Getting the Selection Edge
"All successful employers are stalking people who will do the unusual, people who think, people who attract attention by performing more than is expected of them." – Charles Schwab
Selecting the right people is the life line of achievement. We can do everything else right, but if we miss this one, we might as well hang up the cleats. We can't play the game of high achievement effectively unless we know how to select talent.
Our legalistic society, the high cost of recruiting and training, and the shrinking labor pool make guesswork expensive. When we hire, review, promote or terminate, we need to know what we're doing-and have some basis upon which to support our decision.
Beyond initial selection assistance lies a potentially more important evaluation benefit. Supervisors frequently find it difficult to communicate with staff. Especially when it's time for review, promotion, or when emerging problems make coaching and counseling a highly productive activity. Having an employee's personality and mental profile available removes some of the intimidation supervisors feel. Profiling and evaluation provide considerable insight into the employee. It creates a broad agenda of topics to discuss when coaching, reviewing, or seeking the proper candidate for promotion. A formal evaluation process can be a significant contributor to effective supervision.
Another benefit is the capability to personalize and customize. For example, let's assume you have a 10-person sales staff. Among them are five achievers, three who are mediocre, and two who are marginal. One way to grow your organization is to find a way to clone the five achievers. This is easily done with some evaluation services. Profiling and building a normative pattern of the five achievers provides the mold.
Using normative behavioral patterns as a guide, you can match the profiles of employment candidates with your achievers and integrate the results into the other elements of your hiring decision. Developing this information base will yield a higher probability of hiring success.
Most evaluation tools measure personality characteristics, some measure mental aptitudes, and a few, like PES, include the validity-checking step that provides assurance the evaluation has integrity. All three areas are important, although hourly or low skill employees can be evaluated on personality characteristics only.
The computer is playing a major role in the rapidly increasing use of formal employee evaluation. For example, most services sell user-friendly software which allows easy accomplishment of both administration and in-house scoring. Many employers have wanted to incorporate profiling into their human resource activities but have stayed away because of cost, confusion, or intimidation. Now it's simple and affordable for most businesses.
Profiling your finalist employment candidates, as well as those already on staff, is an important area of opportunity for achieving organizations. It reduces guesswork, helps you know your people better, improves the quality of communication, reduces fear of lawsuits for discrimination or inappropriate dismissal, and helps you find more people like your top producers. All of these opportunities, until recently, were available only to larger organizations.