Employee Assessments and Job Fit Produce Superior Financial Performance

At ExactHire, we believe that picking the right employee for the right job is the most critical part of the hiring process. Making sure there is a fit can make the difference in whether you keep a customer or not. And, keeping the customers you have and gaining more leads to financial success. While we all agree with this line of thinking, let me share a story as to how this has been statistically proven to be more than just a theory.

In 1997, Anthony Rucci, then Chief Administrative Officer at Sears, wanted to test a theory. The theory was that the leading indicators that predict financial performance were employee attitudes and whether customers saw their stores as fun places to shop.

They went to Claes Fornell International Group, an organization made up of econometric statisticians at the University of Michigan and asked them if they could help prove this theory. CFI took years of data that Sears had collected on customer satisfaction and work-place questionnaires and put it into their causal modeling technique. The result was that the CFI modeling told Sears that two key components, employees’ attitudes about the job and attitudes about the company, predicted their behavior in front of the customer. How employees behaved in front of customers predicted the likelihood of customer retention and customers recommending Sears to others. In turn, this directly predicted financial performance.

Here is the real key: They built an “empirical model that says unless you have a trained, literate, motivated, competent work force, and give them decision-making authority, you don’t get satisfied customers no matter how good the merchandise is. The right work force creates customer satisfaction, and that produces superior financial performance.” (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/10/13/232506/index.htm)

Your chances of keeping these most valuable human assets begin with selecting the best ones in the first place. That means using the best applicant tracking tools, assessments for job fit and making the employee onboarding process as seamless and informative as possible.

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