Traditional job interviews and CVs won’t find the best candidates, according to a leading recruitment expert, who says psychometric tests are much more successful.
Sasha Fillaudeau is a director of MySort and says the changing face of recruitment requires a different approach in order to find the best talent.
“We’ve looked after recruitment for UKFast for years and the techniques we developed in those years have seen the team shape UKFast’s famous culture,” said Fillaudeau.
“While recruitment traditionally focusses on interviews and CVs, we know it takes so much more to get to know someone.
“With that in mind, the main focus of our recruitment strategy is centred around the psychometric tests and evaluation methods that have created the incredible culture within UKFast.
“It’s a fantastic formula that CEO Lawrence Jones MBE knew could be of real value to other businesses in the UK and beyond.
“We’ve now rolled that service out to external clients and already have quite a few on our books, we’ve placed some incredible talent with exciting roles to build life-long careers.
“We not only offer recruitment for individual roles, we’re going so much further than that, helping businesses work on their culture while supporting their whole recruitment process by profiling their ideal candidates and running assessment days to help them hand pick the very best talent in the UK for their businesses.”
Psychometric tests are designed to measure candidates’ suitability for a role based on the required personality characteristics and aptitude.
Last year UKFast received 12,000 applications and Fillaudeau said psychometric and aptitude tests were a crucial step in filtering candidates.
“Psychometric tests are broken down into a number of different areas and the idea is we’re asking people to answer questions that tell us about them as individuals,” she explained. “It lets us learn much more about people than you might learn in a normal interview scenario.
“The software is so intelligent and pulls out an in-depth summary of the candidate – it’s spooky how accurately it profiles people.
“Part of it is an aptitude test which tests levels of intelligence in a few different areas. The next stage looks at their temperament in different situations and then they answer over 200 questions about the things that are important to them in life. It only takes around 45 minutes to complete.”
Fillaudeau says psychometric tests also help in directing candidates into areas of the business that best match their passion.
“The worst thing we could do is place a candidate in a role that they think they want but a few months down the line they realise it’s not for them. It wastes everybody’s time,” she says.
“If we can give people a long-term career opportunity, rather than a job, then we’re creating a business that’s sustainable.”
The psychometric test takes place before the interview stage and forms part of the questions. MySort’s consultants also use Skype calls during the interview process.
Fillaudeau says: “We work a lot across technology, cybersecurity, sales and finance, but psychometric testing can be applicable to any sector and we have specialists across a number of areas.
“MySort has the tools to go in and find a genuine fit. It’s our job to find out what the problem is. It could be the work environment. It could be the way they’re recruiting. We can make small adjustments to their process and use our experience and our technology to help them find the right people.”
Fillaudeau admits that the fast growing tech sector was making the race for talent hotter than ever and says today’s candidates are looking beyond the salary.
“Often with technical roles, the salary and perks are secondary to knowing that they going to be developing themselves,” she says. “Are they going to have some time for R&D or to learn a new programming language and use it to build interesting things?
“We’re always sure to stress with clients that they’re giving the candidates what they actually want and that the candidates know that these things are available. There’s a shortage of PHP developers, Linux engineers and DevOps people at the moment, so these candidates have to feel you’re the perfect environment and culture for them.”
Going forward Fillaudeau says her ambition for MySort is to transform the recruitment process of other clients like they’d already done for UKFast.
“We want to identify areas within their business and culture that can be improved and take a holistic approach to building an incredible team,” she says. “We want to be an integral part of our clients’ business and help them to grow in the way UKFast has grown.”
- Sasha Fillaudeau can be contacted at [email protected]