7. “ It’s not experience – or college degrees – or other accepted factors… … (it) hinges on fit with the job.” Source: Herbert M. Greenberg and Jeanne Greenberg, “Job Matching for Better Sales Performance,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 58, No. 5.
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11. Interviews have a 14% success rate in identifying superior people! Hunter & Hunter “Validity & Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance”. Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 96, No. 1. p90
12. With that process, here’s what you see & recruit/promote… Here’s what you get!
13. & here’s what you get! With that process, here’s what you see & recruit/promote…
15. There is a missing third element that is essential… … for predicting future ‘superior’ performance Company Fit Attitudes,Values, Demeanour, Appearance, Integrity Job Fit Personality, Abilities, Interests Skill Fit Education, Training, Experience, Skills, Etc.
Good morning. First of all let me thank you for taking the time to come along. In the interests of keeping to time and avoiding the hooked stick in around 30 minutes, I won’t take questions during the presentation but if there’s time I’ll be happy to do it at the end or later on our stand (K40) You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m not going to sell to you today. Nor, of course, am I going to talk to you about something that our products can’t do – that would be particularly stupid. So, if we can agree that you accept that Profiles products can help you to develop a high performance workforce, I won’t sell to you, then we’ve established an excellent platform for the next 30 minutes or so. DON’T CLICK!!!! 1
Even if you have every other aspect of your business working perfectly, people problems can still be the difference between profit and loss, success & failure. On the face of it that might sound like a very extreme thing to say. And yet that’s exactly what a study of 85 years of research has shown very clearly. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, two of the foremost experts in personnel productivity and psychology undertook a major review of the dozens of studies on the impact people have upon the success of organisations conducted over the last eighty five years. DON’T CLICK!! 2
If you disliked maths as much as I did then you’ll probably be ready to leave when you recognize this shape. Yes it’s a Population Distribution Bell Curve . But don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about it much and I don’t understand it either!! What Hunter & Schmidt found was that for every job they reviewed there were people who consistently outperformed the majority of their peers in the same position. They referred to these as ‘superior’ performers and found that about 16% of the people in any job fell into this category. <CLICK> 3
When they looked at unskilled or semi-skilled <CLICK> workers they found that ‘non-producers’ produced 19% less than their ‘average’ peers; and that superior workers produce 19% more than their average peers. So the difference in output between non-producers and superior producers was a massive 41%! <CLICK> Amongst skilled workers, the difference was even more dramatic. They found that ‘non-producers’ produced 32% less than their ‘average’ peers; and ‘superior’ workers produced 32% more than their ‘average’ peers. So, there was a 74% difference in output between non-producers and superior producers in skilled positions! <CLICK> 4
To avoid unnecessary people costs you must be sure that every time you make a people decision – whether you are recruiting someone new, moving someone from one job to another, promoting someone, or investing in training or development – that you are doing so with a view to promoting superior performance in the target position. But how do you do this? Well, to understand the ‘how’ first we need to look at the ‘why’ - why some people perform at a superior level and some don’t <CLICK> 8
Harvard Business Review researchers set out to answer this question with the largest ever research study of its kind. For twenty years they followed 360,000 people in fourteen industries through their careers to see what made the superior performers successful. Their results were pretty dramatic <<CLICK> 9
… they found that none of the usual ways of selecting people for their jobs had any significant ability to predict whether or not they would be successful in their jobs. There was no relationship between performance and educational qualifications, gender, age, race, experience, or any of the many other criteria used to select people for jobs. What they did find, however, was that when people were ‘matched’ into jobs that they were capable of doing, were motivated to do, in an environment that suited their personality and behaviour, then they were successful. 10
They are people who have personalities that allow them to be comfortable in the environment of the position – interacting effectively with their colleagues and clients – and meeting the challenges of the position head on <CLICK> Finally, superior performers tend to be people who are interested in the work – and because they are interested and get something from the work, they are much more motivated to be successful in the position. They want to do the job well. <CLICK> 11
Well, you have two opportunities to match people to jobs: <<CLICK>> First, and most efficient and desirable, you can recruit or select the right person for each of your jobs first time around. Do this and you are winning right from the start. <<CLICK>> Of course, in some of your positions you will already have people who are falling short of superior performance – and recruiting replacements in those positions is just not an option. So, the second necessary job-matching option is that of coaching your existing people to achieve a higher level of performance than they currently do We’ll look at these two approaches in some detail now. <CLICK> 12
Every year we speak to hundreds of people responsible for placing people in jobs in their organisations, and the first thing we ask them to do is outline the approach they take to recruiting, moving or promoting people into their positions. There are, of course, lots of variations on a theme, but most people follow at least these two key steps as they set out to predict the future: <<CLICK>> First, they look at candidates’ educational qualifications, skills, experience – any information they can find about the candidate’s past performance that has any likely relevance to what they want them to do in the future. This information on past performance is gleaned from resumes, application forms etc. This is really to determine if the candidate has the basic skills and know-how necessary to undertake the target job <<CLICK>> 13
The problem with interviews is that research consistently shows that conventional, unstructured interviews provide only 14% of the information you need to PREDICT how the person will perform in the position and make a good recruiting decision. And that’s what you do every time you recruit someone; you say :”I predict that Tom will be one of my best performers…” Would you feel confident making such predictions on the basis of interview alone – where the statistics suggest that you’d get a one-in-seven hit rate? Of course not. At this stage I should apologise. I could only find a six-shot gun but I’m sure you get the point. In fact, recruiting by interview alone is more like Russian roulette with 5 bullets!! <<CLICK>> 14
Cast your mind back to the last job interview where you were the candidate. Think of who you presented to the interviewers on that day – was it you ‘warts and all’, or was it a highly polished version of you (all warts gone!), with the perfect education, qualifications, experience, and personality for the position on offer? People are like icebergs when they attend interviews – they float into the room looking powerful, whiter than white – a wonderful force of nature. So we recruit them. And the moment we welcome them aboard we get a lot more than we had expected! <CLICK> 15
Now, sometimes what we get is much more valuable than what we thought were getting – and we have that wonderful experience of recruiting someone who greatly exceeds the expectations that we have of them. But sometimes that seven-eighths that floats below the surface unseen is what makes them a critical danger to our businesses – so much so that if we had seen that large volume of hidden attributes we would probably have avoided them altogether! Interviews simply cannot see below the surface of the individual, cannot give you the information you need to have to make a good decision when you put someone into one of your positions <CLICK> 16
Interviews provide valuable information about a person that you cannot easily get through any other means – so they are necessary. But interviews alone DO NOT provide all of the information needed to make these key decisions. And no business can afford the risk of making decisions that can have such a dramatic financial impact as we’ve seen people can – unless they have all of the necessary information. That’s where the value of job-matching, as identified in the Harvard Business Review study discussed earlier, really comes into its own. <CLICK> 17
But what if you were to combine the resume information you get about someone’s experience, education & qualifications; and the information you get from an interview; WITH a job-matching approach? <<CLICK>> So, what is job fit? <CLICK> 18
It’s all about information but not just any information. The information needs to be objective to do the best we can to eliminate the subjectivity each of us puts into this type of process. <CLICK>> The job pattern provides us with a picture of our ideal candidate. There are several ways to produce one but no time to tell you what they are today. <<CLICK>> The candidate assessment uses the same measures to tell us about the candidate. <<CLICK>> 19
Finally, you can identify the specific requirements essential for superior performance in your positions by profiling your current top performers in these positions. You can produce profiles for each of your positions – profiles against which potential new candidates can be matched BEFORE you make your decisions. By Job Matching – ensuring that the candidate has all of the attributes of your proven Top Performers - as recommended by the Harvard Business Review - you will bring your people decision hit rate right up to 75%. So, from a starting point where you potentially had as little as 14% of the information necessary to predict superior performance, you will raise your game to a three-in-four hit rate through the addition of a lot more information to the mix. DON’T CLICK!!!! 26
Profiles can provide all of this information in a single, easy to use , online assessment. It doesn’t need trained or licensed practitioners to administer it. It doesn’t need psychologists or consultants to interpret the reports for you or your line managers. It doesn’t require additional payments for more reports or for the future use of the data. Now that was dangerously close to selling but probably as close as I’m going to get!! <<CLICK>> 27
And there IS a bonus…. The additional research undertaken by the Harvard Business Review that I mentioned earlier found that those who were job-matched to their positions tended to stay in their jobs much longer – significantly reducing employee turnover and the many costs associated with it – advertising costs, agency costs, management time, down time, morale and so on. 28
What happens when you put someone in a job that simply doesn’t fit them? This is you, or me, or indeed anyone who might ever be placed in one of your positions (hold up an elastic band). Notice that at the moment I’m quite relaxed and loose – and I have a deal of flexibility at my command (stretch and unstretch the band lightly). I’m in a job that suits me; I feel good, I’m pretty relaxed, and I’m under no great pressure from my job. Now I hate accounts. So, every time I’m looking at the accounts, dealing with the VAT Return, ensuring we’re getting paid promptly and in turn paying our suppliers, it stretches me (stretch the band) putting me under a little stress (twang the band). But that’s OK, because it’s just occasionally, and it takes no more than an hour or two. I can cope with that and, when it’s done I can relax again into enjoying those parts of the job that turn me on more (let the band go limp). 29
And that’s exactly what is happening all over the world (maybe even in your company?) – people are being placed in jobs that simply do not fit – so they ‘disengage’. They either simply stop trying to do good for their employers – the ‘not engaged’ figure represented by the yellow bands in this slide. Or worse, they start actively trying to do their employers harm (the ‘actively disengaged’ represented by the red band in this slide). So, how do you avoid this? <CLICK> 30
You need to identify the Superior performers in every one of your positions <CLICK> – and develop a profile of what it takes to deliver superior performance in each of those positions <CLICK> You will benefit hugely from Coaching Reports that will help you and your managers to manage so that the focus is upon raising the level of performance in every job <CLICK> You’ll see how to avoid spending on any coaching, training, or development that is not going to result in increased performance on the job – ensuring that development budgets are wisely spent <CLICK> 31
You can also set up a system to monitor the financial results you achieve through managing this key side of your business – providing you with the means to quantify the results you achieve Start measuring performance in every job (our experience is that many companies don’t do this) Establish objective ‘pers’ for every position (what is a per?) (sales calls per week, revenue per sales call) Implement measurement of productivity against these ‘pers’ <<CLICK>> Quantify productivity gaps and target improvements (how far adrift of your top performers are your average performers?) Monitor continually for improved productivity (trumpet the successes) 32
Come and see us on stand K40. We’ll be happy to see you there. Thank you again for coming. I’m happy to take any questions you may have in the few remaining minutes I have available. ONLY IF TIME AND THE FORMAT ALLOW FOR QUESTIONS 33
