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The High Importance of Objectivity in Strategic People Analytics

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As John F Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” That’s why organisations increasingly recognise the value of leveraging data to drive decision-making across the business. HR, being at the forefront of managing an organisation’s most vital asset – its people, has been quick to tap into the potential of strategic people analytics.

Today future ready organisations need to think critically about the assessments they use to ensure they provide the necessary objective data for effective people analytics, ultimately enhancing their existing HR systems.

Most organisations today have great technology that efficiently handles the people logistics aspects. Still, one area on the back burner is the advances made in assessment technology.

Many assessments in use today were developed before hybrid work, wellbeing, and burnout became part of the modern people challenges that HR must manage. Some liken older reviews to the equivalent of using the mobile phone technology from the late 90’s in a world where smart phones exist.

Traditional fixed “one size fits all” solutions for attracting, assessing, selecting, developing, and retaining people are no longer sufficient. That’s why it is crucial to be familiar with the latest assessment technology and the flexibility and employee lifecycle tools they offer.

What are People Analytics?

People analytics, also known as HR analytics or workforce analytics, refers to collecting and analysing employee data to gain insights and make data-driven HR decisions.

HR professionals can identify patterns, trends, and key indicators by utilising vast amounts of employee information. In short, indicators influence:

  • strategic workforce planning,
  • talent recruitment and retention,
  • diversity and inclusion initiatives,
  • performance management, and
  • succession planning.

Objectivity at the core in people analytics

Recent studies highlight the significance of finding measurable connections between HR and business objectives.  While at the same time reducing subjective decision-making in measuring HR and corporate performance.

However, in today’s data-driven world, HR professionals can mitigate bias and make more informed decisions by relying on objective data. Modern and flexible assessments provide access to raw data containing validated, objective data and insights, enhancing HR’s ability to make sense of data.

The power of assessments

New assessment technology enables HR professionals to analyse and better understand their workforce quickly and easily. These assessments provide objective data on various aspects of an individual employee’s profile, including:

  • competencies,
  • personality traits,
  • cognitive abilities,
  • behavioural tendencies,
  • development areas, and
  • skill levels.

By leveraging these assessments, HR professionals can gain valuable insights into an employee’s fit with:

  • the role,
  • the manager,
  • the team, and
  • the organisational culture.

Enhancing HRIS Systems

The seamless integration of APIs ensures that the factual data collected from assessments is easily accessible within the HRIS. This combination of information, supported by its objectivity, helps predict the immediate and future requirements regarding personnel and capabilities.

By incorporating this objective data into decision-making processes, HR professionals can minimise bias, improve employee experiences, and drive the growth of the business.

In conclusion, combining the potential of people analytics and modern, adaptable assessments means enhanced HR information systems with accurate individual data for more informed and strategic choices.

Contact us to power your strategic people analytics.

Isn’t it more important to prioritise job fit over white vs blue collar?

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Historically, blue collar vs white collar jobs referred to manual labour jobs that involved physical work. In the 1940s, this classification was not only based on the job itself but also on social class. Examples of such occupations include those in the construction, trades, and manufacturing sectors.

 

Fast forward to today, and collar colours

Today, blue collar jobs form an integral part of the workforce for many organisations, regardless of the industry sector. These individuals serve as the backbone of a company, frequently working in physically demanding environments and can face heightened risk.

Although businesses must prioritise customer satisfaction, ensuring all employees are content and well-suited for their respective roles and company are equally important.

 

What are the advantages of fit for white v blue collar and all employees?

There are numerous advantages, even in collar colour roles such as blue collar vs white collar jobs. Let’s look at some benefits here.

Any improvement in productivity translates to increased profits regardless of collar colour

A contented team of workers can greatly enhance their own productivity levels. A cheerful workforce creates a favourable work atmosphere that inspires employees to put in extra effort, resulting in improved organisational productivity. As most business people know, any productivity boost translates directly to increased profits.

Keep your top people

Happy employees, regardless of blue collar vs white collar or another collar colour, can also help reduce employee turnover. A high employee turnover rate can cost businesses severely.

 

According to AHRI, employee turnover costs 1.5 times the employee’s salary. 

 

Better mental health across all collar colours for jobs

Today, mental health has become a top priority in all workplaces. Employees well-suited to their job roles tend to experience higher satisfaction levels and are more likely to maintain good mental health. These aspects ultimately result in a more secure work setting.

 

When employees are happy in their jobs, they tend to be more alert and have greater attention to detail. And so, the likelihood of workplace accidents or injuries is reduced. Providing a safe work environment is always a must for organisations.

 

How to hire the right candidate for blue collar jobs?

Modern psychometric assessments can predict role success with high levels of accuracy. But they are rarely used for wage-based or less-skilled roles due to perceived cost constraints in many instances.

 

Great People Inside has a solution to this issue for successful business outcomes. Our highly precise psychometric evaluations are unbiased and efficient in assessing candidates for all job levels. From entry-level to executive positions, from the machine room to the boardroom.

 

The GR8PI platform can design cost-effective assessments to precisely measure fit and what’s essential to each specific role. The result for people in companies is improved productivity, reduced employee turnover, and better mental health.

Are you aware of other collar colours?

In addition to the well-known blue collar and white collar jobs, several other types of jobs are distinguished by collar colour. Each is explained in an article written by Kelly Campbell.

  • Gold collar – Signifies white collar workers with higher skills and are in higher demand. These include doctors, engineers, lawyers, and pilots.
  • Red collar – Refers to workers that work in the government whose salaries come from the red ink budget. This category may also include farmers.
  • Pink collar – An outdated term used to describe sectors historically dominated by women, including nursing and secretarial work.
  • Grey collar – These jobs are often associated with the gig economy or freelance work. Examples of grey collar jobs include graphic design, web development, and writing.
  • Green collar – This is one of the newest additions which refers to jobs in the environment.

We’ve seen the effects. We encourage you to try GPI for blue collar and other roles to make a real difference to your company.

What’s the actual cost of replacing top performers at work?

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As a CFO or finance professional, to help determine what’s the actual cost of replacing top performers at work, what if I asked you to rank your team members from top to lower performers?

Your estimate will likely come up with numbers (give or take) that are approximately:

  • 25% of your team are high performers,
  • 50% are average performers, and
  • 25% are below par.

What distinguishes top performers at work?

According to a McKinsey study, high performers are 400% more productive than average performers. And the productivity difference might reach 800% in sophisticated professions such as management or software development. These outstanding performers have distinct cognitive, behavioural, and personality traits.

Identifying these traits and hiring outstanding individuals is likely to result in considerable financial rewards for your company.

These employees not only boost productivity and income production, but they can also improve:

  • staff turnover,
  • management workload, and
  • investor and consumer confidence.

A terrible hire could result in hidden costs, such as

  • lost corporate credibility,
  • greater stress, and
  • worse employee morale.

What’s the bottom line or actual cost of replacing your top performers at work?

The bottom line is that hiring the wrong person can have long-term implications for your organisation. So, getting it right the first time is essential. And it’s scary these costs are not captured in the P&L and that actual costs can show as staggeringly high.

Making another smart investment for your organisation

As a senior finance professional, you recognise the critical nature of making wise investments that yield a good return. However, in my experience, one area in which many firms frequently struggle is how they hire their people. That is, having a consistent replicable process across the organisation that results in the right outcome- a top performer.

Hiring the incorrect individual might cost you far more than you think, with estimates ranging from 30% to 250% of the employee’s compensation.

To solve these recruitment problems and significantly increase the hiring of top performers at work, our award-winning GR8PI assessments can help. The platform provides an easy approach to measuring and qualifying the attributes of high performers. Advanced analytics are employed for a thorough insight into a person’s cognitive ability, behavioural patterns, and professional interests and motivations.

As a result, making it simple to discover outstanding performers and avoid undesirable recruits and costs.

Investing in a recruitment strategy that easily and reliably identifies high performers is critical to the success of any firm. Senior executives we work with improved their ability to identify top performers by 300%.

Renatus Capital Partners, a private equity firm, says it best:

“We use GPI assessments for our own company and all our portfolio companies. Not only do they have tools they can customise for practically every HR situation but the diagnosis around same, advice on which tools to use and the outcomes are priceless.”

Mark Flood , Director – https://renatus.ie/

So, why not contact us today to learn more about how we can assist your company in identifying and hiring top performers?

The need to hire smarter with a novel approach in talent acquisition

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Impacting talent acquisition, the October NAB Forward View report cheerily tells us that:

“The labour market is expected to stay exceptionally tight in the near term, with unemployment bottoming out at 3.5% before drifting up to 4.3% over the next two years.”

It looks like spotting superstars for job vacancies will continue to be tough. That is assuming you continue approaching your talent acquisition the same way as you always did!

Rejecting applications

According to Indeed, “when hiring managers review resumes, they often skim to find the most relevant information.” In Australia, the result of this approach is that only 16% of resumes get an interview. Most would agree that statistically, among the 84% discarded, there must be the talent that can do the job. But they are rejected because of various issues with their application. The reasons for rejection range from:

  • unsuitable qualifications
  • not enough experience
  • too much experience
  • a poor cover letter
  • spelling mistakes.

Bias in talent acquisition

Unfortunately, how we humans make decisions to move people forward in the hiring process is also flawed. Science tells us that unconscious bias plays a key role in all our decisions. Our minds make decisions intuitively, even before we are aware of them. In his book “Hire with your Head” Lou Adler puts it quite bluntly:

“Intuition and gut feel don’t predict on-the-job success. All they predict is the likelihood the company will make a wrong decision.”

Another roadblock to successful hiring is that a staggering 5 in 6 applicants – or about 83% – report inflating their resume in some way.

Let’s reflect on this for a moment:

  1. When we review resumes, we are reading a document that is not accurate.
  2. As we read it, we are making decisions based on how we “feel” about what we have read.
  3. The result is three out of four people we hire do not fit.

Imagine a process in your business that delivered the right result – in this case, a top performer – only 25% of the time. Without a doubt, the process would be thrown out and a new one introduced.

Predicting success in a role in recruitment

Recruitment is all about trying to predict if a person you do not know will be a top performer in the job in your organisation. It doesn’t matter whether you work in a trade, as a teacher, salesperson, or CEO. Many psychologists agree that the biggest predictor of job success is cognitive ability. In recent years “soft skills” are also considered significant predictors of top performance in a job.

Soft skills used to be a “nice to have,” but today, emotional intelligence- “the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others”- is recognised as a better predictor of success than exam grades or certifications. Both studies by Accenture and Virginia Commonwealth University support this claim.

Use science to screen applicants as part of talent acquisition

NAB tells us spotting superstars for job vacancies will continue to be tough. On top of this, the current approach to screening applicants may get hijacked by our bias and dodgy resumes. What other approach might be useful to add to our talent acquisition armour? The answer is objective data.

With most significant personal investment decisions, such as buying a car or new HD TV, we support our human decision-making process with data. We research the specs for options to understand the performance of new investments to best meet our criteria.

Unfortunately, human beings do not come with a specifications list. To replicate our investment decision-making process when screening job applications, we need a simple economic tool that will provide us with objective data before we reach the stage of rejecting applications. Traditional fixed validated assessments just don’t offer the flexibility that is needed for this task.

The advancements made by the award-winning Great People Inside (GR8PI) platform allow companies of all sizes from all sectors to screen applicants cost-effectively.

In one short, inexpensive psychometric assessment, you can assess candidates as part of your application process for Emotional Intelligence and Cognitive Ability. And the output is a ranking of applicants matched to your specific criteria, which guides you as to which candidates you need to talk to. Speed is of the essence in a tight market, and using this approach gives you objective insights that you can act upon quickly.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us.

 

How an HR management tool can predict sales people performance

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Better sales staff equals more sales revenue. It sounds simple. However, an HR management tool can help significantly to increase your salespeople’s productivity.  A complex task fraught with misunderstanding.

Finding high-performing staff involves a specific hiring approach that targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job at hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency and results.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales positions – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer:

around 50% of sales employees lack the fundamental traits necessary for effective salespeople, and

a further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of salespeople operating to total capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when finding the right salesperson to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best salespeople

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or higher.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their research. These include:

  • Two-thirds of salespeople miss their sales target.
  • More than half of all salespeople close less than 40% of potential deals.
  • Top-performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
  • High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
  • Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing integrate well.

Talent Management – how do you measure an individual salesperson’s productivity?

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve average or poor performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart psychometric assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside psychometric testing platform will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role. As a result, you can match each position with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s psychometric analysis will tell you:

  • what makes your top performers so great
  • why your average performers are less effective
  • how to improve your least successful performers

How to hire the best people with an hr management tool

The right psychometric assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales roles.

Applied correctly, the Great People Inside HR management tool can make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales team turnover. When considering the statistics, these results should be music to any employer’s ear.

Figures reported in Employer’s Advantage show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for an entire year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers?

Many have fundamental traits and attributes that help drive their peak performance for the longer term. Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically study your current top-performing salespeople.

These measures enable us to create a customised job profile benchmark specific to your company based on your company’s top performers, not a random benchmark based on a collection of external organisations. A company customised standard means you can clearly see what sets your top performers apart from the rest.

This benchmark can also be used to significant effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles. You don’t take risks when buying a personal asset such as a car, so why risk it when hiring your most crucial business asset.

Try us! Just click HERE and we will be in touch.

Looking to hire? First build a positive Workplace Culture

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As workplace culture continues to evolve while we slowly resurface, it’s easy to blame the pandemic for this disruption. Add the “great resignation” or whatever it’s called now, and we have plenty of excuses.

If you’re a business that has tried to recruit someone over the past several months, you are undoubtedly familiar with how difficult it is to find top talent.

According to the ABS, in May 2020, 6.5% of businesses reported at least one vacancy. By February 2022, this was the case for 23.5% of businesses. Unemployment is at 4%, the lowest rate since 2008. So it’s a challenge to find top talent in a tightly competitive market.

A survey by Glassdoor tells us that 77% of respondents said they would consider an organisation’s culture before applying for a job, and 70% said they wouldn’t bother applying for a position if they felt the company’s values didn’t align with their own.

Given this, perhaps it’s a good time for organisations to critically look at their workplace culture and make sure their house is in order first. And ensure company culture is not contributing to their hiring and retention woes and costs.

So, what is the culture in a workplace? 

Great question. There are many definitions varying from the look and feel of the work environment to whether the business provides ping pong tables and fresh fruit for staff every day.

Workplace culture examples in action might be, should we speak up and tell the boss that the latest sales strategy will result in a train wreck. Or should we keep our mouths shut in fear of being “decapitated” for suggesting such a thing? If we make a mistake, is it considered the “end of the world” or a learning opportunity?

A fish rots from the head down, and so it is with workplace culture. When your workplace culture isn’t prioritised by leadership, it’s reflected in each employee’s:

  • performance,
  • productivity, and
  • retention.

 Are you playing to win or playing not to lose?

Many businesses tend to look only at the monthly profit and loss as indicators of success. But it’s equally important to focus on your employees and how they experience working in your company.

Caring about your customers and their experience with your business is a waste of time if you don’t care about your employee’s experience. Employee experience is directly linked to customer experience.

A well-designed employee journey allows your people to understand their value to your organisation. Your employees feel cared for and are set up for success during their employment.

If your company hasn’t conducted a culture audit in the last two years, it’s a good exercise to undertake. Culture audits can vary, although they can be as simple as asking employees what’s going well and what’s not. An audit can involve using some of the great software tools in the market that help analyse this.

Sounds expensive! How much does organisation culture change ‘cost’?

Organisation culture doesn’t usually have a line item in the P&L, so it’s not tracked or measured. Any activities that lead to a positive workplace culture tend to pay for themselves.

The benefits of a workplace culture that supports its employees can mean:

  • a higher rate of retention,
  • lower recruitment and re-recruitment costs,
  • diversity happens more organically, and
  • productivity goes up.

Any increase in productivity goes straight to your bottom line.

No time like the present

A business is more likely to benefit when its culture focuses on the way employees view the company. And with significant change more recently in employee views and preferences, workplace culture may need to change.

There isn’t any “one-size-fits-all” culture that makes every employee happy and productive. But paying attention to what is achievable will pay off “bigly” for your employees and business.

Risky recruitment

Attracting the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation’s unique culture can be very risky. There’s lots to consider. For example, you need to determine whether your potential new hires, managers, and team can work together. And work together from various locations.

To do this requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work styles, competencies, and abilities. Our next-gen technology and solutions will do this work for you.

Why not make contact and learn more about our psychometric assessments so you can make an informed decision?

Remote Work – What are seen effects of further shifts in this competitive market?

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After two years of disruption further shifts in remote work and our lives have emerged. There’s been:

  • the rise of individualism and independence bringing out new confidence to show up as themselves at work. (Fjord Trends 2022)
  • hybrid employment arrangements placing more emphasis on staff being able to work remotely and maintain productivity and service delivery
  • continued challenges to organisations due to Omicron leading to staff shortages resulting in increased costs of hiring more or temporary staff
  • increased pressures on both existing and new staff in the present climate

Moving forward, employers need to relook at balancing the flexibility they offer to individuals with the needs of the team and the greater good of the organisation. (Fjord Trends 2022)

Obtaining the right information for remote hires

How can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time for roles in the current labour market? And what about remote work? How can you more easily identify those who will thrive and be productive in a work from home environment?

The traditional recruitment process leaves a lot up to chance. You’ll sift through a stack of resumes and cover letters trying to narrow down the people with the right experience and qualifications and get a sense of other relevant aspects.

You’ll then perform a round of interviews to gauge which candidate sounds and acts right for the role.

You might ask yourself:

  •  “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?..
  • the right credentials?..
  • enough experience?..
  • will they fit in with the workplace culture?..
  • can they bring anything to the table to benefit the business?”

While some of these questions can easily be answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier.

And let’s face it most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer ‘yes’. This is simply because they are only looking at the positive aspects of doing so.

But this is the homeworking equivalent of asking someone ‘How are you?’. And accepting the answer ‘Fine.’ As confirmation that all is well.

Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as:

  • “Will this person be engaged in their work and great in this role?”
  • “Is this person likely to be capable and productive in this remote work role?”
  • “In the long term, will this person be able to handle hybrid working?”

Engagement is critical

Great managers and business owners know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So especially in this current environment, how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of selecting highly engaged remote work top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience and qualifications. Or even age and gender. Studies have shown that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role, the environment, and the workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a particular position depends on a few factors, for example,

  • their attitude,
  • personality, and
  • enthusiasm for the work at hand.

To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. Making this type of decision can be trickier than it sounds, but it is possible.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their role working remotely or onsite.

According to Gallup, employee engagement is defined as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace”.

According to studies they conducted, businesses are 21% more profitable with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this profit increase as a Christmas present!

Instead of solely relying on opinions or a hunch, validated benchmarkable assessments provide you with tools using objective data to determine whether your candidate is right for the role. Recent shifts have meant employee preferences don’t necessarily match what’s best for a business.

 Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one; scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers can make the process of replacing top performers easier while improving their hiring process each time.

Not all candidates are suited to homeworking

Buffer.com published an annual global survey on homeworking and discovered in 2020 (like in previous years) that the top 3 difficulties people experience with homeworking, worldwide, are not necessarily related to the pandemic and lockdown:

  • collaboration and communication,
  • loneliness, and
  • not being able to unplug.

This survey suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that remote work is not a long-term viable option for some people.

 

Remote working

 

To learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams contact us

 

Retention, revenue and return: Why it’s important to identify and hire top Customer Success talent

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Over the last ten years or so, cultural trends and customer expectations have combined, resulting in more and more businesses prioritising customer success.

Recent research reports that there has been an increase in the total number of open Customer Success jobs for the first time since February. In June, there were 6,515 available Customer Success jobs posted. This number was nearly 500 more than in May.

Regardless of the organisation’s size, gone are the days of Sales and Marketing departments only delivering the business goals. Today it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve your deliverables.

Customer Success versus Customer Service

Most customer support roles tend to be reactive as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to Customer Success roles.

These roles are focused on working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure maximisation of the product or service value delivered to the client and head off any issues before they fester. It’s key that Customer Success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

If done correctly, Customer Success’s broader and essential role leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer Success is connected to your bottom line as it:

  • minimises customer churn rates,
  • improves renewal and satisfaction,
  • and in turn, boosts revenue.

Murphy’s law

 

Edward Murphy Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems and was born in 1918 in the Panama Canal Zone. He is best known for his namesake Murphy’s law, stating, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

 

While Customer Success done well offers a significant commercial advantage to a business, if done poorly and with Murphy’s law at times coming in to play significantly affects business factors.  

But what can possibly go wrong with Customer Success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, wrong people are assigned to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation, and you are likely to hear a similar story—a story about a consistently top-performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason? The skills and attributes required as a successful salesperson are vastly different to those needed to be a top manager. The same is true applies to Customer Success Managers.

The abilities and traits required to be a successful Customer Success Manager are many and varied, and selecting the right people for this role certainly presents risk elements.

What makes a great Customer Service Manager (CSM)?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Industry type and service or product offering contribute to answering this question. CSM’s usually possess broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management, and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

  • Great at managing stress
  • Resilient
  • Empathetic
  • Customer-focused
  • Sincere
  • Keeps promises
  • Positive attitude
  • Calm in a crisis
  • Self-assured
  • Socially relaxed
  • Strong reasoning and analytical ability
  • Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

In fact, studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSM’s. Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or redeployment decisions. And this then results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

 

It’s a case of ‘rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information,

how can we possibly make the right decision?

 

We have worked with many clients using our next-gen tools and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our 4-step robust process, our clients in the main enjoy a 3-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside if we can help recruit your next CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.

How people capability in organisations is impacted by assessment types

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Taking a punt on a one size fits all approach to recruitment

Most managers and leaders know hiring a new employee for best people capability is an expensive exercise.

I’ve never actually met anyone who set out to hire a less than ideal employee on purpose. However, it always bothers me that statistics tell us we hire the right person only less than 25% of the time.

Think about that for a moment. Imagine you have a process in your business that only delivers the right outcome with such a low level of consistency. What would you do?

I’m thinking you’d change the process and look for new ways to deliver better outcomes. Good. Then read on.

Roll the dice and take your chances

The goal of recruitment is to hire a new employee that will add value, contribute to the business, and enjoy their work. All this leads to high people capability and engagement.

But it’s not that easy. You gamble $30,000 EVERY time you start the hiring process because humans are complex beings.

For starters, there is the deep-seated unconscious bias that comes with being human. To add to our responsibility, some candidates:

  • lie on their resume,
  • fudge their referees, and
  • turn out to be more of a lone wolf than a team player.

The potential pitfalls are endless! As my mother used to say, “you’d need eyes in the back of your head”!

Typical behavioural assessments for people capability

Many businesses use psychometric assessments to help in predicting the behaviours and ability of candidates.

Assessments are not new. Most have been around since the last century.

However, the issue is that most psychometric assessments are ‘off the shelf’ packages of measures selected by the test provider, not the buyer.  This leaves buyers with no opportunity to vary them in any way.

Consequently, this approach means that buyers measure things they do not need to and fail to measure elements that are critical to their business’s success.

This traditional ‘one size fits all’ solution used across the employee life cycle does not meet the needs of modern organisations. As a result, the ability to attract, assess, select, develop and retain the right people is negatively impacted.

Stack the odds in your favour for your organisation’s people capability

Great People Inside (GPI) appreciates that every organisation both large and small is unique. Organisations spend millions on defining, developing, and implementing for the commercial advantage of their successful business. Some aspects include:

  • those specific leadership competencies,
  • that unique culture,
  • that state-of-the-art customer service,
  • those well-known values and dynamics.

We understand that the uniqueness and greatness of your organisation cannot – and should not – rely on a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

That is the reason GPI invested hundreds of years of collective, international know-how to create technology empowering you to embrace the complete life cycle of employees and executives. From talent acquisition and onboarding, talent growth and development to employee assessment and performance management.

Guided by our easy-to-use platform, the buyer can select from a menu of more than 60 validated and reliable psychometric dimensions.

This same flexibility applies to our 360° surveys, where you can choose from more than 50 managerial skills and competencies. In addition, suggestions for future improvement and development are available.

In effect with GPI, you can easily create totally customised assessments and surveys specific to your needs. From the competencies, values or objectives of any role, department, or organisation – anywhere in the world.

To learn more about the dimensions available suited to modern organisations, or if you’d like to trial our assessments – contact us.

Your ideal candidate when hiring – what’s on your wish list?

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We usually see various words and phrases in job ads that describe an employer’s wish list for hiring an ideal candidate.

This statement below I came across recently brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of this.

 

Can you perform under pressure? asked the recruiter. 

No, said the candidate, but I do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody!

 

Some more standard features you might see employers looking for in hiring an ideal candidate are:

  • Ambitious
  • Resilient
  • Bubbly personality or Can-do attitude
  • Clear thinker and have a Strong work ethic
  • Share our passion
  • Accuracy and Attention to detail
  • a Team player, a Strong Leader, and yes, Perform Under Pressure!

As an illustration, the typical wish list for the “perfect employee” often reads something like this:

“We are looking for someone ambitious who will demonstrate initiative and resilience has the maturity always to remain calm and professional. You will have an excellent work ethic and have outstanding communication skills. 

You are respectful and enjoy working in a team in a fast-paced environment in which you will be able to prioritise and handle multiple tasks while meeting deadlines”.

Job advertisements will also include what the work involves, and the qualifications and experience needed to be a successful applicant.

 

Consider the total recruitment cost of hiring a non-ideal candidate

Despite rigorous selection processes, many studies tell us that up to 50% of new hires fail within 18 months.

For Australian businesses, the cost of these failures is indeed high. Recent research discovered the direct recruitment costs to hire ONE employee are on average a staggering $19,000!

Add to that another 30% to 50% of the annual salary with the total cost of induction, orientation, training, maintenance, termination, and lost opportunity.

There would be “skin and hair flying” in many management meetings if all these costs showed up on a Profit and Loss Statement line.

Your choice

So, what gets in the way of more consistent selection outcomes when it comes to hiring an ideal candidate based on a wish list? Most would agree that even the most basic selection process can get it right with the required qualifications and experience for a role.

However, when it comes to attributes similar to the examples below, the ability to precisely assess if the person sitting in front of us possesses these is close to impossible:

  • Tenacious
  • Ambitious
  • Resilient 
  • possesses Initiative
  • will Remain calm and professional, and
  • has an Excellent work ethic.

People tell us what they think we want to hear; after all, they are looking for a job!

Consequently, many of us make our hiring decisions based on our “gut feel” and what we “liked” about the candidate during the interview. In essence, we hire people we like.

Given that research tells us that more than 40% of Australians think it’s okay to lie during an interview, this stacks the odds against us. We need to add some objective data to our “gut feel” to help us get it right more consistently.

The way forward for hiring more ideal candidates

The next generation award-winning Great People Inside (GPI) customisable assessment platform now available in Australia allows you to choose those specific attributes on your recruitment wish list.

Therefore, if you want to assess certain attributes, these can readily be selected. For example, attributes like:

  • Resilience
  • Tenacity
  • Ambition
  • Discipline
  • Customer Focus
  • Closing sales.

Thanks to https://unsplash.com/@fiteka for this image

Over 60 validated psychometric dimensions are available to precisely evaluate the crucial traits for both your business and the specific role. And if we don’t have what you need, we will build it for you. We call this full customisation.

With this in mind no longer are you restricted to relying on your gut feel and hiring people you “like”. You can easily create GPI assessments as short or as long as you wish.

By adopting this approach, specific objective data can be added to your selection process and increase your success rate by up to 300%.

Don’t take our word for it!

We were delighted to recently receive the following feedback from one of our clients who has been using with great success the Great people Inside (GPI) platform for more than 18 months. This client uses the GPI platform to assess alignment to the company values of both internal employees and new recruits.

They tell us, “We are observing through using the GPI profiling tool to test for values fit, we are naturally defining critical success factors to base our hiring decisions on.

The more we benchmark our top performers and see success in our new recruits, the more we learn about what are the critical behaviours and interests that make a person a successful cultural fit in our business.

Whilst we would like to think we were good at picking this up before, GPI provides us with an evidence-based, tangible tool to confirm this and has been a real value add to our hiring decisions”. 

If you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to let you try us for free. Click HERE, and we’ll be in touch straight away.