By Oliver Anderson
Chief Executive Officer

At 10x Psychology, we’re establishing a better way forward in people management, from talent selection, through to development and optimization.

Hiring exceptional talent starts with clarifying and designing a role that is meaningful, interesting and challenging enough to support motivation and engagement, as well as fuel organizational strategy.

Once the role has been designed, and the key skills identified, the skills can be used as an effective and impactful way to filter candidates. Approaching talent selection in this way encourages candidates to think creatively and more broadly about how they can contribute to make a difference to the organization, customers and investors from the very outset of their candidate experience (Lee & Raschka, 2016)

In addition to enhancing focus, a skill-based hiring approach can boost and improve the diversity of the candidate pool by removing ambiguity and replacing chances for bias, with the opportunity to clearly and objectively identify the skills and potential that individuals have to succeed in role (McKinsey, 2021)

At 10x Psychology, our industry -leading psychometric assessments tailor insights and create ranked lists based on the critical skills that your role requires – streamlining and distinguishing exceptional performance in the context of your organization.

How do we know that the technique delivers exceptional performers?

Well at 10x, we tested the theory with our data.

So, the theory states that where there is a match between what motivates an individual in their work and their job characteristics, the relationship between motivation with performance is expected to increase in strength as the individual would feel more satisfied and stimulated in their role. For example, an individual that is motivated by having a high level of autonomy in their work would not be very suited, and likely not perform to the best of their ability, in a role with little or no autonomy.

We split our 10x databank into those who rated different elements of our 10x Motivation model as low, medium, or high. A low rating would indicate the described characteristic as absent from their current role, while a high rating would indicate its presence. To evaluate the moderating effect of job characteristics on the relationship between motivation and overall job performance, we first reflected the relationship between motivation and overall job performance on the full sample and then compared it against the sub-sample that included only those who rated the relevant, moderating job characteristic as ‘high’.

The analysis (Figure 1.1, below) shows that when the moderating effect of relevant job characteristics is taken into account the extrinsic motivator of Job Design has a moderate relationship with overall performance, with a corrected coefficient of 0.24.

Figure 1.1 Analysis of Job Design as a moderator for overall performance.

This is an important finding.  What this essentially means is that good job design, and matching the right individuals to the right roles brings about increased overall performance.

There you have it! Recruit to the role; don’t just hire the best candidate that presents.  If they don’t ‘fit’ the role you want you’ll have a mismatch and you won’t see the performance gains you expect.

Work with 10x to start hiring the best candidates for YOUR roles in YOUR organisation.

Sound good for YOUR Business?

Book a demo now and find out what 10x can do for you.

Oliver Anderson is the Chief Executive Officer at 10x Psychology, and a leading Human Resources professional with a broad base of experience across analytics, people, and change management. Author of two books on his work across statistical analysis in the Premier League, Oliver combines his unique understanding of people analytics and predictive performance with his people management abilities to manage the expansion and quality of our Solutions. Find Oliver on Linkedin.