The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 40: Dec/Jan 2018/19 | Page 16

USING EMOTIONAL INTEL TO RECRUIT TALENT Director of Niche Recruitment, Nick Wimshurst, shares how Niche incorporates emotional intelligence profiling into their recruitment process. ‘Talent shortage’ and ‘skill shortages’ are frequently emerging terms within the recruitment industry. A consistent message from businesses and recruiters is that they don’t have enough candidates to fill the increasing number of job vacancies. Alongside this, a report by the Office for National Statistics (2017) reveals that unemployment is at a 42-year low. With these low unemployment rates and an increasing amount of job vacancies in the market, is it time that employers look at other ways to recruit talent and focus on positive candidate attributes and behaviours rather than a lack of specific skills? At Niche Recruitment we’re always looking for creative ways over and around industry hurdles. Of course, skillset is an extremely important component of finding the right talent, but surely a candidate who has significant personal/interpersonal skills and the ability to be trained is just as valued? M. Murphy (2011) says that ‘89% of hires failed due to personal attributes, not of individuals with low EI is likely to be unbalanced, closed and limited in productivity levels. Achieving an accurate team dynamic is critical to a business’s success and foundation and EI is a proven critical component. The profiling system that we use includes a short questionnaire and measures ten different key components of effectiveness. These are divided up into two sections; personal effectiveness including competencies such as ‘Showing Resilience’, ‘Driving for success’ and ‘Adapting to change” and interpersonal effectiveness including ‘Connecting with people’, ‘Inspiring others’ and ‘Valuing people’. Once an applicant has completed the questionnaire, a report is composed, and the reader is able to clearly identify the different levels of competencies across these behaviours. These scores are critical in providing guidance, planning training on areas to improve and more importantly for businesses, a selection of suggested “Teams made up of individuals with high emotional intelligence have been consistently linked to success” skills competency’. This has led us down the exciting path of exploring Emotional Intelligence (EI) in our recruitment and selection processes in partnership with a leading business psychology consultancy. EI Profiling explores below the surface and looks at an individual’s behaviour, feelings and attitudes and not just the expertise they hold. EI is proven to be directly related to an individual’s performance at work both personally and interpersonally. As human beings, without emotions we’re unable to make decisions and manage our personality, which is a huge part of any job role. Teams made up of individuals with high emotional intelligence have been consistently linked to success and achievement. Research has shown that these teams are more productive, collaborate effectively and have a superior approach when it comes to resolving workplace conflict. A team made up 16 THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2018 interview questions. The interview styled questions are suggestions designed to help businesses find candidates who hold the same core values as the business and help screen those highly emotional intelligent people who can help your business thrive. Utilising EI brings added value to the recruitment process for both the businesses and the candidate and feedback from both has proven that. Once the questionnaire has been completed, candidates receive a report that is generated to highlight their key areas of strengths and areas in which development is required. Knowledge of these areas can also help them to secure employment opportunities in the future. If you’re curious how emotional intelligence profiling could help your business find the best talent email: [email protected] Taming Tigers 10 Minutes with international keynote speaker Jim Lawless. Jim Lawless is one of the world’s leading keynote speakers. Over half a million people on five continents have been entertained and inspired by Jim’s presentations and many more by his best-selling book ‘Taming Tigers’. Jim has advised companies globally on creating cultural change and elite teams, working with some of the biggest names including Apple, Barclaycard, Axa and BT. Uniquely, he believes in testing his framework for delivering change on himself first. He won a £1 bet to transform, from overweight non-riding 36 year old consultant to televised jockey within 12 months of sitting on a horse using his Taming Tigers framework. He used it to become GB’s deepest freediver, the first to pass 100m, in eight months. Both achieved whilst working at his day job because, as he says, “change must happen whilst we are fulfilling our current commitments”. Jim holds a Bachelor of Laws degree, qualified as a solicitor and practiced commercial law in the City of London and in a major IT company before founding Taming Tigers. Ahead of Jim’s visit to Bath in March 2019 to speak at the South West Business Growth Summit, we met to find out more about him and the conference. HOW DID YOU TRANSITION FROM CITY LAWYER TO TAMING TIGERS? I came from a poor background where gaining a profession was the ultimate prize. I took the legal route but became unhappy and by my late twenties, I had to change.  I resigned, with great trepidation, and went to drama school for a year to grow up and shake things up. It was a huge risk and it paid off. When I left, I set up a company to teach stagecraft to senior people. It was my clients who recognised that what my company was doing was helping their people to think and act differently - and courageously - to transform themselves. They invited us to design some large change programmes.  Working alongside companies like Accenture who were delivering the systems and processes, we delivered the “people” side.  Over a couple of years, the business was organically transformed from into Taming Tigers.  WHY TAMING TIGERS? Our response to the uncertainty and risk of trying new things to deliver a new result - with no guarantees of success - is visceral; it creates a large emotional and physiological change in us. The Tiger concept was invented to acknowledge that fact and to give the “enemy within” a name so that we can be more aware of it.  We do not teach the learnable skill of personal adaptation and change. Yet this will be the defining skill in this century. Taming Tigers is my best attempt at teaching this learnable skill. And we need it urgently in all areas of society. WHAT WILL DELEGATES LEARN AND TAKE AWAY FROM THE SOUTH WEST BUSINESS GROWTH SUMMIT? A greater level of self-awareness and an understanding of why we have the physical and mental response to uncertainty and change that we have. You will take away the basic groundings in psychological and neurological factors that we have to be aware of if we are going to successfully manage ourselves, our thinking, our emotions and our businesses through a process of change.  Everyone will be leave having chosen and committed to an exciting objective that they would have thought impossible before entering the room. Everyone will identify how their individual beliefs might frustrate the goal - and precisely what to do about that.  To hold ourselves accountable for delivering change, everybody will leave with a mentor from the group to work with. Oh - and we’ll all practice riding a finish at the races and have a go at some elite freediving exercises to steady the mind - and to move effortlessly past imagined boundaries!   To book tickets for the ActionCOACH South West Business Growth Summit on March 1, 2019, at Bath Racecourse visit: www.businessgrowthsummit.co.uk