I wouldn’t consider myself a techie, but on occasion I have been known to dabble in the social media space—posting the occasional observational wisdom, a vacation picture every so often, and dare I admit it, a complaint here and there. But this blog entry isn’t about my world wide intertube surfing trends, or any highfalutin comments on the varying notions of privacy. Rather, I would like to take this opportunity to express my secret delight with the outputs of the latest pedantic personality pandemic. Surprisingly I’m not talking about the terrible alliteration of which that last sentence was so incredibly guilty. I am referring to the hokey but lovable evaluations that have become the most recent cross-generational fad.

Let me first say that I commend all those who are not only interested in self improvement but are also motivated to complete an inventory to gain perspective. So in a way, I am excited to see individuals spend time reporting their preferences to determine which Hobbit, Game of Thrones Character, News Anchor, OTC constipation pill or rare bacterial disease best captures their essence. But I think it’s important we lay down a few best practices before this branch of the industry really takes off.

Stay current: I understand if early 90s snap-bracelets or funky hair-trolls are still your thing. But I cannot for the life of me remember the names of the My Little Pony characters. And thus it’s hard for me to comment and relate to your results. (Ok that’s a lie, but I’ll never admit it online). Best to stay current so you can maximize audience appeal.

Do your due diligence: Was the sample against which the instrument constructed a stratified representation of the Muppet population? Should Fraggles have their own local norm? Was the test brought to you by a suspicious combination of letters that form an enigmatic acronym? These are questions that really should be asked before committing to an assessment.

Keep it neutral: I don’t care which political scandal or religious dogma says the most about your interpersonal style. I want to read about fun loving results like which Miley Cyrus phase best represents you. Or which Justin Beiber crime is emblematic of your management approach. However, I shouldn’t have to visualize the likes of brassy over exposed governors or congressional private parts to know how you prefer to be seen.

Not a standalone: When considering what kind of, say, vegetable or cookie you would be, perhaps it’s best to not use such evaluations as a standalone assessment. I recommend pairing them with the appropriate assessment center modules. In this example perhaps an In-Supermarket-Basket exercise would augment the results.

Don’t overdo it: I get it that you want to see yourself from varying angles. But must you take seven of these quizzes a day? Furthermore, I think you lose credibility when you’re equally excited about each one. I know it’s hard to contain yourself when you find out that you would be a poppy seed bagel. But honestly, after reading which waste management vehicle, computer antivirus software and CBS network television character you would relate to most, I’m on the verge of losing interest. Let’s cap it to 16 a week, shall we?

By choosing your social media assessments wisely you can not only ensure more valid results, you can also help me resist the temptation block you from my timeline forever. Thanks for considering these best practices going forward and for doing your part in making the internet, and my timeline a better place.

People are complicated, and predicting performance takes a holistic view at their strengths, weaknesses, and core values. In our second installment of Drinks with Hogan, Global Alliances Consultant Dr. Darin Nei explains the problem with type indicators and the reason we recommend using three assessments.

SEE THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF DRINKS WITH HOGAN

In an article on Forbes.com, HR analyst Josh Bersin extolled the benefits of talent analytics using a case study from a large financial services company:

“One of our clients… operates under the belief system that employees with good grades who come from highly ranked colleges will make good performers,” Bersin wrote. “So their recruitment, selection, and promotion process is based on these academic drivers.”

The firm conducted a statistical analysis of sales productivity and turnover, correlating performance and retention over the first two years against several demographic factors. They found that, of the six factors that corresponded with success, what did not matter was where candidates went to school, what grades they received, or the quality of their references. Within six months of implementing a new screening process, the firm increased revenues by $4 million.

However, for every one company that effectively harnesses their data, there are dozens that get it wrong by:

1. Overestimating performance as a predictor of potential. Research shows that only 30 percent of current high performers have management potential, and that most employees (more than 90 percent) would have trouble at the next organizational level.

2. Using subjective data. Too many companies dirty up their data sets with things like supervisor performance appraisals. Unfortunately, typical performance appraisals are a function of how much supervisors like their employees so, “high performers” are often those who successfully navigate office politics, not necessarily those who perform better.

3. Relying on incomplete data. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, recently wrote in The Guardian that “most organizations lack reliable systems for measuring employees' performance … The result is … the equivalent of investing a great deal of money in weather forecasts without subsequently paying attention to the actual weather.”

4. Paying attention to irrelevant data. I recently read a Harvard Business Review article in which the author was describing the challenge of filling new positions for which data does not exist: “This poses different challenges, such as identifying patterns of your most successful hires, like the schools they come from, where they live...” Just because some of your best employees happen to be from the same school or town doesn’t have anything to do with whether they will be good programmers. 

5. Believing that data eliminates uncertainty. On his ragan.com blog post, Jonathan Lewis wrote: “You can use data to reduce uncertainty, but don't count on the data to eliminate it. The belief that uncertainty can ever be eliminated leads to unrealistic expectations, company paralysis, letdown, and frustration… We live in a complex and imperfect world, so no matter how big or little the data in our grasp, we will always have to make decisions with a certain level of uncertainty.”

Adding Context

Don’t get us wrong, we love data – Hogan’s research database has millions of data points, which we use to create, test and hone our assessments. The key to analyzing your company’s big data is to start with a valid, scientifically developed, objective tool like 360-degree feedback or personality assessment. These measures provide a picture of employees’ strengths, weaknesses, values, and work preferences. Using that information as a starting point, you can add in sales and performance data, demographics, and myriad other information to form a complete picture of how your organization, and your people, operates.

What if you had been the head of a company your junior or senior year of college? Do you think it would have changed your career trajectory or given you more insight into leadership? That’s the idea behind Odgers Berndtson’s CEO X 1 Day. This month, the leading global executive Canadian search firm launched its program that places third and fourth year university students in the shoes of CEOs at leading Canadian organizations for one day.

By shadowing some of the biggest decision makers in Canada, CEO X 1 Day gives students “a tremendous opportunity to observe a talented CEO in action - providing them with inspiration, role modeling and a road map for their careers," said Carl Lovas, Canadian Chair at Odgers Berndtson, in a recent press release. It is “designed to uncover Canada's most promising future talent, while giving CEOs an opportunity to connect and better understand what drives this next generation of leaders,” he continued.

As part of the application process, applicants are given the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) to assess their leadership aptitude. Characteristics factored into this aptitude include confidence, ambition, effective stress management, political savvy, values and the ability to develop new skills – all characteristics of a successful senior leader.

Throughout their one day, finalists will spend valuable one-on-one time with CEOs learning about their background, career path, and how they create value in their organization. The objective is to create a meaningful experience for both students – who will learn what it takes to be the leader – and CEOs – who will benefit from the students’ nubile and fresh perspectives as well as get a glimpse of Canada’s next generation’s up and comers.

Participating Canadian CEOs include: Elyse Allan, GE; Nitin Kawale, Cisco; Jim Gabel, adidas; Patrick Nangle, Purolator; Ellis Jacob, Cineplex; Ian Troop, Toronto 2015 Pan Am; Kirstine Stewart, Twitter; Marc Bertrand, MEGA Brands; Manon Brouillette, Videotron; Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft; and Thierry Vandal, Hydro Quebec. Performance Programs Inc., a Hogan partner, is working in conjunction with Odgers Berndtson during the applicants’ selection process.

Is there such a thing as being too creative? Although creativity is largely associated with positive work outcomes, our research shows that, in excess, creativity can be a powerful roadblock to career success.

To understand how creativity can harm an individual’s career, we must look at personality from two perspectives: bright-side personality and dark-side personality.

Bright-side personality describes the strengths and weaknesses people display when they are at their best. Dark-side personality describes personality characteristics that are strengths under normal circumstances. Under the increased stress, pressure, or boredom of most work environments, people tend to overuse those strengths, and they can become powerful career derailers.

Creative people often have parents who emphasize their uniqueness and favor creative expression over convention. As adults, their ability to comfortably work outside of societal norms makes creative individuals valuable sources of potentially important ideas. However, highly creative individuals also tend to focus too much on thinking outside the box, often at the cost of their ability to clearly explain their ideas or follow through.

For more on performance implications and recommendations for coaching highly creative individuals, download our white paper, Way Outside the Box.

This axiom is all too relevant for entrepreneurs today. Companies like Google and Pixar embrace a collaborative and innovative culture with unconventional work hours and offices. Why do they go through such great lengths to foster their employees’ creativity? Because that’s what a creative employee’s personality demands.

A creative employee’s personality profile indicates that they’re idealistic, nonconforming, and tend to be unconcerned about money. Conversely, good managers tend to be stable, practical, and concerned with maintaining order and controlling costs.

Although they are psychological opposites, managers and creative people badly need one another.
Find out what 5 steps organizations can take to ensure they are properly managing their creative employees and driving innovation by downloading our complimentary ebook.

When it comes to understanding your employees, there are three things that matter.

1. What do they want?
2. How will they get what they want?
3. What will get in their way?

Our assessments provide insight you can leverage to get the most out of your people and help them get the most from their careers.

Hogan’s global network empowers us to provide assessments on six continents, in 43 languages and 56 countries. Hogan partner Peter Berry Consultancy discusses our position in the global HR market.

When discussing the topic of selection assessment with human resources professionals, it can be rather easy to overwhelm a non-technical audience by carrying on about job analysis, criterion validation, correlations, legal defensibility, etc. A former colleague of mine who worked as a sales representative used to say I was getting “I/O-ish” (as in Industrial/Organizational psychology) when I started using such terminology. Keep in mind that I’m the first person to advocate the merits of assessment validation for ensuring effective talent management solutions. However, my colleague made an important point that sometimes, in an effort to provide the details behind the psychometrics of implementing an assessment for candidate selection, we may inadvertently add complexity to the conversation. 

In order to provide a simple structure to explain the process for implementing a selection assessment, I devised what I’ve coined the “which hunt.” That is not a typo. I’m not referring to a witch hunt as in the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, nor does what I’m proposing resemble the McCarthyism of the 1950s. My concept of a which hunt is a series of discovery questions that an organization must answer to create a solid foundation for a high-quality assessment strategy that will support the identification of high potential candidates during the pre-employment screening process. An effective which hunt will help a company to identify:
• WHICH characteristics should we measure?
• WHICH assessment(s) should we use?
• WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?

WHICH characteristics should we measure?
You cannot hope to measure the potential for a candidate to be successful until you define which characteristics lead to success in a specific job. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is an online resource sponsored by the Department of Labor that reports profiles for over 800 occupations.  O*NET provides 277 data points for each occupation covering abilities, skills, knowledge, work styles, and other characteristics. Clearly, if O*NET is any indication, the process of defining a job profile of required characteristics can be a daunting proposition to an organization looking to implement an assessment program to measure such characteristics.
 
Rather than immediately getting into the details of job analysis or competency modeling, I find that a simple description of “can-do aptitudes” and “will-do attitudes” helps communicate the likely outcomes of this first step in the which hunt process. Can-do aptitudes refer to the mental horsepower of candidates such as cognitive abilities, demonstrated capability for job-specific skills, and mastery of specific areas of job knowledge. Put simply, having these aptitudes indicates that you can do the job, but we all know that not everyone lives up to their potential.

The will-do attitudes are often those characteristics that allow employees to meet their potential and can even lead an employee with less raw ability to actually succeed beyond those seemingly more talented colleagues. These work styles include conscientiousness, interpersonal savvy, stress tolerance, and achievement orientation, among others. Very smart, very talented employees often fall short of their full potential or fail because they do not work hard, do not play well with others (customers and/or teammates), and do not effectively manage pressures at work. 

Taken all together the required can-do and will-do characteristics form the success profile for that specific job.

WHICH assessment should I use?
The next step is to identify an assessment that measures these characteristics in candidates. As we do with most ventures in life, we might begin the search for an assessment provider by using our good friend Google. When you type “candidate selection assessment” into Google, the result includes over 1.5 million hits! Which one should you choose?

My message to human resource professionals is that the best assessment is one that measures the critical components of the success profile you identified in the first step of the which hunt. Your assessment strategy doesn’t have to measure the entire success profile (that’s why we conduct interviews, administer basic qualification questions, collect resumes, etc.), but there should be significant overlap. This may require the implementation of multiple assessments. For example at Hogan, we offer the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory to measure can-do characteristics, the Hogan Personality Inventory and Hogan Development Survey to measure will-do characteristics, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory to assess “will-fit” characteristics in terms of how a candidate might fit into the organization’s culture.

WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?
Now for the last leg of the which hunt – interpreting the assessment results. While this task seems easy enough – low scores fail and high scores pass –   the truth is that this can actually be quite challenging for multiple reasons. What do you do with scores in the middle? Is a 40 a good enough score or should I look for 50s and higher? If I have multiple scores for multiple characteristics, how do I know what scores are more important indicators of success? What if the candidate has high scores on some characteristics and low scores on others? It is a delicate process to draw the line in the sand and make appropriate sense of all the good information that assessments provide. 

This part of the which hunt gets a bit complicated despite my best efforts. The bottom line is that we must clearly understand the relationship between assessment scores and job performance. I find it helpful during this part of the conversation to use an analogy for the way a financial institution uses a credit score. If a bank is going to give someone a loan to purchase a house, they don’t just want to get a high level summary of age, income, salary, credit card debt, etc., and shoot from the hip on how to combine all of those data points into an estimation of investment risk for that person. Such an approach would be inconsistent, inaccurate, and not scalable. To make sound lending decisions over time, the bank leverages a proven, weighted equation to combine these data points into an easily interpretable credit score that is backed by research to increase the hit-rate for making profitable lending decisions (the recent housing market collapse aside). Standards have been set to categorize bad credit scores, good credit scores, and great credit scores. This is essentially how a validation study is used when implementing an assessment for candidate selection. We conduct research to give you overall low, moderate, or high evaluations of candidate potential that if used consistently will increase hit rates for selecting successful employees.

The which hunt guidelines break up the concepts of assessment implementation into concepts that are hopefully simple to grasp:  
• Before we can measure anything we must define a benchmark (i.e., success profile).
• We must use that benchmark to guide us to pick the right tool for the job (i.e., assessment).
• We have to know how to read the measurements the tool is giving us and do regular checkups to make sure the measurements are accurate (i.e., cut-scores).

Whether they make your skin crawl or tickle your fancy, the use of cliches has spread like wildfire over the years. These phrases, defined by their overuse, have flooded our everyday lives, making it difficult to get through a full day without hearing or speaking several. Critics discourage their use, especially in writing, as their presence indicates a lack of imagination. Further, many of these expressions are so overused and unnecessary they can be categorized as pure fluff. There are few positive views on these hackneyed phrases; however, I tend to enjoy them (in moderation).

First, their origins fascinate me. As reported by Life Magazine, the expression "hair of the dog that bit you," a common idea for curing a hangover, is derived from the medieval belief that if bitten by a rabid dog, pressing the hair of that dog to the wound could cure the infection. The term "falling on the sword," meaning to offer resignation or accept the consequences of fault, can be found in the Bible in reference to King Saul falling on his sword to commit suicide while in battle with the Philistines. Second, and more importantly, I am impressed by their ability to deliver our thoughts in a concise, succinct manner that would be difficult to verbalize otherwise. In this sense, cliches create a common language which is beneficial as they carry so much information in only a handful of words.