Poor recruitment practice severely damages productivity

Research from Talent Q, a people assessment company that helps employers recruit and manage talent, has found that many companies are routinely making poor decisions when hiring employees. The result is a fall off in productivity equivalent to 2,400 a year for every worker who is placed into a role without being assessed effectively - adding up to a huge 5 billion bill for the UK economy as a whole.

Drawing on official survey data, Talent Q has discovered that 44 per cent of employees were not selected using personality assessment and 24 per cent were not selected using aptitude tests. These findings were processed through a universally-accepted model that illustrates the cast iron effectiveness of assessment, based on 25 years of academic research across thousands of organisations. When the results were combined with Office for National Statistics salary data, the true extent of the issue for employers became clear.

Steve O'Dell, chief executive of Talent Q, said:"Organisations are often employing people based on little more than gut feel, even though it's by far the worst recruitment technique.All the studies show that if employees use assessment to check whether someone has the right aptitude and personality traits, they get far better people and much better productivity.

"In the UK, our productivity per hour worked lags around 20 per cent behind the USA and Germany.If organisations made the right hires it would be a significant way of helping ensure the country doesn't fall behind its global competitors"

The cost of doing it wrong is shocking. With 5 billion you could:

* Pay the wages of Chelsea's John Terry for the next 740 years

* Build 15 replicas of the Burj al Arab, the world's only 7 star hotel

* Or buy a 28,000-strong fleet of the 205mph Ferrari 599.

The bottom-line implications for managers are significant.For an organisation employing 2,500 employees, the lost productivity through poor quality of hires could be as much as 5.9 million per annum.

Steve O'Dell added: "While many managers in human resources are rightly focused on value for money and reducing costs, this can result in a loss of focus around the quality of hires.With a range of innovative psychometric assessments now on the market at competitive rates, failing to assess candidates robustly clearly represents a false economy.