I was browsing the internet one night a few weeks ago, and I came across a story that caught my attention. The story is one of a Los Angeles County traffic cop that, through 20 years on the job and 25,000 traffic stops, has never received a single complaint. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. This is an amazing statistic, especially when you consider that most interactions with traffic police will leave you with a citation and a bad mood. However, this officer has a flawless record and it is all due to one factor – personality. Instead of chastising and embarrassing commuters for speeding, failure to wear a safety belt, and the like, he puts his interpersonal skills to good use and leaves commuters with a ticket and a smile. It’s the perfect combination of charm without being too charming, being personable without being walked-on.

Organizations and individuals looking to hire or promote the right person for a job need to consider factors like an individual’s personality or values. In fact, these factors are the difference between having a good set of employees and a great set of employees. Someone can have all the intelligence, experience, and educational degrees needed to do the job, but if they don’t have the right blend of personality and values needed for the job or the organization, they will likely end up underperforming and may even leave or be fired. What I would rather have is someone with the right personality and values at day one, because skills are trainable and experience will come with time. Personality on the other hand is difficult to train.

You may be saying to yourself right now, “None of this is news to me. That’s exactly why I rely on interviews when hiring people.” Interviews are great for several reasons. They allow you the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and to dig further into interesting items on a résumé. However, there are several drawbacks associated with interviews. First, asking follow-up questions reduces the structure of an interview, which is a bad thing. Second, people are able to fake during interviews, making it difficult to know what the person will look like 6 months on the job. Third, interviews are expensive. Interviewers need to be trained on the concepts they are assessing, as well as how to rate the interviewee on those concepts. Then, there are the costs associated with paying someone to conduct the interview. Not to mention, the costs associated with bringing a candidate in to interview (Sure, there are ways of conducting virtual interviews, but if successful, most are followed up with in-person meetings).

Interviews are an inevitable and expensive part of the hiring process, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do things beforehand to make interviews more cost effective and efficient. This is where personality assessment comes in. First, personality assessments provide a standard set of items that each candidate responds to, therefore adding structure to the hiring process. Second, well-constructed personality assessments cannot be faked. Third, personality assessments are a cost effective way of gathering standardized information on a batch of candidates to trim down the amount of interviews.

To find the right employee to fit your organization (like the zero-complaint traffic cop), assess your candidates then interview. You'll have success every time.

A quick-reference guide to understanding how validity relates to Hogan’s business model and marketing content.

I have been with Hogan now for just under 12 years. It’s been an incredible experience and I’m privileged to work alongside unbelievable intelligence and talent, but I have to be honest about something: in non-professional situations I dread the question, “So what is it that you do, Jesse?” I envy my wife, who when faced with the same question can simply say “I am a teacher,” or a friend who answers, “I’m an engineer.” You see, my response is something like, “I work for Hogan Assessment Systems. We publish personality assessments.” And so it begins….

There are several ways the conversation can go, but it usually consists of a joke in which the person asks what I see in his or her personality, and then a seemingly infinite stream of “Oh. So what does that mean?” It’s very similar to a conversation with a two-year-old, in which every answer is countered with “why?”  I am by no means comparing the inquisitive individual to a toddler; more stating that what we do at Hogan seems really tough to explain. But is it really? Does it have to be?

I’d like to think the answer is no. What we do is simple in its complexity and complex in its simplicity. Let me start with an example. Picture a successful long-haul truck driver. Now picture another individual, only this one is a commission-based sales representative. Take these two successful employees and swap them. Generally speaking, it doesn’t work. But why? The answer is personality; the personality characteristics that make one successful in the cab of an 18-wheeler are drastically different than those that make one successful in a sales role.

Everyone has their own definition of personality. For the most part, we all know what it means, but putting that definition into words can be challenging. Most everyone would describe the above individuals similarly, however the language used to depict them would vary drastically. Furthermore, subjectively applying those various languages to a specific job is inaccurate, ineffective, and could even result in legal trouble.

Enter Hogan. The Drs. Hogan obviously didn’t invent personality, but they did develop a very reliable taxonomy of its constituent parts. The structure and language they built provides the consistency required to accurately measure it, and the methods they developed made those measurements applicable to occupational performance. The science behind all of this is inherently very complex, but in general terms, we help organizations ensure that the right people are selling and the right people are driving. We can even provide a solid foundation for coaching designed to improve the performance of those already driving, selling, or virtually anything else…but that’s a whole different dinner party.

That’s honestly about as short and sweet of an answer I can provide to the initial question, so you might now understand why I dread it. To know what we do requires some understanding of Hogan, which from a marketing perspective is brilliant. To the fella opposite me at a happy hour, however, it may prompt a new set of questions in his bag of pleasantries.

Hogan and the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) partnered to launch Reflect by GMAC, the first self-directed, personality-based development tool designed to bring the power of self-awareness to B-school students.

Reflect evaluates personal and professional qualities deemed imperative in today’s workplace by 800 corporate recruiters. It provides concrete action items to help individuals learn more about themselves, improve their strengths, and address their weaknesses. The Reflect tool is the only interactive platform that goes beyond results to provide a personalized action plan, library, and benchmarking data from 14 job functions.

The assessment measures 10 key competencies:

• Innovation - generates new and unique ideas
• Operational Thinking - works efficiently and effectively
• Decision Making - selects best course of action
• Strategic Vision - combines own ideas with others
• Strategic Self-Awareness - recognizes own strengths and weaknesses
• Resilience - performs well under pressure
• Drive - holds high standards for self and others
• Interpersonal Intuition - adjusts communications to audience
• Valuing Others - builds trust-based relationships
• Collaboration - promotes team accomplishments

More on Reflect by GMAC, powered by Hogan

Providing candidates with accurate feedback about the behaviors they should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing is the first step to improving their interpersonal effectiveness. The Hogan Personality Inventory, Hogan Development Survey, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory provide useful feedback about what individuals need to do to improve their performance at work. This interpretation guide uses a simple, but focused, series of steps to help affect behavioral and repetitional change for the coaching candidate. Visit our bookstore to purchase Coaching Strategies.

When you use one of Hogan’s assessment solutions, you can trust that it works. Hogan conducted 40 ROI studies in 2011 and 2012 for clients ranging from retail to manufacturing. Year after year, we provide empirical evidence, from increased store sales to improved organizational safety, of how our assesments impact clients’ bottom lines. Regardless of industry sector or job type, Hogan’s assessments provide a significant, long-term return on investment.

Read the overall findings of our ROI study.

Ryan Ross and Jocelyn Hays will present at the 2013 Innovations in Testing Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, February 3-6. The conference fosters innovation by showcasing the latest technologies and encouraging relationships among the diverse group of attendees.

Innovations in Leadership Assessment: Research, Instrumentation, and Technology
This session will explore innovations in leadership assessment from several standpoints including: technology innovations that have provided accessible and affordable leadership assessment, research of evidence-based assessment practice opportunities leveraging longitudinal needs analyses and validation results, and a review of trends in leadership derailment and impacts on organizational effectiveness.
Ryan Ross, Vice President of Hogan Global Alliances 

Developing Model Request for Proposal (RFP) Guidelines for the Assessment Industry
This panel discussion will feature perspectives from both assessment providers and firms that use assessments regarding the RFP process, how it can be standardized, and how we might move forward with developing appropriate process guidelines.Innovations in Leadership Assessment: Research, Instrumentation, and Technology.

Pre-Employment Assessments: Expanding the Scope beyond Employee Selection
This session will explore the use of assessments for purposes beyond employee selection and audiences beyond job candidates and incumbents. 
Jocelyn Hays, Hogan Consultant 

Say you apply for a job. You take an assessment to see if you’re the right fit for the company and the role. After you join the company, you take another assessment to gauge your managerial skills. Later you may be part of a team-building exercise, which requires an entirely different assessment. Pretty soon, you’re feeling like this: 

According to senior consultant Dr. Kevin Meyer, a lot of companies are dealing with assessment overkill.

“Over time, they’ve adopted specific assessment tools for specific needs,” he said. “In theory, it’s a good approach, but when you use different tools there’s no common framework for a company to use to understand and evaluate its employees.”

Our comprehensive approach to personality assessment provides the depth and detail companies need to hire the right people, identify and develop talented individuals, build better leaders, and improve their bottom line. And because personality is stable over time, our assessments are a useful tool throughout the employee lifecycle.

To learn more, check out this video interview, or read our new eBook, Why Personality?

Assessments are powerful, business-critical tools that predict and monitor employee performance and multiple assessments are administered based on the different needs within the organization. Over the course of a typical year, some employees might be assessed and reassessed over and over again, causing frustration and assessment burnout for already busy employees. When organizations use multiple assessments that have no or limited correlation to each other, it also creates a glut of data that forms its very own black hole, sucking in all the information – full of redundancies – including the vital insights.

Since the variance between these assessment tools is often slight, organizations risk capturing virtually the same data in different systems that are further limiting because they are unable to talk to each other. Organization-wide, collected data filters into this black hole ensuring it is nearly impossible to compare results or pull broad-spectrum reports. As more assessments are ordered to suit emerging needs, employees and human resources professionals become frustrated. To avoid burnout and black hole syndrome, finding an alternative is imperative.

Research indicates that the solution may be easier than you realize: employ a comprehensive suite of assessment tools. Here’s how:

One Suite, Multiple Options Having a comprehensive suite allows the organization to assess employees once, using the same questions for everyone. With this concise data in hand, the organization can run multiple reports on everything from detecting leadership potential to recognizing levels of accident proneness.

Creating Consistency Collecting the same information about all employees provides a broad, deep understanding of the entire workforce.

Implementing Strategy This starts by identifying the organization’s needs (PDF) including the biggest pain point; once needs are determined a comprehensive assessment suite can be rolled out. We recommend holding a “conversion” training to help employees understand the new approach and its associated value for improving the HR lifecycle and employee experience. 

With a comprehensive assessments suite in place, organizations will see burnout diminish while the black hole gives way to a viable bank of employee data. To find out more about using a comprehensive suite of assessments, download our latest eBook, Why Personality?

Steve Jobs is arguably one of the most successful businessmen in modern times. He started Apple and NeXT, took a majority ownership stake in Pixar for $10M and after ten blockbuster films sold the company to Disney for over $7B, and around the time of his death Apple had a market cap greater than the gross domestic product of Poland. Apple is one of the world’s most recognized brands and the company’s products have won numerous awards for their technical capabilities, functionality, ease of use, and aesthetics. Because of these results many view Steve Jobs as the personification of the successful business leader, yet Walter Isaacson’s biography paints a picture of a complex and highly flawed individual. 

As experts in executive assessment, reading Isaacson’s book prompted us to ask three questions about Steven Jobs and current hiring practices. First, would Jobs have been hired to be the CEO of a start up or a Fortune 500 company if he had to go through a formal assessment process?  Second, what would an assessment have revealed about Jobs’ watch outs or development needs? Third, what can we learn from Steve Jobs and his leadership style? This last question is important, as Job’s tremendous success as a businessman has overshadowed some of the critical lessons about leadership.

Read the full article by guest bloggers, Gordon Curphy and Rocky Kimball.