MyPeople: How to ensure a candidate’s not just right for the role, they’re right for the job.

How many times has your organisation offered a job to someone who looked like the perfect candidate on paper, interviewed well, and said all the right things, only to find that they didn’t fit into the team, or didn’t stick around very long?

At Morson, we are partnering with industry experts to engineer unconscious bias out of the selection process, and remove the preconceived notions of specific qualifications and experience profiles that can lead to excellent candidates being overlooked. Last week, we held a seminar in partnership with MyPeople, to showcase how we’re taking those principles to the next level and helping organisations and candidates to find their perfect match. This is how it went.

What is skills-led recruitment?

Led by Sam Price, Talent Solutions Director at RPO1 Powered by Morson, the session began with a reality check about the challenging talent landscape in the tech and IT sectors. With 30% of companies (rising to 50% in the IT sector) citing skills shortages as their greatest challenge, it’s easy to see that there is fierce competition for candidates.

But finding an individual with the right skills doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve found the right candidate. Sam also revealed that 20% of companies have identified attrition and reduced productivity as major risks for 2024, which indicates that it’s not just finding the right skills that’s proving difficult, but also finding the right fit. The goal is not just making a quality hire, but making a sustainable hire who will flourish and grow with the organisation.

The skills issue is well known. With baby boomers and Gen X leaving the workforce or heading towards the door, there is no quick fix for replacing all that experience and the hard skills amassed during long careers.

But the problem is more complex. With a multi-generational workforce, bringing together employees with varying characteristics, expectations and ambitions, building teams that bring together complementary outlooks, competencies and capabilities in a cohesive way is not easy.

Skills-based recruitment is helping, with Sam explaining that this approach can help multiply talent pools by a factor of ten. But it does mean looking beyond technical competencies,  performance, and the typical tick boxes of a CV to consider the candidate more holistically. Factoring in attributes such as problem solving, adaptability and people focus, alongside the candidate’s team fit and value alignment - for both the organisation and the specific team in which they’ll be working – are key to ensuring new hires thrive and add value.

The challenge, however, as Sam explained, is not just in encouraging hiring managers to think differently and consider candidates’ soft skills, values and career goals, but to offer decision-makers an evidence base for making those important decisions. That’s where MyPeople come in.

The psychology of successful hiring

Having explained the subjectivity of personal preferences, unconscious bias, and even a tendency to hire based on which candidates will fit at the pub after work, Sam handed over to Christian Hughes and Alexa Parritt from MyPeople, to discuss the benefits of bringing a scientific approach into the mix.

The MyPeople team explained how, with a single assessment, proven psychology can provide data in just a few minutes that evidences how the candidate will perform in the job, and the team.   It can be useful, Sam interjected, to assess the existing team first, to build a full picture of the workplace environment and how the candidate is likely to fit into it. It’s important, she noted, however, to think about complementary personality traits, rather than focusing on hiring more of the same.

The assessment works by asking the candidate (and/or existing team member) to rank statements about their personality and how they would react in given situations to build a profile of how they would fit into the team.

Alexa explained that the assessment method measures the candidates’ responses against relevant job profiles from O*Net Database’s 36,000+ job profiles, considering them in the context of a ‘Big 5 Personality Model’ – Conceptual, Conscientious, Outgoing, Supportiveness and Emotion - as well as measuring the connection, contribution and alignment between the individual and team environment, using MyPeople’s 13-factor model of team dynamics.

Christian was part of the team that successfully developed and implemented a programme of marginal gains to optimise performance at British Cycling, and the science behind the MyPeople tools is based on that pioneering sports psychology. The research-based assessments are designed to measure effectiveness in diverse situations, seeking to enable hiring decisions that enable individuals to turn their skills into performance by placing them in an environment where they are a good fit.

The MyPeople process provides a clear, objective picture of what motivates and inspires the candidate, as well as how they behave in a varied range of situations. Combining that data with the knowledge and experience of the Morson team enables hiring managers to go beyond making hiring decisions on qualifications, experience and subjective first impressions alone, instead gaining a 360-degree understanding of how well that individual is likely to perform in the specific work environment.

Innovation through collaboration

The response of delegates was enthusiastic, with lots of anecdotal feedback indicating that this is a collaboration that could be transformative to the hiring process. Unlike other psychological profiling methods, the MyPeople tools do not require expert analysis by a certified specialist, but are designed to offer data that enables intuitive interpretation.

Moreover, the results of the assessment are not only useful to the hiring organisation, but also to the candidate, providing cues for meaningful, positive feedback, whether they are successful in their application or not. This supports a positive EVP and employer brand for the hiring organisation, along with a clearer picture of where attention should be focused for future applications for both the candidate and the recruiter.

Morson has an enviable track record of combining the expertise of its team with innovative technological solutions that unlock both talent and potential to help clients overcome skills challenges and build a cohesive team. If you’d like to know more about our RP01 service and our partnership with MyPeople, get in touch.