Measuring applicant quality in real-time

By studying the common characteristics and real-world performance of the great people who already work for you, it's easier to find more great people when you're hiring new employees.

Our customers primarily use Expr3ss! predictive hiring to look beyond resumes and cover letters in their search for fantastic employees. Using short surveys, Expr3ss! lets them quickly and cost-effectively pinpoint job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit. 

Rather than just focusing on skills, this lets employers hone in on applicants with can-do attitudes and excellent people skills, as well as those who will fit well with their existing team and company culture. Expr3ss! even suggests who to interview first, because they're the great ones likely to get snapped up by one of your competitors.

To help refine your results, you can choose from more than 60 Job Role Benchmarks, which judge your applicants against the benchmarks for what makes an excellent employee in that particular role.

Identify the best with Learning Benchmarks™

Of course, no two workplaces and no two roles are exactly the same. That's why you can also use Expr3ss! to look inwards at your existing workforce to determine what makes your best employees tick. This way, you can more easily identify job applicants who'd make a fantastic addition to the team.

Using Expr3ss! you can conduct a cultural survey, looking at your superstars across every area of operations. From this cultural survey, Expr3ss! can create customised benchmarks for every role. This helps you find the perfect fit for the specific role in your specific business, rather than relying on generic industry-wide benchmarks.

Related article: What is workplace culture and why should you take it seriously?

Expr3ss! Learning Benchmarks™ builds on this. Similar to a cultural survey, it lets you create benchmarks based on the performance of employees who've you already appointed using Expr3ss! predictive hiring. This helps you see exactly what it takes for employees to succeed in their role. 

Expr3ss! is great for recommending the best job applicants to interview, but we can't actually see how those people perform in the job once you've hired them.

Discover what makes your top people shine

Expr3ss! Learning Benchmarks™ lets you bridge this gap, by offering your own feedback on how those employees are doing. This ensures that you're constantly refining the process to get better hiring results, based on your exact business and your exact roles.

Every time you hire someone you learn something, so the more people you hire, the better job Expr3ss! does of helping you hire great people.

Expr3ss! Learning Benchmarks™ have been five years in the making. Previously we offered Expert Benchmarks, put together by our experts based on the results of cultural surveys and input from managers.

Cultural surveys would show all attributes of employees, then our experts would get feedback from managers about how those employees were performing.

The problem we found was that too much of the manager's own personality and bias was creeping into the Expert Benchmarks. This meant that our own experts had to spend a lot of time sifting through the applicant data to allow for this bias.

Expr3ss! predictive hiring is designed to eliminate bias when short-listing applicants for interviews, so we certainly didn't want bias influencing our benchmarks.

Related article: Trying to avoid conscious and unconscious bias? Technology can help

Rather than relying upon the perhaps dubious abilities of untrained managers to accurately and dispassionately make fine judgements on characteristics temperament, the feedback now comes from the person in the business who hired that employee – someone who can be more objective and is also more familiar with the Expr3ss! process.

Keep improving your recruitment results

Admittedly, no benchmarking method will ever be completely free of bias when it relies on people making judgement calls. But to minimise the potential for conscious or unconscious bias, the Learning Benchmarks™ don't require fine judgements of factors like temperament. Instead, people are only required to offer a single simple assessment of an employee's success in their role, a little similar to a Net Promoter Score.

In an effort to maintain consistency, Learning Benchmarks™ only take into account the assessments of employees who were hired using the Expr3ss! process, rather than relying upon exemplar data from people who may have been in the role for quite some time.

Another challenge with Expert Benchmarks was that they represented a fixed point in time and were usually not updated over time. While we advocated reviews after three and six months, and then annually, reviewers were often reluctant to stick with it.

Meanwhile, Learning Benchmarks™ continue to evolve as increasing numbers of applicants are appointed using the Expr3ss! process, which also has a powerful effect of averaging out any residual bias.  

Offering ever-improving customised insights into what makes for a great employee in each role, Expr3ss! Learning Benchmarks™ ensures that your business is continually hiring for success.

By studying the common characteristics and real-world performance of the great people who already work for you, it's easier to find more great people when you're hiring new employees.