DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

What Goes Around Comes Around

By Jazmine Boatman, Ph.D. 

Many of us are linear thinkers – we read, write, and think left to right. But, as with many things in life, the world of talent management can be cyclical. Consider this sequence of events with both immediate and long-term consequences:

1. An organization has no strategy in place to find the best talent for their business so they end up making poor hiring decisions.
2. Then, the same lack of strategic planning that enabled them not to have a hiring strategy means they likely don’t have other processes like onboarding and development in place for their already sub-par talent.
3. Then, as time passes, they have to promote some of these people to fill leadership positions, so now they not only have sub-par talent, but sub-par leadership.
4. Naturally, this has an effect on retaining employees (you know the saying: People leave managers not companies), which means their overall bench strength is even further weakened.
5. This lack of bench strength means they have an even greater burning need for better talent...for which (circle back with me now) they have no strategy for finding.

So even if hiring the wrong person may have seemed like a relatively isolated, recoverable mistake, what I hope I’ve revealed here is that it’s one that is bound to come back around – and with a vengeance. So to prevent this from happening in your organization I ask: What are you doing to break this vicious cycle?   

Jazmine Boatman, Ph.D., is a Senior Consultant at Development Dimensions International (DDI).

NFL Creates Assessment for Personality, Mental Agility

By Mike Hoban

The National Football League (NFL) has recently decided to, um, tackle the issue of trying to predict success for incoming players drafted from college. They've created a new assessment process that aims to identify important intangibles that the experts say are keys to success: competitiveness, motivation, operating under stress, and what they—and we at DDI—call “learning agility.”

Since the 1970s, the NFL has used the Wonderlic personality test to provide insights about players’ cognitive abilities and personality, but the league has found its ability to predict football success to be poor. There were too many false positives and false negatives, so they hired an industrial organizational (I/O) psychologist to design a new assessment. He and his team did a job analysis and identified 16 attributes thought to be predictors of success. The result is a one-hour assessment that measures personality, behaviors, and cognitive ability. The New York Times published a good  article on the assessment.

The new assessment was administered for the first time on February 21, 2013. It will take a few years to identify the correlation between success on the assessment and success on the field, but if it does predict success, it will give a whole new meaning into the phrase “bench strength.”

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

2013 Selection Trends: Managing Uncertainty for Success

By: Scott Erker, Ph.D.

Black and white is out. Uncertainty remains with us this season, but will inspire, rather than depress, creativity in selection design. This uncertain environment has been described as VUCA – a business environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.  In this sneak-peek preview, we’ll reveal HR must-haves and look at how top-performers are dressing for success.

Without question, smart will remain on trend. The companies to watch will sew up the knowledge gaps as workforce analytics will no longer be a high-tech accessory, but rather a complement to future growth. Inadequate or out of date success profiles and competency models will be counterproductive. More, not less, will be the rallying cry around selection tools, as U.S. organizations draw inspiration from their peers overseas. And, candidates that demonstrate innovative and adaptive capabilities will be in short supply and great demand.

Are you suited-up for success? Read on as we reveal this season’s selection forecast.

Eliminate the guesswork.

In recent years, organizations have done a bang-up job of mining talent analytics—"Big Data"— for insights on employee engagement and retention. There has been, however, a missed opportunity to apply a treasure trove of information to hiring and promotion processes. Many who dig into the data limit their inquiry to time-to-hire and cost-to-fill analyses. Others look to improve the source and/or quality of their hires. Surprisingly, only a few put it all together and maximize the data’s true potential: leverage talent acquisition data as a critical component for strategic workforce planning and overall business strategy.

Why are workforce analytics so important in times of uncertainty? Planning-by-the-numbers affords organizations added flexibility to respond to economic and staffing demand shifts. In a world of unknowns, the hiring stakes are higher. HR needs to ensure that it is identifying the best candidates: future high performers who will contribute directly to growth.

For big data to fulfill its promise, information must flow freely between talent acquisition and leadership. Currently, there is little sharing between the two groups. Hiring managers aren't doing their organizations any favors when they don't capture and exchange experiential data on high performers. These leaders fail to recognize the value of the information that allows HR to match the characteristics of successful hires to those of prospective candidates.

A fully functioning feedback system will generate the data necessary to illuminate hidden patterns, throw out irrelevant, non-predictive factors, and update job profiles to meet current and future needs. Trendsetting HR operations will have the ongoing ability to measure and refine their hiring tools, and anticipate future skill needs.

Hire the whole person.

A smile may be worth a thousand words, but it is unlikely to predict or ensure on-the-job performance. After decades of research, the solution remains the same: complete a comprehensive success profile analysis to avoid hiring mistakes. First and foremost, determine the ideal mix of knowledge, experience, competencies and personal attributes required for the position. Next, decide how you will measure each of the components. With this type of checklist, you can exercise due diligence and ensure you get what you need—without personal prejudices polluting the process. 

Best-in-class selection systems that evaluate the whole person utilize a multi-method approach. They not only measure the same behaviors in many different ways, they also allow the capture of behaviors essential in times of uncertainty: adaptability, creativity, initiative and judgment.

Another enormous benefit of expanding the traditionally narrow selection focus is that the hiring manager can evaluate the gaps, if any, between the ideal candidate and the prospective one(s). They can then assess whether the missing skills are trainable or not. Rather than disqualify a good candidate that hasn’t used a software suite, for example, the manager can consider post-hire training and development to complete an otherwise perfect profile. On the other hand, a seemingly attractive applicant with low cognitive ability scores can be an unlikely candidate for development (and employment).

Import confidence.

Staffing directors outside the U.S. are enjoying greater certainty than their counterparts in our 50 states. In a recent study, they gave their selection systems noticeably higher marks for efficiency, flexibility, and ability to identify the best candidate.

Additionally, these talent acquisition professionals tend to use a greater number of selection tools including knowledge tests, personality inventories and job simulations—and they plan to add more in the future. Comparative study results indicate a difference of 10 percentage points (or greater) in the frequency of current and intended use of tools by non-U.S. vs. U.S. organizations.

Clearly, our partners abroad know more and guess less. Given that most selection errors are attributable to an overreliance on hiring manager judgments, U.S. companies would do well to follow the lead from overseas. Let’s utilize more information-gathering tools and build in certainty to our selection systems.

Celebrate the candidate.

Make a good first impression—great advice for the candidate as well as the organization. Despite the sluggish economy, perfect candidates are hard to find … yet easy to turn off. It's true: there are more good jobs than qualified candidates, so the competition is fierce. There are only so many Harvard MBAs to go around, and like the rest-of-the-best, they are harder to retain.

The stakes have never been higher; employees and job seekers share copious quantities of information. From social media, prospective candidates can learn much of what they need to know about corporate cultures, interviewing processes, benefits, etc. In reality, the first impression is gathered well in advance of the first face-to-face with the hiring manager.

Still, the interview and other pre-employment processes are perfect places to lose qualified candidates—so take heed. First and foremost, portray the job accurately. Our selection survey reveals that only half of new hires are very confident in their decision to accept offers of employment. The data also shows that a realistic day-in-the-life preview greatly ups the confidence quotient, and goes a long way toward eliminating the revolving door.

A positive interview experience gets the “yes” when an offer is extended. But don’t stop there: work to continue engagement throughout the onboarding process and beyond. Remember, your pleased-with-the-process candidates, even the non-joiners, are potential best customers and/or real-life endorsements for your products or organization.

While many insights in this article stem from our industry knowledge, economic trends, and our expertise in selection systems, we also analyzed survey responses from over 250 staffing directors and over 2,000 new hires globally in 2012 to provide a deeper understanding of current and future trends in hiring. For the full report, including specific stats, graphs, and charts on hiring trends cited in this article, visit: www.ddiworld.com/gsf.

Buyer's Remorse? Employers and New Hires Doubt Decisions

By: Scott Erker

Half of new employees are experiencing buyer’s remorse after taking a job offer this year. And they are not alone – many organizations also question whether they have made wise hiring decisions as one in eight new employees were failures in the last 12 months, according to DDI's latest global research on hiring trends. 

There is a great paradox in that both unemployment and the number of open positions hover at uncomfortably high levels—and simultaneously, organizations and candidates are shaky about the decisions they made in staffing and accepting roles this year.

DDI’s Global Selection Forecast 2012 research is the first forecast report completed post-recession and uncovers data about missed opportunities throughout the hiring process that impact confidence in newly-hired people and their fit to the job. The study includes responses from more than 250 staffing directors and 2,000 new hires from 28 countries and was conducted in partnership with Oracle.

The major findings include:

Where is the person we interviewed? When staffing directors were asked what the top reasons were for hiring mistakes, nearly one-third of responders blamed overreliance on hiring manager evaluations and 21 percent blamed candidates overselling their own skills. An unpleasant surprise after a candidate becomes an employee is that the new hire just is not cut out for the job. The shame of it all is that information about candidates goes undiscovered in the selection process. Hiring managers need to go farther below the surface to really get to the truth about an employee’s fit for the job.

The research reported that only half (48 percent) of all organizations rated the hiring process as highly effective. This is a very painful ‘look in the mirror’ for hiring managers and the staffing directors they support, especially considering that organizations said that 14 percent of their new hires were failures in last 12 months.
 
I didn’t apply for this job! The research also revealed that only 51 percent of new hires are confident in their decision to accept a new job.  Adding to this uncertainty is the failure of the hiring process to paint a realistic picture of the job, department and company. Not surprising, the research also found that organizations that do a better job of giving a candidates a realistic job preview, yielded hires that were more confident in their decision, highly engaged and less likely to get right back on the job boards.

One way to avoid quick quits is to be real in describing what it will be like on day 5, 50 and 150 for that candidate during the interviewing process. Painting a rosy picture or pulling a bait-and-switch once they’re on the job will just mean you’ll fill that position again in 6 to 12 months.

Bad interviews do more harm.  Interviews remain the hardest working selection tool to predict new-hire performance and resulting business impact, according to the research. The only catch – they have to be done correctly. Only one in three staffing directors said their hiring managers are skilled at conducting high quality interviews—probably due to the fact that the same number are satisfied with their interviewer-training program.

So what does a bad interview look like? Respondents included their top ‘bad’ questions from recent interviews are about race, age, religion, belief in ghosts, and even food preferences.

Additional findings include:

• Staffing directors outside of the U.S. were 10 percent more likely to rate their selection system as effective when it came to the ability to identify the right people (U.S.: 46 percent; Other geographies: 56percent).  One reason for this difference may be that non-U.S. companies report using more pre-employment assessment tools to make their hiring decisions.
• Only half (48percent) of staffing directors rated ‘retaining new hires’ as a top priority—it was actually the third highest priority when asked to pick their top choice.
• Less than two-thirds of staffing directors reported that their interview guides are based on an identified set of competencies for the role they’re hiring. 
• Less than 30 percent of staffing directors are satisfied with their interviewer training program.

Click here to access the full 2012 Global Selection Forecast.

Scott Erker, Ph.D., is the Senior Vice President of Selection Solutions for DDI and the study's co-author.

Volkswagen Chattanooga's Innovative Plant Start-up

By: Elizabeth Kabus

Eighty percent of the success of the people you hire is determined by the selection process, according to Volkswagon's staffing experts. So when the world’s third largest auto manufacturer needed to staff a new plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. to build the new Passat, selecting the right talent was crucial to their success.

That undertaking was especially challenging as there were more than 80,000 applications for the 2,000 production, maintenance, managerial, and professional positions.

DDI partnered with Volkswagen Chattanooga to design a multistep selection process for each of the four job families to include sourcing, screening, assessment, and interviewing. Jobs were posted with a number of outlets to reach the most people and “fill the funnel” with a diverse pool of candidates. Volkswagen Chattanooga’s HR team incorporated DDI’s career batteries to narrow the pool of candidates to those who were well-qualified and also appropriately motivated. In addition, DDI’s Targeted Selection behavioral interviewing system was used to check for the knowledge, skills, and motivations related to the critical competencies for each job family.

The four selection processes were defined by the best-practice use of simulation and assessment, with different tools employed for each job family. Among these was a state-of-the-art production simulation, in which applicants progress through three hands-on, experiential exercises. Volkswagen Chattanooga evaluates each individual’s quality orientation, safety orientation, and ability to maintain an appropriate pace of work over time. This simulation provided a realistic preview of the kind of work performed on the production line.

Since hiring began in November 2009, over 85,000 applicants have applied for all positions, and over 13,000 have been tested. Two thousand applicants have accepted offers, enabling Volkswagen Chattanooga to meet its staffing goals with high-quality workers. Candidates rated the process a 4 or higher, with 5 being the most positive, on multiple aspects of the selection process.

Among the comments candidates share on the evaluation forms: “I felt it gave us a clear view on what to expect. I appreciate the opportunity and if given the chance I would make a great employee at Volkswagen. Thank you,” said one. “This was a very unique approach to measuring a person’s capabilities…I enjoyed it!” said another. And someone else said a lot with just a few words: “Ready to start today!”

Click here to view the full Volkswagon Chattanooga story.

Missing Out: Five Ways to Misuse Online Screening Tools

Note: For e-mail subscribers, please click on the title to access the full article

By: Evan Sinar, Ph.D

Part Four

Misuse #4: Generating Legal Risk via Haphazard Screening

The flexibility of online screening systems to enable idiosyncratic filtering of large candidate pools, if not carefully monitored and managed, can be an unrecognized source of legal risk in at least two ways. First, it can increase the potential for differential treatment of candidates with similar backgrounds. If one such candidate is a member of a legally-protected candidate group and is screened-out while another non-protected group candidate is progressed, this can be considered a form of discrimination. Second, using an online screening tool to search or prioritize candidates may automatically classify all individuals searched against as formal applicants. This can substantially impact the necessity to document the job-relatedness of each requirement or search term. Although these legal risks can be managed through careful planning, if left ignored they can quickly threaten the defensibility of the entire selection system.

 

Misuse #5: Neglecting the Untrainables

A final common misuse is factoring a candidate’s past skills, experiences, knowledges, and other “trainables” too prominently into the selection process in general, and within online screening tools in particular. New hire ramp-up time is a critical concern for many employers given lean staffing levels and low budgets available to support extensive training and on-boarding. Hiring an individual who already possesses many of the perceived prerequisites to effective performance is one way to counteract these restrictions.

However, this approach also brings some important caveats. Taken too far it can lead to a situation where “untrainables” – attributes that are difficult or impossible to develop someone in after they have been hired – play, at best, a minor role in progressing candidates to a final interview. These attributes include vital building blocks such as adaptability, integrity, learning adeptness, and innovation, which can be the foundation for an employee expanding his or her role within and beyond the original job description. Hiring processes that fail to early and adequately capture information about these characteristics, using tools designed specifically for this purpose such as cognitive tests and personality inventories, waste the opportunity to understand the “hows” behind a candidate’s background for the sake of knowing only “what” was achieved.

What a candidate brings to the job on day one may indeed help him or her ramp up quickly, but without pairing this knowledge with insights about untrainables, an employer risks bringing on board an employee with a severely restricted ceiling for future growth. Exercise caution to ensure that online screening tools do not overweight trainable characteristics merely because they are more easily searched and screened upon.

 

Summary 

Making the perfect the enemy of the good is a critical misstep when online screening tools are used to target the mythical ideal candidate. But it’s far from the only caution to keep in mind, and other consequences of squandering the potential of these tools can be equally damaging or even more so. Online screening is here to stay and can add immense value and efficiency when deployed appropriately. However, if the recent negative attention directed toward online screening systems is causing you to re-evaluate and seek to improve the way you use these tools – and it should – consider this broader set of potential concerns while redesigning your processes and approaches, and when you’re determining the influence online screening tools will have within your broader hiring process.

How is the role of technology changing your processes for large-scale, geographically-dispersed candidate screening and selection? What do you see as the next evolution of technology-driven hiring
tools?

This article was originally published by Recruiting Trends and is reprinted here with permission.

 

Diversity, Innovation, Analytics, and Impact: Emerging Themes From the 2012 SIOP Conference

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By: Evan Sinar, Ph.D

Part Two: Emerging Themes from the 2012 SIOP Conference: Innovation, Analytics, and Impact

In part one of my blog on this year’s SIOP Conference I discussed the attendance at this year’s meeting along with highlighting one of the most popular sessions featuring Jacqueline Berrien of the EEOC. In addition to that great session other topics stood out as well.

The topics gaining the largest increase in SIOP presentations from the past year are a key indicator of the zeitgeist amongst I/O psychologists and the organizations within which they operate. From the 2011 conference to 2012’s event, the topics surging the most were Innovation/Creativity (with the number of presentations increasing 82%) and Counterproductive Behavior (increased 78%).

Innovation and Creativity are not surprising; nearly every organization is pursuing these objectives, although many struggle to achieve them. This year’s Innovation/Creativity presentations included sessions on how to assess, train, foster, and reward individual and team creativity.

Counterproductive Behavior, focusing on workplace bullying, abusive supervision, and harassment, is a more troubling emerging topic, and perhaps a sign that abundant on-the-job stress faced by some employees is spilling over to the point that these individuals are lashing out at others, with negative consequences for all involved.

Technology and Analytics as applied to Talent Management, virtually non-existent topics only five years ago, were the focus of several sessions in which advice was shared and challenges openly discussed about HR professionals needing to manage complex relationships involving Applicant Tracking Systems, to incorporate new technologies into the HR toolbox, and to effectively leverage and wring analytic insights from the “big data” generated by their HR systems. Social networking, too, was a focus, with numerous presentations seeking to clarify the appropriateness and utility of social media information for Talent Management purposes.

For each of these areas, while the surge in research and probing discussion is promising, much remains unknown and the knowledge base is not yet adequate to provide detailed guidance for HR professionals – we anticipate these topics to attract even more intensive attention and data-driven investigation at next year’s conference.

In the conference’s closing session DDI’s own Doug Reynolds, current SIOP president, highlighted SIOP’s goals for the upcoming years, including bolstering its standing as a model of integrated scientific and practical effectiveness, growing its membership to reflect an increasingly diverse and global I/O and Talent Management population, and extending its influence and impact within the HR community. This year’s conference accentuated SIOP’s unique role as a bridge between the research and data underlying the tools and processes used by I/O psychologists, and the practical implementation and sustained impact of these approaches.

The criticality of balancing rigor and practicality is certain to only increase in future years, ensuring the SIOP conference’s continued relevance and usefulness to Talent Management professionals seeking evidence-based, logically-sound foundations for their practices they lead, the advice they provide, and ultimately, the organizational impact they are charged with achieving.

Did you attend this year’s SIOP conference? What did you learn? What emerging themes did you recognize? What sessions did you enjoy the most?

U.S. Manufacturers Are Hurting Themselves by the Way They Hire

The United States is at a dangerous juncture: Manufacturing jobs are on the rise, but the growth is still fragile. Given the hypercompetitive nature of global manufacturing, it wouldn't take much to kill this momentum and put the U.S. back to where it was a couple of years ago. That's why it's critical for American manufacturers to maximize the return on all their assets — including their workforces.

U.S. manufacturers have always been at the forefront in making efficient use of physical capital, but human capital is a different story.

Read the entire blog on HBR Blog Network

The Gray Matter Matters

By Mike Hoban

Here’s the good news - the U.S. seems to be having something of a resurgence in manufacturing, especially on high tech factory floors. Manufacturers added 25,000 new jobs in April, the seventh month of gains in a row.  Now for the bad news – there aren’t enough skilled workers to run those sophisticated machines and companies are scrambling to hire and train qualified talent and are even poaching from one another. The long predicted talent gap seems to be appearing, but of all places on the factory floor? 

Wait – what?  A war for talent in manufacturing? Yes, you read correctly. There’s a 9% unemployment rate and 1 in 10 manufacturing employees are out of work in the U.S. but because of several trends, the help wanted sign is out for many companies who sport smart machines on the “new” factory floor.  In the last several weeks, two major business publications – Bloomberg/Business Week and the Wall Street Journal – had prominent articles about the reawakening in manufacturing and the huge challenge companies are having finding and keeping skilled workers. 

Manufacturing has slipped in the last 20 years as a desirable career path and there isn’t much of a pipeline of high school and community college graduates who are aspiring to be part of the manufacturing scene.  But demand for goods is back and coupled with boomer manufacturing worker retirements and offshoring wage rates that are rising, thereby reducing the wage gaps between here and “there,” suddenly we have what looks like a talent shortage. 

Some companies are finding that they don’t have enough of a pipeline of people - especially young people - who have the math and science necessary to run the hi-tech gadgetry on the shop floor. No longer is it enough to have a strong back and a good work ethic. The gray matter matters. 

Industry has heard the wake up bell and programs which teach math, technical skills and equipment training are being dusted off and others area being created anew by companies, community colleges and public sector groups.

That’s certainly part of the solution and represents an investment in our country’s future, but let’s hope the focus on new manufacturing readiness and competitiveness includes a healthy helping of interpersonal and team skills training. These days, kids are coming into the work world with underdeveloped and underappreciated social skills, the not so unexpected consequence of several years of electronic communication.

Having to become a productive member of a fast paced work cell or a problem solving team, workers need to be proficient in the areas of building on ideas, demonstrating empathy, conflict management, gaining agreement, communicating clearly and so on. Several years of texting and tweeting have not prepared our young talent for business world interactions. Let’s make the investment in the soft skills too so that when it comes to communicating, those young workers are not, um, “all thumbs.”

Mike Hoban is a Senior Consultant with Development Dimensions International (DDI)

Should the Unemployed also be Unemployable?

By Scott Erker, Ph.D.

I just heard a story on NPR ”Job Seekers Find Bias Against the Unemployed” discussing how much harder it is for those without jobs to find jobs. Considering that earlier this month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there are still 14.8 million people unemployed—a 9.6% unemployment rate. So that discrimination is directed at 10% of the US population.

One job seeker says that while he knows it's not personal—“try telling that to some kid who asked every single girl to the prom in his high school and they all said no. After a while, being told that you're not desired or wanted that many times, it might start to sink in, but you try to block it out.”

How terrible it would be to lose your job, not be able to get work, and then to have the length of time that you’re unhappily unemployed be a knock against you. Especially considering that in the 12-18 months that have passed since companies experienced massive layoffs, the economy has barely recovered with open positions and ramped-up hiring, so individuals haven't been able to recover with a new job for more than a year in many cases.

Traditionally, time out of work has been a viable predictor of performance and turnover.But today, you have the significant confounding factor of the down economy.

The story pointed out that the chance of finding a highly qualified candidate in the ranks of the unemployed was very likely when you look at the volumes of people out of work and the rate that companies downsized.

So how do employers balance this out? It’s important to note long gaps in employment, but to really look closely at skill, ability and motivational fit to the target job as the best predictors of future job performance.

It would be better to look at what they’ve done in the time they’ve been unemployed—have they been developing themselves, exploring new opportunities, networking—or have they been resting on their laurels, hoping that something great would land in their lap.

Scott Erker, Ph.D., is the Senior Vice President of Selection Solutions for DDI.