Recruitment Using EQ Profiling Saves More Than Just $Millions
Recruiting the right people for the right role can be hard.
Finding the right candidates means understanding roles well, and because of this, businesses often struggle to get the right fit. This can have a huge impact on how a business performs.
I find that whilst many recruiters or managers tend to understand the technical skills required for a role, few think enough about or truly understand the personal, behavioural qualities.
Talent acquisition tends to have an over-reliance on academic and related work experience for prospective candidates because this is historic, easier to validate and easier to understand. Having the academic qualifications, cognitive abilities and relevant necessary experience for a specific job is important of course. However rarely these key things alone are assurance of high performance in a role.
In fact the more senior or influential a role, the less important these classic predictive factors are.
- Over reliance on IQ rather than EQ
Schools and Universities barely teach personal, behavioural skills let alone how to be a productive employee or member of an effective team. IQ and technical tests are still used to evaluate performance and human proficiency. This is true from GCSE’s to SAT scores and A’ Levels, to GPA’s and Degrees. These measures say little about the skills many jobs need to succeed.
The thing is, IQ has minimal correlation to success, or work competencies and significantly less than EQ skills. New employees simply don’t know what’s expected of them when they start working life or how they should act or engage with colleagues. Organisations seem surprised when common challenges occur around communication skills and managing people even though they’ve never had any training on these. Most organisations offer limited training on these areas and even less on comprehensively understanding the personal and social competencies necessary to succeed in specific roles. This is where EQ profiling comes in. It’s based on a scientific model of personal performance that uses norm groups to compare people as well as uncover what makes people successful in certain roles.
- Every role has a set of emotional competencies that are specific to it – do you know them?
it’s possible to support HR and L&D functions etc. to understand EQ profiling, so it becomes possible to analyse roles and so map the ‘most appropriate’ EQ attributes to a role’s competencies. And this can make all the difference, helping create meaningful job descriptions, recruitment and training relevant skills as well as assessing performance, role by role.
- EQ enhances every sphere of life and work
In a study just over 10 years ago, The US Air Force (USAF) were having significant difficulties finding the right people for their para-rescue jumper programme. The programme would take 20 months to train people to jump out of aircraft and look after injured soldiers. Their inability (there was over 80% failure rate on the programme) to find the right people was costing the Air Force $ millions a year in failed recruitment efforts and significant issues finding the right people.
They wondered if emotional intelligence had the answer.
Recruitment and training is simplified when you know the RIGHT qualities to recruit and train for
- Using statistics to select the right people works
Turning to EQ profiling, they tested their ‘best’ people in this role and uncovered exactly what key EQ attributes they had that made them high performers in this role. They then used this information to recruit with a greater focus on those attributes and noticed something amazing happened.
- EQ makes a massive difference
Year 1 – there was a massive improvement in recruitment efficiency (over 90% increase in recruitment effectiveness) saving time and money ($19 million in their first year) and resulted in a smarter, more informed recruitment process.
- EQ makes training programmes more effective
The USAF’s new found greater awareness of the skills that mattered most had a huge knock-on effect for things like improved training programme design and for tailoring individual development needs. For instance they could then tailor training to where one or more EQ attributes might be in need which was must for focused and cost effective.
What I think many don’t realise is that the wider area of emotional intelligence development can have measurable performance indicators built into an incredibly wide variety of development programmes. EQ skills are very much practical skills, based in a logical framework. EQ is not simply a nice-to-have set of attributes. They are often the driving force behind higher performance, success and wellbeing. And the knock-on effects of such programmes often ripple across organisations and cultures in significant ways, all of which align naturally to organisational values and goals.
Large organisations need efficient ways to spot the best candidates
Whether a company uses internal or external recrutiers, they can’t rely purely on their expertise to find the best candidates. For the most important roles using EQ psychometrics can be a clever way to fine tune this process by first finding the skills that matter most, then recruiting or training for them. Some roles an organisations doesn’t need to profile for as the roles are well known to specialists in terms of the competencies they need. Examples are Sales people – where evidence has shown EQ components such as optimism are key drivers for high performance.
EQ cultures are happier, more positive places to work
Positive cultures attract the best talent, because ultimately people like to work where they like the people and culture. This often counts more than the very highest compensation.
So, what were the key emotional intelligence components that made the most difference to the USAF programme? The 3 components that were found to make the biggest differences in this prorgamme belonged to the EQ-i 2.0 Stress Management Composite. These are;
Flexibility – Jumping out an aircraft into the dangerous unknown requires us to be emotionally flexible to be able to adapt thinking and behaviours quickly to novel, stressful situations
Optimism – Having an overall sense that things work out well, maintaining a positive demeanour in such circumstances, is a critical skill for this role
Stress Tolerance – Being able to manage our emotions well and effectively cope and deal with stress with challenging situations is clearly key in this role.
The EQ-i 2.0 profile used to test and profile competencies in this case study is owned and licensed by MHS ltd and is used by certified practitioners such as EQworks coaching.
