Recruiting candidates without experience. How to assess the potential of a future employee?
In this article, we'll take a look:
- Why do companies not want to hire employees with no experience?
- Let's take a look at a tool for assessing candidates without experience, which can help determine their future potential and predict their performance.
- The recruitment system is not prepared to evaluate such candidates. It is difficult for a recruiter to evaluate a candidate because they have no experience, do not have the necessary knowledge, and there is no way to check their performance at the previous place of work. When interviewing such candidates, department heads have no way of predicting their performance and understanding how effective they will be. As a result, managers are afraid to hire candidates with no work experience because they are uncertain whether these candidates will achieve the desired result. After all, if the result is not achieved, the manager will be held accountable. This is a justified fear for any prudent manager who must decide without sufficient information.
- Another reason is that many managers have the paradigm, “we will teach, and they will leave, we will only waste time and effort.”
- Testing the personal qualities of candidates, with the help of which we can determine their potential, motivation, involvement, desire to develop and how long an employee can work in the Company.
- Automated assessment of the level of knowledge.
There are different systems, but in this article, we will look at the automated online personnel testing platform Smart Way, which already has professional psychological tests ready to evaluate candidates without work experience.
To begin with, let's look at the 1st block - assessing candidates' personal qualities, motivation, engagement, desire, and ability to develop. To do this, the Smart Way testing system has a test to assess personality type. This test consists of 72 questions with an average completion time of approximately 40 minutes. As a result of the personality test, you will receive an informative report describing the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates, which consists of the following blocks:
- General characteristics of the personality type;
- The candidate's behavioural style in the role of a subordinate:
- Strengths.
- Weaknesses.
- The recommended type of activity that best suits this candidate based on his or her personal qualities.
- Behavioural style in the role of a leader;
- Working conditions (intrinsic motivation);
- Recommendations for development.
This comprehensive test for testing job candidates will, in many cases, provide you with enough information to make a decision. However, we recommend using the Type of Professional Motivation Test, Level of Professional Burnout Test, Conflict Behaviour Type Test, and Level of Organisational and Communication Skills Test along with it. By using this battery of 5 tests, you will be able to qualitatively assess the potential of candidates without work experience. All tests take an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes to complete.
Let's take a brief look at each test separately.
It's not a big test, but it's a very effective one, with an average time of 10-15 minutes. Based on the results of this test, you will be able to understand what motivates the candidate and whether you can provide him with this motivation. If the candidate's type of motivation matches your motivation in the Company, then you can be sure that the candidate will work long and productively. To make it clearer, let's look at a few examples.
Example 1: We are selecting a candidate for a sales position and have developed a motivation system for this position, which will allow the employee to earn a salary above the market rate.
The motivational test revealed that the candidate has an instrumental type of motivation.
*Note: An instrumental type of motivation is when an employee does not care what kind of work they do, as long as it is well paid.
With this candidate, you can assume that they will work for the Company for a long time and be productive. You provide his main motive - you give him the opportunity to earn more than in other companies thanks to your motivation system. In order to earn more, such a candidate will do his best, and over time, he may become a sales leader.
Example 2: We are recruiting a candidate for a sales position, and we have a rate for this position below the market rate, as we believe that it is inappropriate to pay a candidate without experience at the same level as employees with experience.
We still have the same candidate with an instrumental type of motivation.
In this case, we don't give them the opportunity to earn more. Accordingly, the candidate is not motivated. The position of an employee with an instrumental type of motivation: “as they pay, so I work”. As a result, we hire a candidate with no experience who is not motivated to work for results. He will not work with us for long. We will train him or her, and they will go to a competitor. Because of such situations, the mindset “we will train them, and then they will leave – we will only waste time and effort” has emerged.
In this case, a candidate with a professional type of motivation is more suitable for us.
We have considered only two simple examples, there may be many more.
Therefore, when selecting candidates without experience (and with experience as well), we recommend conducting a motivational test and assessing whether the Company can provide the level of motivation required for the candidate.
To better understand the possibilities of the motivational test, we will prepare a separate article, follow the announcements in our blog.
With this test, we can assess the candidate's burnout level. It assesses two types of burnout:
- Level of psycho-emotional exhaustion. The level of burnout of emotional forces that affect the desire to work.
- Level of personal alienation. The level of desire to establish contacts and communicate with people.
In fact, candidates without work experience rarely have a high level of burnout. But it is better to conduct this test in conjunction with others to avoid hiring a burned-out candidate who is physically unable to deliver the desired result to the Company. The test takes 10-15 minutes to complete.
If we hire a candidate with a high level of burnout, there is a high probability that they will not pass the probationary period. Moreover, we can ruin the candidate's career, because after they are fired for failing the probationary period, it will be more difficult for them to find a new job, and their burnout level will increase even more. The best we can do for such a candidate is to explain the real reason for the rejection and recommend that they work on eliminating burnout. It should be understood that most often the candidate will be toxic and will take our feedback and recommendations negatively.
This test assesses the type of conflict a candidate has.
Depending on the position, it is important for us to hire a non-conflict employee, or vice versa, a conflict employee, or it doesn't matter to us.
For example, if it's a Lawyer, we want him or her to have a “rivalry” type of conflict (this is a conflict type), so that they will persistently defend the Company's interests. And we would not want to hire a Lawyer with the “accommodation” type (this is not a conflict type), because he does not like to get into conflicts, it is easier for him to give in than to defend the interests of the Company.
Or, for example, we hire a Junior Java Developer who will work remotely and will not communicate with clients. In this case, we don't care about the type of conflict, and we won't conduct this test so as not to limit the selection with unnecessary criteria.
We'll tell you more about all types of conflicts and how to deal with them in a separate article.
As with the conflict test, it is also used or not used depending on the position.
For example, when looking for a candidate with no work experience to fill a sales position, we need high communication skills and average organisational skills. And when selecting a candidate for the position of Office Manager, on the contrary, we need average communication skills but high organisational skills. And if we are hiring an assistant to the CEO, rather than an Office Manager, then high communication skills and high organisational skills are already important to us.
As a result, using these psychological tests, we completely solve the problem of assessing the personal qualities of candidates without work experience. Based on the results of the candidate testing, we provide the manager with a detailed report describing the strengths and weaknesses, types of motivation, burnout, type of conflict, recommendations for development, and a dozen other parameters, based on which the manager can easily make an informed decision about the candidates.
To solve the second block - assessing the level of knowledge, the Smart Way system has a test builder where you can create any test to assess the level of knowledge for any position. To prevent candidates from “googling” in search of the right answer, a timer is set for passing the test.
Using this assessment system, we get the following opportunities:
- Significantly reduce the interview time.
- Assess the level of knowledge of candidates without involving technical specialists.
- Submission of candidates to the manager for consideration, assessed in detail for their soft skills and hard skills, with the results recorded in reports. This significantly saves the manager's time for interviews, and increases the speed and quality of decision-making on candidates.
Conclusion. Create an effective recruiting system in your company to select and evaluate candidates with no work experience, use a ready-made, automated online platform for testing candidates Smart Way, and fill vacancies with effective and productive specialists with high potential.
