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).

You may not have realized, but March happens to be a very eventful month. Some noteworthy festivities this month include Mardi Gras (8th), St. Patrick’s Day (17th), Spring Break, Easter (some years), and the vernal equinox or first day of Spring (20th). Some lesser known, albeit random, contenders for March dates are: If Pets Had Thumbs Day (3rd), Multiple Personality Day (5th), Ear Muff Day (13th), Extraterrestrial Abduction Day (20th), and finally a holiday that seems to capture the theme of this blog, National Make up your own Holiday Day (26th).

Today March 15^th, or the Ides of March, denotes the first day of the Roman New Year and first day of spring (also Roman). Historically, the Ides of March is also associated with the stabbing and subsequent overthrow of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.E. If you remember back to your high school English course, or visit Wikipedia, you may recall that Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate in a coup d'tat led by Brutus.

It is not a far stretch to correlate this story to a modern corporate organization. While there may not be physical acts of violence in the boardroom, the rules and players remain the same; specifically, Chairman is to Caesar as the C-Suite is to the Senate. Corporate culture in many Fortune 500 companies mirror this ruthless style and are defined by such mentality as “kill or be killed”; therefore, it is no surprise that organizational failure is driven at the top by self-interested leaders.

As a manager, or leader at any level in the business world, it is crucial to understand how specific individuals in your organization will compete in the corporate game. To this end, Hogan assessments can describe an individual’s day-to-day behavior (HPI), stress-induced derailers (HDS), and core motivators (MVPI). This comprehensive profile of an individual’s personality characteristics relate to business potential, organizational effectiveness, and the ultimate ability to predict job performance.

So the next time you are curious when an employee stumbles in the office late on March 9^th or 18^th, you can look to their Hogan assessment results to determine, with a high degree of certainty, whether or not they celebrated excessively (i.e. Hedonism, Mischievous, Tradition, Sociability). Unfortunately, for characters like Julius Caesar, there is no specific scale that captures propensity to overthrow as would have proven beneficial 2,054 years ago today. However, there are numerous scales that indicate if and how a person will make it to the top and that information can be just as invaluable.

Have you ever wondered why people fall in love? What drives that spark, the initial attraction, and the eventual relationship? Relationships have been in the news a lot this week. On Valentine’s Day, there were stories of couples trying to obtain the record for the longest kiss, how the Obamas keep romance alive in the White House, and whether employees give their “work spouse” a Valentine. The last of these headlines really caught my eye. An article by Eve Tahmincioglu on msnbc.com describes the work spouse as someone with whom you have camaraderie during the long work days. The article cites a number of examples of what this “spousal relationship” may look like, but in general a “work spouse” is someone you speak to when making a business decision, someone who buys the coffee creamer you both like so you can share, or maybe it’s the person to whom you vent during a difficult day.

After spending time thinking about this and taking a walk around the Hogan office to observe some of this camaraderie in action, I think MSNBC may be on to something. Considering the fact that we spend the majority of our waking hours in the work environment, it is important to find colleagues that we can connect with and an organization that we consider a home away from home. In fact a recent survey by OfficeMax found that approximately 50% of respondents admit to having this type of platonic connection in the workplace.

Although the idea of having these friendships in the workplace is appealing and intuitive, these relationships are probably more of a cultural phenomenon. Research has shown that individuals in certain industries tend to report these relationships more than others. Specifically, individuals in Human Resources, Sales, and Marketing are more likely to establish these workplace friendships than are Finance and IT professionals. What is it about these industries that drives the employees to seek out these connections in the workplace? The culture! For those of you who’ve spent some time in the areas of Human Resources and Marketing you will generally find a group of employees who are motivated by collaboration and establishing alliances with others to get things done. In Sales, developing relationships both internally and with clients is imperative for longevity and growth. In contrast, IT and Finance professionals are likely driven by analytical decision making and the bottom line over that of collaborative decision making and building a community within the organization.

When thinking about the key drivers for these industries in Hogan language, we are referring to the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI). The MVPI is an assessment that provides insight regarding one’s key motives and drivers. This assessment is often used in a selection context to determine if a candidate’s motives and drivers align with an organization. As a result, the MVPI is a powerful tool for predicting cultural fit and ultimately an employee’s satisfaction with an organization. For those individuals in IT and Finance roles, the need for analytical decision making and a focus on the bottom line is related to the MVPI Science and Commerce scales. In contrast, the Human Resources, Customer Service/Sales, and Marketing industries consist of employees who may have a need for collaboration, building a community, or a “work spouse.” These drivers are related to the MVPI Affiliation and Altruistic scales.

A recent review of IT and Sales professionals in the Hogan archive further supported this need for Affiliation and Altruism for individuals in Sales/Customer Service roles. In particular, it was found that Sales professionals have mean scores of 71.9% and 56.3 % on Affiliation and Altruistic, respectively. In contrast, IT professionals indicate a much lower need for collaboration and building a sense of community with mean percentile scores of 53.6% and 48.3%.

So what does this information tell us about “work spouses” and Valentine’s Day? It tells us that organizational culture matters and feeling as if one’s values and drivers align with the organization is key to a successful and long term working relationship.

With regards to some of those previously mentioned headlines you may be wondering about, the record for the longest kiss is 46 hours. The Obamas keep the romance alive with laughter but the First Lady would not mind a little jewelry on Valentine’s Day either. Should you have gotten a Valentine for your “work spouse?” It depends. If your “work spouse” is your actual significant other, a nice dinner and some chocolate never hurt anyone.