The Top 5 Takeaways From Our Skills-Based Hiring Performance Report

We recently published the inaugural HiringBranch Performance Report featuring data from more than 5000 frontline employee candidates in 16 different countries, who were hired with both in-house and outsourced teams. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the report, you can download a copy of it here. 

If you just want to grab some key highlights, we’ve got you covered! One of the broad themes echoed throughout the report is that skill-based hiring assessments can help employers make more effective hires, which results in meaningful business outcomes, like improved revenue and customer retention. Read on to get the top five takeaways from our HiringBranch Performance Report.

1. Hiring Teams Need Soft Skills Recipes to Hire for Them

Employers who can screen candidates for the right set of skills, given the role they’re applying for, will have better hiring outcomes than those who don’t. What that means is employers may do soft-skill screening manually during the hiring process, but if they aren’t looking for the right set of skills, they may not be the best performers in that role. 

By understanding which combination of skills is needed for a particular job at a particular company, hiring managers know what to screen for. When hiring teams use unique “recipes” of soft skills as their hiring threshold, they can improve their hiring results, including better CSAT scores, increased sales, lower bad hire rates, and more.

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2. Language Assessments Alone Don't Lead to Better Performance

Employers hiring for frontline worker roles may ask candidates to complete a language assessment. Each hiring process looks different, but language assessments can often play a defining role in the hiring outcome.

Our report definitively concluded that good, better, or best language assessment results coming out of the pre-hire phase did not impact the performance of the employee once hired. Knowing this, employers shouldn’t depend on language assessments for frontline worker recruitment.

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3. Attrition Rates Vary and Can Be Affected by Skills-Based Hiring

Attrition is a problem for every employer, not just those hiring customer-facing roles. However, for large enterprises, the scale of this problem can cause employers to take notice. 

Our report demonstrated that attrition rates can vary significantly by location even within the same employer. Attrition was also affected by the hiring mechanism, whether the team was in-house or outsourced.

Most importantly, the HiringBranch data demonstrated that the candidates who scored highly in their skills assessment churned less than the bottom performers. That means that employers can lower attrition rates by using a skills-based assessment during the hiring process.

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4. Skills-Based Hiring Had a Dramatic Impact on Bad Hires Rates

To understand how skills-based hiring impacted bad hire rates, our report zoomed in on one global organization to see how many employees were fired within three months of being hired before and after the implementation of a skills-based hiring assessment. The results were shocking. This organization saw a 400% reduction in bad hire rates just by using the recommendations of their soft skills assessment, representing millions of dollars in savings generated from the number of bad hires avoided annually.

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5. Skills-Based Hiring Assessments Lead to Better Hiring Metrics

Across every individual study included in the performance report, there was one core theme: the HiringBranch soft skill assessment engine, powered with AI, is capable of better results than traditional methods of high-volume hiring for customer-facing roles. The performance report conclusively demonstrates that soft skills are an indicator of job performance - from performance on the job, to lower attrition with highly skilled candidates and a significant reduction in bad hire rates.

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Take Away a Copy of the Complete Report

Across all of the takeaways above, we found that there were both departmental and company-level benefits for the customers who were featured in the data. Within customer service, finding empathetic care agents using soft skill hiring assessments can lead to improved CSAT scores for example, which would lead to improved customer retention company-wide. Increasing hiring efficiency and getting better performance isn’t just in the interest of the HR department, investing in finding the right skilled people drives the company vision forward! For more high-power insights from our 2023 performance report, download a copy here.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Property of HiringBranch

Image 1-5: Property of HiringBranch

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