One of the biggest headaches for small businesses is hiring good people. Some people are great in interviews but perform miserably. Others are nervous in the interview process but have all the skills to do a great job. Big companies have HR departments that are equipped to sort through the hiring quagmire, but what about smaller firms that don't have human resources people to run interference?
A Canadian firm, ClearFit, has created a software product to help small businesses solve the problem of limited resources and the need to hire the right people. As an employer, you create an account at ClearFit and then answer a series of questions about the job you need to fill and the attributes candidates must have to be successful in it.
Once the job is in the system, job seekers can apply by completing a behavioral questionnaire. After that, the employer sees a report showing the "fit" of the candidates who applied. The system lets the employer know which candidates are good or bad fits, and also which ones are "distorted" fits, meaning they tried to answer the questions for a better result rather than giving honest responses.
Candidates don't have to come to ClearFit directly to apply for posted jobs. They also can do so from more than 16,000 other job boards, including Indeed.com.Employers save time and expense by having a "fit" profile of interested candidates. The employer pays $350 per hire and can evaluate as many candidates as they wish.
ClearFit co-founder Jamie Schneiderman says the benefit to small businesses is partly cost and partly the science behind the system. "Usually, for a testing tool like we have, there is a $100,000-plus setup fee, plus the cost of testing each person." Obviously, that would be out of the range of all small businesses. The patented ClearFit tool, he notes, was designed by industrial psychologists.
Schneiderman says ClearFit also offers benefits to job seekers in addition to putting their application in front of employers. "Candidates get career feedback reports. They can see which careers they are a good fit for, based on 133 benchmarks of job fit that we offer."
ClearFit, which was founded in 2007 and launched its product in 2009, is aiming at employers with 20-50 employees. "That's our sweet spot," Schneiderman says. "That group is the fastest growing and is more open to using technology to make hires."