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Hiring & Keeping Good Employees

June 16, 2010 — admin

By Norm Bobay
January 18, 2000

Employers today are caught between the proverbial “rock and a hard place”. They need more qualified personnel to do some of the most basic of tasks but the labor pool is tight and qualified personnel are limited. Many employers have resorted to hiring bodies in hopes of retaining a few good ones (“Like an archer that wounds at random is he who hires a fool or a passer-by”. Proverbs 26:10). And some employers have even decided to delay the growth of the business until the employment market changes.

Answers to the problem of hiring and keeping good employees are often difficult to come by and may demand a change in the way things have been done in the past. But change is inevitable; and the way an employer manages change has a direct impact on their success. Some employers are what I call “Inactive Employers”. Their head is buried in the sand and they hope the problem will just go away or that someone will come up with a miracle solution that will require little or no effort on their part. Other employers are what I call “Reactive Employers”. They are generally slow to change and only do so when it is absolutely necessary, often after it is too late. A successful employer is what I call a “Proactive Employer”. They not only embrace change, they plan on it and are constantly looking for and trying new ways of doing things. They tend to be open-minded and value creative ideas as a part of their culture.

Much like a professional sports team, a Proactive Employer does not just hire personnel, they recruit them. Walk-ons are the exception to the rule. They are “looking” (scouting) for the right person for the job, not just a body to fill a position. Bodies tend to go as easily as they come, whereas recruits stay as part of the team and produce well. The following are some basic steps that can enhance your success at hiring and keeping good employees.

STEP ONE: Define the need.

Most sports teams have a limit to the number of personnel that they can have on their roster. Be able to justify hiring another person. Are the personnel currently employed doing all that they are capable of doing? Do you have a way of measuring it? If not, is it a true need or could it be due to mismanagement or inefficient processes? You owe it to yourself to find out before you invest in additional personnel.

STEP TWO: Define the position.

A professional sports team does not just hire players, but specific players to do a specific job. A good job description should not only include the tasks to be completed, but the tools and processes required as well as the goals expected and the personality make-up of a successful team player.

STEP THREE: Recruit.

Use innovative ways to seek new personnel. Train current personnel to be on the lookout for quality personnel before there is a need. If you use employment agencies (scouts), be sure that they understand your criteria and that you will accept nothing less. Before you get too far into the hiring process with a candidate, do a good background check (e.g. criminal, credentials, drivers license, etc.). Do not borrow someone else’s troubles.

STEP FOUR: Assess

Enhance the interview with good tests of ability and job fit. Skills are important but can be developed easier than other areas of concern. Be sure your assessments reveal a person’s behavioral tendencies, values and attitudes. The thing most managers find frustrating is the employee who could do the job, but won’t. The more areas you assess the better your chances of having a good match.

STEP FIVE: Reward them.

Turnover is extremely costly. A good employee is worth their weight in gold! Signing bonuses are not unusual in sports and are becoming more common in the business sector. But cash money is not the only area of concern. Appreciation is always appreciated and a kind word is always kind. Also, some unique perks are being utilized in today’s markets that are tailored to an individual’s needs. A little creative thinking in this area outside the box could go a long way in securing a loyal workforce.

STEP SIX: Develop their potential.

A good manager is not a manager at all, but a coach. A coach is always looking for ways to encourage his team and motivate them to be their best. Studies overwhelmingly conclude that companies that invest in developing their personnel out produce and out sell their competitors by 200-300 percent.

Hiring and keeping good employees today is no easy task. There are no quick fixes. It requires a strong commitment by management and some creative thinking. The up front cost will seem expensive, but the long-term results will pay off many times over.

Posted in Hiring. Tags: employees, Hiring. No Comments »

Are You Hiring the Wrong People? 5 Steps to Picking Winners

April 5, 2010 — admin

by Jay Forte Monday Mar 8, 2010 & seen on www.bizmore.com

It is a difficult and personally troubling lesson when you hire someone you feel to be a good employee and are soon disappointed by the performance and the inability to live up to your expectations.

I was involved with a client last week who was struggling with this situation. She was a very capable corporate controller and was promoted to vice president of finance. In order to continue to making a significant difference in her company, she needed a strong replacement for herself — a new controller. She hired who she felt to be a good choice and over the following six months was consistently disappointed with most every aspect of this employee’s performance, attitude and effort. Though this employee could handle the daily skills, the overall attitude, focus on exceptional results, organization, efficiency and innovation were not part of her thinking — her talents. The new controller was not a good fit for this role. My client was more upset by how she could have made such a poor hiring decision.

We assessed the situation and determined the following problems in the way the employee was hired:

1. Skills and experience were used as exclusive criteria to identify viable candidates; the employee had done a similar job before in a similar work environment. There was no outside verification of the impact or the success the employee had in the other role.

2. An assessment of performance talents, attributes, attitude and passion for the work was not completed; the organization was not clear who would be a good “fit” — both in the role and in the workplace culture.

3. Performance expectations for the role were not created or reviewed with the applicant to corroborate expectations or fit at the outset.
I find most organizations continue to use this outdated and ineffective hiring process, resulting in average or low-productivity employees. And though there is a glut of unemployed talent in the market, a poor hiring process will still yield poor hiring results.

We modified the process to search for a new employee, knowing the current employee would need to be released. I introduced this new process:

1. The creation of the Talent Matrix (one of the Fire Up! Process worksheets I present in my book, Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition). This worksheet defines the performance talents (needed to be effective in the role), the team talents (what is needed to be effective in the particular workplace) and the skills and experience that will encourage great performance for the role; this can be done for every role in the organization to clearly define the attributes needed to be successful in each role.

2. Once completed, the Talent Matrix clearly defines the attributes needed to create a clear and precise employment ad. This improves the ability to define performance attributes and expectations, improving the ability to source the right employees.

3. Once candidates are sourced, use talent-based phone and face-to-face interview questions — questions designed to elicit candidates’ first reactions about situations (these indicate their talents and attitudes) – to see how they would react to situations they will encounter in the particular workplace. This is the truest assessment of candidate fit and role effectiveness.

4. Previous work experience is used to assess and to corroborate the existence of the required talents — to assess whether they used these talents in other work or roles.

5. Work histories are reviewed to determine the degree of value creation the candidate created in other work or roles.

The result is a clearer selection of better candidates and ultimately a candidate who not only has many of the core skills, but also has the attitude, focus and talents to fit in to this the particular workplace culture. The hiring of the right employee — for the right reasons — will now allow this VP Finance to focus on her larger role instead of constantly stepping back in to the controller role to do the work the miscast employee could not do. The candidate responses have been exceptional and significantly different from her earlier process.

Sometimes we don’t know our approach is outdated. Hiring today is not best done on skills and experience. It is in creating a profile of a high performing employee for the role — and what talents, skills, experience and passions the ideal employee will have. Talents and passions now lead performance. Rule them out and you will hire employees who do just enough. Rule them in and you hire employees who impress you with their performance. Things have changed. Has your hiring approach?

Posted in Assessments, Hiring. Tags: employee, employee screening, Hiring. 3 Comments »

Decoding Data Deluge

March 19, 2010 — admin

Are you feeling “infowhelmed” these days? It’s no wonder. The quantity of information is soaring.

Information is growing at an annual compound rate of over 60 percent. Keeping up with the information is getting more and more difficult. There has always been more information than people can process. But the chasm between the amount of information available and our ability to deal with it is widening.

For instance, man created 150 exabytes of information in 2005. In 2010, we will create 1,200 exabytes of new information. On an average day in 2008, 34 gigabytes bombarded each person. Are you exhausted yet?

How big is an exabyte?

One page of typed text equals 2 kilobytes

The complete works of Shakespeare total 5 Megabtyes.

One gigabyte equals a pickup truck filled with books.

All the catalogued books in America’s Library of Congress total 15 Terabytes.

All the letters delivered by American’s postal service this year will amount to around 5 petabytes. (Google processes around 1 petabyte every hour!)

One thousand petabtyes equals 1 exabyte. Five exabytes equals 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress.

By 2013, the amount of traffic flowing over the Internet is expected to exceed 668 exabytes.

Moving forward the business of managing business information will be a critical skill. Limiting the information you receive is simply not an option if you want to remain competitive. While economic production used to be based in the factory, the new measurement of production will be information output. A new kind of professional will be sought after to manage the data deluge - the data scientist. These new workers will combine the skills of the software programmer, statistician, and storyteller. Their job description: to extract a diamond from the waste.

Is that TMI? (In text lingo, that’s “too much information.”)

Posted in Sales. Tags: businesses, data, employees, hiremax, Hiring, norm bobay, organizations. No Comments »

Good Validation Matters in the Selection of Top Performers – Part 4

March 16, 2010 — admin

Tests Add Consistency and Uniformity to the Hiring Process

Employment tests ask the same questions, in the same order, every time. They are scored and the results are presented in exactly the same way. This sameness lets the employer focus on the applicant’s responses. Even the best interviewer can have a bad day and forget to ask all the questions of each candidate. Tests don’t have bad days.

Tests Save Your Prospect or Client Valuable Time

Applicants can answer hundreds of test questions without taking up an interviewer’s time. Employment tests use the applicant’s time, not the company’s time. When there are many candidates for the same position, tests help an employer narrow the number of people who will be considered to those who meet certain job requirements — and do so in a time- and costeffective way.

Tests Demonstrate Respect for the Applicant or Employee

Employment tests give each applicant an opportunity to demonstrate their job-relevant skills or attitudes in a fair, unbiased way. Giving all applicants and employees this same opportunity is a demonstration of fair-mindedness and respect on the company’s part.

Tests Help Your Prospects and Clients Avoid Bias in Hiring Procedures

There are two kinds of bias that should be considered. The law forbids discrimination, sometimes referred to as bias, in hiring. According to the U.S. employment law as promulgated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, all aspects of the hiring process, such as interviews, application forms, reference checks, background investigations, physical examinations, drug testing, job-relevant tests, etc., are to be fair and not biased against any individual or group.

A second kind of bias arises from the natural human tendency to allow impressions, preconceived notions, and variations in interpretation to affect decisions and actions. This is almost always an unconscious, unintentional bias on an interviewer’s part in the hiring process.

The best way to guard against the second kind of bias exerting an unintended influence during the hiring process is to rely on procedures and tools that are objective and consistent. Properly validated employment tests that are job-relevant help companies avoid the influence of the second kind of bias in the hiring process. There is usually no such evidence that can be shown to support the idea that the interview, reference checks, or any other part of the hiring process is equally fair and unbiased.

Posted in Hiring. Tags: businesses, employees, hiremax, Hiring, norm bobay, organizations, validation. No Comments »

Good Validation Matters in the Selection of Top Performers – Part 3

March 15, 2010 — admin

Validation of the Assessment

For example: a vendor may say that in a national survey conducted on salespeople and earned commissions, that there is at best a weak correlation between profile scores and commissions earned. Scores obtained on a national level would be unsatisfactory predictors of commissions earned.”

What assessment users should know is that it is important to know that sales commissions are consistently the number one indicator of sales performance, and if and when a vendor openly admits that their test scores are an unsatisfactory predictor on a national level and you may want to ask yourself why you would want to use this assessment.

Theory of the Test

Start with one simple question. Were the procedures used in validation consistent with generally accepted professional standards such as those described in the “Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests?” A reputable test publisher will generally make such a statement somewhere in its brochures or validity manuals.

Be cautious of any personality test that claims to have been written by a professional, and then immediately tries to lead you to the conclusion that it was professionally developed without referencing any validation or reliability studies. The two concepts do not necessarily go hand in hand.

What I would have to really question in relation to such a test would be whether or not the validity studies would meet the requirements of the “Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures” as they pertain to the professional standards for validity studies.

Let’s say that a company has designed a test that measures communication styles and that the personality assessment is very effective. The validation studies for any assessment instrument are only an objective measure that evidences that the test actually measures what it purports to measure, and in this particular case it is communication styles.

Let’s say that this particular personality test is later given certain external modifications so that it can also be sold as a pre-employment assessment. The personality test is still backed by validity studies, but unless new validity studies are done, there are no validity studies to support the use of the assessment for its intended purpose as a pre-employment assessment. In this example, the intended use is quite clear (to measure communication styles).

The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures specifically state that the evidence of validity and utility of the selection procedure must support its operational use.

Cutting Through the Quagmire

Suppose we accept that 1) Causation is the only way to accurately predict performance and, 2) our Test Content is a pre-cursor to job performance. Our next question is how to prove or validate the test and arrive at good cut-off points. This takes a thorough knowledge of statistics and experimental design.

For example, we have to define what to predict. We have to find “hard” data that is hard to fake, something we know we can trust.

Okay, let’s suppose we have the right kind of hard data. What’s next? We need to compare test scores with on-the-job performance. We can do this several ways:

1. By giving the test to everyone who applies, hiring them all, waiting until we get performance data and comparing test scores with job performance.

2. By giving the test to people already in the job and comparing test scores with job performance.

Of course we’ll need to correct for “restriction of range,” that is, the people who are IN the job will be more similar than people who APPLY for the job. So what? Well, for one thing, we might not see the same kind of big differences between high and low producers that we would see between applicants.

Flawed decision-making in hiring leads to misguided job standards, using tests that are not validated properly, hiring the wrong people, and rejecting the right ones. It is a major reason why Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Department of Labor wrote the 1978 Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures.

Posted in Hiring. Tags: businesses, employees, hiremax, Hiring, norm bobay, organizations, validation. No Comments »

Good Validation Matters in the Selection of Top Performers – Part 2

March 12, 2010 — admin

Validation is the means of determining whether a test accurately predicts job performance, not simply identifying common personality traits.

Validity is not supposed to be some risky venture to determine if something or anything correlates with job performance. It is supposed to be validation.

The Guidelines to prove this are clear. They suggest using either Content (competencies – the nature of the job) or Criterion (performance on the job) validation, not benchmarking. An acceptable process of validation is explained in the nearly 4,000 words in the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. These guidelines include prerequisites for conducting a job analysis that include fairness, representative samples, personality traits, critical knowledge, skills and abilities, statistical sampling, statistical procedures, and other important criteria.

It is important the even people with “the right” personality traits can fail in the job because they have the wrong skills.

Here’s where it pays to use your common sense. Don’t you think that if you could identify the “high performers,” it is likely they would have different personalities?

If a test is really valid, wouldn’t it be nice to know whether the candidate’s test results were significantly different from the low group or that the candidate’s results were statistically similar to the top performers in the validation study?

What Do “Validation” and “Reliability” Mean with Regard to Employment Tests?

“Validity” refers to how well an employment test measures what it is supposed to measure. A validation study is a systematic gathering of data and information to support a claim that an employment test is valid, or (in other words) that it measures what it says it measures.

“Reliability” refers to the consistency in performance of an employment test: does it measure the same knowledge, skill, or ability every time it is used?

Employment tests should be carefully documented so that people and companies that want to use them can examine the way they were developed and validated, and for what purpose they are intended.

There are professional guidelines and standards for how an employment test is validated. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publishes Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures that includes standards that a proper validation study should meet. This does not mean that EEOC “approves” a validation study or an employment test. The EEOC does not review, approve, or give stamp of approval to specific tests.

The American Psychological Association has published Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing that serve as guidelines for psychologists to use in the development and use of tests. These standards do not have the force of law, but psychologists who are involved in the development and use of employment tests should be thoroughly familiar with them.

Posted in Hiring. Tags: businesses, employees, hiremax, Hiring, norm bobay, organizations, validation. No Comments »

Good Validation Matters in the Selection of Top Performers – Part 1

March 11, 2010 — admin

In today’s litigious business environment organizations want to know that the tests they are using in their selection process are legal.

Your answer is, yes, job-relevant, validated employment tests are a fast, fair, accurate, and legal means to better selection, placement, and promotion decisions. The better the match between a person’s personality traits, skills, knowledge, abilities, and attitudes, and the requirements for the job, the more likely the person in that job will work productively and successfully. The proper use of employment tests is good for the employer and good for the employee or applicant. There are two legal criteria that employment tests must meet. Employment tests must be (1) properly validated, and (2) job-relevant. If they meet these criteria, then it is legal to use them.

What does it mean when we say a test is “job relevant?”

It means that here must be a demonstrable link between what the employment test measures and what the job requires. This means that the test publisher is responsible for making sure that the employment test measures the skill or attitude that it is designed to measure, through a process called validation, and the company that uses an employment test is responsible for making sure that the job description demonstrates the need for behavior or attitudes that the employment test measures.

Many test vendors say that they believe in construct validity. Still others will offer up that they prefer criterion validity as the best method. You will often hear a vendor say that good business sense suggests that concurrent validation on a group of people in your organization is the best approach. Their concurrent study is done by benchmarking as few as 3 to 10 employees in a job.

This approach is questionable at best!

It is Important to Know That Correlation is Not Causation

Suppose a well known magazine published a nice twenty-question hiring test. Furthermore, suppose your prospect or client gave that test to their high producers and averaged their scores.

Is that validation?

Correlation means there is an association between two variables, for example, high producers tend to be good talkers. But correlation is not enough. Test developers and publishers need to find Causation. Does being a good talker cause high production (causation)? Or do high producers tend to be good talkers (correlation)? Your prospect or client should toss all of their tests in the closet unless they know, for CERTAIN, that the content they test for causes productivity.

Styles as measured by the MBTI, DISC, Enneagram, Social Styles, and so forth, might occur more often among certain job holders, but life is too complex to assume style causes productivity. This is critical to remember because, while hiring managers might embrace an intuitively attractive test today, if is does not predict performance, it WILL FAIL over time.

Organizations need to know that “what is measured” equals “on-the-job performance.” Remember that blue eyes and blond hair might be correlated, but one does not cause the other.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 – What is Validation?

Posted in Hiring. Tags: businesses, employees, hiremax, Hiring, norm bobay, organizations, validation. 3 Comments »