Part One: Learn

Employers are facing historic challenges when it comes to talent.

Getting workers in the door is a difficult task in itself. Then employers need to find ways to make sure their people are happy, engaged and willing to stay.

Even with the staffing situation so dire, the talent game is about more than filling roles. It’s about filling the right people and tending to them correctly. It’s a big task, and one that most organizations are botching.

PeopleBest offers a path forward. Our approach to talent is reflected in our name: We want you to find the best people for your company, and then we want to empower you to treat them the best you can.

We know that’s a lofty goal. Quit rates are at a 20-year high, leaving employers dealing with systemic brain drain and gargantuan knowledge gaps. As companies race to maintain staffing, they’re depleting their resources trying to replace a workforce turning over at rapid speed.

There’s a solution, but it’s not at your company’s entrance or exit; it’s right in the middle. When companies give employees the chance to flourish, they slow down the turnover churn. Opportunities for learning, growth and change build workers’ confidence — both in themselves and in their employers. They lean in. They invest. And they stay.

Want to know more? In our new three-part series, we will explore how a holistic talent system can power your people decisions.

• Part 1 — Learn
  Envision your talent goals and learn how a system can help you achieve them.

•  Part 2 — Discover
  See how talent systems use data to generate insight.

• Part 3 — Find

  Learn to assess a talent system’s functions and judge for success.

If your talent strategies need a refresh, fill out the form below to get these insights right in your inbox to hear about how the PeopleBest approach can revitalize your process.

In my last post, we talked about how personality tests are insufficient and how behavioral assessments are conducive to achieving predictive and actionable data.  We established that personality tests fall short when it comes to customizing the data to the things that matter most to you, e.g. your values, your company’s culture, and your strategic business goals.

Lastly, I stated that personality tests are indeed sustainable from a financial and ease perspective, but that the data might not sustain you with the caliber of people you need to help you run an effective organization.

In short, we established that behavioral assessments are the preferred method of creating job fit profiles that you can then measure your potential new hires against to ensure that you’re hiring the best person, for the right job, when you need them the most.

But not all behavior-based hiring assessments are created equal…

A Deeper Look at Behavioral Assessments

If it isn’t clear by now, having the capability to determine how a person will behave in any given situation is the desired state that you want to be in as an employer.

But even behavioral assessments must meet the 4-must-have criteria:

• Predictive
• Actionable
• Customized
• Sustainable

Let’s see how behavior assessments stack up….

When you measure for behavior, you get results that tend to be able to help you look into the future and get a sense of how someone is going to respond to the world around them. In this way, behavioral assessments check the box for predictive.

Also, because behavioral assessments point toward specific behaviors, you can work with the data. You can come up with an action plan to help your new hire close the gap through continued education, coaching, and mentorship. Or, you can decide that if a person is lacking in one area, that you might want to put them on a team that is strong in that area and mask their deficiency.

Also, on a more positive note, maybe this person is super-strong in most areas…you may want to put them in a role, department, or team that lacks that strength to make the team that much stronger.

There are all sorts of things you can do when you have precise data. So, in this way, behavioral assessments check the box for actionable.

So far, so good. Behavioral assessments check the first two boxes.

Here’s Where Things Start to Go Wrong 

When it comes to the customization of behavioral assessments some companies are better than others. Some of the bigger companies will use card sorting to identify common behaviors of the most successful people inside your organization, create a matrix, and use a bunch of complex math to calculate percentages and analyze their findings. Good stuff—sort of.

I say only sort of because this is where most behavioral assessments start veering away from the 4 must-haves. They just aren’t sustainable. First, the big players in this space, e.g. Hogan, Omnia, and Caliper…they’re going to send in an I/O Psychologist who’s going to take at least a couple of weeks to get their footing and begin aggregating data. Then, it’s going to be a couple more weeks to process that data. Then it’s going to be another couple of weeks to rationalize that data.

In about a month and a half, and $20K-$30K dollars later, you’ll have a profile you can use to start hiring. If time and money aren’t important to you, then you have yourself a winner. I’m not sure I’ve ever met an executive who didn’t care about time and money though…

Another Downfall of Behavioral Assessments

My next point is, admittedly, a little out of scope for this post but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point it out. One of the most insidious downfalls of behavioral assessments actually has nothing to do with the company giving them. Rather, it has to do with how their business model disincentivizes your organization to stay up to date.

Your company is as dynamic as you are. People come. People go. You’re always learning. Always trying to improve. If every time you need to create a new custom profile, it’s going to take 6-8 weeks and $30K—you might do it once every 5 years? Maybe? 10 years? If you think that dusty old profile is going to be as relevant in 5 years as it is the day it was made, you’re sorely mistaken.

In reality, this high barrier to entry actually kills what should be the bedrock of the solution; fast, flexible, and accurate data.

Imagine the Possibilities 

Given what we now know about personality tests and behavioral assessments, what if you could get all the benefits of measuring for behavior, but not have to deal with the crazy-high price points and long lead times?

Imagine if you could gather all the info you need by the end of the day, crunch the numbers in minutes, and have a customized job fit profile that you can use to start hiring immediately—all in house, all at a price that lets you afford to make another one tomorrow once you have access to more data.

That would be a best-case scenario, right? Well, that’s what PeopleBest does.

If you’re interested in learning more about PeopleBest, my door is always open.

Until next time…Happy Hiring!

Let’s say you’re the hiring manager at a call center and you’re looking to fill a customer service position. You know that on any given day, your potential new hire is going to have to deal with a wide array of customers on the other end of the telephone—not all of which are going to be happy campers.

So, as a manager who’s looking to hire someone who can deal with the potential rigors of the job, you want to glean some information from your job candidate that might suggest how this person is going to deal with an irate customer.

Now, let’s imagine you had the opportunity to ask this person 10 questions to help you determine how they might react when Mr. Mad Guy is on the line. After asking your 10 questions, would you rather come away knowing that this person is:

• An extrovert

• Easygoing

• Excitement seeking

• Experiential

Or would you rather know whether or not this person will:

• Recover from negative interactions quickly

• Display empathy & understanding

• Be quick to anger and lash out

• Shut down emotionally

If you chose the second set of data, then—perhaps unbeknownst to you—you’ve just chosen behavioral data over the results of a personality test. Good choice.

As an employer myself, I’ve found personality tests to be insufficient.

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about the 4 must-haves of an effective hiring tool. I’ve stated that to be effective, a hiring tool has to be predictive, actionable, customized, and sustainable. If you’re going to use this criterion to assess personality tests, you’ll soon realize why they’re an insufficient barometer for hiring.

Do Personality Tests Check All the Boxes? 

Are They Predictive? 

They aren’t. Clear and simple. Personality tests are designed to produce results that are descriptive of the individual, but there’s little scientific evidence that the results are indicative of a person’s ability to be successful within a particular job role. In fact, research on occupational attraction shows that certain personality types are indeed drawn to certain careers, but it also shows that all personality types are represented in almost every occupation. Which would suggest that there are other factors at play. So, while personality tests are interesting and descriptive—they don’t tell a complete story and therefore shouldn’t be used as the primary gate for hiring.

Are They Actionable? 

I’d argue that they aren’t. When Carl Jung first started talking about personality archetypes, he theorized that your personality was an inborn, fixed entity that couldn’t change over time. Recent studies, however, have tweaked that theory and suggest that while personality largely stays consistent over time, that some changes do occur as we get older and wiser. However, from the employer’s perspective, personality is a fixed entity. Because either Jung was right and we have no ability to influence it, or employers don’t have the luxury of time to wait years for someone to change.

So, if you’re looking to hire someone who can be effective in the near term, you’d want to know how they’re personality is going to manifest—which means you’d want to know how they’ll behave, given their current personality. To do that you’re going to need a behavioral assessment—not a personality test.

Once you know how a person will behave you can create action plans to optimize for the best possible behavioral outcomes and put this person in situations where they will have positive responses to their environment and are likely to succeed.

Are They Customizable?

Not really. They just aren’t granular enough to address the things that matter most to your business. When I think of customizable, I’m thinking about it from two different perspectives. There’s the “is this person going to be a good fit” perspective and the “is this hire going to help me achieve my strategic business goals” perspective.

When it comes to creating a job fit profile from a personality test, I think you’re going to be hard-pressed to develop an effective one. You could argue that you can extrapolate the results to see trends within your organization.

For example, you could give everyone in your organization the MBTI® and you might notice that 90% of your salespeople are extroverts and 95% of your accounting people are introverts. That says something, but there’s just not enough data. There’s no accounting for why 10% of salespeople are introverts and 5% of accounting people are extroverts. You need to get more granular than that.

On the other hand, when it comes to driving strategic business results a personality test isn’t going to help you do that at all. No business owner is staying up at night wondering how they’re going to get more introverts, enthusiasts, or reds on their team. No. They worry about things like decreasing turnover, cultivating culture, mitigating workers’ comp claims, and customer satisfaction. Again, personality tests just aren’t granular enough to help you uncover the behaviors that will drive the results you’re after.

Are They Sustainable? 

From a cost and ease of use perspective, I must admit—they are. You can easily administer these tests to large groups of people and get the results in a reasonable amount of time. They come at a price point that allows you to administer the tests often to keep your data up to date. And they don’t rely on one-off expertise, so much of the legwork can be handled internally by the Operations Team or an HR department.

So, the process is sustainable, but the question then becomes whether or not you trust that the data is enough to sustain your business needs—hiring, talent development, achieving strategic business goals.

Determining the answer to that question is up to you. 

The Results Are In

So, my results are in. Personality tests get 1.25 stars out of 4 on the must-have checklist and behavioral assessments are the way to go. But not all behavior assessments are created equal.

In my next post, I’ll discuss some of the common pitfalls of behavior-based assessments and how they sometimes fall short

• Predictive

• Actionable

• Repeatable/Sustainable

• Customized

Some basic products might check one or two of these attribute boxes, and that’s a good start. But if it doesn’t have all four, you’re not really going to be successful with it. Sure, you might see some marginal improvement, you might even get lucky and find your next superstar, but it isn’t going to be sustainable unless all these attributes are in place and accounted for.

In this video, PeopleBest CEO, Jim Hunter digs deeper into each one and outlines what it means to be predictive, actionable, customized, and repeatable/sustainable.

The 4 Must-Haves of an Effective Hiring Tool (Transcript)

At PeopleBest we’re really passionate about four different principles in terms of how not only we build tools, but if in the marketplace, if somebody is going to be looking at a particular tool we would challenge anybody to really address each and every single one of these four principles. We call it PARC, P-A-R-C. P for predictability. Can this be something that will absolutely not just be accurate? There’s a lot of tools out there. There’s Myers-Briggs, not throwing rocks at any of them, but are do they describe me? Yeah, probably, pretty much, pretty much the case. But the challenge here is in terms of the predictability, can this foretell, if you will, how well somebody is going to do in a particular job, not just who they are but where they’re going to fit in a particular unique job.

            The second part, the A, if you will, is the actionability. Once we have this information, be it if we bring somebody on, nobody’s going to be perfect for a particular job, right? Where’s those gaps within a particular person coming on, or for that matter within a particular team? What are those gaps that we need to address? What are those actionable steps to take somebody from where they are to where they need to be? The R, if you will, is repeatable. How do we then take this and make this a concept where the repeatability of a particular job, or in our particular case when we build a job fit, is this repeatable over a sustained period of time? Different types of people, will they fit in this particular role and then how does this grow and repeat separate from any other type of profile tool out there, which is just off-the-shelf, we can then develop a customized repeatable and that’s that last element of customization.

            And this is where I challenge anybody to look at how they can customize a particular set of findings that are absolutely unique and specific to that job, and then absolutely unique and specific to that particular company. Because we know every single company is different and truth be told every single job is different. There is no such commonality of a marketing coordinator or an admin person, or a vice president of sales that fits across every single genre, so it needs to be customizable both to that position within that particular company.

Let’s take this concept of PARC and break it down, peel back a little bit. Let’s start with the first element of P for predictability. There’s a lot of profile tools out there, and there’s a lot of profile companies that will approach a project or looking at success in a probably consistent sort of way. Who are the A players, who are the middle of the road B players, and who are perhaps the lower producers, maybe the C players? But the issue really comes in in terms of the particular profile that they’re using because unless there’s a lot of data, it’s not going to be very accurate. If we’re looking at people that… so the A players are a little bit higher in dominance or they’re a little bit more extroverted or something like that, that’s all fine and well, but the issue is there’s not a lot of specificity and there’s not a lot of scalability.

            By that I mean, PeopleBest, we’ve broken everything down into 29 particular traits, not just 29 traits but on a one to 10 scale. There’s a high level of specificity within those 29 traits. And then we kick it up a notch and not only just look at the specifics around 29 traits on a one to 10 scale, but we develop specific ranges, bullseyes if you will, that we know exactly where those A players, if you will, the differences and the uniquenesses to that. Then when we start talking about a predictable model, if we’re starting to pull somebody in from off the street, or if looking at somebody if they’re going to be successful, we have an absolute template that is highly specific, extremely unique to that particular job that we can predict success better than anybody within that particular area for that particular job.

            The second concept in our PARC is that about actionability or actionable. And so what we mean by actionable is, as we create these Efficacy Attributes or traits, we’re developing a pinpoint accuracy to what is going to be successful in that particular role. Well, as we’ve talked about before, we have 29 Efficacy Attributes and we get very, very specific in terms of where people could fit to be successful. Well, human beings are not cookie cutters, nor would we ever think that everybody needs to look the same. This whole actionability concept is around identifying the gaps.

            How is somebody specifically unique to a particular role and where might they need to be so that if we’re bringing somebody on that is still an A player we know they’re going to be successful in the job, they just may not match up in a particular area. So what is that particular area and how can we make that actionable to then help improve that particular person in that particular situation, be it an onboarding process? The unique thing is two, is that’s directly applicable to everybody inside of an organization? Because once again, not everybody’s going to be that “A player” so how do we identify those gaps and then start to build and develop those people to be more successful than they are.

            The third element that we talked about is repeatability, having the ability to create a model that can be sustainable over a period of time. Unlike other particular models where they have to be customized to fit a particular concept or a particular job, we want to build a repeatable model that is self-sustaining as you go so you can know absolutely if somebody is going to be successful in it, but then we also kind of create a unique concept called smarter-as-you-go. that gives you the ability to then take data and look at who’s been successful, who hasn’t, maybe who’s left the organization, but use that information to build a little bit smarter model and develop more repeatability as you go as well.

            And lastly, the fourth element is that about customization. And this is where I challenge any other profile company to be as unique as we are. When we talk about customization, we really talk about developing a specific model to a specific job within a specific company. Let’s peel that back a little bit more. There’s so many different templates out there from different profile companies that have just this commonality across all jobs. A marketing coordinator, an administrative assistant, a vice president of sales, where this particular template they’ll use to suggest for your particular job in your particular company, this is the template they have.

            And that is absolutely positively not the case, we customize every single job unique to that job within that particular company. We look at the A players, B players, and the C players within that particular job in your company to develop that particular job fit because we know every single job is unique and we also know that every single company is unique, so we customize to exactly both of those criteria.