Assessing Candidates & Your Team

Assembling the Pieces: Comprehensive Executive Assessment

When all is said and done, a top executive needs to orchestrate performance and reduce risk.  It’s one thing to “read” a spreadsheet, but it’s something quite different to “read" a candidate or an employee.”

To survive and thrive today, every organization has to have a process to respond to its needs for talented people. Whether organizations use the term talent management, human capital, or some other label, organizations must have in place procedures and techniques to address the following:
  • Attract and select the right people.
  • Integrate people to ensure they are aligned with the goals of the organization.
  • Develop and coach people in their current roles.
  • Develop people for future roles.
What we have found is that it’s dramatically useful to
  • Assess candidates with between one and six online instruments.  These tools measure a variety of characteristics or competencies to include behavior, values, skills, personality and "barriers to success." 
  • Conduct deep-dive interviews.  We conduct thorough interviews with candidates with an eye toward determining their fit based on an employees views of what skills, outcomes and competencies are required.
  • Assess current employees with a online tools and deep-dive instruments.  This step provides very powerful information for self-development and for improved teamwork.  The experience with these instruments also starts the slow transition to a powerful competency-based approach to evaluating performance.
  • Assess all employees who are in, as Jim Collins describes them, “key seats,” based on a core set of competencies using sets of 360o assessments.  
  • Use the resulting knowledge to (a) develop candidate interview questions that get essential competencies in every  job, (b) create feedback and development paths for each person assessed, and (c) generate a competency model to shape your hiring steps.
 

How Can You Risk-Proof Your Candidates?

How can you ensure that you hire the right, and not the wrong, people? Two assessments we use regularly are the DISC and PIAV (Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values), now also neatly combined into one online assessment.

In a nutshell, DISC measures how someone does a job; PIAV measures whether someone will do a job. PIAV looks at a person’s values, which in turn will drive behavior—which is what DISC measures. So the two instruments go hand-in-hand to answer questions like these, to cite literally just a few:
  • Will this person be motivated to do this particular job?
  • Is this the right position in our company for this person, or would they be more productive and happier in a different role?
  • What do I need to know to manage this person in the most mutually beneficial way?
  • What are the “red flag” issues I need to explore thoroughly before we hire or promote this person?
  • How can our company appropriately motivate and reward our staff to increase the chances they’ll stay happy and stick around?
The specific form of DISC we employ uses over 40,000 variables that ultimately spew out 384 categories. Placement into 1 of 384 versus 1 of 16 categories, as with Myers-Briggs, leaves a lot more room for subtle differences among respondents—and, as a result, more room for face validity, too.
Contact us for a free sample of our DISC/PIAV combo: Laura@CageTalent.com

Field-Tested, EEOC-Compliant Tools

DISC and PIAV do not measure IQ, personality, cognitive skills, or psychological makeup. Both have been designed to be appropriate and nondiscriminatory for all ages, all abilities, all races and ethnic groups (in fact, they’re available in a couple dozen languages, in 50 countries). 

Importantly, they meet the guidelines spelled out by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the EEOC as appropriate tools for the workplace. The company that created them continually tests their reliability, validity, and practicality in terms of language and contemporary culture—most recently in 2009.

Finding the “Derailers” Prior to Hiring a Candidate

Cage Talent also employs an instrument that specifically identifies personality-based performance risks and derailers of interpersonal behavior. These behaviors are most often seen during times of stress and may impede work relationships, hinder productivity, or limit overall career potential. These derailers—deeply ingrained in personality—affect an individual’s leadership style and actions. If these behavior patterns are recognized, however, they can be compensated by development and coaching.

Thirty Years in the Making: Identifying Competencies

For thirty years, organizational psychologists have tried to determine the role and importance of competencies in organizational performance.  Researchers went into thousands of organizations—with blank sheets of paper—to determine exactly what competencies made the most difference in that specific organization.

With 17,000 studies in hand, researchers then wondered, “Among these competencies, do any of them overlap?”  The answer was surprising:  Over 85% of them were the same, no matter the role’s sector, industry, or location!

The valuable upshot of this discovery is that it’s possible to adopt one or another competency model, and overlay it onto your organization.

To implement a fully integrated talent management system, Cage Talent uses the Lominger suite of research-based, integrated, and complementary tools and products.  We are fluent in Lominger’s “competency language” and certified in its Leadership and Team Architect tools.

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