PUBLISHED ARTICLES

One of the hottest topics that managers in China and all over the world today are facing is how to successfully select and develop their talent. How can this be done in a practical and consistent way? To find a reliable, consistent and cost effective way to select, develop and retain qualified employees is the key to any business. We will discuss this topic in-depth this week.

All our experience and most research indicate that it is attitudes and personal behavior patterns (rather than a lack of technical skills) that keeps employees and managers from being excellent and reaching their full potential. This dilemma might be avoided by using a recruitment process including a behavioral assessment tool when selecting and developing employees in a company. Time invested in training and development will be much more productive. There are though four important criteria an assessment tool has to pass to be effective and useful in a recruitment process and/or talent management process:

1) Can the assessment be customized to be job specific? A good assessment tool will provide you with the knowledge of which factors that relate to success for each specific position. This should be based on performance research, which identifies the factors or behaviors that distinguish high performers from the poor performers (not just focusing on good or normal performance). Unless the behavioral assessment offers you this capability, you will only be guessing at how to interpret the results. And, if different people in your organization use the assessment, they will each be guessing in a different manner.

2) Does the assessment measure enough behavioral traits? Research suggests that a minimum of 100 behaviors or preferences are necessary to enable job specific talent suitability. The reason the system will need enough information is to be able to be used for different positions. If too few traits or behaviors are measured it will be impossible to distinguish highly suitable candidates from less suitable ones. Systems that use all traits for all positions usually lack clarity and consistency.

3) How easy is the assessment to deceive? This is especially important when the assessment is used for recruitment. Many assessments are easy to cheat and thus make the results very unreliable and less useful from these systems. Ideally a system should check for consistency in a sophisticated manner and let the user know if it is too low so corrections can be made. This is very important since all assessment result relies on correct input from the person assessed.

4) How easy is it to use the assessment? If the system can only be used by psychologists it will be very costly to administer. Your assessment tool should be able to tell you the behavioral suitability of the person for a particular position. It should offer guidance for attracting candidates, retaining employees based on their specific needs, and how to develop employees in relationship to a specific position.

The above requirements demands sophisticated technology and methodology, we cannot expect that every product on the market will do the job. Unless the assessment tool chosen can meet these standards, the potential benefits will be very small for an organization.

- Peter J Karlsson