We all have unintended biases about who we hire, and there is a tool I offer called PXT Select™ that helps make the very human decisions about hiring simpler and smarter. It is a powerful selection assessment that measures a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behaviors, and interests. It equips you and your hiring managers with easy-to-understand information about the candidate and provides intuitive questions to strengthen the interview process. Purchase one meter and generate up to 13 reports over the life of that employee. DM me for more info or a demo!
Make your hiring simpler and smarter!
PXT Select™ helps make the very human decisions about hiring simpler and smarter.
- It is a powerful selection assessment that measures a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behaviors, and interests. Assessment results equip organizations and hiring managers with easy to understand information about the candidate, and provides intuitive questions to strengthen the interview process.
- PXT Select measures a candidate’s thinking style, behavioral traits, and interests: three areas that impact an individual’s approach to situations in the workplace.
- PXT Select provides data about a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behavioral traits, and interests, providing organizations with insights to make smart, wellformed hiring decisions.
- PXT Select - One Powerful Assessment – A Suite of Reports. For the price of just one assessment, PXT Select’s suite of reports help you select, onboard, coach, and develop employees. PXT Select offers the following reports:
Comprehensive Selection Report. Is the candidate a good fit? This powerful report helps you make smarter hiring decisions with confidence. Featuring dynamic interview questions and tips on “what to listen for” with each candidate, this report gives you a meaningful edge in your hiring process.
Comprehensive Selection Report: Sales. This powerful report helps identify a candidates fit to a role. It features dynamic interview questions to help strengthen the overall hiring process. With a focus on sales, this report highlights critical sales practices and describes how a candidate might demonstrate them, helping you select the right salespeople for your organization.
Leadership Report. This report is designed for selection but may also be used for coaching or development purposes. It provides one candidate’s results presented in graph form and linked to narrative about their possible approach to six leadership skills commonly required of organizational leaders. Each of the six leadership skills are illustrated in relation to the candidates results. The report includes a candidate’s potential leadership strengths and challenges, as well as customized questions that can be used to interview the candidate or analyze their leadership potential.
Multiple Positions Report. What’s the best fit for a particular individual? Compare a candidate or employee to multiple jobs in your organization.
Multiple Candidates Report. Make hiring decisions with ease. Compare multiple candidates for a single position.
Team Report. See how a potential candidate fits an existing team or address your current team’s dynamic and strengths.
Manager-Employee Report.Discover how a manager and employee can work more effectively together.
Individual’s Feedback Report.Candidates can learn from PXT Select, too! This narrative report doesn’t reveal scores and is perfectly safe to share with applicants.
Individual’s Feedback Report: Sales. Candidates can learn from PXT Select, too! This participant report offers personalized feedback to the candidate or employee using common sales language and does not include critical sales practices.
Individual’s Graph. Are you more of a visual person? The graph illustrates a candidate’s results that you can view at a glance.
Coaching Report. Wish you had coaching advice tailored to each employee? This report gives you exactly that and more!
Coaching Report: Sales. This report provides tailored coaching guidance giving managers personalized tips and strategies to develop their sales team members.
Performance Model Report.Understand the range of scores and behaviors for the position you’re trying to fill. Learn about the ideal candidate for that role.
It's a buyer's market out there.
Hiring people who want to work, who are committed to your organization’s goals, and who work well within your culture is today’s challenge for lots of reasons. So focusing on tools that cause the hiring process to be more thoughtful and exact, cause people to understand each other quickly as they are onboarded and assigned to various teams, and building fast and effective teamwork will make you and employer of choice. Call me to learn more about these tools.
Hire, manage and retain your best associates.
The PXT Select suite of solutions provides you with accurate, objective, and reliable data so you can confidently hire, manage, and retain productive employees. With the right people in the right roles, developed to their full potential, you can build a high-performing culture where people thrive.
With PXT Select™, we specialize in a comprehensive suite of talent management solutions designed to help you hire smarter and engage your workforce to drive business results.
PXT Select at a Glance
• Over 20 years of experience
• Over 42K organizations assisted
• Presence in 93+ countries worldwide
Whether you’re filling an open role, designing effective teams, identifying talent gaps, or developing your leaders, the PXT Select suite of assessments helps you fuel the growth of your people and your business.
Data from our assessments helps you understand:
• How people think and solve problems
• How they work and interact with their coworkers, managers, and customers
• What motivates and interests them
• Attitudes toward important performance-related issues.
By understanding your employees at a deeper level, you understand how to help them thrive. And when your employees thrive, they experience a greater sense of engagement and interest in their work. In the end, that leads to a healthier work environment, greater productivity, and an increase in your organization’s bottom line.
Make hiring decisions based on data not instinct
Hiring managers and employees alike are susceptible to unconscious bias and may unknowingly make decisions and choices, both personally and organizationally, that can exclude certain individuals based on a single characteristic or trait. In this way, unconscious bias could derail your organization’s ability to be diverse, equitable, and successful. The stressful experience of being understaffed can leave many organizations feeling dire, making speed the predominant criteria in the selection process. This leaves proactive efforts to hire for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) placed lower on the ladder of considerations. But choosing this route not only increases your organization’s risk of unconscious bias but may also have a long-term effect on your ability to attract and retain quality talent.
In order to better understand the impact of unconscious bias on hiring and selection and its long-term impact in the workplace, Wiley Professional Learning surveyed over 5,000 working professionals. Survey respondents included individual contributors (43%) and managers or other leadership positions (57%). About half of all respondents had some involvement in the hiring process, with managers representing the largest portion of this group. In The State of Hiring 2022 Report, you will see Wiley’s findings and see the actions they recommend that you can take to combat unconscious bias in hiring and selection. Reach out to me to see this report!
The water we are swimming in and how we can adapt
Based on Deloitte, Gallup and McKinsey analyses, here is what we are facing now in our organizations:
•77% of managers don’t believe in their talent acquisition strategy
•77% of managers don’t believe in their talent acquisition strategy
•73% of employees aren’t engaged
•70% of team members don’t feel considered
•Organizations need help finding and engaging their people.
•Gig economy: by 2020 40% of all workers will be contract
•Skill sets needed in 2030: decrease in basic cognitive, small increase in higher cognitive, large increase in social/emotional
•Continuous learning needed
•Shifting organizational structure – matrixed organizations
•Agile systems, processes needed
• Rapid pace of change
•Disruptive forces
•Globalization
•Demographics diverse in country of origin, age, ethnicity, culture, gender, language
•Technology advancing rapidly
This results in things people in organizations have to do differently now:
•Change direction quickly
•Communicate effectively
•Accept and work well with differences of perspective
•Form effective teams quickly
•Create teamwork with nontraditional arrangements
•Define selves by effectiveness not by title
•Create psychological safety so good ideas can surface
•Create personal connection amid increased technology
•Hire using more than resume – fit now more important
•Share power and information
We have tools to enable you and your organization to adapt and be successful! See our products on this site for more information and call me with your questions or to order!
Apply Operations Principles to Talent Management
Peter Capelli offers us some valuable supply chain guidance as a way to think about talent management (HBR).
Principle 1: Make and Buy to Manage Risk. A deep bench of talent is expensive, so
we should undershoot our estimates of what will be needed and plan to hire from outside to make up for any shortfall. Some positions may be easier to fill from outside than others, so we should be thoughtful about where we put precious resources in development: Talent management is an investment, not an entitlement.
Principle 2: Adapt to the Uncertainty in Talent Demand. Uncertainty in demand is a given, and smart companies find ways to adapt to it. One approach is to break up development programs into shorter units: Rather than put management trainees through a three-year functional program, for instance, bring employees from all the functions together in an 18-month course that teaches general management skills, and then send them back to their functions to specialize. Another option is to create an organization-wide talent pool that can be allocated among business units as the need arises.
Principle 3: Improve the Return on Investment in Developing Employees. One way to improve the payoff is to get employees to share in the costs of development. That might mean asking them to take on additional stretch assignments on a volunteer basis. Another approach is to maintain relationships with former employees in the hope that they may return someday, bringing back your investment in their skills.
Principle 4: Preserve the Investment by Balancing Employee-Employer Interests. Arguably, the main reason good employees leave an organization is that they find better opportunities elsewhere. This makes talent development a perishable commodity. The key to preserving your investment in development efforts as long as possible is to balance the interests of employees and employer by having them share in advancement decisions.
We are licensed and accredited to offer Wiley’s PXT Select tool to help you do all of this. Call us today to plan a pilot!
Why the Pre-Hire Process is Really About Planning
Think about the last time you ventured out to find a new job. Did you come across postings that seemed as though they were written a decade ago?
You know what we’re talking about, right? It’s not that the job descriptions are entirely out of date, though sometimes they are. It’s more that what was once an emerging skillset is now an accepted norm in the workplace. Yes, we do know how to use the Internet! Does that mean we get the job?!
Perhaps the company that posted the job descriptions from 10 years ago hasn’t given much recent thought into what they are now and who they want in the new role. And they really haven’t considered how the needs of the position have changed with time. For a prospective candidate, that would be a turn off. And if you’re the one doing the hiring it might just limit your pool of candidates.
To find the right person, you need to know what you’re looking for. To understand what you’re looking for, you need to know what the company needs, and have clear alignment on the core characteristics most important for someone to be successful in the role.
Put more simply, employers need a pre-hire plan. Robert Half, the founder of the first and largest accounting and finance staffing firm, once said, “The time spent on hiring is time well spent.” And that time starts well before the candidate comes in to interview.
Studies show that the lack of organizational alignment on expectations for success in a given job is just one reason that one-third of new hires quit their job after about six months. The exact same ratio of employees knew after the first week if they would stay at their new company for the long-term. These employees could see quickly that they weren’t the right fit. Why couldn’t the employer avoid that before they made the hire?
Think about how different your job is now compared to the one you did a few years ago. Even if it’s the same title, you’re probably learned or applied new skills. Even more, you’ve changed in how you learned to adjust to the changes.
Now think about the traits and behaviors in yourself that enabled you to make the changes, to get along with that new manager (accommodation!), to engage with your team (sociability!). Perhaps in some situations your innate behaviors needed to shift. And you handled it well.
Did your company use science and data to predict these innate traits and behaviors before they hired you? Or, did they use gut instinct and got lucky? Without the right tools making objective hiring and selection decisions can be risky, and expensive.
Mmanti Umoh, a renowned leadership and management consultant, said the optimal talent selection process comes down to planning and having stakeholder alignment early in the process.
By planning ahead with pre-employment due diligence, you can:
Reduce hiring mistakes
Accelerate the hiring process
Improve hiring precision
Minimize the costs of a bad hire
Save costs on recruiting
At PXT Select, we help hiring managers and recruiters align on the expectations of job requirements, by finding out what the behavioral and cognitive traits, and interests, are needed for someone to succeed in that role and at that organization. With this, they can develop a job description that clearly states what they are looking for from a prospective hire.
Candidate data sets from the assessment are compared against a Performance Model of the preferred traits for a given job. If the model suggests that an individual whose results fall in the higher range of the scale for a given trait tend to be most successful in the position, then organizations want to hire the people with those similar traits who fall on the higher end.
If the Performance Model calls for scores on the lower end of the scale for a given trait, a lower result is what an organization wants to see. No matter where the range falls, the more similar the candidate is to the performance model, the better the chance they will be successful on that role. PXT Select allows you to create custom models, replicate top performers, or use a performance model library so you can tailor your model to your needs at the time.
Whether you’re hiring from the outside, or selecting existing employees for new roles, a performance model helps you identify top candidates. When used with the rest of the PXT Select suite of reports, performance models can be used to help organizations build career paths for their employees, think about succession planning and build bench strength in their organization.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree,” Abraham Lincoln opined on the concept of planning and preparation. “And I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
How prepared is your organization? Do you have a plan in place? Is it adaptable? If you don’t know, maybe it’s time to invest in finding out. Start planning now.
Call me at 704.372.9842 or email kag@mindspring.com.
