How does having top performers on your team impact your company?  A couple of recent studies show these people have a dramatic impact in two completely unrelated ways. (more…)

DIRECTV has implemented an assessment for its Call Center and Technician Employees.  The online tool is meant to determine who is interested in these jobs and what the job would be like if they were hired.   In 2010 the HR team added this tool to their process to try to get the best people and reduce their turnover. (more…)

Do you know if your Pre-Employment Testing is validated or has adverse impact?

A recent article by Dr. Wendell Williams points out something that many people seem to know, there are a lot of junk assessments on the market.  To those of us who have known (and deal with it everyday) it is not a surprise that these tools are used but not validated.  Most of our clients never even ask about the potential for adverse impact or the validity of what we are providing  (see our page via the link).   (more…)

Are Biases Affecting Your Bottom Line? 

Have you ever hired someone who was not the best candidate for the position to prevent any potential liability from an EEOC claim? There is nothing in the law that says you must hire an inferior candidate. The law only states that you, and any of the systems you use, cannot discriminate against the protected group(s). Jobs can’t talk and tell us what kind of candidate they require, so as managers, we need a system for hiring that does not allow typical human biases to enter the process. (more…)

Hiring Solutions Workshop

The hiring solutions workshop is now open for registration!

If you register before 2/28/2013 will receive 5 free Assessments worth over $1000.00

Click HERE to register or call 814 490 4568

Hello Everyone.  Employee Insights LLC is going to put on a half day hiring seminar March 14th 2013.  Mark you calendars! More details coming next week.

Coaching, is it reactive or proactive?  If the word coaching is in your organization’s vocabulary then you need to answer this question.  An article by Aubrey K. Wiete for the Human Capital Institute discusses coaching, how and why it is typically used.  Aubrey points out that there is a general lack of clarity around organizational coaching and how it measured or assessed.

We agree with Aubrey’s comments.  Coaching is a loose term that sometimes mimics “managing”, other times mimics “training”, and often times mimics “teaching”.  In our world coaching means “leading”.  Leading the horse to water (you know the rest of this), leading the employee to a set of values, or leading the team to a goal.

Let’s use an example of hiring a new employee and let’s for a moment consider that no employee is a perfect match for the job, ok except maybe Michael Jordan.  The first question you have to ask yourself is “what do I need to coach my new employee on”?  Hard skills or job specific tasks would be more like training so let’s eliminate those from the question.  Now the question becomes harder to answer and this is where coaching starts to unravel.  What do you coach your employees on?

How about understanding the employee’s behavior style and the behavioral style of the team as a whole?  Maybe the new employee has been hired for a technical outside sales position that requires frequent interaction with people yet the employee seems a bit reserved in front of strangers. He / she got the job because of their technical expertise but not because of their outgoing personality.  This would be a good example of a trait that is coachable.  We’re not saying that you try to make the employee go from introvert to extrovert but rather coach your new sales person on how to identify and properly interact with other personalities, or put another way, differences in communication styles.

In order to best accomplish this, a set of job standards or benchmark as we call it, needs to be defined.  The benchmark creates a way to assess a would-be employee to see if he or she is a poor, good, or great fit for the requirements of the job.  After hiring these same standards now becomes the basis for a coaching plan and yes,,, a way to measure the results of the coaching.

Two things are a given with coaching, it needs to be proactive and it needs to be measured.

Kris Dunn for the HR Capitalist wrote posed a question every manager, owner, partner and corporate HR professional should ask themselves; “Do our company values match what the employee wants”?  The chart below shows 2 columns of the same questions.  The ones in red on the left were the top 4 out of 100 companies, and the ones in blue on the right were the top 4 from individual high performers.

Interestingly we noticed the ones on in the red seem to fit more with the definition of “values” while the ones in “blue” seem to be more defined as a “trait”. These 2 terms can interchange depending on the context.  The high performers that participated in this likely were trying to define why they are successful instead of trying to define values as related to company values.  We believe if values and company personality are of top importance to the stakeholders, then a controlled and objective assessment should be used to understand what those company values are. The same assessment with the same controls and validation should then be used to assess would-be or current employees. Kris hit the nail on the head, this is one of those ‘lazy concepts that we simply don’t question” but should.

Click Here to read the original article.