It’s the turn of HR departments to use the “matching” principle from dating sites. This process takes account of a candidate’s personality, aspirations and talents… to find the employer for whom he will give perfect happiness.
According to American psychologist Daniel Goleman, 60% of a company’s results depend on the emotional skills of its employees. This high proportion highlights the importance of choosing employees well, not only for their skills, but also for their personality and compatibility with the existing staff.
To avoid calling candidates to an interview where they will not succeed, some online platforms do advance screening. The principle is simple: in addition to the skills required, the employer describes the personality traits ideally sought for the job posted. Job seekers send their CV and complete a personality test. The system can then propose job offers to them that match their personality, as sought by certain employers.
This is the principle used by the French MonkeyTie platform, created in 2013. It asks companies to describe the preferred qualities out of five personality traits, from extroversion, professionalism, openmindedness, emotional stability and friendliness. This is then used to “match” employees and employers to find the perfect union.
Finding the best employee for the company
According to Jean Lamontagne, a serial entrepreneur who founded LesPAC.com, current job posting sites do not meet the needs of most companies. In Quebec, 95% of companies are SMEs. They don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend to post on a job site.
So with his partners, he created HereBusiness.com, a one-stop shop for SMEs which offers an “affinity matching” service. His company goes one step further, because it not only asks the skills and personality traits, but also the tasks that the employ will have to accomplish in the job. It’s an improvement that makes all the difference, according to Jean Lamontagne.
“In a large company, it’s easy to define the job of someone who meets customers at the counter all day. In a SME with ten employees or less, on the other hand, the same person could do ten different tasks. For example, I am looking for a receptionist, but she greets people and answers the telephone only 5% of the time. The rest of the time she is managing social media, planning trips and doing accounting,” the businessman gives as an illustration.
This versatility therefore requires adaptability and resourcefulness by the candidate, personality traits that are sought by SMEs. Thanks to the HereBusiness.com search engine and its algorithms, employers can find the rare gem by matching tasks, skills and personality traits. “Instead of finding the best employee for a position, we help find the best employee for the company. This is an important change in perspective,” says Jean Lamontagne.
While these “affinity matching” platforms are not yet widely known in Quebec, their principle is not new. Any recruiter will admit that in an interview it’s essential to get to know the candidate, but sometimes it’s difficult to assess the candidate’s real personality. Candidates show their true colours… then find the “perfect match.” In love and work, authenticity pays.