Donna Burr has been a partner in Watermark’s Interim Management Practice since 2018, deploying senior-level interim executives in both private and public sectors. She focuses on CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs, change & turnaround professionals, senior Finance, HR, Operations, Legal & IT executives. She has completed interim management search assignments across various industries, including Financial Services, Government agencies, Peak Member and Regulatory bodies, Not-for-Profit, Healthcare, Energy, and Utilities.
I interviewed Donna for The Job Hunting Podcast recently (episode 71, which you can listen to in most podcast apps). I asked her the most common questions executives have about job hunting, recruitment, and selection. This is what she had to say.
How to identify your transferable skills?
In Donna’s case, she had a mentor point out to her what her traits or superpowers were, which helped her transfer her skills and develop new expertise. But you don’t need a mentor to do that. Here are her tips for other ways to find out what your superpowers are:
Once you get the answers to these two questions, look for patterns. Your superpowers will be in the answers. Then, you need to develop a narrative and understanding of what they mean in terms of skills you can transfer to a different workplace.
Be ready to accept the answers you will get. Those superpowers might not be what you expected or wanted to hear. Most likely, it will not be “leadership” or anything grandiose! It would be best if you took the feedback on with interest and curiosity. Listen and spend time reflecting on it; it’s what people have seen over a long period of time.
What to do when you don’t have industry experience?
What happens when you have been working in an industry all your life, and now you find there are not many jobs advertised in that industry? You need to start looking for jobs in industries and companies unfamiliar to you, but the job title and the responsibilities are within your skills and experience. How do you position yourself to compete with other candidates who have industry or sector experience?
Donna reminded us of something we have heard before in previous interviews of The Job Hunting Podcast “Never answer a prospective employer and tell them, ‘I can do anything.’ This is not helpful. The Tighter you can be about your strengths or superpowers, the more likely it is that people will be able to help you, and an employer will be able to see where you could potentially fit.”
Dealing with ageism when job-hunting?
There are two ways to address ageism when job-hunting:
“Renata, your optimized job search schedule is gold dust!”
Donna and I discussed the importance of a great job-hunting routine to speed up results. If you’re an executive or a job hunter in transition, be disciplined about your week. You need a reason to get up in the morning, a rhythm to the week. It would be best to read the news, map out those sectors you’re interested in and who you need to connect with. You should be looking at your digital profile, your resume and seeking the help that you need. You should be getting out and speaking to people, be it virtually or in person, if possible. Be disciplined about it. There’s no short, quick, fast way to do this.
To help you understand what tasks you should be doing each week to optimize your job search, and choose the best routine for you, download for free the Optimized Job Search Schedule.
For some, the job market is still very competitive. It can be frustrating and demoralizing when you’re getting knock-backs or just feeling like you’re not making progress. Still, be patient, keep the discipline, believe in yourself, surround yourself with people who will help and support you. Donna and I firmly believe that if you do focus on all those things, you’ll start seeing conversions, leads, and opportunities coming your way! You have to put in the hard work. No one’s more interested in you finding a job than you. It’s not the recruiter’s job; it’s not your friend’s job; it’s not your network’s job to find you a role.
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Renata Bernarde is a Career Coach and Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. You can listen to the podcast in all available podcast apps. Download Renata’s Optimized Job Search Weekly Schedule to create the perfect job search routine to suit your needs, no matter how much (or little) time you have.
Whether you’ve been job searching for months or you have just started, I encourage you to press reset, sharpen your focus and go through the list of key success factors below. Make sure you are reviewing and addressing them every day during your transition. I hope that by being strategic and building a healthy job search routine, you will – like my clients – have a shorter transition that leads to the best possible outcome for you in 2021.
Regardless of the magnitude of your career goals: be it finding a similar job or making a bolder career change, the strategies below will help make your pitch crystal clear to recruiters and hiring managers:
1. Understand who you are as a professional and what you offer to employers.
Find out what your strengths and transferable skills are. Even though different sectors require different expertise, they need common essential skills, such as communication, analytical skills, people skills, etc. Please write down your transferable skills and include them in your job search materials, not as a jumble of words, but as the most relevant competencies applied to you. Whether it be an interview, your resume, or your profile, ensure you can speak confidently about the skills you listed and that you have robust examples to back them up.
2. Ask yourself, what industry, sector, and organizations do you want to work for?
If you are unsure where to go next and curious about industries and companies you don’t know, investigate. You can read about them, and most importantly, talk to professionals who work there. Draw on your network, or start building one. For example, you can tap into your university’s Alumni, former colleagues, and friends. Think outside the box, talk to people from different areas and sectors. Then make sure you make these decisions before you start your job search. Yes, you can revisit later. In fact, you should be reviewing your job search strategy constantly. But sharpen your focus on the industries, sectors, and companies before going to market. Otherwise, there’s a great chance you will feel overwhelmed and pulled in too many directions.
3. Once you identify your preferred industry, find out what knowledge, qualifications, experience, and skills are valued by the hiring managers.
Your research will provide you with important clues that you should use to draft your cover letters, resumes, LinkedIn profile. It should also guide the way to interact with recruiters and even which recruiters to interact with. Good sector analysis will help you learn the sector’s language so you can better explain in writing and conversations how your strengths and transferable skills can support your new career transition. You will feel more confident about your prospects at this stage.
4. Find a coach to support your transition or at least a mentor.
It is not easy to shift sectors, and having a mentor can help access information to support the transition. And learning how to play the game and win as a job candidate in a sea of highly qualified peers is a steep learning curve. Investing in help at this stage can shave off weeks or months of unemployment, as well as keep you operating at high performance and low-stress levels. It is a competition, and there’s no way around it. The top players usually have top help. Be one of them.
5. Know your values.
What sort of culture and what kind of organization brings out the best in you? For example, do you work better in an organization where there is a lot of autonomy? Or do you work better in an organization where you’re part of a team? Use the interviewing process to learn more about the organization, the same way they are using it to learn more about you. Values alignment will make a difference in how long you stay in that organization. Don’t just take the first thing that rolls up along the aisle because it could be a disaster. Transitions can be stressful, but you don’t want to regret your move a few months down the track because you took the first offer, and now you’re miserable again. I’m assuming you can have the privilege of making the most out of your transition period. However, if your situation requires you to find a job quickly, then it may have to be first in best dressed. In that case, don’t forget to keep working on your future career steps and don’t take too long to move again.
Keep in mind: success occurs when opportunity meets preparation!
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Renata Bernarde is a Career Coach and Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. You can listen to the podcast in all available podcast apps. Download Renata’s Optimized Job Search Weekly Schedule to create the perfect job search routine to suit your needs, no matter how much (or little) time you have.
The best employers use a variety of creative and novel ways to attract, inspire and engage their people. Here are 21 proven ideas to get you started:
We’d love to hear about creative things your organization does or practices you’ve seen work elsewhere, to add to this list. Please share your ideas and comments with us and we’ll circulate these so everyone can cultivate better, more positive and fun workplaces.
For more details on how to design and implement an effective strengths-based people strategy that delivers exceptional engagement, contact us at info@talentpredix.com
Every candidate knows they are going to be asked about their weaknesses. Yet, this line of questioning still provokes deep fear and anxiety for many. They are unsure of how to respond well without exposing their deepest vulnerabilities or coming across as inauthentic. Below are some tips to help you ace this question, ensuring it doesn’t undermine your chances of securing the position.
Be straightforward
Don’t be caught off guard or act surprised by this question. I have interviewed dozens of job candidates over several decades and the worst examples of this I have seen is when people say something like “I can’t think of any” or “Ummm, now let me think… I can’t recall anything specific off the top of my head.” My alternative tip is to prepare for the question and to answer it in a straightforward, authentic, and assured way. Remember that everyone has vulnerabilities and weaker areas so you don’t need to “act surprised” or even worse, beat around the bush or try to water down your response.
Be honest and specific
One of the traps people often fall into is to be dishonest or vague about their weaknesses. They use clichés like “I don’t spend enough time on my self-development” or “I’m a real perfectionist” to disguise their real performance risks. Instead, be specific and totally honest about your one or two biggest performance risks and explain to the interviewer how you’ve learnt to mitigate these risks offering several examples by way of illustration. The interviewer will value your self-awareness and honesty which is what most interviewers are looking for. You will also avoid getting bogged down in the traps of being guarded, vague or defensive or even worse, telling ever-bigger lies to cover up if a savvy interviewer decides to probe your response.
Talk about your overused talents
When your greatest talents are overused, they can lead to unintended negative consequences that undermine your performance and relationships. They also become viewed as weaknesses by co-workers and others around you. Recent studies show that overused talents and strengths are a greater source of performance problems for people than more obvious weaknesses and shortfalls in competence. For example, when overused, understanding others and empathy can become overinvolvement, positivity can become overbearing excitement, creativity can become idea overload and decisiveness can become recklessness. By being aware of your overused talents and sharing these with the interviewer in response to the weakness question, you will be showing excellent self-awareness. Tell the interviewer how you’ve learned to recognise the situational triggers of these overused behaviours and mitigate any negative risks associated with them. This conveys excellent self-awareness and should impress most interviewers who may not even have this level of insight themselves.
Final tips to prepare for this question
For more details on how to design and implement effective job interviews, contact us at info@talentpredix.com
Most medium and large organizations use psychological assessment tests (incl. ability and personality testing), principally for hiring, and this figure is expected to climb to almost 90% in the coming years (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2015). Using assessment techniques to support talent development and organizational change applications (e.g., to support reskilling in response to the digitization of work) is also increasingly common. Work-based assessments provide more objective data to inform key talent management decisions and if applied professionally, can help reduce subjectivity and a multitude of human biases in hiring, development, succession planning and other critical HR processes.
Rapid technological advances, changing client requirements and a more digitally curious HR profession means that the range of work-related assessments on offer is growing faster than ever. This is long overdue. Many assessments are decades old and have changed very little since the last century. Using them is equivalent to using a legacy mainframe to calculate your household budget rather than using the latest app on your smartphone or tablet. Yet it is not just about embracing innovative new technologies in assessment like gamification and machine-learning. The fundamental assumptions and models we use to assess and make important decisions about people’s futures need to shift significantly too.
Assessing and amplifying people’s individuality and uniqueness
Assessments measuring personality still tend to describe and measure human abilities and behaviour in imprecise, limiting ways. For example, many widely used personality profiles pigeonhole people into broad, oversimplified personality types, categories and even colours. This view of human behaviour at work is seductively simple and although such over-generalized personality typing can be helpful in giving organizations a basic understanding of how people approach tasks and relate to others, their value is limited and can be counterproductive.
In a world that increasingly recognizes the importance of discovering and leveraging diversity, they promote narrow thinking and stereotyping about people. They fail to reflect the countless unique differences that make us who we are, including the talents, values, and motivations we leverage to do our best work. Even when people have similar personality traits, the way they use these depends on their goals, motivations, values, and the way they interpret and respond to different situations.
The younger generations entering the workplace want their individuality and unique talents to be valued, appreciated, and developed from the get-go. Any assessment that labels or pigeon-holes them too narrowly can quickly undermine their sense of identity, value, and psychological connection with the organization.
Many traditional assessments that are still commonly used today are unlikely to stand the test of time. To future-proof their organization and achieve better talent outcomes, HR leaders and professionals need to evaluate the rigour and relevance and of their current assessment tools, including how well they are predicting performance and promoting a diverse, inclusive workplace. Those based on outdated thinking and questionable science should be replaced with scientifically validated, up-to-date tools that pinpoint people’s unique and diverse talents, abilities motivations and values.
Further reading
Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2015). Ace the Assessment. Harvard Business Review, July-August.
For more details on how to design and implement an effective talent and strengths assessment strategy, contact us at info@talentpredix.com
Based on decades of experience working with leaders, it is clear to me that many of the best are critical thinkers. Their ability to logically analyse information and evaluate problems to reach effective, well-reasoned decisions is vital for any business.
When they’re in the zone, critically-minded leaders are quick to spot problems and gaps, identify potential gaps and risks in solutions and are very effective in playing “devil’s advocate” by pointing out gaps, problems and weaknesses when evaluating data and solving problems.
However, when used in excess, critical thinking can result in the following problematic behaviours for leaders:
However, there are a variety of techniques critically-minded leaders can apply to avoid these risks. Based on my coaching work with this type of leaders, these are the most effective:
Identifying situational triggers for the overused behaviours
Leaders develop deeply ingrained habits and ways of approaching and handling tasks and decisions based on what’s worked for them in the past. These habits are developed over many years and are often very difficult to change. However, by becoming more self-aware of what triggers overused behaviours, critically-minded leaders can learn to monitor how they are using their critical thinking skills across different situations and the impact they are having on others. For example, periods of intense stress and pressure can often amplify overused behaviours. Similarly, they may be triggered by overly optimistic or positive people. Through practising “dialling up” and “dialling down” their critical thinking, they can adjust their behaviour to the needs of the situation and minimize the risk of overdrive behaviours showing up.
Using signposting to clarify expectations
Critically minded leaders are often misunderstood by others as being overly critical or negative, especially when the team is made up of positive and creative thinkers. By signposting their intentions to the team more clearly, critical leaders will be better understood and trusted to play a complementary role that brings value to the group. There are various ways leaders can signpost their intentions up front, however, the easiest is to say something along the lines of: “Are you ok if I play devil’s advocate during this meeting?” or “I’m happy to flush out issues and problems as we work through these options if everyone’s ok with that.”
Effective questioning skills
In coaching critically-minded leaders over several decades, some of my greatest breakthroughs have occurred by helping leaders to understand how to shift the way they use their critical thinking talent from presenting arguments and objections to posing powerful questions. Critical thinkers typically ask themselves tough questions about the data or options in front of them but don’t always verbalise these questions. By communicating and inviting others to reflect on these open questions with them, they can enrich the conversation, promote better scrutiny of the data, and broaden the team’s conversation about potential options, risks, and decision criteria.
Creating space for creative problem-solving
Leaders who are critical thinkers need to learn to make space for creative thinkers to have a voice and apply their talents, especially when creative problem-solving is called for to tackle complex problems or promote more innovation. This requires consciously “dialling back” on their tendency to find fault with ideas and solutions to allow sufficient time and space for creative thinking. They can either call on the natural creatives in the team to lead a brainstorming or brainwriting session or they can do this themselves. We recommend the former as this will provide creatives with an opportunity to shine and optimize their talents. Leaders can also make greater use of established divergent thinking techniques such as the POINT method when problem-solving. This encourages people to first look at the Pluses and Opportunities associated with ideas and alternatives in advance of issues and problems. The second step is to encourage the team to raise Issues as problem questions rather than simply stating the issues, as questions invite divergent and creative thinking. Finally, the team explores New Thinking to tackle problem questions that have been raised and discussed.
When leaders overuse their critical thinking talents, their overwhelming critique, negativity, and problem-spotting can easily be misunderstood by others. These overused behaviours can lead to a multitude of other unintended consequences, including poor performance, damaged relationships, and low morale. However, by building greater self-awareness, adapting their critical thinking to the needs of the situation, and collaborating with others who are more creative and solutions-oriented, leaders who are critical thinkers can significantly improve their leadership effectiveness and outcomes.
To find out how we can help your organization avoid using overused talents, contact us at info@talentpredix.com
Increasingly passion is being highlighted as a key ingredient for success at the individual, team, and organizational levels. In today’s rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, companies need passionate people who can drive outstanding and sustained performance.
Although it has been defined in different ways, passion is best defined as a “fire in the belly” or positive energy to achieve and outperform against one’s goals. Based on significant research over the last 2 decades, we know that when people are in jobs that enable them to do what really motivates them and optimize their talents, they are far more likely to demonstrate higher levels of passion. Passionate employees are also more likely to go “above and beyond” to achieve exceptional results. Organizations today need passionate, strongly committed people to deal with rapid changes in the business environment, growing complexity and increased competition.
Passion is different from employee engagement in that engagement focuses mainly on employee satisfaction with work environment factors such as co-workers, management, working conditions, etc. Passion is about the individual and their purpose. It focuses on how aligned and connected people are with the company’s vision and whether they believe they can use their unique talents and abilities to help the company solve challenges and achieve its goals. It provides intrinsic motivation stemming from the person’s own aspirations and sense of identity that can boost a person’s performance between paydays.
Perseverance involves working hard to achieve goals and sticking with a task even in the face of immense pressure and setbacks. It ensures focus and discipline to establish the productive routines and habits necessary to achieve excellent results. There are many factors influencing perseverance, however, the one that is arguably most important is being committed to and energized by one’s roles and the overall purpose of the company.
So, it seems that passion and perseverance are strongly and positively related. The research has recently been advanced by studies about “Grit” by Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth defines Grit as the capacity to sustain both effort and interest in projects or tasks that take months or even longer to complete. She has found that people who are high in Grit don’t deviate from their goals, even in the absence of positive feedback and in the face of adversity. The Grit concept is essentially a combination of passion and perseverance. It suggests that we should be looking to identify and develop both in our people, rather than focusing on one or the other.
Suggested Reading:
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, 2016, Angela Duckworth. London: Penguin
Intelligence, typically defined as a person’s cognitive ability to analyze and deal with complex problems in a logical way, is undoubtedly a huge asset in the workplace, and is crucial in dealing effectively with work demands and challenges.
The way intelligence is defined is still narrow and limiting
In today’s fast paced environment where the speed of change is dizzying, analytical intelligence is important, but insufficient for success. In recent decades psychologists and people professionals have increasingly recognized the importance of taking a broader approach to understanding and measuring intelligence that recognizes its multi-faceted nature. For example, Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Business School introduced the idea of “multiple intelligences” as a way to broaden the research and practice on intelligence beyond logical, verbal, and numerical abilities. In recent decades this has given rise to a long overdue exploration of different intellectual strengths including creative, social, emotional, and practical intelligences. Studies indicate that for many roles, these are just as important as traditional types of intelligence. However, schools, higher education institutions and workplaces persist in inflating the importance of analytical intelligence. Measures typically used to assess intelligence such as IQ, verbal and numerical reasoning tests reflect this narrow approach. This significantly limits opportunities to expand our understanding and measurement of different types of intellectual strengths and talents in education and the workplace. Moreover, it is not just intelligence that is hugely important in predicting job performance.
It is often the people who persevere that outperform intellectually gifted ‘smarts’ who lack the social-emotional skills to succeed or give up too quickly when confronted with new or difficult challenges.
So, can an employee who demonstrates exceptional perseverance achieve better results than someone who has higher logical intelligence and reasoning abilities?
Perseverance and Grit are just as important as intelligence
Perseverance, or the capacity to persist in the face of obstacles or challenges, is receiving increasing attention from behavioural scientists and practitioners alike. Recent studies show that in many roles, it is people who work hard and stick to their long-term goals that are more likely to achieve peak performance. Those demonstrating both passion for their role and dogged perseverance, a combination that has been labelled “Grit” by psychologists, work hardest to overcome obstacles, and don’t give up under stress and pressure. They are therefore more likely to achieve their goals, even when their natural intelligence is lower.
An interesting finding is that intelligence and Grit aren’t necessarily related. For example, many extremely intelligent people are bought up in overly protected environments and have learned little about dealing with hardship and facing difficult challenges, so they have very low levels of Grit. Contrast this to people who have fought hard to overcome adversity linked to their gender, ethnicity, or social class to succeed in a world that throws down razor-sharp tacks at every turn to slow their progress.
Perseverance is also crucial to develop learning agility required to deal with fast-changing environments. While intelligence is important to effective learning, if the person is not willing to put in the hard work and effort needed to develop new skills and adapt to constant changes, they won’t be able to sustain high levels of success. When tasks and problems are highly complex and the skills to master them are particularly difficult to learn, such as those found in leadership and technical specialist roles, perseverance becomes even more important.
Hire for perseverance as well as intelligence
Of course, for more complex, knowledge-intensive roles, the person who has both high levels of intelligence and perseverance is the person who will typically achieve the best performance. They are also more likely to have the Grit and learning agility to thrive in the face of extreme uncertainty and adversity.
While intelligence is a key quality to have to be able to solve problems and make good, well-reasoned decisions, it is only effective if the person can use their intelligence in an agile way to deal with new and unexpected challenges and opportunities. Perseverance is essential to help leaders and employees tackle and overcome obstacles, deliver results under pressure, and adapt to change. Some may be surprised to learn that studies show that many of the most successful leaders and entrepreneurs are not people with the highest IQ scores or grades from school, college, or university. They achieve success principally through ambition, hard work, love, and belief in what they are doing and dogged perseverance to succeed. Human Resources professionals would therefore be well advised to incorporate this ability to persevere into their assessment strategies to ensure it is part of the way they attract, select, develop, and manage their talent.
Being motivated does not mean the same as motivation. We cannot fool ourselves into feeling motivated with the ‘fake it till we make it’ approach. We need to actually feel intrinsically motivated for long term achievement.
Commonplace ideas around motivation actually do not work for long term habit building. This is the ‘psych myself up’ sort of motivation where you listen to motivational speeches in the morning or look at your vision board.
All types of motivation are not the same and they were not created equal.
Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation is classically what we think of when we think about “motivation”. It is often associated with rewards and recognition, but in essence, it is any reason we do the work other than the joy, or satisfaction, of doing the work itself. Anything we promise ourselves for doing the work or anything that we get as a result of doing the work are all extrinsic motivators.
Conversely, intrinsic motivation refers to the activities you do because you enjoy the activity itself, or feel it’s important. It’s intrinsic to the work and it is for the love of it. When you are intrinsically motivated you do the work because it is internally satisfying. You would do it even if they didn’t pay you. It is the feeling of being in flow or feeling driven without the need for external motivators.
Honestly, how many times have you succeeded in your goals when trying to force yourself to do something you are not intrinsically motivated to do? Compare that with how many times you have succeeded in something you did, just because you loved it. Don’t get me wrong, extrinsic motivation is not bad; it is simply a poor driver for sustained effort and success. Without this sustained effort, you will not form long-lasting good habits.
Be motivated to do what you love
Think about a time you tried to psych yourself up for something you didn’t really want or did not feel intrinsically motivated to do. Perhaps you even went through the effort of making a vision board or setting smart goals. Maybe it worked the first time or for a week but I can almost guarantee that it did not work for you in the long term and may actually cause more harm than good. All you are doing is fostering a dependence on a temporary and unsustainable emotional state. The next time you have a bad day you will fail because you cannot psych yourself up to do the thing. There will always be bad days and you will still need to make the effort in order to succeed.
While writing this I am reminded of the Mark Twain quote “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” If you can find what your intrinsic motivations are and find a role or career that ticks those motivation boxes, then you will probably start to feel more motivated, energized and in flow than you have before.
A good career drivers or motivations assessment can help you figure out what your biggest intrinsic motivators are to help guide you in your future career path.
Most medium and large organizations use psychological assessment tests (incl. ability and personality testing), principally for hiring, and this figure is expected to climb to almost 90% in the coming years (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2015). Using assessment techniques to support talent development and organizational change applications (e.g., to support re-organization and reskilling in response to digitization of work), is also increasingly common. Assessments are also being deployed by organizations seeking to improve the diversity of their recruitment and talent pipelines. They use these tests as additional data sources rather than replying purely on traditional selection techniques like CV screens and behavioural interviews that are prone to subjectivity, rater error and unconscious bias.
It is not just the popularity of assessments and range of applications that is changing. Rapid technological advances, changing client requirements and a more digitally-curious HR profession means that the type of assessments is changing fast. Many assessments are decades old and have changed very little since the early part of the last century. Using them is equivalent to using a legacy mainframe to calculate your household budget rather than using the latest app on your smartphone or tablet. So what does the future of assessment hold in this digital age we are entering?
Some of the most important trends are:
The rapid adoption of new technologies
New technologies offer innovative breakthroughs in the way we assess people. Mobile technologies, including smart devices and tablets, are likely to replace PCs and laptops as the most common way of undertaking assessments moving forward. This presents some formidable challenges in terms of ensuring standardised test conditions, especially with regard to ability tests for selection purposes. However, companies are moving ahead regardless to incorporate these cost-effective and candidate-friendly technologies into their testing processes.
Traditional surveys are giving ways to new, more engaging ways of collecting and analysing data. Many of these shift the focus from proxies of behaviour (e.g., completing a survey) to measuring actual behaviour. A growing number of companies are introducing virtual reality hiring and and high-tech simulations, which enable them to see how candidates respond under pressure to challenging situations in the same way pilots are screened and trained using tough simulation exercises. This approach is, in many respects, a far more objective and robust way of measuring performance and potential, particularly in high pressure, changeable or unpredictable situations.
Computer-based artificial intelligence (AI) is also being introduced by some companies like HireVue to help minimize subjectivity in decision making, especially when collecting and analysing interview data. With a growing number of tech companies offering smart interview recording and analysis technologies, including video screening via laptops and smart devices, this is a trend we predict will grow significantly.
Gamification of tests measuring a wide range of abilities, including thinking styles, verbal and numerical reasoning and interpersonal styles, is growing in popularity too. This approach has the advantage of improving the candidate experience and minimizing bias in measurement caused by factors such as test anxiety which can occur when using more traditional tests.
However, games-based assessment is not without critics who argue that psychometric rigour is sometimes compromised in order to engage candidates in a fun, immersive experience. Of course, this type of assessment is also relatively expensive to design, test and implement so adoption remains limited.
User experience is paramount
We now live in a world where end user experience is paramount and this applies to the world of online assessments as much as it does to any other online solution we consume. Many assessments are still long, cumbersome and dull to complete. They rarely provide a rich ongoing user experience following test completion with no or little link to development and ongoing performance improvement.
In a world of immersive digital experiences and increasingly short attention spans, assessment designers will need to offer shorter, more focused assessments using more engaging approaches such as game-based assessments, interactive rating formats, and virtual or augmented reality technology. This means they will also need to work out how best to combine psychometric rigour with highly engaging formats, as these two aims are not easy to reconcile.
Understanding peak performance
A much sharper focus on productivity gains (doing more with less) and building a work culture of excellence will accelerate the move away from measuring ‘normal’ ranges of behaviour and performance to predicting qualities driving peak performance such as strengths, talents and motives. By continuing to focus on measuring how a ‘typical person’ behaves at work and applying competencies to try to standardise behaviour across large groups of leaders or employees, we miss an opportunity to fully understand and unlock peak performance.
Zooming in on diversity and uniqueness
A related trend will be a shift away from pigeon-holing personality and ability into broad, oversimplified categories, e.g., “extroverts versus introverts”, as a way to understand and predict behaviour. For example, according to MBTI, people can be classified in one of 16 character preferences and most behaviour can be explained by their type. Insights Discovery does something similar by assigning people one of 4 main colours (e.g., “sunshine yellows” are warm, expressive types) which are supposed to explain most behaviour at work.
This view of human behaviour at work is seductively simple and although MBTI and Insights can be effective in helping people gain a basic understanding of how they and their co-workers typically approach tasks, make decisions and relate to others, their value is limited. They fail to take account of the vast range of differences that make us unique, including the strengths, talents and different ways in which we achieve our results.
Oversimplified personality assessments also don’t take account of the complex and fast-changing person-situation interaction effects evident in today’s organizations. Assessments can better account for these by ensuring employees get 360-degree feedback on how their qualities and behaviours are perceived by co-workers and other stakeholders, including measuring how their strengths and behaviour play out in times of rapid change and stress.
Another major force accelerating this trend is the changing demographics of our workforce. Millennials coming into the workplace want their individuality and unique talents to be valued, appreciated and developed from the get-go. Any assessment that labels or pigeon-holes them too narrowly can quickly undermine their sense of identity, value and psychological engagement with the company.
Measuring learning agility and GRIT
Businesses increasingly need agile, energized and resilient workforces in order to be nimble, competitive and adapt to increasingly turbulent markets and rapidly changing technologies. Consequently, there will be an increased focus on defining and measuring qualities like learning agility, flexibility and resilience. A related trait, GRIT (a combination of passion for a long-term goal and perseverance) is similarly receiving a lot of attention from HR professionals and business psychologists recently as it reflects what many businesses need from their people in order to remain focused and highly productive in the face of pressure and uncertainty.
Using social media data
In the coming decade, organizations will make increasing use of data provided on social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to recruit and screen candidates. Algorithms and tools have already been developed and tested that accurately describe your personality based on your Facebook and other social media activity. The ethical and legal implications of using social media ‘digital footprints’ in this way are already raising concerns among candidates, HR and legal professionals. Ethical considerations arising from the use of web scraping from social media to assess people were recently brought into sharp focus by the questionable personality profiling practices of Cambridge Analytica and it is highly likely that the use of such techniques will increasingly be curtailed by changes in legislation such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Many assessments are unlikely to stand the test of time as we move into the new digital age. In order to future-proof their organization and achieve clear talent outcomes, HR and people leaders should experiment with some of the new tools, ensuring outdated approaches are replaced with scientifically validated, up-to-date approaches that are engaging and also pinpoint people’s uniqueness and diverse talents, as well as measuring job-based requirements.
Further reading Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2015). Ace the Assessment. Harvard Business Review, July-August.