Cultivate CEO and Co-founder Casey Clark sat down with Jay Hawreluk, CEO of AcuMax Index, to discuss how behavioral assessments utilize data to improve recruitment and overall leadership.
Whether you’re just starting to expand your team or looking to add a few talented employees to your roster, learning how to recruit well is important not only for filling job vacancies but also helps prevent costly hiring decisions. And when it comes to recruiting, finding the perfect candidate is the most critical part of the process.
When looking for the right candidate to hire, there are often key characteristics that you should look for. And to identify those characteristics, a Behavioral Assessment might be your secret weapon.
What is a Behavioral Assessment?
A behavioral assessment is a method used to observe, describe, explain, and predict behavior. Similar to popular personality tests, including Myers-Briggs and Enneagram, behavioral assessments use questions to identify one’s behavior based on unique traits exhibited across various situations. Often, behavioral assessments will indicate whether someone is introverted or extroverted or how they make decisions. With the right information, the results of a behavioral assessment can tell you if a candidate will be a good fit within your organization and company culture.
At Cultivate, we have partnered with AcuMax Index to help hundreds of entrepreneurs heighten their recruiting process by finding the best candidates to fill open positions.
The AcuMax Index is a unique assessment designed to help hire, engage, and develop teams by identifying key characteristics that align with the role and the organization.
In this video, Cultivate CEO and Co-founder Casey Clark sat down with Jay Hawreluk, CEO of AcuMax, to discuss how using the AcuMax Index can help owners scale faster by giving them the advantage of hiring the right fit for each role based on their hardwiring.
According to Jay, AcuMax looks beyond behavioral analysis, which can change over time, to focus on the neurological side, identifying the neurological pathways deeply ingrained in each person.
Understanding the hardwiring of your interview candidates can help you hire and manage better teams. In addition to giving you insight into how an individual thinks, behavioral assessments open the door to improved communication, productivity, and decision-making by understanding the individual’s preferred way of processing information, communicating, and solving problems.
Here are three areas where you can use a behavioral assessment to make data-driven decisions that lead to higher employee retention.
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Identifying the characteristics of the perfect candidate
The first step in creating a recruiting plan is to identify who you need. Planning your recruiting strategy involves analyzing your business goals and considering how roles will need to expand and shift as the business grows.AcuMax helps in this area by using data to compile an ideal profile for each role to use as a template for future hires. This includes pulling together profiles from top-performs on your team.
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Developing a screening process
As a small business, you might not have a dedicated recruiter. Pre-screening candidates using a behavioral assessment gives you a peek into how that person is wired. This snapshot will tell you if they’re a good fit for your company culture and the role based on your ideal candidate template. Pre-screening candidates can speed up your process by removing subjectivity and eliminating candidates who aren’t a fit for your company before you interview them.
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During the interview process
In an interview setting, candidates will often tell you what you want to hear, which isn’t always helpful. A job candidate may have a perfect resume and skill set for the job, but when it comes to the interview process, it helps to be armed with as much information as possible to make the right decision. With the assessment results, you know how your candidates are wired, allowing you to frame specific questions that dig deeper into any areas you have additional questions. The AcuMax team has taken it a step further to develop interview questions, including specific questions to identify if the candidate is self-aware and honest in their responses.
If you’re not using behavioral assessments for pre-employment screening and employee development, you could be losing valuable time. If you’re a Cultivate client, you can access 10 AcuMax Index requests per year for use with your team. You also receive discounted pricing on the advanced recruitment reports from AcuMax through your partnership with Cultivate.
If recruiting isn’t your strong suit, and you don’t know where to start, you don’t have to go at it alone. Schedule a free two-hour business assessment to dig into your business and develop a plan.
