Understand a Team’s Personality, Understand How They Can Win
How to use Articial Intelligence to make your teams better
a guest article written by
Dr Patrick Oehler, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Retorio
When a person joins a company, they’re hoping to not only to contribute, but to grow. Training Needs Analysis (TNA) (also often called ‘skills gap analysis’) supports teams and companies to address gaps between current skill levels and where they need to be. It’s a helpful tool for pre-employment assessments and other recruitment efforts in talent search. In this era of remote and AI recruitment, this feedback system can be the most effective method to have recruitment managers, teams, and team members appraise skillset.
In terms of job search and skill assessment, AI has greatly changed the landscape. According to a Korn Ferry Global survey, 63% of respondents said AI has changed how recruiting is done in their organizations. CEO and co-founder of Ideal, Somen Mondal, tells Vox, “Companies just can’t get through the applications. And if they do, they’re spending — on average — three seconds. There’s a whole problem with efficiency.” In short, skill sets are not be thoroughly analyzed.
Save time in hiring
For many companies it’s especially difficult to sort for skill and personality. By decreasing the amount of time needed to rank candidates, hiring managers are able to focus on increasing time on personal interviews with their chosen candidates.
And this is exactly what Retorio’s AI-supported video recruiting software supports you with. Instead of manually going through CVs, applicants record a short video in which they answer interview questions. By feeding thousands of hours of video material, the AI recognizes behavior such as voice, gestures and facial expressions and creates a well-founded candidate profile. The analysis is based on the scientifically recognized and standardized Big 5 personality model. Recruiters get a first impression of the candidates and see where their strengths and weaknesses lie within the five dimensions extraversion-introversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.
Recruiters and hiring managers can then opt in to rank candidates based on role (e.g. scores high on Extraversion for a sales role). This allows recruiters to focus on the top candidates, watch their video responses for further insights, and automatically extend an invitation or decline a candidate.
After implementing Retorio, one client increased their time savings in the hiring process by over 70%.
Create an unbiased and improved candidate experience
Banning any type of discrimination is a legal requirement for most organizations.
Technology can help create a more structured and objective talent selection and development process. Video-based interviewing and pre-employment assessments give companies an opportunity to hire and promote using a fair recruitment process. Last year, video technology was reported to be used by 60% of hiring managers. A survey of 506 companies showed 47% use video interviewing to shorten the hiring timeframe. With COVID-19, companies are quickly implementing a digital workflow to create a candidate experience that safeguards against bias and gives rapid feedback to candidates.
Develop existing talent
Companies want to learn more about their employees’ DNA: what makes them successful, what are areas that need improvement, and how to replicate their top-performers. By digitizing the Big 5 Personality assessment, Retorio made it easy for companies to understand their employees at an individual level, how they best work in teams, and strategies for interpersonal communication. Our customers found Retorio to be particularly useful in developing their teams’ communication and soft-skills training
Prepare employees for the future
It’s nearly impossible for hiring managers to assess existing skill set — — but also forecast what training would be needed to get an otherwise great candidate up to speed. Succession planning, for example, often includes finding a great applicant. 62% of employees claim they would be ‘significantly more engaged’ at work if their company has a succession plan. By having a plan how to internally mobilize employees, organizations decrease employee turnover.
The first step to create a stronger workforce is to assess skillset throughout the talent lifecycle.
Training Needs Analysis (TNA) operates on three levels:
1. Organizational
Understand how the training fits into organizational systems and strategy by considering:
● What internal training resources are already available?
● How were internal training resources used?
● What weaknesses exist within the organization?
This part of the level is about the birds-eye view of the company. Assessing an applicant during the recruitment process could also include presenting the department’s objectives. These objectives should show how they relate to the company’s overall goals.
2. Task
With the job descriptions created by department and recruitment managers, the task level determines the specific skills needed. It can also be beyond hard skills, but can venture into the realm of soft skills, such as being charismatic or particularly empathetic. Task level also includes knowledge, certificates, or other kinds of abilities needed to complete tasks.
● What tasks are needed to excel at this job?
● Which knowledge or skills are the most difficult to learn/prone to errors?
● How might requirements evolve in the future?
When conducting an interview or a pre-employment assessment, recruiters need to pick out the skills, knowledge, and abilities that are the non-negotiables.
AI-enabled recruitment supports this process. It’s able to quickly assess whether a candidate possesses certain skills. Thus, it not only helps in landing a qualified candidate, it enables a smoother workforce planning process.
3. Individual
Identify the person who may need further training. Perhaps there is an individual who fits the description but lacks a few skills. It may be worth it to the company to train them by sending them to a workshop or hiring a coach, rather than prolonging the candidate search. For managers and recruiters, they must quickly ascertain how open the candidate is to learning new skills.
AI recruitment is a helpful method in this step. AI has the capability to map out thousands of data points quickly. This means understanding and learning about multiple candidates’ resumes and personality can coincide. In fact, it can help learn more about your internal team and map out what strengths could be a value-add during recruitment. For example, Retorio learned from a customer that they used Retorio’s AI and Big 5 combination to create in-house team building. They not only used the tool to find and qualify potential employees, but they found it useful to create dynamic teams.
A personality pre-employment assessment gives recruiters insight. They take into account the expected performance output and measure the previous performance of the person in correlation with how quickly and/or enthusiastically they acquired skills in their previous position. A smart recruitment strategy ensures that training will bridge the skill gap. During the hiring and recruitment process, this kind of step is familiar: observing past performance, checking with references, or customer feedback to check how they could thrive in a role.
