I don't know about you, but I have been having more conversations about how quickly hiring is changing.
We are all being asked to do more with less, and technology tends to be where people turn for the answer. In recruitment, that increasingly means AI, and much of it has been built to give you some of your week back. It takes on the simple administrative work that used to eat into the day, and I am now seeing the early signs of it being used to read through applications and rank candidates before a person has looked at them.
I am not going to sit here and tell you that is a bad thing, because the time it saves is real and so is the pressure you are under to fill the role and get on with everything else. What has been on my mind is where this is heading and how AI is being trusted with the recruitment decisions that matter the most.
I am in the middle of a piece of work that brought it home for me. A company came to me needing to replace someone who had recently left, and we sat down to talk through what the role needed. What they said to me during that conversation is the reason I wanted to write to you this month.
They looked great on paper
The first thing they asked me was whether I had recruited for this kind of role before. I have, for more than ten years, and I know it well enough to know how much it has changed in that time. That is why I told them I would lean on their expertise for the technical side of the work. They understand the detail of it far better than I ever will. My job is to go and find the person who is the right fit for that work and for the team.
They were relieved to hear it. They had been through this more than once. They hire someone only for them to leave within 6-12 months. They are spending their time replacing someone, all the while there is pressure from above to grow the team.
When we talked it through, they were clear that the knowledge side did not worry them. They could teach what someone needed to learn. The problem they had never cracked was finding a person who would stay.
There is research that speaks to why this happens. City and Guilds recently asked hundreds of hiring managers and HR professionals what makes someone succeed in a business. 74% put the human capabilities first, the way a person communicates, solves problems, and works through a situation with a colleague or a customer, ahead of technical skill.
The same research asked about AI now doing much of the early sorting, and around 69% said they believe it favours technical skills over those human ones.
Why are they leaving?
The part of hiring we are handing to AI to save time is the part that reads what a person looks like on paper. The qualities those same managers say decide whether someone succeeds are the ones getting pushed further down the hiring process. And it happens right at the front, where the shortlist is drawn up. By the time anyone reaches an interview, the decisions about who is even in the running have already been made.
This is the ground the company I mentioned was standing on. They had been hiring for what a person knew and could do.
There is a figure I come back to often. Nearly half of new joiners leave within their first twelve months, and around 95% of those exits come down to behaviour and how well someone fits the team, rather than whether they could do the work. And most hiring is still built almost entirely around skills. Around three quarters of hires are made that way. When you put those two numbers side by side, the cycle this company kept ending up in starts to make sense.
Before I go looking for anyone, I want to understand the behaviour the role calls for and the behaviour of the team the new person will join. It is the insight I draw from The Predictive Index that lets me do this, and I have come to think of it as behavioural intelligence. When the people on a team understand themselves and each other, they work together better, and a new joiner has a far greater chance of settling in and staying. Measuring for that at the start, before a shortlist even exists, is the thing their previous hires never had the benefit of.
Mitigating the risk
For a company under pressure to grow, measuring more at the start is what takes the risk out. Every hire that does not hold sets the team back further, costs more than the salary that walked out of the door, and adds to the pressure that was already there. Getting the behaviour and the fit right before an offer is made is how you stop paying that cost over and over.
Whilst I continue to work with this company, I can tell you is that the conversation changed the moment we stopped talking about what the person needed to know and started talking about who would thrive in the role and the team.
If any of this sounds familiar from where you are sitting, or you have found yourself filling the same role more than once and wondering why, I would be glad to talk it through with you.
Reply to this email and we can find a time to chat.
Best of luck with your next hire this autumn.
Dave Crumby
Founder at 360 Talent Solutions | Certified PI Practitioner