Profiles International is the global leader in assessments
Home About Us Selecting and Retaining Great People Assessments Become a Distributor

Menu:

Updates:

April 2010:
Expert Insights - Creating a Team-Building Culture

March 2010:
Executive Briefing

February 2010:
Join other leaders who are maximising business performance

September 2009:
JobFit Assessments

August 2009:
Managing Human Capital in Unprecedented Times

June 2009:
Is your Organisation "Best-In-Class"?

May 2009:
Now is the time to Review your Screening & Selection Processes

March 2009:
Candidate Screening & Downsizing - How to make it effective!

January 2009:
All Managers can be Great Coaches

December 2008:
Study proves that Managers rarely understand the Success Factors of their employee

November 2008:
Perhaps if I starve the patient … that will make them stronger

October 2008:
Developing Courageous Leaders

September 2008:
Low Cost Employee Perks that won't punish your bottom line

August 2008:
Lessons of the Square Watermelon

Subscribe »

JobFit

JobFit is the ability to match people to roles based on the critical success attributes of the role, not on the individual’s experience, educational qualifications, age, gender or race.

In one of the largest studies of its kind, the Harvard Business Review released findings by H & J Greenberg about the importance of establishing JobFit. The findings were based on a 20 year study of 360,000 individuals in the United States, Canada and Western Europe from the following industries:

There were some alarming discoveries that challenge the current recruitment practices of most organisations by proving that experience and educational qualifications are not statistically reliable predictors of future high performance in a role. For example:

“Experience is usually a principle criterion for making hiring decisions…… Yet we found little difference in performance between these experienced individuals and those with no experience. The person with no experience, given training and supervision, is as likely to succeed as the person with two or more years of experience”

“There is an old saw that 20 years’ experience reflects one year’s bad experience repeated 20 times. Our findings confirm that this is often the case. Too many people cling tenaciously to their unsuitable jobs and do just well enough not to be fired. Thus they accumulate years of “experience”.”

“As a value to be cherished and encouraged in our society, education cannot be challenged. The use of formal degrees as the criterion for judging someone’s potential effectiveness in a …job, however, must be challenged….The results of our probing show that people with little education can do the job as effectively and as readily as those with college degrees.”
The study goes on to state:
“In view of these findings, an obvious question arises: If these long used criteria are invalid, what criteria can industry use to better predict job performance? The answer is: criteria that make a better match between the person and the job.”
The ability to establish JobFit by identifying and quantifying the critical success attributes of a role (such as the mental demands, the environment, behavioural traits and the occupational interests), allows organisations to increase the success rate of employing future high performers by up to 300%.