How HR technology is behavioural mapping data for candidate recruitment

By Karunjit Kumar Dhir

Seasoned business leaders say ‘Hire for attitude and train for skills’, but in the real-world, attitude is left to chance, and skills are purchased. More than ninety percent of recruitment leaders agreed to the fact that they have no consistent and data-driven method to measure the behavior of the candidate as per a study. HR analytics enables HR professionals to make data-driven decisions to attract, manage, and retain talent, which improves ROI for the organization. It helps business leaders make effective decisions to create a better work environment and maximize team productivity. When used effectively, HR technology has a significant impact on the bottom-line.

New business scenarios are rapidly evolving. Lifelong employment and working in a predictable environment are fast shrinking. Companies are expecting their employees to be highly adaptable and keep learning new skills in line with changing business needs. Companies undergoing change find resistance to change, and leaders find it increasingly difficult to handle the situation leading to significant failures in change management exercises. Adaptable behavior from employees is no more a choice but a necessity. This makes it even more critical for companies to accord due importance to behavioral assessment and mental alignment to the ecosystem of employees they hire.

Analyzing behavioral data is reasonably established and old practice. It has been happening for several decades, and psychologists around the world have created several assessments that are reasonably accurate in predicting individual behavioral patterns. Online assessment tools are readily available that provide instant outcomes, even though the validity remains in question. Methods like question based assessments, gamified simulations, workplace simulations, online behavior analysis and even background checks are some of the popular models that recruiters are adopting to assess candidate’s behavioral patterns.  Even with so much progress, adoption of behavioral analysis in recruitment or even on existing employees remains mostly ignored.

Most of the recruitment leaders openly admit that conventional assessments have a sizeable manual intervention that needs professionals to analyze and provide the right input. In many cases, candidates to are unwilling to undergo such evaluations. Selection of the right tool is not a very straight forward task for most recruiting leaders. This is primarily because of the usual debate & varying viewpoints on their validity, cost, ease of use, acceptability; that pushes the decision of adoption in a cold box.  Need for experts to analyze the reports to give deeper insights act as an entry barrier for the adoption of the existing platforms. Finally, the pressure to hire fast and in large numbers further pushes down the importance given to behavioral analysis as the skills get the focus in the hiring job market.

Technologists, on the other hand, admit that mapping human behavior and have computers analyze that is equally challenging. Even with constraints, these real-world issues have created room for technology to step in and address the gap. Artificial intelligence holds a lot of promise here. Almost all tech-driven behavior analysis in the market focus on analyzing the individual behavior, mostly taking emotional intelligence as the basis. However, another venture in this space claims that analyzing individual behavior alone is a meaningless exercise and would yield limited results.

Workplaces are not about individual efficiency alone, but it is teamwork and alignment with the company’s vision that drives an individual’s behavior. An American Times study shows that time spent with co-workers is more than time spent with friends and families on a weekday, just next to being alone. Meaningful individual behavior, therefore, depends on harmony with the team, the demand of the job, and also mentally fitting the culture of the company. All these elements are impossible to find with the conventional behavior analysis tools & assessments that only seek individual data and not that of the ecosystem that plays the key role in an individual’s efficiency.

The current method of individual assessment and stand-alone analysis will soon be upgraded with a data-driven and AI-enabled holistic model of evaluation.  This will take into consideration the behaviors needed for the job, the matching of behavior with people their colleagues and finding the match with organizational culture. The data-driven approach will make it easier for recruiters who will not have to run any process manually in parallel, rather get an indicator of fitment even before they engage the candidate for interviews. Recruitment focus from hiring the best behavior trait will shift to hiring the right behavioral quality that fits the ecosystem better. As the war for talent is getting more intense, finding the right individual attitude becomes even more critical, but having a great team remains the key requirement. A holistic behavioral analysis will make it possible for companies to hire the best fit who can stay longer and stay happy in the organization.

Coming years are going to see a significant leap in behavioral predictions not only during hiring but also for existing employees. It is high time the organizations start taking the proven model of ‘Hire for attitude and train for skill’ more seriously for happier and engaging workplaces.

(The author is the Co-founder of SCIKEY)