Article by Gregory Limbe
These days, staying a step ahead of unpredictability is a primary goal in business. Maximizing and maintaining the performance of your employee is a key strategic advantage for your company if you are to thrive in your industry. One of the most important elements which affect your employee performance and engagement level is job-fit. Job-fit outlines the unique, job-related qualities that make a person productive based on individual strengths, needs, and wants in a job and the work environment. When interests align with personality traits, abilities, and behaviors, both your employee and your organization experience a good job-fit.
Did you know that employees who are well matched to their jobs are 2.5 times more productive? According to the Harvard Business Review, the “job matching” approach predicts job success more accurately than education and experience.
Today, many organizations use job fit assessments throughout the interview process to learn more about job candidates. There are many kinds of employee assessments available, but the most successful assessments use job fit as a tool to increase consistency and success in the hiring process. Job fit solutions combine tested and reliable data derived from employee assessments with customized data to create a benchmark, which matches candidates to the job and specific company. By including job-fit as a key factor in your employee selection process, your hiring procedure will be significantly more effective.
How does job-fit work?
A good assessment tells you who the candidate really is and what you should do with them upon hiring. As such, job-fit assessments are used for selection, coaching, training, promotion, managing, and succession planning. They predict job suitability, accurately matching people with the work they do while allowing you to identify and place top performers in each position.
Identifying your company’s organizational culture and incorporating it into your hiring process determines the type of individual that would fit in your organization. If your creative department is filled with enterprising individuals, candidates with a desire to share their ideas with others across departments would thrive in your organization. A keen grasp of the values shared by your high performers positively influences your ability to choose new hires that would sync well with your organization. Implemented correctly, this translates across your entire workforce increasing employee performance and satisfaction across the organization.
Return on Investment
Imagine a situation where employees are happy to report to work and do not draw motivation from monetary rewards or the fear of executive rebuke. Such an environment is easily created by incorporating job fit into your hiring process and applying the same approach to lateral moves and promotions. When your employees are well-matched with their occupations and your organization, then they are inclined to be satisfied with their
job (as shown by attendance), remain in your employ, and be more productive in their work cycles. However, while job-fit ensures that you have high performers that thrive in their work environment, their individual performance is not the end-all measure of success.
A high-performing individual is good to have; a department that performs well is desirable; an organization built upon job-fit with high performing individuals thriving within high-performing departments is ideal. In the same way, a colony of bees has different roles of equal importance, so does your organization. Multiple successful units as a result of job-fit create a well-oiled machine that is a joy to work in and the positive synergy that comes from this will have a great impact on your organization as a whole. After all, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Profiles International East Africa is a talent management solutions provider that offers businesses and organizations with information that enables them to make better and more impactful decisions regarding their people’s issues.
