Make Sure People Will Fit - Before You Hire Them!
By: Dr. Janice Presser, of The Gabriel Institute
Hiring people is usually thought of as a supply-side activity. You know what you need and you try to get the best for the least. No argument there. But taking it to the next level, you can also hire for fit with your organization’s unique culture. Since your culture is a function of how people interact, you’ll need to measure your candidates’ ability to team in the distinct way your company requires.
Teaming Characteristics
The biggest challenge in any job is often something other than the knowledge, skills, and talents we hire for. It’s the way we expect people to work together. That’s true whether we’re talking about a development team, a short-term project staff and the client, or a sales person and their prospect. It’s all about the teaming characteristics needed to nurture, secure, and maintain those relationships.
“Building coherent teams in high growth startup companies is one of the most reliable predictors of success. Role-Based Assessment gives our management team a powerful too and has provided our portfolio companies with a significant competitive advantage.”
Edward Melia
Managing Director
Revolve, Inc. |
Personality traits have been extensively measured and applied to business situations, but they focus on the ‘components’ of an individual—not on the holistic aspects of ‘teaming’, which predict how well a person will work with others in a given context. Someone with great teaming characteristics can get along with almost anyone, in almost any situation. But even those who don’t enjoy chit-chat can still have fine teaming characteristics. It’s all a matter of what the environment demands vs. what (and how) a person is oriented to contributing.
What Does Your Organization Demand?
This may seem like a frivolous question, but it’s critical if you want to weed out, in advance, those who are likely to ‘wash out’ within the first few weeks or months. Remember, you are looking for fit. There are no right and wrong answers. And these are just a few questions for your consideration:
- Does your organizational culture give opportunities to people who want to move into a new role or try something they've never done before? If so, does it also give them the support they need to succeed?
- For managers, in particular, does your organizational culture favor power players or cordial citizens? Does either type have a lock on seats in the boardroom? What is your preferred metric for managerial performance?
- Does your organizational culture expect people to be more than workers? For example, does the company value what people do outside the organization, whether what they do serves themselves as individuals, the company, or society as a whole? Is personal growth supported and valued, or is it seen as a waste of time or a diversion from work?
This is also a good time to ask yourself if you apply these demands across the board or only to some positions – or people. There’s no value in increasing the quality of your hires when you’re also exposing the company to claims of unequal treatment, harassment, or discrimination.
Improving Your Hiring Process
There is a great deal of activity these days around Quality of Hire, and recent industry surveys indicate a rapid increase of interest in employee assessment tools. But it’s not enough to buy a product that claims to tell you where people will ‘fit’, and says it’s been ‘validated’. For example, such assessments will confirm that most salespeople have similar personality traits—but as anyone who has ever hired or managed salespeople can tell you, personality does not equal performance! What you are looking for is a way to predict a person’s ability to add value, and that means answering only one question: Did your new hiring process demonstrate sustainable positive impact on your bottom line?
As W. Edwards Deming observed, decades ago, “Put a good person in a bad system, and the system will win, hands-down.” So in order to improve your hiring process, you should also take a look at some of your current onboarding and operational processes. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- Do your new employees ‘onboard’ quickly? Do they merge seamlessly into your – or your customer’s - cultural mainstream and quickly learn how to work well within it? Do people stay with you or do you have double-digit turnover? Is your turnover higher in the positions most critical to your success?
- Do your qualified employees advance in the organization? Do they seek out challenging assignments and invest in their own career development, or is that kind of initiative discouraged?
- Are your performance reviews opportunities for growth, development, and encouragement – or threats of termination?
- Are your staff members advocates for your organization and their colleagues? Do they mentor others, resolve conflicts effectively, and bring more to the table every day?
- Do your managers seem to galvanize their work team to achieve more creative undertakings? Do they add to the intellectual and social capital of the organization?
- Do you have totally satisfied customers? Your customers can be external or internal – either way, customer satisfaction has been demonstrated to have a positive effect on the bottom line.
Doing it Better, Faster, Cheaper
The bad news is that, if you look objectively at the overall picture, you are likely to uncover some problem areas. The good news is that hiring people with good teaming characteristics will tend to make process improvements easier to identify and implement, and you don’t need a crystal ball to predict how people will work together in a team. You just have to use the right tool: one that was designed to measure how people will perform in teams. There's a completely new way to do this, called Role-Based Assessment (RBA), and it works better than trying to make assumptions about how one personality might work with another. This is business – not an exercise in touchy-feely.
It's no hassle, since it’s all handled online. Ok, that’s two – better and faster. Everyone knows you can’t get all three, and most of the time you’re lucky if you get two. But since you’re a member of NASVF, we’re going to do a little magic and get you all three.
The next time you’re hiring someone, pick your top five applicants and contact us. Then, just let us know that you heard about RBA in this newsletter and we will provide RBA reports on all of them at no cost. What have you got to lose?
Find out more at www.TheGabrielInstitute.com.
Follow Dr. Janice via Twitter!!, blogs on Wordpress at 'Ask Dr. Janice
', 'CEO2CEO', and 'Tools4Careers' and networks on LinkedIn.
back to top  
Member Spotlight
Construction has begun on the Kansas Bioscience Park Venture Accelerator, a public-private partnership with the Kansas Bioscience Authority (KBA) and the City of Olathe, Kansas. The first building on the 2.12 acre site will feature highly-flexible laboratories, built-in modules that can be leased individually or in small increments then grouped to form larger business blocks as the tenant company matures and grows. The Kansas Bioscience Authority and Heartland BioVentures headquarters offices will also be located within the incubator facility. Building completion is expected by February 2011.
NASVF member, The Kansas Bioscience Authority (KBA), is a $581-million economic development initiative that is expanding Kansas' world-class research capacity; helping bioscience startups grow; developing the state's bioscience clusters; and facilitating business expansion and attraction. The KBA is an independent entity of the state governed by an 11-member board of directors comprised of local and national leaders in technology, science, and business.
http://www.kansasbioauthority.org/news/Detail.aspx?id=84
back to top
Calendar of Events
When: Jan 31 10 2:00pm - Feb 2 10 5:00pm
When: Feb 24 10 - Feb 25 10
When: Mar 16 10 7:30am - Mar 17 10 9:00pm
When: All Day Mar 18 10 - Mar 20 10
When: All Day Mar 24 10 - Mar 25 10
When: Jun 22 10 8:00am - Jun 25 10 1:00pm
View the NASVF Calendar Online
back to top
|
