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Three Steps To Better Hiring

Many organizations are pushing to make hiring more speedy. The craze has led employers to rethink their hiring processes — what a great opportunity for improvement. 

I believe that the standard candidate experience is not just stale, but broken. We ask candidates to sum up their experience on a piece of paper, sit through a nerve-wracking interview, and then wait weeks as we deliberate on a yes or no. This sequence of events is tedious for the applicant and unproductive for the employer.

There’s a better way. Consider these three steps to rethink your hiring process.

#1: Reconsider the resume

Here is a hot take more and more business leaders share: Resumes are worthless.

I know this idea challenges the recruiting status quo, but hear me out. Resumes aren’t the most reliable sources of information. In a 2020 report from ResumeLab, 36% of Americans admitted to lying on their resumes. The fibbing stemmed from insecurity; most of those who fessed up said they lied because they lacked the required experience.

Despite this, the vast majority of employers require resumes, posing them as the first step in selecting a new worker. Even so, research shows that recruiters look at a resume for only a few seconds. A quick glance isn’t enough time for talent professionals to understand whether an applicant can do the job they’re looking to fill.

This information should cause us to question the current process. Instead of relying on a resume to kick off your recruiting process, consider identifying the most important aspects of the role you’re looking to fill and screening candidates based on how their strengths match up.

#2: Think beyond the interview

I’m frustrated with our reliance on the resume. But I’m simply over our insistence on the interview. Job interviews aren’t inherently bad, of course. But when waste time, money, and energy with a process that requires weeks of scheduling, slotting, and conferencing.

As one lecturer wrote in the Harvard Business Review, interviews cause many employers to pass over great candidates. And not because the candidates underperform, but because employers ask the wrong questions. “If you are working on innovation, you need someone who can think with you,” Nilofer Merchant wrote in the article. “And by focusing on capability over experience, you increase the chances you find that person.”

I believe the problem with interviews runs even deeper bad questions: Interviews can’t produce completely unbiased assessments of a candidate’s strengths. So what can?

Standardize your process with assessments

Companies can measure the strengths and opportunities each candidate presents with standardized assessments. Equipped with that information, they can select the person who best fits the needs of the job — not the person with the nicest resume or the sharpest interviewing skills.

PeopleBest “Profiles” are customized to the exact job you need done. They find the unique ‘code of success’ inside of people, offering insights and identifying missing areas that may frustrate an employer — or drive an employee to quit. By discovering how workers score in the skills most important to an opportunity, companies can better understand what workers want, how they stay motivated, and where they can grow to better contribute to their teams.

We go beyond having killer Profiles — we use analytics to uncover why certain people outperform others, adding to an even faster, impartial, and unbiased way of learning through every person inside your company.

To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists. PeopleBest will provide you a no-cost opportunity to hire your next person to experience a better way to hire!

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies.

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Why do employees quit?

Why do employees quit? 

This question has vexed virtually every employer in the last year. Quit rates have been at all time highs, prompting all kinds of nicknames for the widespread business challenge. Call it the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, or the Great Recruitment, but many of us are still feeling its effects.

With so much attention on the workers who say “sayonara,” there’s good reason employers are asking the big question above. Why do employees quit? Is something pushing them out? Or is the grass really that much greener on the other side?

It’s not (just) about money

We all know a job offer that comes with a bulkier salary is hard to pass up. But money is not the only motivation of workers who resign. According to a recent McKinsey survey, the top reasons workers quit spanned from opportunities for growth, to money, to managers:

  • 41%: Lack of career development and advancement

  • 36%: Inadequate total compensation

  • 34%: Uncaring and uninspiring leaders

  • 31%: Lack of meaningful work

  • 29%: Unsustainable work expectations

When McKinsey asked respondents why they accepted a new position, the results largely aligned with respondents’ motivations for quitting. Workers’ top three reasons for taking a new job were: Career development and advancement; adequate total compensation; and meaningful work.

These numbers tell a powerful story. Workers want to grow, do work that’s meaningful to them, and make enough money. The only question that remains: How can employers deliver?

I can’t help you get your compensation strategy in order. But I can equip you with a tool that leads employees to work that fuels their passions, all while outlining a roadmap for growth. We provide intelligent data based on employee performance and aspiration. With this information, we help organizations create environments in which employees flourish based on their giftedness. In addition, we help leaders and managers understand how to lead through change, create synergy in their teams and coach employees for future career steps.  To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies

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Four Marks Of An Effective Talent Tool

There are a lot of tools on the market right now that claim they can assess candidates and workers. But how do you identify the tools that will give you the insights you need to find the right workers and make sure they thrive?

To answer this question, I’ve identified four attributes that mark the most successful talent tools.

#1: Predictable

A talent tool should be able to foretell how well someone is going to perform in a particular job. It will highlight not only who they are but also how they will fit.

#2: Actionable

No one is the perfect fit for a job. A good talent tool should flag the gaps in a hire’s sills and abilities. It will lay out actionable steps to take somebody from where they are to where they need to be.

#3: Repeatable

How do we take this concept — predicting skills and identifying improvement actions — and make it repeatable? A tool should allow you to analyze many workers in many jobs.

#4: Customizable

We know every single company is different. And we know every single job is different: A marketing coordinator will look completely different than a vice president of sales. A good talent tool will be customizable to positions and to companies.

We at PeopleBest have built our platform on these four attributes. To make sure our tool drives results that are predictable, actionable, repeatable, and customizable, we’ve created an assessment that analyzes 29 traits on a scale from one to 10. We didn’t stop there. We’ve developed profiles that are highly specific and unique to a particular job, so we can predict success with an exactness that is unbeatable.

To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies

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3 Behaviors To Pay Attention To For Remote And Hybrid Work

High-profile employers are making headlines as they decide whether to call workers back to the office or leave them at home. Remote work is no longer an option at SpaceX, for instance, after Elon Musk ordered employees to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office each week. The co-founder and CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, took a different direction. His company shuttered several offices around the U.S. in an effort to “double down” on remote work.

Many, many other business leaders will make decisions about work arrangements that won’t get picked up by the press. But that doesn’t make them any less important. As executives, HR teams, and managers meet to discuss whether extended remote work is a viable option, they need to make sure they’re working with all the facts. Behavior data provides leaders the insight they need to determine each worker’s preparedness for remote work.

Workers equipped to work from home possess a blend of skills that position them to be successful away from the office. When discussing your team’s remote productivity potential, consider these three skills:

Takes Initiative

Workers who take initiative feel empowered to make decisions and initiate action — all without being told. These workers generate objectives for themselves or in tandem with managers and do what it takes to achieve them.

Results driven

Guided by their objectives, results-driven workers don’t waver from their commitments. If they’re required to produce results, they step up, at times directing the efforts of others, even when they’re in individual contributor positions.

Works independently

Workers who are strong in independence feel more productive working in the silence of solace than they do against the din of office chit chat. They find it easy to maintain objectivity and focus on the tasks at hand. They are comfortable proceeding with work without much input or direction from others.

PeopleBest measures these skills and more to develop a work from home profile — a set of skills that will measure a workers’ proclivity for remote and hybrid work. Our ‘Work from Home’ model can also be tailored to an organization providing a precise “code of success” for remote workers. A group of employees take the assessment, relevant performance metrics are provided and correlated with the aggregate behavior scores.  The outcomes include setting desired score ranges reflecting high performance and the custom assessment is used in the hiring process with candidates or when evaluating employees for internal moves.

To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies

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People

Coaching As A Preventive Mental Health Tool

It’s no longer sufficient for employers to simply recognize the importance of mental health. Organizations must provide proactive support for employees — or risk serious business consequences.

A recent report from Mercer found that employees deeply need mental health support. One in five respondents worldwide said they experience high or extreme levels of stress on a daily basis. Those numbers rose to 25% among U.S. workers.

The dire state of worker mental health isn’t exactly surprising. According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic triggered a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide. As employees struggle to get the help they need, they’ve turned to their employers.

Eighty percent of respondents in a 2022 poll from the American Psychological Association said they plan to consider employers’ mental health-related offerings when they search for a new job.

Employers have taken note. Many organizations are offering new and enhanced mental health benefits, from wellness rooms and awareness efforts to time off and expanded health insurance coverage.

As organizations devise strategies to support worker mental health, I have one suggestion: Don’t forget the preventive measures. Some of the world’s leading experts in mental health point to the power of preventive care, yet it’s something we employers, in our haste to get workers the help they need, often forget about. Read on to learn more about one way employers can focus on prevention in mental wellness.

The value of prevention

As employers, and as people, we tend to view mental health care as something that comes after: after symptoms get bad, after a crisis occurs. Don’t get me wrong. Mental health support should be readily available and accessible whenever anyone needs it.

But there’s another timing element to consider: before. Consider the perspective of Nick Taylor, a U.K.-based clinical psychologist who founded workplace mental health platform Unmind. In an interview with HR Dive, Taylor spoke about employers’ overwhelming focus on reactive care.

“The historical approach to the topic of mental health has been to put all of our focus on people who have mental illnesses. And the problem is that category keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we just can’t build enough nets to catch people as they kind of fall into that category of mental illness…All of the focus has been on reactive solutions; we wait for people to get unwell and we try to get them a solution for them. But there aren’t enough therapists, clinicians and social workers in the world to support those people. We’re saying, ‘Hold up. Stop putting all your attention on reactive care and focus your attention on proactive care.’”

What could prevention look like?

So how can employers provide their workforces with proactive mental health solutions? One possible solution: Coaching.

The APA encourages organizations to train managers to promote health and well-being. Managers and supervisors who work directly with employees have a special opportunity to highlight opportunities that create support.

I would suggest employers take this a step further and provide coaching with an eye toward mental health — not only as a way to flag issues but also as a way to build mental health strength. Through coaching, employers can help employees build resilience.

Coaching can be especially successful when employers are equipped with real-time data about their employees’ strengths and weaknesses. With PeopleBest’s AI-powered platform, employers get a picture of where their employees thrive, how they succeed, and where they need to buid. To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies

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Cultivating A Culture Of Feedback

What role does feedback play in an organization? Surely, it’s important to guide employees throughout their tenure, ensuring they don’t just log hours, but learn and grow.

But feedback is tricky to get right. A recent essay in the Harvard Business Review featured two business leaders’ musings on the subject: “The research is clear,” they wrote. “Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.”

Where does this information leave managers, leaders, and employers? Workers crave growth – it’s so important to them, in fact, that many say they’d leave their jobs if threatened by stagnation. But how do employers foster growth if we can’t tell them where and how that growth should occur?

In defense of the comfort zone

The authors of the HBR essay had a couple of helpful answers to this question. They pointed to research delving into the learning process, findings showing that learning happens first and foremost in the positive. “Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly,” the authors wrote. “…we learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.”

Growth and learning do not occur when workers are admonished with a vague command to “get out of your comfort zone” or “pick up a new skill.” Instead, workers learn the most when they’re encouraged to explore their strengths.

“It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zones, because that’s where our neural pathways are most concentrated,” the pair wrote. “It’s where we’re most open to possibility, most creative, insightful, and productive. That’s where feedback must meet us — in our moments of flow.”

Create continual, consistent feedback

As you may have noticed in past blogs, I’m passionate about feedback.  I truly believe that these moments should be done weekly, at a minimum. Share those “quick moments” with your people when their in their zones to improve feedback and trust.  Don’t miss this opportunity to find out the ‘best’ in each of your team members!

At PeopleBest, our technology-forward approach to workplace psychology opens the door for employers to provide continual, consistent feedback hinging on employers’ strengths. With a roadmap to growth, your employees will be unstoppable. To find out how PeopleBest can serve your team, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies.

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Product Features

PeopleBest Finds Innovative Managers Who Lead With Head And Heart

Measuring What’s Important When the Goal line Moves

Feature Set: PeopleBest offers over 100 job templates and 300+ competencies to quickly use what works for your job, or your can create a unique set that reflects your organization’s critical success factors. Managers are critical to directing workflow, time and resource management, engaging employees and helping them stretch to maximize their potential.

Content:

Managers live in a new world these days. Economic pressures, resource constraints and talent shortages have highlighted the importance of managerial skills like coaching effectiveness, stress tolerance, team building and change management.

Among the many demands of the job, managers have to be ahead of the curve to help their staff connect, express and support each other when uncertainty causes angst.  Managers serve as frontline “culture advocates,” setting managing the social and personal dynamics of their teams.  Change initiatives involve personal gains and losses and managers’ empathy, on-point communication and pursuit of restoring rhythm sets them apart.

When managers lead staff through change and growth, they enable the team to shift and restore productivity. This role is therefore mission critical. But, how do you know an employee or candidate has what it takes? A hiring manager can quickly review candidate profiles to see the overall degree of “Fit” for the role. The profile also reveals the percentile of strength for each critical job competency.  Not only will the results show you the “Fit” for today’s role but reveal strengths that can make way for career advancement in the future.

Tech Specs:

Participants respond to a series of online behavioral preference statements.  PeopleBest’s software measures participants’ strengths in competency areas essential to leading their teams in execution, leveraging abilities and managing relationships.

Content Summary:

Managers, as the frontline purveyors of culture, affect retention, time and resource management and quality of service and deliverables. Well suited and equipped managers make a tremendous difference to the bottom line.
Assess Your Managers: Let us help you build your dream team and keep them sharp with precise insights that will help them engage, grow and contribute at higher levels. Reach out to PeopleBest today and get started by customizing a competency set that is Unique to your culture. Ask for a DEMO at  [email protected].

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Making The “Stay” Interview Meaningful

As the Great Resignation swept across the business world this year, companies reached for new strategies to boost retention and slow turnover. Organizations rolled out enticing new benefits, upped employee appreciation measures, and handed out competitive counteroffers. 

Among these tried-and-true strategies, another emerged: The stay interview.

What is a stay interview?

The stay interview isn’t technically new, as Georgetown management professor Brooks Holtom told CNBC’s Jennifer Liu. But the tactic enjoyed renewed attention as employers intensified retention efforts.

In essence, stay interviews are like exit interviews with a twist. Instead of analyzing the motives of workers on their way out the door, stay interviews target employees who are engaged and motivated. They identify what draws committed team members to their work, what they’re looking forward to, and what the business could do to support them to go even further.

In a recent article appearing in the Harvard Business Review, one business leader recommended four questions employers and managers can use in stay interviews:

  • What’s your frame of mind today?

  • Who do you feel connected to at work?

  • What barriers can I remove for you?

  • What new thing do you want to learn that will excite you and help you grow?

In his interview with CNBC, professor Holtom suggested a few more queries: What excites you to come into work? Do you feel good about the impact of your work? Do you see a future for yourself at the company? If you were manager for a day, what would you do differently?

Make it meaningful — and easy

These questions all seek to uncover the essence of an employee’s relationship with her job and her employer. The answers, when honest and detailed, provide a wealth of information to organizations.

While stay interviews carry tremendous value, they do present a few challenges:

  • First, though they potentially highlight trends within an organization, they create a window into only one employer-employee relationship.

  • Second, they require companies to spend sometimes costly amounts of time interviewing, analyzing, and interpreting responses.

  • Third, they generate personal answers that are much harder to analyze than standardized data.

This is not to say organizations should ditch the stay interview. But here’s my suggestion: Support the stay interview with another mode of employee listening that retrieves information from your whole workforce in a quick and standardized manner.

Learn how you can dial into what makes each of your people thrive using PeopleBest, and take your stay interviews to a new level. At PeopleBest, we’ve created an AI-powered platform that provides employees’ code to success. Ask us how we can help you discover the best in each of your people.

To find out how PeopleBest can help you fight retention, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies.

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People

What Makes A Good Manager?

We all know the famous saying: People don’t leave bad jobs — they leave bad managers. And that’s true. But, it’s more than a just a famous line, especially when you look at the fascinating research on how great managers can make a huge difference.

Did you know, workers are 80% more likely to improve in their jobs when they see managers making bringing their A game, according to software developer Humu. Humu’s report also revealed that employees felt more support and showed greater resilience when they were working under good managers during the pandemic.

A Gallup study found that an excellent manager can boost a business’s profitability by 48%. The same study showed that great managers can increase employee engagement by 30% and drive productivity by 22%.

These statistics, while illuminating, raise an important question: What makes a good manager? Research promises amazing results from good, great, and excellent managers. But what are the exact qualities that make managers so effective?

The 1-2-3 checklist of a good manager

At PeopleBest, we’ve spent years distilling behavior data from managers from every industry, nationally and globally. This information has allowed us to single out the skills that make good managers great. Here are three TOP areas to challenge your management skills on:

1.Decision Quality

A manager’s confidence stems from the proven quality of her decision making. How does she execute business goals? How does she ensure efficiency, productivity, and profit? Decision quality says it all.

A question for you: How much do you allow others to share in both a decision and ownership of this decision? People support that which they help create, so decisions may not always be yours alone.

2. Coaching Effectiveness

A good manager can take a mediocre worker and make a star employee. How? Coaching. Through motivation, goal setting, and follow through, managers help workers see and reach their own potential.

To be a great coach you need to be organized, consistent, and have the time to be there for each person you manage. It’s one thing to be skilled but if you’re not consistently spending time and managing progress, you’re not progressing? Remember: You can’t manage what you don’t measure!

3. Team Building

A coach doesn’t lead one player — she leads the whole team. Managers must be able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each individual team member and align her team accordingly.

Finding each person’s code of success is essential… Just ask us to help, if you wish!

Show managers where they shine

PeopleBest’s software gives managers a window into their skills, providing the self knowledge they need to recognize their strengths and improve on their weaknesses.

When managers understand the qualities that make them great — and the qualities that could make them greater — they create the potential to drive the business results everyone dreams of. Better retention? Check. Greater productivity? You bet. Amplified engagement? Absolutely.

Allow us to show you how to become a rock-star manager.
No obligation, just schedule a demo to chat.

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Think Beyond The Traditional Performance Review

We’re more than half-way through the year, and I’ve got a scary question for you: Where are you with your annual review? Have you thought about it since you walked through it with your boss just before the holidays? Have you made any progress on the goals you set in January?

August is not the traditional time to think about the annual review. But that makes it the best time to reconsider the practice. What is your companies policy on performance reviews?  If you don’t have one, then you have options. If you need to be compliant with your policies, then you have to deal with the best way to handle this important task. 

You see, it’s my belief that the standard performance review fails workers and employers. It’s also my belief that there’s another way. Behavior data allows managers to speak in specifics with their workers to drive progress all year long. Intrigued? Read on.

Where the annual review fails

The annual review fails for three reasons. 

1. It’s taxing.

If you’ve ever managed anyone, you know how much work goes into a performance review. Each review deserves your full attention — after all, that’s the mechanism that will drive workers’ growth (and, not to mention, pay) throughout the next year. But combing through 12 months of meeting notes to devise each reports’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities takes serious time and effort. 

There’s another side to consider here: The employee. Performance reviews are a classic trigger for stress and anxiety among workers. The performance review itself, embroiled in nerves and tension, steals the show, taking attention from what’s really demanding: A coming year of hard work and progress.

2. It’s subjective.

Managers are human. That means managers are subjective. One manager may see an employee’s socializing as self-indulgent procrastination, while another may see it as a collaboration-boosting strategy. The difference in opinion could color the tone of a performance review. 

Employees are also human and subjective. An employee may interpret a manager’s firm feedback as a nice-to-have goal rather than the key to their promotion. 

3. It’s vague.

Performance reviews are often littered with vague feedback and hazy goals. This leaves managers and employees in an unhelpful spot: Employees don’t know how to move forward, and managers don’t know how to assess their progress.

Behavior data does it better

The problems with performance reviews leave a lot of room for improvement. And they’ll motivate some to go back to the drawing board entirely. Here’s my preferred option: Behavior data. 

Using scientific tools to unveil the patterns in your employees’ actions, thinking, preferences, and passions, you’ll see how they work and why. You’ll gain the insights you need to propel them toward better performance. And you’ll ascertain where they want to go in the long term.

Let us, at PeopleBest, help you get to your 2022 finish line with a sample or insight of anyone on your team, on us!

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies