"Companies hire for skills; they fire for attitude"

Larry Stybel, Stybel Peabody & Associates, and Greta Roberts, Target Teams, lead the seminar which continued our search for ways to improve the rate of success in hiring senior and middle management. In this seminar we focused on the use of assessment tools in the hiring process.

There are two basic categories of assessment tools, the Projective and the Objective.

The Projective tools are forms of standard interviews conducted by trained professionals, usually psychologists. The purpose of the interview is to determine the fit of the candidate to the requirements of the job and to the cultural norm of the company. This requires that the interviewer understand the three year job requirements and the company mission and culture -- and you have to provide this information to the interviewer. These interviews can be good predictors of success. It is hard for the candidate to "fake" it with a trained interviewer. But, the process is hard to leverage and must be repeated with each candidate. It is very "high touch".

The Objective tools are standard questions that can be answered by checking boxes on a form. Today these are usually done on line. The answers are compared to a large data base that has been validated as predictive of behaviors or attitudes. A profile of the candidate is usually reported back almost immediately and can be compared against the benchmark profile for the job and the culture. It is very important that the right benchmarks are defined before the assessment is used. Once the benchmarks are defined the assessments can be administered quickly and easily and repeatedly. This is a "high tech" tool. There are many Objective tools in use and you need to careful that you select the ones that can answer the "so what" question when you get the results. Tools like the DISC (behavioral) and Motivation Insights (attitudes and values) from Target Training International (TTI) are highly predictive when interpreted by a professional. In this seminar we focused on assessment tools for non-sales functions because the use of such tools in hiring sales staff has been generally validated and are widely used, e.g., the assessment tools developed by David Kurlan & Associates.

Both Projective and Objective assessment tools can be used in the hiring process and can serve as a check and balance on the entire process. Sometimes a battery of tests is the best approach. The selection of tests is often a trade-off between the importance of the hire and the cost -- but the cost of the testing is a small fraction of the cost of a mistake. Larry and Gtreta recommend using the assessment tools later in the process, when the list of candidates has been narrowed. But, you must have a documented process for when and how you use these tools and you must follow this process every time to avoid hiring discrimination issues.

One of the concerns is at what level of employee hire should assessment tools be used? Will candidates for high level jobs be "turned off" ? Not if properly presented. The use assessment tools should be seen as a sign that your company takes hiring very seriously and is willing to invest to make sure that the fit is right is for both the company and the candidate. Testing is part of your corporate culture.

This seminar reinforced the messages of the first two seminars -- hiring right is a complex process that can be learned and used to increase our rate of success in hiring.

Greta Roberts summed it up this way, "You should have a Balanced Hiring Scorecard. One that assigns different weights to each of the different considerations, e.g., 10% for the resume, 20% for the skills, 40% for the behavioral interview, 20% for the objective predictions and 10% for the reference check -- understanding that a strong negative in any of the considerations is automatic out."