When determining the right candidate for your company it is all about company/job fit. We don't want to select a 190cm basketball player when we want them to drive an F1 car. So at the same time we don't want someone who is 10 on energy for our QA position where patience and being meticulous is of the essence.

To understand where we want our perfect candidate to fit we have to understand what the position does and how they will interact with their managers, other staff and your customers.

We can understand more about the type of person who will be successful in our company in 2 ways; the most accurate method is to select a staff member who is our best employee and assess them to determine what traits they have that make them successful in your company. The other method is to complete a series of questions about the position so we can build a picture of your perfect employee and create a benchmark against that.

The questionaire can be completed online or if you prefer: download, print out a copy, complete the 57 questions and fax to us so you have a copy for you records. One of our consultants will then prepare you a complimentary report to provide you an insight into what makes a superior performer for your company.

Please feel to complete a questionnaire now and with no financial commitment from you at least you will gain an insight into what type of candidate you are looking for.

The questionnaire only takes 5 mins and has such questions as:

1. This job requires the use of a university level vocabulary	Rarely Occasionally Frequently
2. This job requires understanding the meanings of words	Rarely Occasionally Frequently
3. This job requires the use of complex words	Rarely Occasionally Frequently

Now that we have completed our questionnaire, we know exactly how high we want our employees to jump! Too high and they will be set up for failure and too low and the challenge will not be enough to keep them. Many employers make the mistake of setting the bar too high when fine tuning the benchmarks.

Selecting candidates who then align with those scores can often lead to boredom and lack of job satisfaction if the position does not match up to the benchmark. The secret is then to be realistic about what the job entails and what skills are important to excel in that role.
Fine tuning the benchmark is an important stage of the process. From the initial survey or round of assessments we prepare a Job Analysis Report. For a sample copy click here.

Each trait that is to be measured provides a graphical scale of the determined optimal values along with a description. As an example let's look at attitude.

Attitude

Employee Description:
Employees who consistently maintain their positive expression and trust easily. They tend to have a relaxed social style.

We need to read the description carefully and ensure it matches our criteria. If it does not we then need to adjust the benchmark.

Our benchmarking reports provide a comprehensive description of not only how your perfect candidate may be described but also what each trait measures and the effects of moving the scale up or down.

In this case we may decide that we want our candidate to be slightly more vigilant in the area of attitude. If we look at the description we can then see which way we may want to adjust our scale.

Low	Scale Description – Attitude	High
Sometimes sceptical Can be critical of others Often vigilant	Attitude measures the degree one is willing to demonstrate trust towards others. It relates to the tendency to maintain a positive view about people and outcomes. We are speaking specifically about the tendency one has for trusting in the motives of others and the outcomes of our endeavours	Optimistic Trusting Relaxed social style

By making an adjustment to our scale we are able to change the description that describes our ideal candidate. In this case if we move our scale to 4-7 we would get a new description: "Employees who demonstrate a positive attitude, yet are not required to resist the expression of frustration in order to achieve success in their work."

Once we have fine tuned our benchmark we are then ready to start assessing our candidates so we can see where they align with our perfect employee. While we rarely see a 100% fit for the role, a close alignment is enough for us to make a valued decision about the selection of our staff and determine a winner.