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
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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