There are many types of assessments and each has its own purpose.
A critical consideration in selecting an assessment is to use an assessment that fits your purpose. If you are attempting to hire, develop, promote, and retain talent, the assessments must produce reports that are related to the requirements of the job.
If you use a job suitability assessment, there are several important factors which make the assessment useful. These include:
Do you have a Drama King or Queen? You know the type….
Characteristics: Wants the whole world to know what’s happening in their lives and ever ready to share openly the ups and downs of their all too public soap operas.
Who does not enjoy taking behavioral personality assessments to better understand themselves? We are infinitely interested in who we are, how we interact with others and just what makes us tick! The problem is, most assessments measure a very narrow set of traits. Many common psychological and behavioral assessments look primarily at personality traits. For instance, Myers Briggs and DISC are widely used to measure personality styles. Imagine of the 6+ billion people in the world, you are one of 16 Myers Briggs styles! So what exactly does that make you — 1 in 375,000,000? No, YOU are unique! To appreciate just how unique you are, view this powerful video and be encouraged: You are Unique
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To Hire Leaders from Within, or to bring in Outside Leaders? That is the Question
During these times of high structural unemployment, finding skilled workers to fill open skilled positions is among the top challenges in virtually every organization. As the economy improves, top talent will have more choices and attrition will accelerate. In addition, “X” and “Y” generation leaders will require us to evaluate our approach to career progression/options, work-life balance and global factors. This, along with strategic uncertainty, the impact of social media and data overload, and the increasing velocity of business, indicates mounting people challenges ahead for businesses large and small.
Sometimes hiring external candidates to meet these needs is a sound strategy. However, according to research by the Center for Creative Leadership, an astonishing 66% of senior managers hired from the outside fail within 18 months. Clearly, our historic view of leadership and talent pipeline readiness will have to be redefined.
Organizations have been utilizing the 9-box approach to succession planning for many years, yet the challenge of measuring potential is often very subjective and based on who knows whom! Organizations have sought to reduce the impact of the “halo effect” or “fair-haired” syndrome by developing leadership competency models and applying them to the evaluation process. However, the challenge of actually measuring one’s potential relative to competencies generally remains subjective. Finally, there is a behavioral analytics approach that removes the subjectivity of predicting leadership potential. How is it accomplished?
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Psychological Traits of a Good White Collar Worker
Baby Boomers remember the old days that had set working hours. You went to work and then around five p.m., you packed up your stuff and went home. If there were an emergency you might stay until five-thirty.
Those days are gone! White-collar work, sometimes called Knowledge Work, is never done. Your immediate To Do list might have twenty items on it, but right behind the immediate To Do list is a supplemental To Do list with another forty action items on it and after that list is done, there’s a third one waiting.
Most white collar workers today need to be able to work autonomously (that big college word for trusted to work on your own and get it done without supervision). And yet, they also need to be able to work cohesively as part of a team when the need arises.
But not all white collar jobs are created equal.
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Do you have a Zealous Extremist working for you?
Characteristics: Strong personal values and life principles; completely passionate and committed to his own belief system. Can be overzealous in preaching or influencing others towards one’s belief system.
Traits to look out for: High influencing power, highly cause-motivated, highly certain and enjoys teaching and/or making presentations.
Negative side: Can either work with the organization or against the organization, depending on whether their values are aligned or different.
How to assess when you hire: If the interviewer finds the above tendencies through profiling, it is critical to takes the time to fully explore the individual’s values as well as the alignment with the organization’s value and direction.
You may even have a “Zealous Extremist” as an employee.
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Robo Advising HR
Algorithms seem to be the hot topic and “Robo Advising” is one of the newest fads. Algorithms are used for predicting everything from the weather, sports, economic indicators, and financial data to who is the best person to date? Trying to predict behavior is nothing new, people in ancient times used oracles, fortune tellers and crystal balls. Today’s technology uses algorithms and the new age of “robo advising” has begun.
According to dictionary.com an Algorithm is: a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, as for finding the greatest common divisor.
Even though Algorithm’s are sometimes used in place of a human being, hence the term “robo advisor”, they are ultimately just a very powerful tool that needs to be used with care by human beings in order to accurately predict successful outcomes.
So is there a Robo Advising HR that can choose the right person to hire?
Missing a Step in the Hiring Process
You place an opening on a job board to find the professional employee. This is considered time and money well spent since the position you are filling takes skill and requires a substantial amount of training and investment.
But what do you do with the applicants? How do you know from the resume and their references that they are the right fit for your job? Many past employers are afraid of the legal ramifications of indicating that a person did not work out in the job. Or, they may have an incentive to have you take this bad hire off their hands so they may stretch the truth in order to push the exit.
One of the next steps is typically to choose the top 5-10 and then interview. However, you are “missing a step” in the process.
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