1. WorkFACTS™ Scales
Honest, smart, hard working candidates seek work that aligns with their interests, values, and talents. They aren’t the problem. The problem is telling the difference between these contenders and pretenders who are dishonest, smart and ambitious.
Faking on ability and knowledge tests is hard since picking the smart answer counts. Most personality tests make it easy– posing lots of short questions with 5 tick-box answer options (i.e. Agree to Disagree or Never to Always). Test fakers know that picking 3s doesn’t land the job. For a sales job, the ‘always’ answer is a good bet for the item, “I find it easy to make friends in new situations.”
That is a key reason why WorkFACTS™ scales work so well. When you have to pick “All that Apply” or the BEST answer from a series of statements, it’s hard to know how to boost your score. You can’t be sure which answer gets points, or even how many answers to pick. So the best test-taking strategy is to answer as honestly as possible. People who picked blue answers in the colored image sold more on the job. The red answer, less. Created by Dr. John Callender over a 24 year career at P&G, these scales deliver boosts of 50-150% in selection suite decision accuracy.
2. Performance Scenarios
Deploying killer strategies that sustain competitive advantage means translating those strategies into job behaviors in specific scenarios. Then the choice falls between hiring people who are “naturals” on those behaviors or closely supervising pivotal performers, making sure they behave according to plan. Hiring naturals in very specific behaviors is how the Oakland “A”s put together a winning team in the movie “Moneyball.” Close supervision followed by payoffs or punishment has been tried. It hasn’t worked so well and it is costly.
A Performance Scenarios module begins with stakeholder interviews and an online Scenario Modeler to capture what strategically successful performers do differently in challenging scenarios. The online assessment places candidate in those challenging scenarios. Candidates rate how well each of set of action options captures their “best behavior” in the scenario. Action options come from how successful and struggling performers handled the scenario. It’s what happens on the job, so candidates experience a “slice of life” as they take the test. The extra one-time cost in creating Performance Scenarios more than pays off in employer brand appeal, plus it further boosts selection suite decision power.
3. Veris Fiduciary Trust for Intelligent Professionals
There are other “Integrity Tests”, but none prior to this one developed for highly intelligent, high-impact professionals. Research reported in the Harvard Business Review found that as valuable as replacing an average performer with a star is, it is 10 times more costly to hire Toxic Talent over an average performer, due to lasting damage on customers, peers and managers.
The Veris assessment emerged from items suggested by a review by Dr. George Paajanen of over 300 books and articles that studied personal characteristics of white collar felons. Those items were administered to a benchmark of 840 white collar felons incarcerated in 40 prisons. Only items that showed significant differences between the felon benchmark and employed financial professionals were kept in the operational version of the test.
Item factor analysis performed by Dr. Tom Janz found that eight factors contribute to strong vs. weak moral fiber. Recently, an infamous felon joined the benchmark. Bernie Madoff scored high on Ambition and Carefulness, which makes sense given the size of the crime. He scored much lower on Accountability, Consideration of Others, and almost at the very bottom on Conscientiousness– a marker profile for Toxic Talent. Veris continues to identify both Toxic and Trusted talent profiles so your organization can confidently confirm the integrity of strategic hires.
