Introduction

How many of us have made a mistake when SaaS hiring? Most of us at some stage. In fact, one of the most important attributes of any successful SaaS CRO or commercial leader is how successful they are at hiring and building winning teams that don’t constantly turn over through staff attrition.

Did you know that somewhere in the region of 75% of Fortune 500 companies use psychometric of scientific profiling of some sort? In the SaaS industry, a growing number are but there are still many that do not.

Intrinsic Executive Search has embedded scientific profiling into our Executive Search process to de risk the hiring process for our clients when making key commercial hires in SaaS and Technology companies.

 

Making Bad Hires is Just Plain Bad

Apart from the direct and indirect cost of making a bad hire, the fact is it looks plain bad. Don’t forget the damage to career and personal life that effects the candidate as well as the morale issues that can affect teams when a poor or short-term hire is made.

I think that most people start a new role with the best intentions to do the best they can. Sometimes the feedback from a hiring manager is less than positive after a failed hire and of course this may be founded in certain cases but sometimes it is unfounded. Companies have a duty of care to hire well.

 

Gut feel is helpful but not a solution

Often, it seems that hiring comes down to a gut feeling, a decision or a set of decisions that may be subjective. That said, many SaaS hiring managers are very successful in building their SaaS teams using intuition and many years of experience.

But, in my experience, successful SaaS hiring uses a combination of experience, good practice, intuition but also technology, specifically psychometric assessment solutions to remove the guesswork, subjective decision making, unconscious bias or just to identify the nuances that are hard to see to the naked eye.

 

Positive Candidate Experience 

I’m not suggesting that we rely exclusively on psychometric technology to make our hiring decisions and there are many reasons for this. We can see the frustration that candidates feel when they apply online for jobs and then get “placed in the hopper” with AI driving what essentially is a soulless candidate experience that brings no value to anyone and destroys candidate experience.

I’ve seen companies use psychometric profiling solutions but deploy them entirely inappropriately such that any benefit is outweighed by the damage that they do to candidate experience and their employer brand.

It is a tremendous mistake to “front load” your candidate engagement process with a request to go straight to a psychometric stage only to then ghost the candidate with zero or poor feedback if it turns out that they are the wrong fit.

This is an entirely poor approach to Executive Search and guaranteed to damage your talent brand.

 

Informed Hiring for Candidates and Companies

But, using profiling as an aid to our SaaS hiring campaigns opens a huge opportunity to de-risk the hiring process and provides a greater opportunity for company and candidate to get to know one another and make an informed decision on one another

Furthermore, the use of any psychometric solution must be seen as a value add for the candidate as much as it is for the hiring company. The fact is, when used and presented properly, psychometric profiling technologies bring a huge value add to candidates. After all, the last thing the candidate wants is to take a role that looks to be a perfect fit, only to find out that taking the role was a massive mistake.

In Executive Search, there is usually only one winning candidate, so make sure all those disappointed long listed and short-listed candidates walk away knowing that they were well considered and did not go forward for the right reasons.

I’ve lost count on the number of times that a candidate has thanked me for providing the insight that helped all parties come to the right hiring decision. This again drives better CX outcomes and supports your talent brand.

 

People are Complex

One memorable experience I had was being to explain why a lifelong SaaS New Business Sales leader was so much happier in their new career direction in Customer Success Leadership. This helped the person in question with their career planning and answered the question they had been asking themselves for some time.

Proper use of psychometric technologies in SaaS Executive Search and hiring is a very powerful tool in our hiring toolbox but must be implemented carefully in the knowledge that there are no good or bad profiles in a person.

 

How & Why use Psychometric profiling to support your SaaS hiring?

Other than the obvious which is to make better hires, here are some further ideas on how psychometric profiling solutions can bring huge value to your SaaS firm. There are many more of course.

• Identify knowledge gaps in teams so that the appropriate team member/s can be upskilled, or additional team members be hired to fill the knowledge gap
• Understand where team issues exist and how to deal with them to promote harmony and solve conflict
• Succession planning
• When hiring a new manager for a team, (often a risky hire and must be successful) understand the correct behavioural profile to hire to ensure the team does not churn
• When planning a new business initiative or strategy, to support precision hiring of supplementary and complimentary team members
• Holding on to your most valuable resource – your people – supporting career development by identifying other roles or career directions that they may take in your company
• Gain insights on how to vary a role or expectations to accommodate someone with a great cultural fit for your company. Especially useful for roles that are hard to fill
• Understand how someone might perform if you are considering them for promotion
• Keep your people engaged

 

How do I Move Forward?

Clearly not everyone in your company will have the skills or experience to deploy psychometric profiling but the process should be led by at least one person that is experienced or you may be working with an Executive Search Partner that can support the whole process for you.

If you are a Tech or SaaS company Commercial or HR leader, please contact Paul French, Director at Intrinsic Executive Search and I’d be happy to talk you through how to consistently make great hires by seamlessly embedding Psychometric profiling into your critical commercial hiring campaigns