You Need to Use These Tools For Successful Hiring and Team Building
Have you experienced the pain of a poor hiring decision? I know I have.
Over the last 30+ years, I’ve hired dozens of employees. I learned that especially for small to mid-sized organizations, each individual hired has a great impact on the success of the organization. This became very apparent when I served on the hiring committee of my 20-person firm. When we got it wrong, the entire firm suffered.
The consequences of a poor hiring decision include:
Wasted firm resources
Increased employee turnover
Demotivated staff and work teams
Reduced productivity
Lost opportunities while dealing with bad hiring mistakes
Furthermore, bad hires become unengaged employees who stay too long and disturb the high achievers.
Just like that–one poor decision created a ripple effect throughout the entire organization. The thing is, talent selection is a complex process. And for small businesses and organizations, hiring doesn’t happen often enough for teams to get great at it. But I was determined to create a system to save our firm from unwanted consequences—and so I did.
Creating a Thoughtful Hiring and On-boarding Process
One aspect I help my clients with is developing a robust hiring process. If you’re still conducting traditional conference room-bound interviews, you (and prospective employees) are missing out. (See my previous article Hiring a Great Employee Starts with a Robust Hiring Process.) Additionally, I often help them institute an on-boarding process which can have so many more benefits than just the obvious ones. (See my previous article Onboarding a New Team Member Effectively Makes Good “Cents”)
Most business owners would agree that their people are their most valuable asset. Yet so many pass up or ineffectively use one of the most powerful hiring tools: Behavioral Assessment Surveys.
Deeper Insight and Understanding with Behavioral Assessment Surveys
You could say I love behavior assessment surveys. I’ve taken and paid for EIGHT of them. Personally I learned a lot about myself taking all those surveys. I also learned how the survey tools compared to each other, and importantly, the best assessment survey for specific purposes.
Not only are these tools powerful during the hiring process, they can also be used for promotion and team building.
Here are 4 tips for using behavioral assessments:
Try a couple – There is a sea of assessments, and new ones or upgraded versions appear all the time.
Pick one or two – I like one better for hiring and one better for setting up working teams or promotions.
Decide when in your hiring process to use them – I suggest using them after round two in the candidate short-listing process.
Use with consistency – You have to give a new process time to work, identify the kinks, and complete the learning loop by feeding results back into your hiring process.
My Two Favorite Assessment Tools, and Why and When to Use Them
PDPGlobal
I often recommend my clients use the PDPGlobal ProScan for hiring decisions when down to 2-3 short-listed candidates and they want to learn more about traits that might not have surfaced during their face-to-face interactions. The ProScan tool shows you the individual’s leading behavior indicators, such as level of Dominance, Extroversion, Patience, Conformity.
It also tells you:
Their decision-making process; Fact, Feeling or a Combination of the two
Their Energy style and “battery power” to identify project types they handle more effectively
Their Leadership and Communication styles
How much the current stressors in their life (work and personal) are affecting their natural tendencies.
How adaptable they are to change their behavior when the situation calls for it.
Do you have several existing top performers in one category, for example Project Managers? If so, PDPGlobal is able to use top performers’ predictive data that you can utilize when hiring for a similar job position to get more top performers.
StrengthsFinder (now CliftonStrengths)
I recommend using CliftonStrengths with existing team to help them:
Fully utilize their strongest attributes effectively
Support their productivity
Work effectively within teams
Mentor their direct reports
From a series of 34 one word “strengths”, the survey can identify your top five strengths or even where you stand on all 34. For example, my top five strengths are: Strategic, Maximizer, Ideation, Achiever, and Input.
It can be fun to share everyone’s top five themes and use them in an organizational team building exercise.
Learn more about yourself by taking the PDPGlobal
After exploring all the behavioral surveys, I decided to become certified as a PDPGlobal Professional. Want to learn more about yourself and this great assessment tool?
Send me an email at carol@sharpeningpeople.com and ask for a PDPGlobal ProScan survey.
It will take you ten minutes to fill out.
Receive the survey at a discount, a report and a 20-minute call to elaborate on how to make best use of your results for $90.
