The Middle East and Africa Association of Test Publishers (MEA-ATP) held their inaugural conference entitled “Education Technology in the Middle East and North Africa: Unlocking Student Potential,” in Abu Dhabi on January 28-30. As a gold sponsor, Hogan sent now-former CEO Scott Gregory, Senior Consultant Darin Nei, and Director of Asia Pacific Business Development, Krista Pederson to attend and present on various topics along with several of Hogan’s distributors in the region, including Career Connections in Kenya, Mentis in the UAE, UK, and Thailand, Baltas in Turkey, and JvR Africa in South Africa.

Scooping up the first speaking session of the day, Scott and Krista presented Hogan’s take on using personality to assess General Employability, while Madeleine Dunford of Career Connections, and Andrew Salisbury of Mentis, followed by sharing Hogan case studies.

During the next session, Darin and Scott discussed the merits of Competencies and how Hogan maps them, while Nicola from JvR Africa, and Ekin Capar from Baltas, shared Hogan competencies case studies from South Africa and Saudi Arabia.  Hogan Distributor JvR Africa also made an additional three presentations across the course of the conference.

Some strong themes from the conference included Technology and how to use technology to further advance the assessment market in education and all other fields; General Employability, especially the need to assess student graduates and other entry level employees on this; and Education Assessment, and how to use assessment to promote further development of the field of education. During the conference, Senior Officials from the UAE announced the launch of MESA, the Moral Education Standardised Assessment, becoming the first nation to implement standardized testing for moral education.  

Hogan is a long-time sponsor of the Association of Test Publishers (ATP), supporting various events across the word including the main “Innovations in Testing” conference each year in the US; the E-ATP conference held in Europe each year; and smaller events organized by the Asia-ATP steering board. 

Whether getting Hogan certified is one of your New Year’s resolutions or something you’ve been planning to cross off your bucket list, there are several Hogan Assessment Certification Workshops planned throughout the United States in 2019. By completing this two-day program, you will be able to administer and interpret Hogan’s three core assessments: the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory.

If you are already Hogan certified and want to hone your feedback skills, you should consider registering for the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop, previously known as Hogan Level 2 Certification. This one-day workshop was designed for practitioners who want to receive more extensive instruction and opportunities to practice delivering effective feedback.

In addition, Hogan certified users can now register for the newly-developed Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop. This one-day workshop was designed for practitioners who want to gain more advanced instruction and practice on how to interpret Hogan assessment profiles. Attendees will also gain a deeper understanding of how to extract maximum interpretive value from Hogan scales and subscales.

The workshops will be offered in multiple cities across the United States throughout 2019, with the advanced workshops occurring on the third day. Participants can complete the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop during the first two days with the option to attend either the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop or the Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop on the third day. Each of the two, one-day advanced workshops are also available upon request for those who have previously completed the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop. Hogan certified users can email training@hoganassessments.com to register for an advanced workshop separately.

Click here to learn more about Hogan’s three certification programs.

At Hogan, we work with organizations every day to help them identify effective leaders using a data-driven approach leveraging the predictive power of our personality assessments. To ensure our services are the best in the business, we have spent decades studying successful and failed leaders.

Our data show that three psychological factors have a profound influence on leadership effectiveness: charisma, narcissism, and humility. Charismatic and narcissistic CEOs have plagued organizations for decades. However, their strong political skills and ability to stand out from the rest of the pack have helped them emerge as leaders within their organizations. On the other hand, humble leaders often go unnoticed, largely because they focus primarily on their teams and not drawing attention to themselves, but research shows they are more likely to be effective leaders.

Join Ryne Sherman, chief science officer of Hogan Assessments, for a webinar hosted by Talent Quarterly 10 am EST on Monday, February 14 as he discusses these three leadership qualities and why “The Charismatic CEO is Dead.” Register here!

Over the years, we’ve discovered growing enthusiasm for identifying leadership potential, since talented leaders drive success. Unfortunately, many organizations make a critical mistake at the very beginning of the process – they don’t define potential in a way that leads to the selection of strong leaders.

Through our decades of research, we’ve found the person who draws attention to himself and performs well at his role may turn out to be a dud as a manager. And those who might perform best at the role might never get the opportunity to lead since they focus on their job and don’t draw attention.  

The Hogan High Potential Talent Report can help. This new video will walk you through the process, from our streamlined definition of success to personality characteristics of effective leaders.

The trend toward Big Data shows no signs of slowing down, as businesses, organizations, and governments continue incorporating new technology in the race to collect an almost unfathomable amount of information. But a more critical problem remains – what do you do with all that data? How can you find something useful within?

In this video, Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments, discusses how Hogan has embraced Big Data from the very beginning in order to study one of the most complex subjects of all – the human mind.

*This article was originally published on November 2 by People Matters.

Agility in leadership is about the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance at a rapid pace. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership?

The leadership consulting industry loves catchphrases. Popular ones include transformational leadership, servant leadership, boundless bravery, coherent confidence, learning agility, grit, and now agile leadership. These are all superfluous words consultants use to keep their work current in the eyes of consumers.

The challenge with all these phrases is the majority are just a repackaging of what we have known for a long time: personality predicts leadership performance. The lens through which personality is viewed – and the buzzwords – can change; but in the end, personality is just that: personality.  

This brings us to “Agile Leadership”, which some describe as the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance (i.e. people, processes, and innovation) at a rapid pace. Sure, information is flowing at faster rates than ever before, and leaders are being asked to integrate all of this into real-time decisions. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership? Although the evidence-based answer is still pending, our preliminary findings suggest that the majority of high-potential leaders simply need the organization’s environment to change. Many of these leaders are already fighting what McKinsey describes as the “machine organization.” Specifically, their goal is to introduce a new mindset of collaboration, new technology, less structure, and higher team engagement — but most have to fight against their organization’s old-fashioned ways. 

We believe the discussion should not just focus on digitization and the speed of change. Equally important to the debate is the need for strategic self-awareness — the ability to be introspective while listening to outside opinions of oneself. A stronger focus on self-awareness is the underpinning of true agility. The characteristics of great leaders include the ability to understand how they view themselves, and how that aligns or departs from how others view them. Accordingly, leaders like those at ING, Pixar, Alibaba, and Walmart would be appropriately described as having agility. 

Three things can occur to help drive leadership agility in organizations. First, recognition that many leaders have the necessary characteristics to survive in the digital world; they just need to be unleashed. Second, that organizations, not so much the people in them, need to change structures to tear down silos. Third, using valid personality measures can facilitate the awareness that current and future leaders need in order to keep the concept of agility top of mind.

Agile leadership is important, but it is not new. It is just being rediscovered. The emphasis must be put not only on the individual, but also the organization. Some organizations are so stuck in the past that agile leaders waste most of their energy fighting history. So, let us not get so awestruck by a new phrase that we forget the basics of effective leadership — to build and maintain high-performing teams. Industry buzzwords will continue to change, and in 2019 there will undoubtedly be a new catchphrase that enamors organizations. However, what won’t change are the tenets of leadership that translate to organizational success, and those can be measured using valid personality assessments. 

Hogan will expand its Global Learning offerings in 2019 with the new Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop.

The one-day workshop will focus on how to analyze themes and connect personality scales across Hogan’s core assessments, allowing attendees to gain a deeper understanding of how to extract maximum interpretive value from Hogan scales and subscales. Jackie VanBroekhoven Sahm, Hogan’s Director of Global Learning, said the new program was developed based on two years of participant feedback.

“In early 2017 we launched the Hogan Level 2 Certification Workshop, which focused more on advanced feedback delivery of Hogan profiles,” said Sahm. “What we discovered in post-workshop surveys was there was also a popular demand to take a deeper dive into Hogan scale interpretation. So, we decided to expand our program offerings accordingly as part of our commitment to create the best user experience possible.”

Beginning in January 2019, Hogan will offer the following workshops in the United States:

Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop – This two-day program, previously known as Hogan Level 1 Certification, qualifies professionals to administer and interpret Hogan’s three core assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory.

Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop – This program, previously known as Hogan Level 2 Certification, is a one-day add-on workshop designed for practitioners who want to get certified and also receive more extensive instruction and opportunities to practice delivering effective Hogan feedback.

Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop – This newly-developed program is a one-day add-on workshop designed for practitioners who want to get Hogan certified and also gain more advanced instruction and practice on how to interpret Hogan assessment profiles.

The workshops will be offered in multiple cities across the United States throughout 2019, with the advanced workshops occurring on the third day. Participants can complete the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop during the first two days with the option to attend either the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop or the Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop on the third day. Each of the two, one-day advanced workshops are also available upon request for those who have previously completed the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop. Hogan Certified users can email training@hoganassessments.com to register for an advanced workshop separately.

“We put a major emphasis on ensuring our learners have the tools they need to be successful, and that begins with listening and responding to customer feedback,” said Sahm. “What we learned is that people find tremendous value in our workshops and leave wanting even more. That’s why we developed the new advanced interpretation workshop, and we will continue to explore new additions to Hogan Global Learning curriculum in the future.”

Click here to learn more about Hogan’s three certification programs.

Awair, an authorized Hogan distributor in Italy, Spain, and France, hosted an event on November 14 in Milan attended by nearly 50 members of the Italian community of Hogan Certified talent management experts. The lively session allowed participants to network, expand their knowledge of Hogan competencies, and to share experiences. 

Over the years, the community of certified people has been growing significantly, and many of the participants have shown interest in meeting and exchanging ideas. With facilitation by Andrea Facchini, Awair Partner and Hogan expert, Awair launched the first Italian Hogan Certified Community, with a remarkable turnout of people ready to share their Hogan knowledge at the November 14 event.

During the meeting, Andrea introduced three main topics requested by participants via survey (Report Selection: How to choose the most appropriate Hogan product. Feedback & delivery: Sharing success and stories and lessons learned, as well as tips for more creative and efficient feedback. Report interpretation: How to handle critical profiles and to look at interdimensional conflicts from a different angle) and then opened the floor to the participants for continued interaction and discussion.

The benefits of being part of the community include:

1. Keeping your Hogan knowledge up-to-date
2. Advancing by learning from practical, real examples
3. Meeting like-minded people, listening, and sharing experiences
4. Expanding your professional network

For those who are not certified, Hogan Certification allows attendees to develop a deep knowledge and understanding of the tools. By leveraging the predictive power, use of the assessments can boost organizational performance by identifying and addressing both the individual and the organizational development areas. But that’s not all: Hogan Certification provides participants with a set of skills that changes their way of looking at the nature of human nature.

Awair has organized Hogan Certification Programs in Milano and Roma since 2015, and has certified over 400 HR experts, including HR professionals at several levels, as well as talent management consultants, coaches, and psychologists.

The meeting on November 14 was a pilot and the feedback was so positive and enthusiastic that more meetings have been scheduled for 2019 in Italy. Also, keep an eye out for the launch of a Hogan Certified Community in France and Spain as well.

A recent article in the Washington Post described a new service from a company called Predictim that claims to help people find the perfect babysitter. The service scans the would-be sitter’s entire Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram history, then uses recent advances in personality and data analytics to assess four “personality features” — propensity toward Bullying / Harassment, Disrespectfulness / Bad Attitude, Explicit Content, and Drug Abuse.

At face value, this type of service has merit. There is a plethora of recent research demonstrating that social media profiles and word use on Twitter reflect the personalities of their users. Thus, it is sensible to think you could combine social media profiles and behavior to predict how a person might behave on the job.

However, these services ignore a long history of research showing that people strongly respond to incentives and will modify or even falsify their responses to succeed. This is a major problem, not just for Predictim, but for any service offering to evaluate someone’s work potential on the basis of their social media pages. Let me explain.

In the mid-2000’s, many employers started using text-searching programs to quickly sift through resumes. This worked just fine until savvy applicants found ways to stuff their resumes with keywords. A simple tactic was to put loads of keywords typically used by employers to select candidates in their resume in white font. When printed, the white font is undetectable to the human eye (on white paper, of course). However, the computers slogging through resumes picked up all of those keywords hidden on the resume, increasing the applicant’s chances of being selected.

Today, text-searching technology has gone beyond keyword-only searches to use natural language to weed out such strategies. However, the point is not about resume stuffing. The point is job applicants strongly respond to incentives and will try to trick or cheat the system to get selected.

In 2013, researchers demonstrated that “Liking” curly fries on Facebook was associated with higher IQ scores. However, as this curious finding made its way through the media, the relationship quickly disappeared; liking curly fries no longer predicts IQ scores. People thought they would appear smarter if they liked curly fries on Facebook, so everyone started liking them, eliminating the relationship.

Which brings us back to choosing babysitters via social media analysis. Virtually all the research mentioned in the opening paragraph demonstrating that personality is linked with social media usage was done in a context in which the people being studied had no incentive to be dishonest. However, when people know their social media profiles are being used to measure their intelligence and select them for jobs, they will start gaming their social media profiles to beat the system. If there is an incentive to have a “clean” social media profile, people will have them.

In fact, many people already have both “professional” and “personal” Facebook accounts. Which account do you think they submit to a potential employer who asks? Which Instagram account will the potential babysitter send to parents?

With employers using social media records to make personnel decisions, the stakes of social media use have become much larger. When careers are at stake, people will carefully cultivate social media profiles to maximize their chances of getting the job. If employers continue to do this, services that specialize in creating sanitized social media accounts for job applicants will emerge. How will employers combat these services? How will firms that assess personality via social media know that the profile they are getting is the real “Risky Rebecca” and not the professionally cultivated “Responsible Rebecca?”

Faking is a common problem in the personnel selection industry, though traditional personality assessments based on questionnaires tackled this issue long ago. Simply put, faking a questionnaire-based personality assessment is extremely difficult and many people who try to fake on such assessments get worse job-fit scores than they would have gotten if they had simply answered honestly. Faking a social media-based personality assessment is much easier, as you just need to keep content positive and to a minimum. If social media analysis companies cannot solve the faking problem, it will quickly put an end to their business model.

Nicole Neubauer, CEO of metaBeratung, an official Hogan distributor in Europe, was recently featured at Rethink! HR Tech Europe in Berlin along with members of her team. Neubauer presented on the importance of valid assessments during the conference.

The event, attended by more than 150 CHROs and HR decision-makers from renowned European companies such as Siemens, Daimler, and SAP, is considered one of Europe’s leading HR summits.

Presenting alongside Neubauer was Lidija Sljeric, senior talent manager at Mondi AG. Over the past two years, metaBeratung has worked alongside Mondi to implement new, cutting-edge processes for employee selection and development by integrating Hogan’s assessments. The project’s success was directly responsible for the selection of Neubauer and Sljeric as featured presenters at the event.

“Rethink! HR Tech Europe offered us the perfect venue and audience to talk about the work we have undertaken with our friends at Mondi,” said Neubauer. “The need for valid personality assessment in the workplace has never been greater, and this provided us with an opportunity to share that message with some of Europe’s leading HR executives.”

Also attending were Neubauer’s Director, Simone Pelzer, and Associate, Kerstin Danzl, who represented metaBeratung’s booth at the event. By doing so, the two helped the company project a strong presence among an international audience of key influencers in the HR industry.

“I’m so fortunate to have such a talented and vibrant team that works tirelessly to accomplish our goal of improving the European workforce,” said Neubauer. “But most importantly, they understand how to have fun throughout the process. That’s what makes my job so rewarding.”

Rethink! HR Tech Europe allowed CHROs and other HR executives to discuss key industry topics, share knowledge, create new partnerships, and identify opportunities for their business. Key topics featured included HR Digitalization, HR Technologies, recruitment, agile change management, and more.