Last Updated August 2023
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What is the Match Score
The Match Score describes the likelihood that a candidate will be a high performer in a specific job at your organization.
Searchlight focuses on measuring the traits that are most predictive of on-the-job outcomes: soft skills like strengths and growth areas, cultural alignment, and work motivations. Soft skills and culture alignment are 4X more predictive of a candidate’s performance on the job than technical skills and knowledge. In fact, LinkedIn reports that 89% of mishires are due to a soft skills mismatch.
Searchlight measures the alignment between a candidate’s talent profile to the traits that predict performance and retention at your organization.
Therefore, the Match Score is a helpful tool for recruiters and hiring managers on a candidate’s potential to be a high performer.
How to see the Match Score in the Searchlight application
When viewing a candidate’s data report in Searchlight, you can see the Match Score in the left side bar and see more details by clicking “Match Score” in the header:
How is the Match Score calculated
Searchlight summarizes and aligns the hiring team on the most important behaviors and working styles in a Behavioral Model. You can read more about how Searchlight customizes our predictive Behavioral Models to your unique organization to positively impact employee performance, retention, and productivity in our guide.
Once the Behavioral Model is decided for a Job, every candidate that is assessed by Searchlight for that Job will receive a Match Score against the Behavioral Model.
Each candidate will receive a score between 1 and 100:
A Weak Match will have a score between 1 and 25
A Moderate Match will have a score between 26 and 50
A Good Match will have a score between 51 and 75
A Strong Match will have a score greater than 76
The max score is 100, but will be very rare.
The Match Score is comprised of 2 parts: Winning Traits and Working Styles
Winning Traits
Winning Traits are the combination of strengths and growth areas that have the highest predictiveness on whether a candidate will do well at your company. Prior to August 2023, we separated these out as Strengths and Growth Areas, but combined them to a single list of Winning Traits.
We analyze all the strengths and growth areas that were mentioned by the candidates themselves or their references and calculate the likelihood that the candidate will exhibit these Winning Traits on the job.
If a candidate's reference checks or self-assessment indicate the presence of a winning trait as a strength, the candidate will score higher. Moreover, if the presence of that strength is corroborated by multiple references, then the candidate will score even higher.
Similarly, if a candidate's reference checks or self-assessment indicate a winning trait as a growth area, then the candidate will score lower. If that winning trait is flagged as a growth area across multiple references, then the candidate will score even lower.
If the Behavioral Model has a winning trait that is neither a reported strength or growth area for the candidate, then there will be no impact on the score.
Winning Working Styles
Winning Working Styles measure a candidate's fit with the Working Styles shared by the highest performers within your company. Prior to August 2023, this was described as Culture; however, we changed this to Working Styles, because previously this caused some confusion with company's existing Culture or Values.
Winning Working Styles is based on academic research showing that individuals are most likely to succeed at an organization if they share the working styles of the company they are joining. The stronger a company’s working styles, the more likely it is to affect the way employees think and behave. Strong working stylers are linked to stronger team cohesion and stronger business performance.
We measure working styles on six traits.
On each trait, we measure how closely a candidate matches each the working styles in the Behavioral Model of the job. The closer the candidate is to the "Target" of each individual trait, the higher they will score. The candidate will score highest if for each working style, the candidate matches the exact target for that trait.
On the opposite end, if a candidate is far apart from the "Target", then the candidate will score lower, indicating the candidate might be bringing in contrasting working styles to the team that may impact their performance and retention.
Sometimes the Culture Alignment section of the Match Score will be missing, if your assessments do not contain our gold-standard culture questions.
Understanding the Match Score
A candidate’s overall Match Score is either Strong, Good, Moderate, or Weak.
Score | Description |
Strong (>76) | A strong match is likely to be a high performer because of high overlap with the target Behavioral Profile. |
Good (>50) | A good match is likely to be a quality hire because they have many traits that correlate with high performance and retention. |
Moderate (26-50) | A moderate match has some overlapping traits with a great hire but may require some degree of focus and training. |
Weak (1-25) | A weak match has traits correlated with attrition and low performance. |
How to interpret the Match Score
A Strong Match and Good Match is likely to be a strong hire.
While the overall Match Score is valuable to understand the candidate’s alignment, we recommend that you dig deeper into each of the subcomponents of the overall score when making a hiring decision.
When does a candidate not receive a Match Score?
First, check if a Behavioral Model is attached to the candidate’s job. If a Behavioral Model does not exist, we do not compute a Match Score.
Second, check which types of questions were asked of the candidate and their references. We require that your survey questions include Searchlight’s gold-standard Strengths, Growth Areas, and Working Styles questions in order for us to calculate a Match Score.
Third, check how many responses are submitted for this candidate. We require at least 2 viewpoints to ensure that the results are reliable. These 2 viewpoints can be from 2 submitted references, or 1 submitted reference and 1 completed self assessment.