Does Your Hiring Process Have a Blindspot? How Behavioral Benchmarking Helps You Hire for Your Culture

Resumes and interviews tell you a lot about a candidate: their experience, their skills, how they communicate and whether they’ve done similar work before.

What’s harder to see is how that person will show up once they’re actually in the role. How do they make decisions? How do they respond to pressure? How will they work with the team around them? Where could one of their greatest strengths become a blindspot?

Even experienced hiring teams miss these things. As Catherine Grace, Director of Client Services at Behavioral Essentials, puts it, “Some people can be really good in an interview and we still miss things.” That gap is where a lot of hiring decisions go sideways, and it’s the gap behavioral data is designed to close.

Watch: What a Behavioral Benchmark Is

In this short video, Catherine explains how a Behavioral Benchmark is built and why it helps organizations hire for both skills and behavioral fit.

We Tend to Hire for Skills, Then Wonder Why It Didn't Work

Most hiring processes are built around skills and experience, and that makes sense. Someone has to be able to do the job. But when a hire doesn’t work out, the reason usually has less to do with skills and more to do with fit: how that person works with the team, the manager and the organization around them.

The same thing happens with promotions. People are often moved up because they were very good at their last job, not because they have what the next one requires. A strong individual contributor doesn’t automatically become a strong manager, and a great salesperson doesn’t automatically become a great sales leader.

In an ideal world, organizations would hire and promote for both skills and behavioral fit. A Behavioral Benchmark is how you do that.

What Is a Behavioral Benchmark?

A Behavioral Benchmark is an ideal candidate profile built on behaviors. It defines what success looks like for a specific role, and unlike a generic job fit assessment, it’s built from your own people, your culture and where the role is headed.

To build one, we look at several things together:

• The people succeeding in the role today. What behavioral patterns do your strongest performers share?
• Where others have struggled. What shows up in the data for people who have experienced gaps, and why?
• What the role actually requires. The day-to-day demands, pressures and relationships the role involves.
• What the culture needs. How the role fits within the team and the organization around it.
• Where the role is headed next. What the role will need to look like as the organization grows or changes.

Once the benchmark is in place, it gives your team another layer of information as candidates move through the hiring process. The E3 Behavioral Insights Platform also includes behavioral interview questions, so hiring managers can dig into the specific areas the data points to.

The Hidden Cost of the Wrong Hire

When a hire doesn’t work out, the cost goes well beyond the salary. There’s the time spent recruiting and interviewing, the months of onboarding and training, the manager hours spent trying to make it work and the teammates who pick up the slack. There’s also the toll on the team’s wellbeing and the mistakes made along the way. Then the process starts over.

Often, the warning signs were there from the start. They just weren’t visible in a resume or a 45-minute interview.

The environment around a role matters more than most hiring processes account for. As Rick Breden, founder and CEO of Behavioral Essentials, says, “We tend to quit bosses. We don’t tend to quit our jobs.” In high-turnover roles, even small improvements add up. If a better match to the role and the culture means someone stays a year instead of six months, that’s a meaningful win.

It's Not Just About "Fit." It's About Your Culture.

“Culture fit” can turn into “people like us,” and that’s not what behavioral insight is for. A better question is: does this person have what it takes to thrive in your culture?

Every organization has its own pace, pressure and way of working. The same behaviors that make someone successful in one company can create friction in another, even in the same role. An organization that values directness and quickly spotting gaps may need different behaviors than one built on relationships and collaboration. Neither is wrong, but a candidate who would thrive in one may struggle in the other.

That’s the idea behind behavior in context, and it’s why a benchmark is built for your role, in your organization, rather than from a generic profile of a “good” employee.

Read More: Behavior in Context

Benchmarking for Where the Role Is Going, Not Just Where It's Been

A benchmark doesn’t have to describe the past.

We recently worked with a client in the staffing industry that was shifting several important roles from a traditional sales environment to one that was much more relationship-focused. When the team looked at behavioral data across strong performers, people experiencing gaps, managers and others around those roles, a pattern became clear: some of the behaviors that had driven success under the old expectations weren’t the ones the organization needed next. Some of their top performers had been hired for a version of the job that was changing.

So we built the benchmark for where the role was headed, knowing it might need adjustments over time. The process gave the client a much clearer conversation about who they needed next and why, and about how those roles connect to the culture they’re building.

Data-Driven Hiring: Data Alongside Your Judgment, Not Instead of It

Good hiring managers rely on instinct, experience and relationships, and that doesn’t go away. Data-driven hiring adds evidence to that judgment. As Jill Macauley, COO of Behavioral Essentials, puts it, “Data can validate: does this person behaviorally align? Are their motives aligned with our motives?”

At the same time, a benchmark isn’t a pass-fail test, and no single hiring assessment tool should make the decision for you. The E3 is one tool in the hiring toolbox. In Catherine’s words, it’s a valuable one, “but it’s not a magic bullet.” The best hiring decisions bring it all together: skills and experience, interviews, references, the team the person will join and the behavioral insight that helps you see what might otherwise stay hidden.

Hiring Is Where Your Culture Starts

Every new hire either strengthens your culture or slowly changes it. That’s especially true in growing organizations, where hiring can outpace a company’s ability to be intentional about who it brings in.

Behavioral benchmarks help you name the behaviors that make your culture work, so you can look for them in every hire. And because the same behavioral data follows new hires into onboarding, awareness doesn’t have to start at the top and slowly trickle down. It reaches every new person who joins the organization.

Where Benchmarking Fits in the E3 Behavioral Insights Platform

Benchmarking is one part of the E3 Behavioral Insights Platform, which turns assessment data into practical insight about the behavioral patterns shaping how people show up at work. The E3 has been used for more than two decades, and most people complete the assessment in just 8–10 minutes.

The same insight can be used across the employee life cycle to support:

• Hiring and onboarding: understand how someone may align with a role, team and culture
• Leadership development: uncover strengths, blindspots and patterns that may be affecting a leader's impact
• Team development: better understand communication, conflict and how people work together
• Executive alignment: give leadership teams shared behavioral data and language
• Individual development: create greater awareness and more focused development
• Succession planning: add behavioral insight to decisions about future roles and leadership needs

The assessment itself is only the beginning. The value comes from using that data to make better people decisions, and hiring is one of the most practical places to start. Curious how the E3 compares to tools your team may already use? See How the E3 Differs from DISC, Hogan, CliftonStrengths & More.

Read More: Learn more about the E3 Behavioral Insights Platform

Start With the Platform. We'll Help You Put It to Work.

Organizations that start an annual E3 Behavioral Insights Platform subscription by December 31, 2026, will receive 4 complimentary Behavioral Benchmarks, valued at up to $10,000, at no additional cost in 2027.

You'll have ongoing access to behavioral insight your team can use across hiring, onboarding, leadership and development, and we'll help you start by building benchmarks around the roles that matter most.

Because the question isn't only "Can this person do the job?"

It's also "Will this person thrive in our culture, and help it grow?"

Related Resources

• Behavioral Benchmarking
• Comparing Workplace Assessments: How the E3 Differs from DISC, Hogan, CliftonStrengths & More
• Behavior in Context: The Missing Link in Leadership, Hiring and Team Performance
• Awareness to Alignment to Action