Which qualities are most important to employers today? The Burning Glass Institute analyzed millions of job postings from across the US and identified the most commonly mentioned skill sets. The top three? Communication, teamwork/collaboration and problem solving. While these have always been important competencies, the pandemic has put new pressures on how we work and interact with colleagues and customers. Whether you’re working in-person or remotely, these skills are even more critical today. Employees must be able to work effectively in a team structure whether they are in the same physical space or in different time zones.
The challenge for recruiters and hiring managers is to identify these skills quickly and accurately in the hiring process. What’s needed are tools that can assess candidates based a set of competencies that are proven to predict job performance. Interview questions must be sophisticated, able to dig deeper to uncover the qualities most important for the position.
What’s the Right Kind of Smart?
While organizations need individuals with a variety of skills, job descriptions have traditionally focused on logical-mathematical intelligence, verbal-linguistic competency and technical skills. But a high-functioning team needs members with less obvious but essential kinds of smarts, too. These could include:
- Intrapersonal intelligence – a person who understands their own thoughts and feelings, is good at self-direction, motivation and planning.
- Naturalist intelligence – someone good at making distinctions, differentiating messages, and understanding the larger picture.
- Interpersonal intelligence – a person who understands others’ feelings and motives.
- Spatial intelligence – someone good at spatial reasoning, mental imagery and who has an active imagination.
Strong teams have individuals with a diversity of intelligences. To ascertain whether your candidates have these more nuanced qualities takes a more sophisticated hiring process.
How to Find the Right Team Player
A candidate may be a team player on paper, but to find the best person for a specific work team, recruiters and hiring managers need a better sense of their candidate. That’s where a video interviewing solution that’s purpose-built for hiring can make the difference. With on-demand video interviewing, hiring teams can screen many candidates to narrow the field to the best potential matches with speed and efficiency. Then, a live video interview brings candidates face-to-face with hiring decision-makers much faster than an on-site interview. It’s a convenient way to assess a candidate’s communication skills, depth of relevant experience and enthusiasm for the position without leaving the office.
With Modern Hire’s science-based hiring technology, recruiters can screen, assess and interview a high volume of candidates efficiently, effectively and ethically. Interviews are faster and more candidate friendly. On-demand interviews can replace traditional phone interviews. Recruiting teams can create custom interview questions and invite candidates to record their responses—on their own time, when it works for them. On-demand interviews ensure a convenient, consistent, and equitable candidate experience and allow hiring teams to make an initial determination of skills, abilities, and fit.
Modern Hire’s platform also provides Automated Interview Scoring for on-demand video interviews. Recruiting teams have the option to use artificial intelligence (AI) to auto-score candidate responses to interview questions to remove bias and ensure a fairer interview process. Ranked recommendations allow recruiters to prioritize high-scoring candidates or use scores as part of an overall measurement of fit for hire. On demand interviews can be integrated with pre-hire assessments. These predictive talent assessments help streamline the hiring process and create a seamless hiring experience.
In a highly competitive labor market, your organization needs to find the best candidate accurately and quickly. Modern Hire’s science-based intelligent hiring platform can accommodate virtual teams and panel interviews, allowing for better collaboration and assessment, accelerating the process and helping you find the best candidate with the teamwork and communication skills you need.