Recruitment usually begins with an immediate problem. Someone has resigned, a new position has been created, workloads are increasing or the business has grown to the point where another person is needed. The natural response is to define what the job requires now and find the person who appears best equipped to do it.
That makes perfect sense, but it can also be a bit short sighted.
A recruitment decision is rarely just about filling a vacancy for the next twelve months. If the appointment works well, the person you recruit today may still be with the organisation in three, five or even ten years, by which time their role, the technology they use and possibly the organisation itself may look quite different.
So perhaps one of the questions we should ask during recruitment is not simply, “Can this person do the job?”, but “What might we need from this person in the future?”
The job will probably change
The pace of
workplace change makes this increasingly important. Technology, AI, automation, changing customer expectations and new ways of working mean that many jobs are evolving faster than the traditional recruitment process acknowledges.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs
Report 2025 found that employers expect 39 per cent of workers’ existing skills to be transformed or become outdated by 2030. At the same time, capabilities such as analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, curiosity and lifelong learning are becoming increasingly important.
That does not mean technical skills and experience suddenly become irrelevant. If you are recruiting an accountant, engineer, psychologist or electrician, there are clearly capabilities the person needs from day one. The mistake is assuming that today’s technical requirements tell us everything we need to know about tomorrow’s successful employee.
Look beyond the immediate vacancy
Imagine two candidates who can both perform the current role. One has slightly more direct experience and has essentially performed the same job elsewhere. The other meets the required standard but also demonstrates stronger learning capacity, adaptability, problem solving and an appetite for taking on unfamiliar challenges.
Which candidate represents the better appointment?
There is no automatic answer, because it depends on the role and the organisation. However, if we only compare candidates against the position as it exists today, we may be ignoring information that becomes increasingly valuable over time.
This is particularly relevant for a small or growing business, where jobs often change as the organisation changes. The person recruited as a specialist today may eventually need to manage people, deal with clients, learn new technology, exercise greater judgement or assume responsibilities that did not even exist when they were appointed. Recruitment therefore becomes partly an exercise in workforce planning, even when you are only recruiting one person.
This changes what we should assess
If we want to recruit for the future as well as the present, the selection process needs to look beyond qualifications and previous experience. A CV is primarily a record of the past. An interview can explore what someone has done and how they say they would respond to future situations, but neither provides a complete picture of the underlying person.
This is where psychometric testing for recruitment can add another source of evidence.
Depending on the role, properly chosen assessments can provide information about cognitive capability, personality, problem solving,
learning capacity and behavioural tendencies. They do not tell us whether someone will succeed in some unknown job five years from now, and they should never be treated as though they can. What they can do is help us understand capabilities and characteristics that may not be obvious from experience alone.
The objective is not to predict the future with certainty. It is to make a better-informed decision about who may be equipped to deal with it.
That is also why recruitment decisions are stronger when they are based on a convergence of data. Experience, qualifications, structured interviews, reference checking and appropriate psychometric tests each provide different information. When those sources begin pointing in the same direction, there is greater reason for confidence in the decision.
Recruit for where you are going
Most organisations understandably recruit because they have a problem that needs solving today. But a good recruitment process should occasionally lift its eyes from the immediate vacancy and look a little further down the road. You cannot know exactly what the future job will look like, but you can recruit someone who appears better equipped to grow with it.
Recruitment often focuses on solving an immediate vacancy, but a successful employee may remain with an organisation long after the role they were originally hired to perform has changed. By considering adaptability, learning capacity, problem solving and other enduring capabilities alongside current experience and technical skills, organisations can make hiring decisions with both the present and future in mind. Psychometric testing can contribute another source of evidence to that decision, particularly when combined with structured interviews, experience, qualifications and reference checking.
If you are recruiting and want to look beyond the CV and interview, Fermion provides psychometric testing for recruitment to add objective evidence to your selection process and help you make a more informed hiring decision.
The focus of Fermion is
"Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and
“Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please
contact us at Fermion.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt.
