Best Practices for completing the Match Criteria Survey for Talent Acquisition/Recruiting

Match Criteria are the behavioral job requirements that you and your team set for a job. It outlines which behaviors are most important for being successful in the job.

Plum recommends having a minimum of 3, and ideally close to 8 team members complete the Match Criteria Survey for each role. This allows you to:

• Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
• Leverage a diverse array of inputs.
• Reduce bias from a single judgment.
• Ensure that the Talents you choose are related to the job and not based on the person’s own Talents.

Here are some additional tips for the Match Criteria Survey:

1. Ask your top performers to complete the Match Criteria survey. Do this instead of asking them to take the Discovery Survey and examining their Match Score. Asking a limited number of people to complete the assessment then examining their results (an internal benchmark) often leads to inaccurate conclusions. Instead, ask the people who perform best, and, therefore who know what it takes to be a top performer, to define what a top performer looks like.

2. Complete Match Criteria for each individual role. It can be tempting to group roles together, such as different sales roles, and complete one Match Criteria Survey for all of them. Yet, our research has found that Match Criteria often differ between roles, even if they are similar. The assessment will be more accurate if you complete Match Criteria for each and every role.

3. Think about success criteria specifically for the role. Some pitfalls we see are selecting socially-approved behaviors even if they are not required for the job, selecting behaviors just because they are similar to what you do, and attempting to "clone" one individual top performer. Instead, think about the job, and what behaviors are necessary to perform well in it.

4. Review and discuss the Match Criteria amongst the hiring team. Identify and discuss areas of convergence and divergence. This can often be achieved in an intake meeting.  

5. Update your Match Criteria. If success metrics or job duties change, your Match Criteria may as well.