NEARLY 50% OF SMALL BUSINESSES CAN’T SOURCE TALENT… BUT THERE’S NOT A LACK OF PEOPLE.

Are you in HR or recruiting? A business owner or manager? If you’re currently hiring, you know there’s not a shortage of applicants. Quite the contrary, actually. You’re seeing a lot of resumes but few are the right candidate. 

47% of small businesses are experiencing this. But where are all the ‘quality’ applicants? Are the job ads not clear enough? Is it an internal issue or are we lacking in talent as a nation? 

Know the cultural fit of your company. 

Before you write off every applicant, take the time to explore the type of person you’re looking for, beyond their CV. As recruiters, we need to go deeper than making decisions based on what’s ‘on paper’ to determine the archetype of the ideal candidate. 

First, it’s important to understand which personality traits you’re after. Then, you can clearly articulate these requirements in the job listing and interviews. What characteristics do you need? You can’t teach talent and personality, but you can develop skills. Avoid short-lived employees and making wrong decisions by focusing more on the personality fit. 

Tick’s easy to use personality profiling tools can help you identify who your candidates really are, not what they’ve done. 

But the skills-job match isn’t just isolated to small business. The proportion of university graduates landing full-time employment has dropped to 72.9% (from 85.2%) in the past decade. A survey revealed that 23% of unemployed graduates said there were no suitable jobs in their area of expertise. 

Could this be part of the issue for people matching candidates to jobs? Is it possible nearly ¼ of recent graduates looking for work are applying for positions that their skills (and interests) don’t match? Maybe.

While this touches on greater societal issues that need to be addressed on a higher level, it does serve as a lesson for both employers and job seekers – to know what person (or what job) you need to be looking for. 

This is what the Tick personality and career testing tools are designed for. 

If you’re applying for jobs, use our tools to learn about the positions that match your personality, style of working and career aspirations. The same approach can be adopted by recruiters. By determining the personality type of each applicant, you can quickly see whether they’re an attitudinal or cultural fit. 

You can still measure performance and place importance on the details in their CV. But for longevity of employees, you can’t ignore personalities.