Belbin in Recruitment
Find and nurture the talent your business needs
Choosing the right people is key to success.
That’s why you need a robust recruitment process that gives the best outcomes for your team and organisation.
As a recruiter, you want to hire the right person for the job – a high-performer who can make the most of the role and gel with the existing team.
You want a fair, structured and easy-to-understand process which uses time and money efficiently and effectively.
And you want this process to be mutually beneficial for you, your organisation and your applicants.
It sounds easy… but we all know it isn’t.
The secret to engagement and retention
For many organisations, recruitment means job adverts, CVs and interviews.
That’s great for finding people with the right qualifications and experience – hard skills.
Some hard skills will be non-negotiable for that role; others can be taught on the job.
But anyone who has encountered career guidance software will know that prescribing careers based on skills and qualifications alone frequently produces unpredictable results.
Hard skills in isolation are not good predictors of a successful hire. And focusing solely on them can be a costly mistake when it comes to employee turnover.
Yet often, job descriptions are drawn up with only these factors in mind.
The most qualified workers are less engaged
Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace’ reports that the most qualified workers are less engaged. Why? Because many don’t have the opportunity to do what they do best every day – to play to their strengths.
Those who do have the opportunity to play to their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged at work.
Meredith Belbin’s research finds that people stay longest and perform best when they have the strengths required for a job, but also have room to grow in the role, when it comes to hard skills.
When we can choose between candidates based on these criteria in conjunction, the recruitment process has a greater chance of success.
In other words, when we hire for behaviour and train for knowledge, we get a better return on investment.
There’s an ‘I’ in ‘recruitment’, but where’s the team?
As well as focusing exclusively on hard skills, many recruitment processes also neglect to consider the broader context of the hire – the team.
But assembling the right team is key. SMEs can’t afford to 'carry' anyone. And for multinationals, engagement and retention are key metrics with a direct impact on performance.
Research shows that 1 in 4 start-ups fails because of the team. Having the right team is identified as a key factor in the success of the business, exceeded only by funding and market need.
What’s the solution?
So when you have two or three equally-qualified and experienced candidates at interview, how do you decide which is most suited to the job in terms of strengths?
How do you predict how each will fit with the rest of the team?
That’s where Belbin comes in.
Belbin offers key insights that can elevate your recruitment process.
Our reports provide vital information about your applicants' strengths, and how these fit with the job – and the team they'll be working with.
Additional information
Of course, this isn’t intended to replace the CV or the interview. It’s not an either/or, it’s an ‘and’ – an extra tool to help you ask the right questions and hire with confidence.
The question then becomes: how do you want the job to be done? Do you want someone who takes a broad, analytical approach? Or someone who will focus on the details and ensure that no mistakes are made?
What’s most important to the job? What works best with the rest of the team?
Belbin at Inovus Medical
Inovus Medical, a multi-award-winning surgical training company, have used Belbin for recruitment since their inception.
They ask applicants to complete a Belbin questionnaire and use the report to guide interview questions or corroborate statements and claims made at interview.
Dr Elliot Street, Entrepreneur and CEO of Inovus, tells us of the impact Belbin has had on his business.
“Belbin allowed us to gain incredible clarity on the process we wanted to follow. One thing we have found is that Belbin one hundred per cent translates internationally. We've just built an entire commercial team in the U.S. and Belbin was central to that process. We've got a very vertically integrated team, so lots of skillsets, lots of different profiles of individuals... It translates universally across the business. It does add value across every type of hire you can possibly make. From my experience, it's incredibly powerful in terms of its translation globally, both from a geographical perspective and from a type of job role."
Belbin in Recruitment - a panel discussion
Elliot Street (of multi-award winning Inovus Medical), Mike Kerins (of leading life science company, Cambridge Bioscience) and Bob Penney (Belbin Accredited business consultant) discuss their transformative use of Belbin within their recruitment processes in the biomedical industry.
How do you replicate this success?
Our suite of Belbin reports help you to identify your candidates’ key strengths and those required for the job, so that you can see how well the two match.
Discover your interviewee’s behavioural strengths, so that you can see how they might perform the job and contribute to the team.
Frame a job in terms of Belbin Team Roles, so that you can see how closely potential candidates fit with the strengths the job requires. Since there is often disagreement about what the job entails, this process helps key stakeholders to reach a consensus – what Steve Jobs referred to as a ‘collaborative hiring process’.
Is there a fit?
Establish the degree of fit between an applicant and the job.
Whilst our reports do not give a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (things are never as simple as that), they provide an additional source of information to help inform your decision, along with advice and guidance on the right questions to ask to determine behavioural fit.
Step by step
Partnering with Belbin in your recruitment process enables what Steve Jobs called a collaborative hiring process.
Step 1. Start with the team - what do you need?
If you're recruiting for someone to join an existing team, it's crucial to consider which contributions might be missing and how the new recruit might slot into the existing team composition.
The Belbin Team report can help here. It indicates where gaps and overlaps in contribution might occur and where the team is reliant on one individual to fulfil a particular Team Role.
It also gives an overview of the team's culture.
These considerations can help narrow down the behavioural contributions you might look for in a new hire, as well as assisting with the onboarding process further down the line.
Step 2. Build consensus among key stakeholders
In order to recruit successfully, key stakeholders must be in complete agreement about (and able to articulate clearly) what the job entails, the skillsets and capabilities required and how performance will be measured.
To help stakeholders to discuss and pin down specific behavioural attributes required, the Belbin Job Requirements Inventory (JR) can be completed. The Belbin Job report is created from the responses, indicating the Belbin Team Roles needed for the job in question.
Along with the Job Specification page, which can be used to inform the written job specification, it includes Job Expectations, which can be given to applicants attending interviews.
Before embarking on the selection process, the job profile can usefully be compared with the Team report, to explore whether the new role will fill in gaps in the existing team.
Step 3. Understand the applicant's strengths
The Belbin Individual report offers key insights into a person's strengths, behavioural propensities, preferred working styles and ideal working environment.
It can provide discussion points for interview and avenues into supporting examples of certain contributions. This report is generated when the candidate completes the Belbin Self-Perception Inventory, a questionnaire which takes approximately 15-20 minutes.
Step 4. Assess how the candidate fits with the job
Once you have the Individual and Job reports, you can compare the two to see how well the individual fits with the job.
This report (the Job Comparison report) can be used 'behind the scenes' in the recruitment process, or presented to the candidate at interview for discussion.
Step 5. Explore how potential candidates might relate to their managers
The Working Relationship reports can be run for any working pair, whether for a manager and potential new hire, or for new recruits and existing team members who will be working closely together.
These reports give an at-a-glance view of synergies and potential clashes between individuals, offering some questions and pointers for discussion.
Ready to find out more?
We pride ourselves on a team that’s ready to pick up the phone and help you get to what you need.
Give us a call on 01223 264975 or fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.
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