Smiles All Around: Why a Strong Job-Fit is for Everyone

Employee Retention, Reducing Turnover, Succession Planning… these are all terms that mean a great deal to any business owner, manager, or CEO, and so they should. But making sure an employee is a strong fit for a company isn’t just about what works best for said company, but also for the employees themselves. What’s the point in having a state-of-the-art fish tank if none of your fish can swim?

High staff turnover isn’t cheap, and succession planning isn’t easy when your staff simply aren’t sticking around. But neither of these issues need to be issues at all as long as you make these simple things a priority in your workplace; employee job-fit and satisfaction. Considering last year it was reported that more than half of Americans are unhappy at work, it’s clear that the employees of today’s workforce need to have more attention paid to their job suitability.

Baby Steps

There are many steps one can take to ensure an employee will be a strong fit for a company and respective role, and pre-employment testing is only one of the options. Implementing a whole new process can be both daunting and time-consuming, but this doesn’t mean there aren’t minor, easy changes that can be made for quick and positive results.

On a smaller scale, even simple steps such as ensuring that a job advertisement is accurate in its description of a role can have a hugely beneficial impact. The fact that 48% of employees claim they aren’t doing the job they were hired for is a clear indicator that workers cannot be expected to be a strong fit for a position if the position itself was misrepresented to attract a higher number of candidates. Ensuring that your company culture and values are clearly defined in the pre-hire stages is a highly effective way to ensure that your interviewees know what they’re getting themselves in for, instead of being unpleasantly surprised somewhere down the line.

Know What You Want

This applies to employers and employees in equal measure. If you don’t know what you want from an employee in a certain role, you’ll likely end up hiring someone in an unstable position where their responsibilities are unclear. And likewise, if you aren’t sure what you want from a career, you’ll probably end up working a variety of unfulfilling jobs in workplaces you feel you don’t belong. This is one of the contributing reasons for excessive job-hopping in Millennials and Generation X alike which, while not always a bad thing, can become a real drain after a while.

Overcoming this requires patience on both parts. As an employer, you may need to take some time to assess your company’s needs to ensure you know exactly who you need to join your workforce and what you need them for. And, as a professional individual, you can’t expect to feel comfortable in a career if you haven’t taken the time to discover your strengths, weaknesses, and passions. This isn’t always an easy journey, which leads us to…

Pre-Employment Testing

Using pre-hire software to determine someone’s job-fit isn’t only in the best interest of a company. Such tools uncover a person’s unique traits, ranging from their passions to their preferred manner of working, and sometimes they can even tell an individual about aspects of themselves that even they were unaware of. Not only does this provide career guidance so an individual can know what kind of work they are a good match for, but it also allows them to feel comfortable and perform well in a job they’re suited to, providing they fit the job benchmark. The result of this is employee longevity, reduced staff turnover, and a generally higher level of workplace satisfaction across the board.

On top of this, pre-employment testing is a great guide for employers, ensuring they know exactly what they need in a role and can hire accordingly for a strong job-fit – that’s the real meat and potatoes of such technology. Mmm, potatoes.