Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Assess to Select the Best. My name is Nicole Clout, Marketing Manager at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to all registered attendees. The email contained a webinar attendance sign-in sheet, a guide to downloading your Certificate of Continuing Education, and a PDF of today's presentation. The handouts are also available now and can be found in the handout section located near the bottom of your GoToWebinar toolbox. If there are multiple listeners at your location, please circulate the attendance sheet and send the completed sign-in sheet back to PCI per the instructions on the form. The attendance sheet is only for use at locations with multiple listeners on the line. If you are the only person at your location, there is no need to complete the attendance sheet, as we already have your information from registration. If you cannot download any of the handouts, please email PCI Marketing at marketing.pci.org, as shown on your screen. Please note that all attendee lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane, where I'll be keeping track of them to reach the presenter during the Q&A period. Also, a pop-up survey will appear after the webinar ends. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI eLearning Center. PCI has met the standards and requirements of the Registered Continuing Education Program, RCEP. We can offer one PDH for this presentation. Credit earned on completion of this program will be reported to RCEP.net. A Certificate of Completion will be issued to each participant. As such, it does not include content that may be deemed or construed to be in approval or endorsement by RCEP. With hundreds of attendees for our webinars, it is impractical to prepare individual certificates. As PCI has met the standards and requirements of the Registered Continuing Education Program, we will upload attendance data to www.rcep.net within 10 days, and you can print your Certificates of Continuing Education. Your login name at www.rcep.net is your email address, so please do not leave that blank if you are completing the sign-in sheet. We need your email address to get you your certificate for this course. AIA credit is not being offered for this presentation. The course description for this webinar is, We're all familiar with the hard and soft costs associated with poor employee selection decisions. However, perhaps more importantly, hiring the wrong person is painful. Painful for the person who has to manage them, for their teammates, for the individual who is hired and is now failing, and for HR who finds themselves back at square one. Poor selection decisions happen because the decision criteria at our disposal are limited, often subjective, and unreliable. In this session, we'll learn how to infuse additional objective data points into the selection process in order to increase the odds of making the best hire every time. Learning objectives for this webinar include learning the relative predictive validity of key employee selection methods, discovering a process for identifying what candidate attributes matter most, and will have the biggest impact on key organizational outcomes, exploring different types of assessment instruments and the strengths and weaknesses of each, and reviewing several important business metrics to quantify the impact of your employee selection process. Our presenter for today is Whitney Martin, president of Proactive Consulting. As a measurement strategist, Whitney's passion and expertise lies in the field of surveys and assessments. A self-professed data nerd, Whitney has a master's degree in the area of human resources measurement and evaluation and has conducted extensive research on the predictive validity of various hiring assessment strategies. Whitney has been a highly rated speaker at several national HR conferences and has authored articles on assessments for several books and publications, including Harvard Business Review. She is a member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and has two decades of experience working in the assessment industry. I will now hand the controls over to the presenter so we can begin our presentation. All right. OK, I am really excited to be with you guys today, and I hope that this will be a really meaningful and enjoyable presentation for you. I always like to start my presentations with this image because I think it gets us in the right frame of mind as to why we are spending the time to talk about this important topic today. And you probably recognize that this is that wolf in sheep's clothing, right? And if you think about, you know, if you have ever hired somebody who didn't meet your expectations, you probably have an immediate name or story or face that comes to mind. I generally find that those stick in our heads pretty well when we've been burned by hiring that wolf in sheep's clothing. And as you know, that can look like a lot of different things. That can be something fairly innocuous, like that the person said they were really good at using Excel, but really they were hunting and pecking like the rest of us. Or it could be something much more severe, you know, in terms of embezzlement or sexual harassment or just really being a bad apple that can potentially have a really profound impact on the team. And so if you think about those times where maybe you made a hiring decision that just didn't pan out like you think it was going to, and you think about the times where you made a really good hiring decision, right, where you were like, I think I'm really excited about this candidate. And it turned out they were everything you hoped they would be. Think through those two scenarios and ask yourself, what did you do differently? The time that you hired your star person as opposed to the time you hired your wolf in sheep's clothing? And the answer is probably nothing, right? I mean, we have a process in place to try to help us pick the best people every time. It's just that sometimes it fails us, right? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And the good news is this honestly is no reflection on your competence as a HR person or as a business leader. It's just that you are being asked to make really, really complicated and complex decisions with limited information. And frankly, the type of information that leaves you with a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of crossing your fingers and a lot of hoping and praying. And so what I want to talk about today is how we can improve our odds, how we can stack the deck a little bit more in our favor and try to avoid these wolf in sheep's clothing decisions whenever possible. A little bit about me. My master's is in human resources, measurement and evaluation. So basically, I am the data nerd side of HR. I love helping organizations get and use really meaningful, actionable, reliable data around their people to make their organizations the most effective as possible. I've been doing this for 20. I started my business 22 years ago and was doing it even a little before that. So I've been doing this a really long time. I am just super passionate about helping companies leverage assessment instruments or survey instruments or 360s or whatever it might be to really help them get good, actionable data around their people. So, you know, the whole idea about around hiring the best person for you is that we first have to define who the best is. Like, what does that mean? What does it mean for somebody that's going to be the best for us? And so one thing we might look to is our job posting, right? Because that's what we're putting out there into the world to say, hey, here's who we need to come join us. So if we look at our job descriptions, typically we might see some sort of education, maybe a certain type of degree, maybe a certain certifications that we might be looking for. Usually we list some sort of experience. You know, we'd like you to have a certain amount of time in management or sales or construction environments, whatever the case may be. And then there's usually some sort of subject matter expertise, like, you know, be proficient in Microsoft applications, know how to use a jackhammer or a welding torch or drive a forklift. You know, there's maybe some list of requirements there. And then there's usually a few attributes. Like, I don't think I've ever seen a job posting in my life that didn't have attention to detail listed. So that's almost always there. Maybe we need somebody who can work both independently and with the team. That's always one of my favorites because that's not not a contradiction at all. Right. So, you know, this, you know, even though you have incredibly varied roles in your organization, I guess that this job posting sums up like 90 percent of them. Right. And so the question becomes, is this really enough of a rubric, a specific enough rubric to help us judge who's going to be a really good employee for us and who's not? And organizations will often have me come in and help them answer that question. And so what I will do is I will look at those job descriptions for key roles. I'll also look at performance documentations of like performance evaluations, like what are people actually held accountable to in this role? I'll look at their mission, vision, value statements to see what kind of thing people might fit into our culture. In addition to just, you know, in the job, I'll look at any training and onboarding documentation and I'll start to synthesize all that information to say, OK, here's a list of everything that you said you needed in an employee. Everything that you said was important, whether it's the knowledge or the behaviors or the values, you know, whatever it is. And I'll usually come up with a list that looks about like this. Now, let me just spoiler alert you. This is way too much. OK, this is not reasonable. Whereas that job description before was a little bit too high level and too vague to be a rubric of what we're looking for. This is way too convoluted. I mean, if you think about it, is it reasonable to think that we can accurately gauge all these things in an interview? Definitely not. Right. Is it likely that some managers and some recruiters and some people who are doing interviews are are emphasizing more heavily some of these traits than others, creating inconsistency in what we're actually selecting for? And is it likely that all the people involved in that selection decision are using consistent, fair, accurate and reliable ways to probe into these areas? And, you know, when you start to think of it that way, you're like, geez, it's it's a wonder we ever get the right person. Right. Because I think a lot of times we just have this inconsistency in terms of of really understanding what is truly important, what matters most, what are we really selecting for? And then how can we gauge that in our selection process? So while all of these traits and attributes on the screen are most likely important and your list might look a little different than that than this one, but I think a lot of these things tend to show up a lot. You know, we need to be much more intentional about determining what is that secret sauce. Right. What is that combination of a few critical traits and attributes that are truly going to differentiate between the people who are really fantastic in the role and those who just end up being, you know, kind of middle of the road or don't work out? So that's what I'll help organizations do. And here's just a couple of examples. So there was a food manufacturing company I was working with. They were really focusing on making sure their candidates could measure things and they could do the math because they were literally mixing up batches of certain types of food products. And when we got in there and we really started digging and we were like, you know, what is it that somebody doesn't work out in the role? What is it? They're like, you know, in reality, we need twenty six people physically standing here before we can start the line. We need people who will just show up. Right. And so that became kind of the base of their pyramid is we need people with that attendance, reliability, work ethic to show up. And then, you know, we also need to make sure they can do that. That math stuff. Another great example was a company who was making parts, their engine parts for airplanes, and they were doing a phenomenal job, an incredibly thorough job of screening for mechanical aptitude. So they had all sorts of simulations and testing that they would do with candidates to make sure they really had that innate ability to understand mechanical aptitude. But when I started again, kind of digging in a little deeper and saying, you know, when somebody doesn't work out, what is it? They were like, it's initiative. You know, we can't tolerate people who just stand around and wait to be told what to do. We really need people who take that initiative to step up and pitch in and see what needs to be done. So we were able to, again, kind of build this really specific model of how to prioritize the different traits and attributes that they needed in a candidate. One more example over on the right, this was a farm bank, farm credit type of organization. But what really struck me about this one is more so than any company I've worked with in over 20 years, they had a culture that was truly collectivistic. I mean, it was a we above me, you know, very unselfish organization. They also had incredibly strong accountability around giving and receiving feedback. So, like, there would be an expectation that at least three times a year I would provide my boss with feedback on their performance. And so they really needed people who thrived on that, who were humble, who had the emotional intelligence to give and receive that sort of feedback in a positive way. So that became really paramount in their organization to find people who would fit in that culture much more so than just the role that they were considering them for. So all of that is to say, you know, can you see how it would be very a very different selection process if we were just trying to gauge is this person going to show up on time? Are they going to take initiative? Do they have mechanical aptitude? Or do they have, like, humility and emotional intelligence? Those are all very different outcomes, and we need to measure and gauge things in the selection process using very different methods. So, again, the idea is that we come up with a system that is really designed to measure a very specific range of things. And if you don't know what you're selecting for, the rest of your people on your team don't know either. Right? So maybe as an HR person, maybe you have, you think you're very clear on what you're selecting for. Turns out the hiring manager may be thinking some different things are important. Maybe the hiring manager knows what's important, but the recruiters aren't quite in alignment with that. So we want to work to create that alignment of vision around what are the most important traits and attributes for success. So how are you going to do this for you? You know, kind of create this model like the examples I've shown you. And the first thing you need to do is begin with the end in mind. Right? We've all heard that. We know that if we don't know where we're going, any road will get us there. So take a minute and think about your organization. What is your unique selling proposition? What is unique about your culture? You know, think about the things that are really important to success in your organization. And we're going to start by thinking about what are the outcomes? Like if we were hiring better, what would that mean? What would the outcomes be in terms of what we would get more of or better of or less of if we were hiring better? And once we define that, we can then back into what are the inputs or what are the traits or abilities or attributes that we need to measure in candidates that will directly predict those outcomes. So if you, and I know we don't have the ability to chat with each other or interact, but think on your own terms. What would hiring better mean for you from where you're sitting in your organization? What would the outcomes be? So one of the things I hear a lot is, you know, we would have less turnover and I'll say, okay, great start. Well, let's talk even more about that. Right? Would it be less people who point out on your attendance system within the first 90 days? Would it be less people who leave after three years? Are there certain departments that you're having a lot of turnover in? Because we got to get really granular about turnover when we say that, because there are different antecedents, right? There are different things that cause turnover at those different times and in those different places. And so really understanding, you know, what we're trying to fix, which problem we're trying to fix will help us determine what things we need to measure in candidates. So maybe hiring better for you means less 90-day turnover, right? Less hiring those people that we're going to violate policy or point out on the attendance system or be a no-show. Maybe hiring better for you means more employee engagement. Maybe it means more people that you can promote into different roles in the organization. Maybe it means we would have less quality errors. If we were hiring better, we'd have less rework. We would have better customer retention. We would have lower workers comp rates, fewer safety incidents. It would mean we'd have more creativity, you know, so all of these are very viable outcomes, and I want you guys to be able to think about this for yourself and be really clear, like, write it down, be able to share this with everybody involved in your selection decisions, because until you're on the same page about what you're truly selecting for and what success looks like, you will never have a successful selection process, period. So it's really critically important that we're able to truly define what success means for us and then be able to really share that goal with the rest of our team. So these are some questions. You guys are going to get a copy of the slide deck if you don't already have it. I think it's in the handouts. But these are some questions you guys can use to navigate this within your teams. So the basic one is, what are the traits, abilities, knowledge, skills that we need for somebody to be successful in the role? The question I love more than anything is, when somebody doesn't work out in this role, what's the cause? You get a completely different list of answers than what you got in that first bullet. It's fascinating. So what are people held accountable in this role? That's another great one to really start to dig into what really matters when the rubber hits the road. What are those key things that people are really accountable for? Are there must-haves for somebody to fit into the culture beyond just what's needed in the role, like the example I gave earlier? Maybe there are some really important things that your culture values that are critical if people are going to thrive in your organization. What do we absolutely need people to come in the door with versus what do we have the capacity or ability to teach? That one's a really important one, especially as we see the nature of work changing, and we're going to talk more about that as we go through, but really understanding what are those non-negotiables that we have to have versus, even if it's painful, what could we maybe agree that we could teach people down the road? And then another great question is just, what's hardest to gauge in an interview? Because maybe that's something where you could use some other methods to try to get some in-depth insight into traits or abilities or values or things about a person that are hard to gauge in an interview. So those are just some questions you guys can use to really start to build this beautiful model of what is most important, of all the things that we can measure in candidates, that huge chaotic list that I showed earlier. What's going to be that beautiful, well-conceived model of what's truly important that allows us to all rally around this unified vision of what we're truly selecting for? So that is absolutely foundational. I just don't see enough organizations being intentional enough about this part of it, and it explains a lot when we start to get into kind of the outcomes that they're experiencing. So I'd love to challenge you guys to really spend some time on this and get really granular and really specific around what you're hiring for in a given role or just within your company at large. Once we know what we're hiring for, we got to figure out how to gauge it in the candidates. And so usually the first thing we do is we look at a resume or an application, and usually the first things we start to look at on that are education and experience because that's the easiest place to get started, right? And so I would like to kind of push back on this a little bit, right, and get us to think critically about what those two pieces of information tell us and what they don't tell us. So education is really only – should only be a required factor in your job posting if they can't gain that knowledge any other way. So like a surgeon, right? I don't want a self-taught surgeon. Likely most of your engineers are going to have very specific learning that they get in a traditional engineering program, you know, your controller in your organization. Like there are certain roles where clearly an education requirement makes sense because that is how you learn to be effective at that job. Otherwise, you know, if there are other ways people can come across this knowledge, usually an education requirement is going to be kind of doing you a disservice because what happens is that we oftentimes use education as kind of a crux or a proxy to assume that, well, because somebody has that degree, they're probably relatively smart, they're probably capable of learning, they probably have some sort of interest in this area, they could probably stick to something for a few years. You know, those are a lot of dangerous assumptions. And so it also introduces tremendous bias. I Googled this morning just to see what the latest stats were, but it's like 50% or less of the U.S. working population has a degree, and that number is tanking drastically right now. The number of people that find it necessary to go pursue a traditional university degree is just falling. And so if you think about the fact that by having that education requirement, you are weeding out about 50% of the population, and we know that the people who possess those degrees is not going to look the same across all racial, socioeconomic, those types of factors. So it's introducing a tremendous source of bias right off the bat to have that education requirement. So you want to think really strategically about whether that is a factor that you even want to take into account. Certainly certifications I think are a great one, you know, for people to have demonstrated that they have a certain domain of knowledge. I think certifications are probably even going to be more of a factor and more of a kind of progressive way to go moving forward. But if we don't necessarily look at education for all roles, we know that some of them are going to stick with that education requirement, and that makes sense. But what about experience? So when we look for relevant experience, right, we have in our head what we think that is, right? So maybe they've had a certain type of job title that we feel like is relevant, or maybe they've worked in a certain industry we think is relevant. And so when we start to look at that resume or application and we're looking for that relevant experience, we all have to find in our own head what that relevant experience is. But, again, we may need to really broaden our knowledge and have to train them as much. Maybe they like this type of work. Maybe if they've stayed at their company for a while, they'll stay at our company for a while. And, again, we're going with a lot of wishful thinking here. Just because somebody has done similar work doesn't guarantee that they're going to be good at it or like it or at least be effective in your organization working for you. And so we want to open our mind about what is that relevant experience. We're really looking for transferable skills, and that can come from a lot of different places. I think about if you're looking for a bartender. Now, I know you guys aren't because it's not the industry you're in, but it's maybe something we can all relate to, right? We want a bartender to be friendly. We want them to be able to have a good memory. Maybe a hairdresser or a barista. There are so many other types of roles that have those transferable skills that they could bring to that bartender job. So really want to broaden our minds about what is that relevant experience. Yet again, this is another way, a very subtle way that we can introduce bias because if we're only looking at people who have worked in such and such a role in such and such an industry, we are likely weeding out a disproportionate group of people because we know that, you know, like, you know, in the role of engineers, for example, if you look at the demographic of engineers, it's not going to look the same for all races, all socioeconomic backgrounds, et cetera. So the idea that I want to get you to think towards is that we want to get to a place where we're screening in based on potential instead of screening out based on education and experience. They are frankly just lousy predictors. I mean, the correlation, if you look at the predictive validity of education and experience, they account for about 5% of how the person ends up performing their job. I mean, it's kind of atrocious that we would put so much weight on these two things when we're screening resumes, when they are just absolutely lousy at predicting job performance and they incorporate all of this bias by screening out huge proportions of people that potentially have the ability to be fantastic at your work. Another thing I think people look at on applications and job resumes is whether somebody appears to be a job hopper or not. I get that there's a propensity to think, okay, if they've had a lot of jobs recently, maybe they aren't going to stay with us very long. But I would just say, what is the other, what is the flip side of that tell you? If they've stayed at a job a really long time, maybe they're just lazy. I mean, maybe they were related to the owner. We don't know. And so I would just say with all of these things, let's stop making assumptions, right? Let's stop hoping that we think we know what these things indicate. And let's actually start thinking about how we can verify and validate that this person actually has the skills and abilities and traits that they need to be a good performer. You know, I think this is incredibly, especially important for you guys because you are in a very niche, niche, niche industry. Your pool of candidates, if you are saying they have to have worked in precast concrete before, you know, either people who have a lot of experience there are either retiring or they're very expensive. So I think there's going to come a time where you have to really think about how can we train to aptitude? How can we select for people who have the right characteristics for the job and then raise them up to be effective in our companies? So I love this quote that experience isn't a proxy for skill or talent or attitude or work ethic or anything other than the ability to hang on to a particular job for a certain amount of time. And I think that's very humbling to think about. So how do we move from being so reliant on education and experience as those top of funnel screens and just jump to verifying can this person do the job? And that's where assessments come into play. And so there are thousands of different assessments out there, all designed to do very different things. And so you're going to want to be really strategic about thinking through what types of assessments might be a nice supplement to what you're already doing via interviewing and, you know, background checks and reference checks and all the other stuff you might be doing. So I'm going to show you a couple of different types of tools and talk about kind of what the implications might be. If you were to use those, we can certainly do some sort of knowledge or skills test. Right. So instead of assuming that they have a degree and they must be smart, well, whether they might be smart and not have a degree. Right. So why don't we just validate? Do they know? Do they have the mental capacity to do this job? So certainly you have all sorts of tests out there designed to test knowledge. So, like, do they know how to drive a forklift? Do they know how to do lockout tag out? Do they know how to use a wrench or a welder or whatever? Right. So that's knowledge base. Now, keep in mind that knowledge changes quickly. Our world is changing so quickly. Technology is changing so quickly that just because I come in the door today, knowing how to use some of these tools or equipment or software programs, it doesn't mean that I necessarily will know how to do what you need me to do next year. So that's kind of a caveat. It's more of a check the box. I'm verifying that they're coming in the door knowing what they said they know, as opposed to some of the other things in this little circle, like attention to detail, logic and reasoning, mechanical aptitude. Those are are you don't have to have previous experience to show that you have those qualities and those abilities. So those are really pretty cool things to assess if you want to say like, OK, just because this person has been working at Starbucks doesn't mean that they don't have tremendous mechanical aptitude. And could it come in and be phenomenal in a production type of job? So those are some of the things that you might consider doing. You might also be interested in measuring like attitudes and values. So this is where we get into. Are we hiring people that are going to show up that have good attendance? They don't have a lot of tardies because they have that kind of belief that that being on time and adhering to the rules is important. We are going to try to weed out people who are going to steal from us, file fraudulent workers comp claims. You know, it's all of that kind of thing. So we're trying to really screen out the people that we're not going to work out with us because of policy violation or, you know, just no call, no show, that sort of thing. So usually these are really easy. They're probably the easiest ones to tie to metrics. So we can put some in a screen like this in place, an assessment like this in place and start to track our 90 day turnover going down. You know, our involuntary turnover going down, our safety claims, theft, that kind of thing. So these are these are great if those are the kinds of things you're trying to solve for. And they're really easy to show the value of in a pretty short time frame. Another thing you might want to do is measure personality, because back when we were talking about that secret sauce of things that really matter, there may be some personality traits that are critically important to being successful in a given role. You know, maybe you need somebody who's very independent. Like, if you have drivers out there that work really on their own all the time, they have to be independent. That might be a really important thing. Maybe you need people who are truly self starters and take initiative. Maybe you need people who are super adaptable and flexible. Maybe that conscientiousness, that attention to detail is paramount. So there might be some personality traits that are really, really important. And I want to take a minute to get on my soapbox just just a smidge here, because personality assessments are very widely available there. There's something we've probably all encountered at some point in our careers. And if I ask you to show of hands, how many of you have taken an assessment sometime in your life that you chose the words that sounded like you and the results came back and it was one of four things. Right. So that could be letters like D.I.C. or numbers or colors or animals or different types of barn owls or Hogwarts houses or Disney princesses. I mean, the list could go on and on. These are very prevalent types of assessments out in the marketplace. They are called four quadrant personality assessments because they they they basically sort you sort humanity into four different categories. OK, they have been around a long, long time. They actually started in 440 B.C. when the philosopher Empedocles noticed that people tended to act or react in one of four ways. And he called those categories earth, air, fire and water. There was a person a few years later that came along in Hippocrates. He was a doctor and he said that he'd noticed that same thing. Like people tend to kind of fit into these four categories in the way that they behave, the way that they interact. And he called those categories blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, which is really gross. And so I'm glad that we've come up with better terms over the years. But we're essentially kind of doing the same thing with these types of tools. And they can be very insightful if you want to understand a person's style or tendencies or preferences. So I am very introverted. My preference isn't to have a lot of small talk. Does it mean I can't do something like this? And even if we were in person and I could see you, I could still do it. I promise. No, it doesn't mean that. Right. And so my preference is to spend most of my day in my office by myself. But it doesn't mean that I can't perform the parts of my job that require more sociability. And so I would just I like to to do a little bit of a discourse here, because these four quadrant personality assessments are probably the most popular type of assessment. But they honestly should never be used for hiring. And the reason that that is is that these tend to first of all, they only talk about your preferences. They don't talk about your abilities. Right. So just because I score a certain way doesn't mean I can't do that part of the job. It also they tend to change over time. So a lot of times if you think, well, you know, when I was younger, I would have answered a different way than I answer now or when I was on the job market for six months. I would have answered that really differently than now that I've been in this position for two years where people really prize me on the fact that I'm a go getter. And so they they can tend to kind of change and evolve with you over time because they are sensitive to your context. When you're filling them out, you might find that you're different at home than you are at work. And that's valid. Right. And so if the results are likely to change, how can we use them to predict future performance? And you really can't. So if you are using a four quadrant assessment in the workplace for like team building and fun coaching and stuff like that, that's all good. But if you are using a pre hire, let's have a conversation offline, because I think there is a tremendous amount of risk involved in using these types of tools pre hire. Now, should you measure personality pre hire? Sure. But the way to do that is to first measure stable traits. So these are things that remain very consistent over your lifetime, shy of very traumatic circumstances. Also, normed work assessments. So these are tools that have such huge validation studies that they can actually show on a standard distribution curve how people in the population will score. And we can predict with certainty kind of what percentage of people will score a certain way. And that can be relative to the working population of North America, or that could be relative to like all accountants. So there are different norm groups that these types of tools use. And then the third criteria is so stable traits, normed personality assessments, and then under have a clear understanding of how that personality trait overlays with your job. And so, for example, I was doing a study one time for claims adjusters. And I my assumption was that you would probably want your claims adjusters to not be very trusting. You want them to be a little bit cynical, a little bit skeptical because they kind of have to, they can't just buy every story that somebody, you know, calls in with to try to claim this insurance, right? And I did a validation study and found out that the best claims adjusters were actually way more optimistic and positive and trusting than I would have expected. And I was very worried because I thought I was about to lose a client, but it turns out they were thrilled. They had been working really hard to shift the culture and differentiate from their competitors by having claims adjusters that were much more customer centric than their competitors. So we actually had data to show that scoring in a certain range on that particular personality trait of trust and optimism was critical for success. I worked with a huge healthcare conglomerate one time and I was talking to the recruiters and I'm talking like 400,000 employees, I mean, huge company, talking to one of the recruiters and she was like, you know, this particular customer service job, I know people have to be patient. So I will incessantly click my pin throughout the interview to see how people react. This is alarming, okay? This is not the way that we create fair hiring decisions, okay? There's all sorts of things about that that are wrong. I was in a production environment once and they were trying to assess manual dexterity and they were having people deal out playing cards. Like this is not how we do this people, okay? So we gotta have a really clear understanding of what these traits are that truly matter for success. And then we've gotta have a standardized, valid, reliable way of measuring them that is really gonna make sense and give us that insight that we need. So thank you for letting me get on my soapbox about personality, I think it's incredibly valuable but we also have some caveats there about what types of tools we use and how to make sure we're really getting the right information that truly correlates with job success. Another, sales I know is a huge challenging role to hire for and so we can measure things about salespeople in terms of their, how they're gonna prospect and close and are they coachable and how do they build relationships? Another one might be engineering roles or just leadership or other pivotal roles where you might need to get a more in-depth picture of what this person's bringing to the table in terms of their cognitive problem solving, their personality traits, their interests and passions and motivations and we might need to kind of really have a clear understanding of how they are gonna fit within our specific roles in our specific company. So I show you these two screens to show you that again, there are a lot of different assessments out there designed to do very different things that would have very different outcomes on the back end in terms of how we measure success. And so if you're noticing a QR code and I'm gonna show that again at the end but if you would like to talk specific products, I would be happy to do that because I do not believe there is a one size fits all best product or test vendor out there. It is always gonna come back to your model that you really intentionally developed at the beginning of this presentation, right? About what do we wanna measure and why? And once we understand that, I can certainly after 22 years, let you have my knowledge and you would be silly not to. I spend most of my time interacting with the test publishers out there to understand what they have, what they do well, what they don't do well, what's the right fit. And so I'm able to connect my clients and prospects with the best fit solutions for them. And so if you wanna talk about anything that you are using currently, you're thinking about using or you're just like, I need something that does X, Y, Z and solves this problem, point me in the right direction. I'm happy to do that as a thank you for being here. So feel free to scan that QR code and I'll mention that again later. So don't stop now. Certainly these assessments can be incredibly valuable for selection. They can give you a lot of insight. They can help you kind of validate, is this person bringing what we think they're bringing to the table? And that's really, really important, it'll help kind of verify what you're seeing as you're doing interviews, right? If you're like, I'm really impressed with this person, but this assessment is all of a sudden painting a different picture. I might need to dig a little deeper here. That might help. If the assessment is like spot on with your impressions, then you can feel extra confident that you know what you're getting. And that's a really great feeling. A lot of these assessments will also provide interview guides, which is incredibly helpful. I think the interviews can just be really, really tricky, especially if this is not something that you do all day, every day. And so to really have that guide to say, what are some things that would be really meaningful and helpful to ask that are gonna be job related and fair and not get me in trouble, I think that can be great. If you are asking candidates who they think should play them in a movie or what car they should be, please stop. I mean, it is so frustrating for candidates. I've had, you know, really, really smart people who are like, I'm not gonna work for a company that would ask me that sort of ridiculous question because clearly they don't care about my actual skills and qualifications and what I bring to the table. So having this assessment generated interview guide might be just a tool that you would really love to have in your hands as you're doing that selection. Discussion, a lot of assessments will also provide coaching and onboarding reports. So kind of like a maintenance manual for your new employee to say, okay, how can I get them up and running as quickly as possible? What are those key check-in points that I really need to make? What are some things I need to be looking out for? What are some ways that we can maybe head off some potential issues before they even arise? So that's another great value of assessments. They also are fantastic for looking at your team dynamics, especially as you're bringing on a new person, we can look and see, okay, or do we have a well-balanced team? Do we have a team that's stacked in a certain area? Are we being intentional and deliberate in terms of how we're leveraging the things that people are bringing to this team? So a lot of cool insights there. And then succession planning and career pathing. So really looking at, okay, just because they were effective here, we're thinking about promoting them. Is that a good choice? Is it good for them? Is it good for us? Is it gonna be the right fit? What challenges are they gonna have? Can we have some proactive dialogue around, is that the route they really wanna go? Being able to see a career path for myself, that is one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement right now. So really being able to leverage that information in kind of a strategic way and start to have career growth conversations with employees based on that assessment data can be really, really powerful. So that is just a little bit of what the assessment stuff could bring to the table. But then once you've got your selection process in place in terms of assessments, interviews, reference checks, all the stuff you're doing, you wanna be able to show that it works. And there are a lot of different metrics you can use to do that. I'm certainly not gonna cover all of these, but like we talked about earlier with that values-based assessment, we can really quickly start to look at absenteeism and tardiness and see if we're making a dent in that. And we can put a dollar figure to that pretty easily. We could look at if we are measuring attention to detail and then we can start to track, are we having less rework? Are we having less customer complaints, less product going out the door that's out of spec? We could track that, we could put a real nice dollar figure to that. Safety incidents, just all sorts of things that we can track and really tie back to, are we doing better? Are we doing a better job of hiring better? All that stuff we talked about earlier. And if you have any questions about how to do that, I'm happy to just give you kind of a simple step-by-step guide of here's how I would go about trying to kind of track that particular metric and tie it back to your selection decisions. When I start talking to people about hiring assessments, there are three main concerns that come straight out of their mouth. The first one is, well, I'm worried that that would introduce bias or adverse impact. At which point I try not to laugh out loud and I try to just say, look, bias enters this process so far upstream that we can't even identify it anymore. I mean, which candidates are seeing your job postings based on certain algorithms? Which candidates your recruiters are seeing based on AI term matching services? All of those have been shown to have some propensity to potentially have bias, right? Then we weed them out based on education and experience, which we talked about is a really huge source of bias. Then there was a study in Forbes that said we're more likely, two times more likely to call in a man or a woman for an interview who was fired as opposed to one that said they opted out of work for a while to be a caregiver to a family member, like a child or an aging parent. I mean, we have biases so far baked in that it is insane. And then we bring them in for an interview and we decide within the first 30 to 90 seconds whether we like them or not, and then we spend the rest of the interview just trying to justify our hiring decision. So there is so much bias involved in this that putting an objective assessment in place is one of the best safeguards against that. It is one of the most uniform, fair ways that you can really try to mitigate that all of those sources of bias and put everybody on a level footing and say, okay, look, who really has what it takes to do well at this job? So bias adverse impact, if the tool is well-developed and the test publisher should absolutely categorically be able to show you the data that shows that their tool does not have any of that inherently baked in, it is absolutely one of the best ways to combat that bias. Of course, there's a time and a cost involved in adding an assessment to your process. Usually, like we talked about earlier, if you can reduce scrap or reduce quality errors or reduce safety incidents by a tiny margin, I mean, it's a laughable drop in the bucket with that ROI is. I mean, yes, like there's a cost involved in administering assessments, but usually any of those metrics that you've decided to track on the backend are gonna so far outweigh that tiny cost. I mean, it's usually like 20 to one return on investment at the minimum. So, I mean, I've done tons and tons of these studies over the years for all sorts of industries that show that. And then candidate experience, believe it or not, if we do a fairly okay job at communicating why we're doing the assessment, candidates tend to have a pretty positive reaction. They would much rather be judged based on their information that they're providing you about themselves and what they're bringing to the table as opposed to whether they stumbled over that one interview question or whether they wore the wrong thing to the interview or whether they sent you a handwritten thank you note or not. They would much rather be judged on something that they believe is fair and job relevant and is unbiased. So actually all of these things are incredibly surmountable and can bring in a lot of odd value to you on the positive side. I love the little elephant thingy down here because it's just, it's another set of eyes, right? If we're all looking at a candidate from different perspectives, we might all have different beliefs about what this person's bringing to the table, but an assessment is kind of that extra set of eyes to just bring us all together and say, okay, yeah, there's consistency here in what we're looking at. So my key takeaways for you before we open it up for questions is really just that the vision is the foundation. You cannot select the best person for your role without defining what the best means. And so you gotta really work to create consistency in what you're selecting for and how you're selecting for it. And that needs to be aligned on all the members of the team. So the recruiters, the hiring managers, everybody who's touching that selection process really needs to have the same vision of what you're selecting for. There are tons, thousands and thousands of assessment instruments out there. So if you're considering integrating those, let's be really systematic about identifying what products and processes are gonna drive those very specific outcomes that you've identified. Don't just use what your CEO's golfing buddy uses, right? That's not strategic. We gotta really think about what's that right fit for you. And then assessments are gonna allow us to infuse that additional objective data into the selection process and mitigate bias to make better decisions overall. So those are really the three things that I would love for you to come away with this thinking about. That QR code's up there again. I've got four articles that I have heard from session attendees of mine are very, very helpful, especially if you wanna share some of this information with colleagues. I do not do a newsletter. I do not do any sort of marketing. And so if you are scanning this QR code, you are literally signing up for one email with these four PDFs attached. And then certainly at that point, you can also reply back and say, hey, Whitney, would love to pick your brain on what we're doing, what we've done in the past, what we're thinking about doing, or what like, hey, we would love for you to just tell us like what is a good assessment for salespeople or engineers or webcast people out in the field or whatever it is, I would be more than happy to just point you in the right direction. And like I said, I don't believe there's any one best tool. That's why I don't talk specific product names, but because I wanna make sure that I'm giving you what's best for you. And so I would love to do that if that's something you're interested in. So with that, I would love to get Nicole back on and turn it over for questions and see if there's anything I can do to clarify any of this for you guys. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you, Whitney, for a great and informative presentation. We'll now start the Q&A portion of our presentation. So the first question is, at job fairs, we don't necessarily have the time to sit down with each candidate, but in that short time we have with each person, what would you in a sense recommend we focus more on to determine if they would potentially be a good fit? Yeah, so I think that that list of questions I showed, so like what are the key traits and abilities? So being really, really clear, like I'm talking, you know, that's a fast turnaround. You maybe have two things that you wanna focus on, right? So maybe it's, I'm just guessing, right? Maybe it's mechanical aptitude and initiative. I'm just making these up, right? So maybe you're gonna be hyper-focused on two things in that screening. And maybe you have a couple of questions that you can ask that would help with that. You know, you might wanna think about what are the hardest things to gauge in an interview? You might wanna think about what are those non-negotiables that we need people to come in the door with? I mean, if there is something, you know, really specific, I would just use that list of questions to kind of come up with that focus for you so that you're focused on the absolute most important things in that tiny little window of time. And then certainly once you get, you know, into the selection process, you can always dig deeper on certain things. Wonderful, thank you. And then we did have another question come in. So this is more like on the other side, that like, what if you've already been hired and you were hired for a specific role, but the role does not fully come to fruition? How should you navigate that with your manager? Should it be with the manager or should it be with like the HR department? That's a lovely question. I don't know that I'm the best person to answer that, but I can, a couple of things I would say, if I can flip that on its head for a minute. So let's think about how we would prevent that situation from happening, right? So first of all, those assessments can be fantastic for kind of that career pathing and having those proactive conversations so that you know ahead of time kind of where you can go in the organization. Sometimes the assessments also provide kind of a realistic job preview. So there are some that are like simulation-based so you can make sure you're getting into the right thing. After the fact, obviously, it's a little bit of a different conversation, but yeah, I would say both with your manager and with HR, just being able to say like, hey, like here's what I believe that I'm bringing to the table. Here's where I think that I could offer even more value. You know, what do you think in terms of potential ways to do that in the organization? I mean, it certainly can't hurt. I mean, staying in a job where you're not fully leveraged is not helping anybody. So I would say absolutely just jump out on that limb and see what you can make happen because you wanna be bringing your best to your job, so. That was great. Thank you. I'll give it just a few more seconds in case additional questions come through. Yeah, and like I said, if you're interested in those extra articles or just having an offline chat about, cause it's really hard in this context, I know, to ask kind of blanket questions. You might have something that's super specific to you. Again, I am just more than happy to, you know, shoot me an email or whatever. And I will, if I can't answer it, I can maybe even just, you know, point you in the right direction to somebody who can. So always love connecting people with solutions. Perfect. So I don't see any additional questions that have come through. So again, on behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank you again, Whitney, for a great presentation. As a reminder, certificates of continuing education will appear in your account at www.rcep.net within 10 days. If you do have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketingatpci.org. Thank you again. Have a great day and please stay safe.

employee selection

objective assessment

predictive validity

hiring criteria

personality assessments

skills assessments

values-based tools

data-driven hiring

organizational goals