22% of major UK companies with values fail to identify shared values when recruiting
14/09/2007
Only 22% of companies with Organisational Values use psychometric tools to check that all job applicants share these values.
Although it is still an emerging innovation, there is an increasing number of HR practitioners who will testify that recruiting individuals who share the same values as your organisation improves performance, retention and customer experience. Yet despite the significant potential benefits, a recent survey of over 100 major UK organisations that have developed and articulated their core values has found that only 22% of them use psychometric assessments to select job applicants against these values. A further 31% do occasionally use this approach selectively, typically for management positions.
Many businesses that have implemented values-based recruitment have become enthusiastic cheer leaders. For example, one respondent to the survey, Anita Laws, Head of Sales and Service (South) at Mortgage Express part of the Bradford and Bingley Group , explained "Recruiting contact centre agents who share the same values as Mortgage Express is fundamental to how we do business. Everything within the company is around our mission statement and values of ‘supporting each other’ and ‘working as a team’. Staff are assessed against these values in their appraisals, and rewarded if they display values exceptionally well."
British Gas Services (who as clients of Criterion Partnership were not included in the survey) are through to the finals of the Personnel Today Awards for their successes in this area. As Karen Hopkins, Regional Resourcing Manager, British Gas Services explains: “We found that combining online values and competency assessment at the application stage of the recruitment cycle literally halved the number of assessment centres we needed to run to fill vacancies. What is more, when surveyed, our internal customers believed that the quality of candidate went up by 55% as a result of this approach.”
Criterion Partnership offers the following top tips for companies considering values-based recruitment:
- Analysis of the critical behavioural elements of your organisation’s values should form the basis of your recruitment success criteria or competencies
- Front line staff need to demonstrate the right values as much as managers; so find low cost ways of assessing their values such as online assessment at the pre-selection stage
- Follow up values-based assessment results through evaluation at interview and assessment centre
- Use values-based assessment as part of your succession planning as well.
Although Criterion Partnership provides both online and assessment centre solutions in this area, to ensure balanced survey results it did not include its solutions clients in the survey.
