As our company keeps growing it’s time to introduce you to another team skeeled member. Our series of in-house blog posts has already covered most of our main departments: Management, with Mike and Nicolas; Engineering, with Artur; Sales and Customer Success, with Olfa; and today we’ll open the door of our Porto office, so you can meet António Gomes, our Psychology Expert.
António joined skeeled almost a year ago and plays a key role in our company, for he’s responsible for all the support regarding our personality assessment. More than ever, it’s important for recruiters to be able to make good and effective hiring decisions, so companies are investing in using psychology-based assessment to measure candidates’ cultural fit and predict job performance.
The integrated personality test is one of the skeeled software’s most valued features, therefore, having a Psychology Expert in our team adds great value to our tool. Among other responsibilities, António oversees and manages the pre-employment test we use, making sure that it is in accordance with the best practices.
In this article, I reveal to you how and why António joined skeeled, what's his view on HR tech and on how psychology assessment helps improving quality of hire.
Joining the HR (R)Evolution
Behind a somewhat intellectual professional title stands a very hands-on and engaging individual. António believes that “employees are the cornerstone of a company’s success”, thereby he understands how important it is to attract the right people and he’s fully committed with skeeled’s mission to help our customers hire better and faster.
Before joining skeeled, António worked as a HR Manager for more than three years in a security company. “It was a really challenging job”, he says, explaining to me that the company had “more than 500 employees across the country” that he had to manage.
He travelled a lot within the country, which had its perks like “meeting a lot of interesting people” and never get bored with traditional office routines.
But, despite remembering it as a “really fun job”, António tells me that he started to feel that he “needed something more”. He wanted to really “make a difference” within a company and started seeking for an opportunity to fulfil his aspirations.
Being back on the job market was an adventure, but António had a good feeling about skeeled. “I mean, a start-up that was aiming to revolutionise the HR industry by making a tool that integrated all steps of the recruitment process? That really caught my attention!”. It was “a great opportunity to have an impact on the way that HR would evolve worldwide”.
António came on board as a Psychology Expert and he’s responsible for “giving all kind of support regarding our personality assessment. From applicants who want to access their personality results to clients that might be in need of guidance to understand results that we provide”.
He provides Personality training (through webinars), creates content “that helps recruiters use the personality tool and understand how it really works” and manages the applicant support team, which “helps candidates that might have difficulties applying to finish the process”.
His day-to-day life at skeeled is anything but boring as he is involved in many different projects. “Lately, I have been producing some tutorial videos with other team members to improve candidate experience and make everything easier in our platform”.
Personality assessment and job performance prediction
During any recruitment process recruiters try to assemble all the relevant information they can, so they're able to make the best hiring decision. “The problem is that the traditional methods for gathering information are very subjective and unreliable and that is why pre-selection tests play an important part in the recruitment process”, António defends.
Unlike someone's gut-feeling, “these assessments can be an objective source of reliable information that can help recruiters to substantiate and base their hiring decision on concrete criteria”. Research shows that “well developed pre-selection tests can successfully predict employee performance across the wide range of job categories”, he concludes.
For those who may wonder how personality assessment helps predicting future job performance, António challenges you to think about how “in a work setting, personality is determinant in the way individuals interact with one another and how that affect the daily outcome of any organisation”. If a team doesn’t work well together that will ultimately affect the organisational productivity, agree?
At skeeled we use a personality assessment provided by Wonderlic called the Personal Characteristics Inventory (PCI). “This assessment is based on worldwide known personality model, the Big Five Model, which categorises personality into five broad dimensions”, António explains.
How does it help recruiters in the selection process? “This personality test helps recruiters to quickly assess if a candidate is suitable for a job position or not, because it measures workplace personality traits and occupational scores that are predictive of job performance”.
António clarifies how it works, adding that “the PCI is a normative test which means that it yields an estimation of the position of the test-taker regarding the general population. This allows the recruiter not only to assess the result of an individual, but also to make direct comparison between candidates in the recruitment pool and assess which one will be the best fit for their company”.
Ultimately, while individual competencies represented on a CV can tell us what kind of tasks or responsibilities one can perform on the job, “personality assessment can portrait the way a person will do it”, he concludes.
Will one experience extreme stress when facing an adverse situation or keep his head up and overcome it with ease? Will one do the job in a more conscientious manner or in a more careless way? “Personality has major impact on individual behavioral tendencies and in order to fully evaluate if a candidate will fit the job profile, recruiters should have this type of assessment into consideration when making their hiring decision”.
AI Technology and Psychology team up
AI Technology can help us deal with and solve many recruitment pain points, such as large-volume applications screening, candidate engagement or time-to-fill deadlines, among many others.
Adding Psychology to the mix improves the recruitment process even further, helping recruiters at the decision-making level by lowering bad hire rates.
António underlines that the “predictive analysis of psychology assessments provides an overview of a candidate’s behavioural tendencies and that allows recruiters to really understand if a candidate will, in fact, be a top performer and if he will fit the culture of the company”. Having this kind of insights before making the hiring decision is crucial to decide better.
And what makes this even more valuable, in his opinion, is “being able to provide this assessment on a digital platform, saving both the recruiter and the candidate a lot of time and making it much easier to analyse and compare the results”.
Currently, HR departments aim to do recruiting in the more accurate and cost-effective way possible. Meaning that “they need to reduce the recruitment cycle without affecting the quality of candidates”, he adds. It’s true that it can be “somehow difficult” but this is where AI technology and Psychology come hand in hand to support recruiters.
Even though he acknowledges that some companies are still afraid of integrating technology in the recruitment process, especially for matching and screening purposes, António is confident that people will soon fully understand its key benefits.
What makes skeeled an unique recruitment software
For António, skeeled is one of a kind recruitment software. “An artificial intelligence-based platform that analyses and ranks candidates’ CVs considering each job requirements”, allowing recruiters to focus “only on candidates that match the profile they are looking for and spend more time in the tasks that matter the most”.
For him, the fully automated matching process significantly improves the initial screening. “We’re talking about an AI-based analysis, performed by a bias-free screening machine that doesn’t take time off and works 24/7”, which makes it easier to process large-volume applications.
Our software also facilitates the process for the candidates, António adds. “The fact that we have a personality assessment that can be done in our platform, when and where candidates best see fit, really eases the recruitment process and improves their experience”.
On top of that, he defends that using a “valid and reliable personality assessment, like ours, to identify which candidates will be the best performers in any given position, for any company”, really paves the way for recruiters to succeed in the selection process.
But skeeled offers much more to recruiters. Pre-recorded video interviews, for example, are a great feature. António highlights its benefits: one hand, it “gives candidates the opportunity to prepare themselves and give the right answer to the recruiter’s questions, improving their chances of being selected for the position”, and on the other, “it allows recruiters to get a small presentation of every candidate and gather more information that can help identify the best ones, without the scheduling headaches of face-to-face or phone interviews and no-shows”.
So, from his point of view, using a solution like skeeled is key for any company that wants to thrive in the digital era and is in need to modernise and improve their recruitment process.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
