Take a moment to consider your most disastrous hire. What did this mistake cost you in time, resources, and reputation? In their book “Topgrading”, Brad and Geoff Smart interviewed 52 organizations and asked them to calculate the true cost of their bad hires. When factoring in the time wasted, lost production, and other collateral costs, forbes the true cost of a mis-hire of someone making $100,000 was estimated to be a staggering $1.5 million dollars. A recent Yahoo! Hot Jobs survey found that 41% of job applicants admitted to having lied in a job interview. A 2006 Forbes article estimates that 40% of resumes are not “entirely above board.” It is also worth noting that these figures are pre-recession. One could easily infer that the financial pain caused by the latest downturn is leading would be employees to do whatever it takes to get a job, even if that means being dishonest.

With the task of separating the truly talented from the pretenders being so fraught with deceit, apkdnews and the cost of making a mistake so steep, many organizations are turning to experts in the field of pre-employment assessment. Organizational psychologists provide two solutions for making the kind of hiring decisions that protect the organizational bottom line while ensuring goodness of fit between employer and employee. The first solution is a pre-employment assessment that includes a behavioral interview, measures of intellect and strategic thinking, as well as standardized personality profiles that give piercing insights into potential hires. Before undertaking the pre-employment assessment process, consultants meet with the hiring manager to determine the competencies necessary for success and then provide specific, home4cloud concrete data that ranks the candidate relative to the identified competencies.

The second solution, featured in a 2010 Forbes article, is a real time assessment of the skills of the candidate, as he or she navigates a series of obstacles designed to perfectly simulate what would become their role. By “doing and observing” rather than “asking and believing”, would-be employers gain valuable insights into the actual skills of a candidate and cut through layers of subterfuge. In a corporate landscape where technological parity and the free exchange of knowledge are the status quo, hiring exceptional people remains “the last competitive advantage.”