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Bad Attitude, Identify It Before You Hire It
- By Rob Mckay
- Published January 26, 2008
- Recruitment
- Unrated
Rob Mckay
Rob McKay MA(Hons) is an Industrial/Organisational Psychologist and Director of AssessSystems Aust/NZ Ltd. He specialises in employee assessment for selection and development and has over 30 years of practical hands on business experience. He can be reached at office@assess.co.nz or on the web at assess.co.nz
View all articles by Rob Mckay
Why use psychological testing within your selection process? Isn't this expensive? Don't you only use these tests for top executive appointments? Don't I need special training, or an Organisational Psychologist to conduct and interpret the test and its results?
These are common questions our team at AssessSystems field everyday. Psychological profiling for employee selection and development has come a long way over the last 10 years. Typically, testing covers two broad areas.
The first relates to the candidates' personal attributes, their innate characteristics, or personality, this gives us an idea of how a candidate will behave on the job - their attitude.
The second area is mental abilities; examples here are numerical, verbal, abstract thinking, mechanical skills, coding & checking tests etc. This gives us an insight into the candidates learning capacity, how they solve problems? What is their critical thinking like? Can they learn the required job skills quickly?
Jobs are different. People are different. Sometimes, even the right person can't do the job as well as expected. This begs the question, "What individual differences discriminate between top and average performers, what separates the best from the rest?"
Every job needs to "fit" the person's knowledge, skills, experience, mental ability, personality, attitudes and motivations (KSAME). Not every person meets the required level in each of these areas. The greater the mismatch between a person's KSAMEs and the requirements of the job, the more likely that mistakes, bad attitudes, and turnover will occur.
When individuals are hired, or promoted into the wrong jobs, productivity suffers and morale plummets. Personality and mental ability Tests help avoid matching the wrong person to the wrong job.
The tree analogy is a good graph example of the selection process; candidates only let you see what they want you to know. It's what they hide from you that is the danger.
The fruits of the tree represent the knowledge, skill and experience to do the job - this is teased out through the resume, interview and referencing. This is learned behaviour and therefore coachable, trainable and observable. This area tells us if they CAN do the job.
The roots of the tree is what is hidden. This relates to HOW, or WILL they will do the job. This is the area that most hiring managers fail to check. This relates to the innate personality and general intellect of the candidate. This is where you uncover a person's work attitude, how will they behave in certain situations; you can only get this through psychological profiling. It can also be argued that it is not trainable - it is who we are - our innate personality characteristics.
By the way, don't be fooled by experience. A candidate may have had ten years experience, but it may have really been one year, that was bad and they have repeated it nine times!
Remember, for most non technical jobs it is better to hire on attitudes and train for aptitude - you can teach people how to do a job, but you can't teach them the innate personality characteristics and mental abilities that govern how, or if they will do it.
Through the use of Psychological Profiling, interests, attitude, motivation and mental abilities can now be evaluated effectively, helping managers to predict and coach performance with incredible accuracy by being able to answer questions like these:
Will the person be "customer driven"?
How will the person handle stress, work pace and work with other people?
Will they be reliable and dependable?
What's their follow through, personal organisation like?
Are they motivated to persuade and influence customers to buy?
Will they have the ability to handle simple calculations and verbal interactions?
Psychological Profiling helps you reliably and legally identify employees who are trustworthy and hardworking, good team players, and have the potential to be effective leaders, managers, and top performing salespeople.
Psychological profiling help hiring managers and business owners differentiate between the leaders and followers, inspirers and de-motivators, decisive and wishy-washy, emotionally stable and easily excited, organized and reactive, outgoing and reserved, risk-takers and risk-adverse, competitive and cooperative, assertive and timid.
Psychological profiling can even help identify the likelihood of employees who will be productive or disruptive. The good news is that it doesn't take radical surgery to move from hiring "just okay" to "optimum" performers no matter what size your business. You can optimise your business starting with your next hire by placing your employees in the right place, in the right way, by using a structured interview approach and backing this up with psychological profiling. The cost is negligible, when you consider a wrong hire has been estimated to cost an employer between 40 and 60% of the annual wage.
Many people perceive psychological testing as expensive, the domain of top executive appointments, dependent on the role; costs vary between $50 and $500. Total interview kits applicable to specific job role cost around $50. It's amazing how many managers quibble over spending a couple of hundred dollars to "get it right first time".
At AssessSystems, we have a saying - "Why hire a turkey and teach it to climb a tree, wouldn't it be better to hire a squirrel?"
Rob McKay MA(Hons) is an Industrial/Organisational Psychologist and Director of AssessSystems Aust/NZ Ltd. He specialises in employee assessment for selection and development and has over 30 years of practical hands on business experience.
He can be reached at [mailto:rob@assess.co.nz]rob@assess.co.nz or http://www.7steps4hiring.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rob_McKay http://EzineArticles.com/?Bad-Attitude,-Identify-It-Before-You-Hire-It&id=820724
These are common questions our team at AssessSystems field everyday. Psychological profiling for employee selection and development has come a long way over the last 10 years. Typically, testing covers two broad areas.
The first relates to the candidates' personal attributes, their innate characteristics, or personality, this gives us an idea of how a candidate will behave on the job - their attitude.
The second area is mental abilities; examples here are numerical, verbal, abstract thinking, mechanical skills, coding & checking tests etc. This gives us an insight into the candidates learning capacity, how they solve problems? What is their critical thinking like? Can they learn the required job skills quickly?
Jobs are different. People are different. Sometimes, even the right person can't do the job as well as expected. This begs the question, "What individual differences discriminate between top and average performers, what separates the best from the rest?"
Every job needs to "fit" the person's knowledge, skills, experience, mental ability, personality, attitudes and motivations (KSAME). Not every person meets the required level in each of these areas. The greater the mismatch between a person's KSAMEs and the requirements of the job, the more likely that mistakes, bad attitudes, and turnover will occur.
When individuals are hired, or promoted into the wrong jobs, productivity suffers and morale plummets. Personality and mental ability Tests help avoid matching the wrong person to the wrong job.
The tree analogy is a good graph example of the selection process; candidates only let you see what they want you to know. It's what they hide from you that is the danger.
The fruits of the tree represent the knowledge, skill and experience to do the job - this is teased out through the resume, interview and referencing. This is learned behaviour and therefore coachable, trainable and observable. This area tells us if they CAN do the job.
The roots of the tree is what is hidden. This relates to HOW, or WILL they will do the job. This is the area that most hiring managers fail to check. This relates to the innate personality and general intellect of the candidate. This is where you uncover a person's work attitude, how will they behave in certain situations; you can only get this through psychological profiling. It can also be argued that it is not trainable - it is who we are - our innate personality characteristics.
By the way, don't be fooled by experience. A candidate may have had ten years experience, but it may have really been one year, that was bad and they have repeated it nine times!
Remember, for most non technical jobs it is better to hire on attitudes and train for aptitude - you can teach people how to do a job, but you can't teach them the innate personality characteristics and mental abilities that govern how, or if they will do it.
Through the use of Psychological Profiling, interests, attitude, motivation and mental abilities can now be evaluated effectively, helping managers to predict and coach performance with incredible accuracy by being able to answer questions like these:
Will the person be "customer driven"?
How will the person handle stress, work pace and work with other people?
Will they be reliable and dependable?
What's their follow through, personal organisation like?
Are they motivated to persuade and influence customers to buy?
Will they have the ability to handle simple calculations and verbal interactions?
Psychological Profiling helps you reliably and legally identify employees who are trustworthy and hardworking, good team players, and have the potential to be effective leaders, managers, and top performing salespeople.
Psychological profiling help hiring managers and business owners differentiate between the leaders and followers, inspirers and de-motivators, decisive and wishy-washy, emotionally stable and easily excited, organized and reactive, outgoing and reserved, risk-takers and risk-adverse, competitive and cooperative, assertive and timid.
Psychological profiling can even help identify the likelihood of employees who will be productive or disruptive. The good news is that it doesn't take radical surgery to move from hiring "just okay" to "optimum" performers no matter what size your business. You can optimise your business starting with your next hire by placing your employees in the right place, in the right way, by using a structured interview approach and backing this up with psychological profiling. The cost is negligible, when you consider a wrong hire has been estimated to cost an employer between 40 and 60% of the annual wage.
Many people perceive psychological testing as expensive, the domain of top executive appointments, dependent on the role; costs vary between $50 and $500. Total interview kits applicable to specific job role cost around $50. It's amazing how many managers quibble over spending a couple of hundred dollars to "get it right first time".
At AssessSystems, we have a saying - "Why hire a turkey and teach it to climb a tree, wouldn't it be better to hire a squirrel?"
Rob McKay MA(Hons) is an Industrial/Organisational Psychologist and Director of AssessSystems Aust/NZ Ltd. He specialises in employee assessment for selection and development and has over 30 years of practical hands on business experience.
He can be reached at [mailto:rob@assess.co.nz]rob@assess.co.nz or http://www.7steps4hiring.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rob_McKay http://EzineArticles.com/?Bad-Attitude,-Identify-It-Before-You-Hire-It&id=820724