Excellence in high-volume recruitment: ThriveMap’s approach

Many hiring assessments today still rely on abstract questions that do little to reveal a candidate’s true suitability for a role.

They evaluate personality traits, measure intellect through theoretical puzzles, and assess skills that may not be relevant to the job.

The consequences of these poor assessment processes impact every part of the business: productivity, profit, and people.

But what underlies these problems?

In many instances, newly hired employees find themselves facing a significant disconnect between their expectations and the reality of their roles.

This gap, referred to as the Candidate Expectation Gap, drives as many as 50% of employees to leave shortly after joining the organisation.

Recognising this challenge, ThriveMap’s founders, Chris Platts and Mark Hla, embarked on a mission to eliminate unrealistic job assessments.

The outcome is ThriveMap, an organisation dedicated to assisting companies engaged in high-volume recruitment in designing and implementing Realistic Job Assessments that bridge the Candidate Expectation Gap.

In this article, we will guide you through ThriveMap’s best practice end-to-end recruitment process, offering insights, templates, and downloadable resources to streamline your high-volume recruitment efforts.

The road to a world-class assessment:

1. Defining Success
2. Job Analysis by Your Role Experts
3. Hosting an Assessment Ideas Workshop
4. Crafting the Ideal Candidate Profile
5. Designing the Workflow
6. Building the Assessment
7. Accelerating Candidate Selection
8. Post-Hire Analytics

Outsourcing pre-hire assessments to specialists like ThriveMap brings fresh practices, innovation, and improved recruitment to your roles.

Interested in seeing our impact? Request a demonstration to see our tools, services and approach.

1. Defining Success

Context is King when it comes to designing your pre-hire assessment.

Think of it this way: if you’re a chef tasked with creating a burger, the approach you take varies significantly depending on whether you’re working for McDonald’s or the Fat Duck.

The price the customer is willing to pay, whether it’s £99 or 99p, further underscores the need for context-awareness.

A generic “burger making test” would be futile when applied across the diverse landscape of the hospitality industry.

This is where ThriveMap assessments shine, by placing context at the core of our pre-hire assessment process, custom-tailored for each of our clients.

We’ll ask questions to understand more about the requirements:

• What does success look like in this role?
• What does the company want to achieve from the role?
• What are the current business challenges?
• What are the current recruitment challenges?
• What are the current attrition rates in the role?
• What’s leading to new hire attrition in the role?
• Who are the key stakeholders in the hiring team, and what are their roles?
• What do the recruitment performance metrics currently look like?

This helps us to generate an initial understanding of your pre-hire assessment, what success will look like, and what level of investment will be required.

2. Job Analysis by Role Experts

Can’t I just ask Bob what he wants in a candidate? He’s been hiring call center agents his whole life…

Bob sees the challenges in new hires one way. Sarah, Zane and Rafiq see completely different challenges.

While individual thinking suffers from bias, a diversity of biases helps the communal brain reduce blind spots.

By only asking Bob (no offense, Bob) individuality gets quashed, delusion sets in, and sacrifice group intelligence in favor of brute strength.

The first tool we use in our pre-hire assessment process is Signal.

Signal, a tool by ThriveMap is a Job Analysis Questionnaire portal.

And if you want to use Signal, it’s available free of charge too.

Signal involves asking current role incumbents and role experts what tasks are actually completed on the job, what attributes they believe are required to do those tasks well, the challenges, and the rewarding aspects of the job.

For the best understanding of the role, a minimum of five surveys should be completed, but you can ask as many people to contribute as you like. This bottom-up approach takes into account lots of different perspectives and heuristics. 

3. Hosting an Assessment Workshop

The next stage is to include the views of a broader stakeholder group.

We’d recommend a representative from at least one of each of these business areas:

• Various hiring managers
• Leadership
• HR
• Recruiters
• Training and development teams

All of the above have an important role in deciding what skills are needed, and, as a result, who gets hired. 

ThriveMap plans and facilitates a workshop encourages individuals to openly share their experiences of hiring these roles, performing tasks.

Beforehand, we’ll prepare the necessary data from the bottom-up job analysis, to provide a guided and productive session to tease out the views and opinions of managers.  

At the end of this session, we finalise a list of attributes, their descriptions, and their relative importance to one another.

4. Ideal candidate profile

Designing the Ideal Candidate Profile is a pivotal phase in refining high-volume recruitment processes. This meticulously crafted profile offers a concise yet comprehensive depiction of the ideal candidate tailored specifically to your role.

Here’s how we accomplish this:

In-Depth Analysis: We commence with a thorough examination of your organization’s requisites and the role’s intricacies. This analysis encompasses both hard and soft skills, alongside cultural compatibility.

Essential Skills: We pinpoint and elucidate the precise skills necessary for candidates to excel in the role.

Preferences and Attributes: We identify attributes such as adaptability, communication style, and work ethic that harmonize with your company’s culture and the role’s demands.

Alignment with Company Goals: The profile harmonizes with your company’s overarching goals, ensuring candidates contribute effectively to your organization’s triumphs.

Holistic Vision: It offers a comprehensive perspective of the ideal candidate, one who seamlessly integrates into your team and propels growth.

This profile becomes your recruitment compass, directing candidate assessment, interview inquiries, and selection, ensuring you secure talent that not only fulfills job prerequisites but also resonates with your organization’s principles and culture.

5. Designing the pre-hire process:

Following the comprehensive groundwork of Job Analysis, Assessment Ideas Lab, and the Ideal Candidate Profile, ThriveMap takes the next crucial step by crafting a tailored pre-hire process and assessment. This phase is meticulously designed to deliver against the goals around your desired recruitment workflow which can include:

• Minimize Manual Screening Processes: We aim to streamline your recruitment journey by reducing the need for time-consuming manual screening, ensuring a more efficient and cost-effective process.
• Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process: Our approach is engineered to mitigate bias, fostering a fair and objective assessment of candidates, and ultimately promoting diversity and inclusivity in your workforce.
• Make the Candidate Experience Seamless: Prioritizing the candidate experience is paramount. Our process is geared towards providing candidates with a smooth and informative experience that sets a positive tone for their engagement with your organization.

For instance, consider a scenario where you’re seeking entry-level candidates who do not require prior experience or specialized skills because comprehensive training will be provided. In such cases, we may recommend eliminating steps like CV reviews, phone screenings, or even automating the selection process entirely.

6. The Realistic Job Assessment:

The Realistic Job Assessment is a multifaceted tool designed to enhance the recruitment process in several key ways:

An Authentic Job Preview: Our assessments provide candidates with an authentic and detailed glimpse into the role they are applying for, helping them better understand what to expect.

Real-life Tasks and Scenarios: Our assessments are more predictive of success because they literally model the tasks and situations people in the job will encounter.

Welcome from Leadership: Leveraging a ‘Welcome from Leadership’ feature allows you to promote your brand and set clear role expectations from the very beginning of the candidate journey.

Empowering Candidates to Choose: Through insightful questions, candidates are empowered to assess their fit for the role, ensuring a more informed decision-making process.

Alignment with ATS / Existing Tools: We prioritise seamless integration with your existing systems to ensure a cohesive experience for both candidates and your recruitment team.

7. Candidate selection

The Candidate Selection phase is crucial for identifying the best-fit candidates efficiently and accurately:

Evaluating with Data: We emphasize data-driven decision-making by evaluating candidates based on their ability to complete job-relevant tasks and exercises, allowing you to make informed choices.

Streamlining the Process: Candidates are scored and banded to aid selection decision-making, saving time and resources while maintaining quality.

Insightful reports: Candidate reports show scoring breakdowns as well as answers to key questions in the assessment. These can be used to guide candidate interviews and training.

8. ThriveMap’s Dashboard

ThriveMap’s Dashboard is a powerful tool for ongoing improvement and adaptation:

Tracking Performance Trends: With this feature, you can easily monitor performance trends over time, gaining valuable insights into your recruitment process’s effectiveness.

Metrics that Matter: We help you keep a close eye on key recruitment metrics, enabling you to make data-backed decisions.

Adapting to Change: As roles evolve and business goals shift, our dashboard allows you to continuously refine the Ideal Candidate Profile, ensuring your recruitment process remains aligned with your evolving needs and objectives.

Interested in getting started with ThriveMap’s best practice high-volume recruitment process?

See examples, understand the process to better pre-hire assessments, and ask our experts questions in your 1-to-1 ThriveMap demonstration. Find out more about our free demonstration service here: thrivemap.io/demo