AI summary
Most mis-hires come from measuring the wrong things too late in the process, not from bad candidates. This article explains the three points where quality leaks out of a hiring funnel, and how role profiling changes what gets measured before a shortlist is built.
Key takeaways
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A mis-hire in front-line roles typically costs between a third and a full year of salary, most of it hidden across rehire, onboarding and lost productivity.
- CV proxies — years of experience, previous employer, education — predict job performance far more weakly than most hiring teams assume.
- Assessment only reduces mis-hires when it happens before the shortlist. Results that arrive afterwards can't change the decision.
Where the process usually breaks
Three failure points account for most of it. Roles get defined by job title rather than by what good performance looks like. Screening happens on CV proxies — years of experience, previous employer, education — that predict performance far more weakly than most people assume. And where assessment is used, the results arrive too late to change the shortlist.
"By the time a manager sees a shortlist, every person on it should already have been assessed against the role. Anything else is guessing with extra steps."Dr Rab MacIver
Research & Development Director
What Wave Connect changes
The platform starts from the role rather than the candidate. Role profiling establishes what actually drives performance in that specific job, in that specific organization — built from data on people already doing it well, not from a generic competency library.
Candidates are then measured against that profile on behavior and ability, and the results attach to their record in the ATS. That last part matters more than it sounds: when assessment data travels with the candidate, you can analyze quality of hire afterwards instead of arguing about it.
What good looks like in practice
Organizations that get this right tend to share three habits: they profile the role before opening the requisition, they set an assessment threshold and hold to it, and they train hiring managers to read the output rather than treating it as a score to nod at. The third habit is the one most often skipped, and the one that most affects whether any of it sticks.
See how the role profiling works
Wave Connect builds a role-specific profile from your own top performers, then measures candidates against it.
