finding the best mix of behaviors for your next hire. If you are a hiring manager not yet using DISC or behavioral benchmarks, consider profiling your superstar employees to see where your next best hire will fit.

With each DISC for hiring report, you get behavioral interviewing questions to use in your hiring process. For more information about DISC for hiring or occupational benchmarks, get in touch with a Peoplekeys' behavioral specialist.