The perfect selection: how to find the (right) skills while avoiding costly mistakes

Companies hire people for qualifications and fire them for skills and behaviour. A strong assumption, but extremely topical and, above all, true. The complexity of finding the 'perfect' human resources for one's own organisation, marked by fierce competition for the best talent on the one hand, and economic and regulatory uncertainties on the other, are forcing HR managers (and management as a whole) to adopt a new way of recruiting.

Today's approach to recruitment meets a number of specific requirements: it needs to be much more strategic and innovative, more flexible and skills-oriented. "Know-how", as Elena Balzaretti, director of the HR Advisory division of PageGroup, points out, "is not enough, because it is how you do it that changes the success of a selection process in the medium term".

The competency-centric model, in contrast to that based on educational and traditional qualifications, prioritises a candidate's skills, enhances their potential and also looks to the future of the resource and the role they occupy. The benefits are long-term, because it looks beyond the contingency of filling a position and goes in the direction of expanding the organisation's pool of know-how and talent. The real challenge, adds Balzaretti, is to identify the right skills for the right role, and for this reason a mix of tailor-made solutions (from organisational design to emotional-behavioural analysis) aimed at mapping the soft skills of candidates must be put in place.

How important it is to choose well is confirmed by a simple fact: a wrong recruitment can cost companies about half of the person's gross annual salary, including in this calculation the costs of the recruiting process, the salaries paid to the employee, the expenses for his or her training and any benefits. There is also an intangible impact that can be generated by having introduced into the workforce a profile that is not suited to the role and function required, namely the negative influence on the working climate, performance and the business in general. "A team composed of members who do not work well together or who do not possess the necessary skills," concludes the PageGroup manager, "can lead to frustration, inefficiency and even turnover.

In this sense, the competency-based selection process focuses on what a candidate is capable of doing, while in the process of assessing the technical and transversal-behavioural skills of candidates, assesment tools play a critical role. Their prerogative is essentially to increase the success rate of recruitment (up to 90%, according to PageGroup) and to minimise selection errors, favouring inclusion and the construction of a career and growth plan for the new resource from the outset. Under the magnifying glass are both technical and personal and emotional-social skills, indispensable (the latter) to understand whether the candidate can adapt to the company's cultural and operational characteristics. Careful selection that leverages the person's skill set is therefore the goal that companies must strive for, and not only to avoid the (very significant) costs of a bad hire but also to strengthen the company's image and brand and consolidate a personnel management strategy more oriented towards effectiveness.