Employee Assessments

Zak

Hello, and welcome to People Performance Radio sponsored by SuccessFactors, the global leader in performance and talent management software solutions. Without further ado, please allow me to introduce Dr Steve and Jim "The Mad Dog" Matheson.

Jim

Welcome back to People Performance Radio, you are here with your host Jim Matheson.

Steve

And Steve Hunt.

Jim

Steve, what's the phone number?

Steve

I don't know, I forget it right away every time.

Jim

650-425-7474.

Steve

650-425-7474.

Jim

OK, so call us at that number, leave us a voicemail, comments, questions that you may have, we'll maybe get it played on the air, hoping to get some voicemails, that's our goal for this month.

Steve

Cool.

Jim

And they can email us: podcast@successfactors.com. They can also follow us on Twitter, twitter.com/ppradio, they can go into iTunes where they probably hopefully are already subscribed and rate us in there and they can also check out your bio page up on www.successfactors.com/podcast.

Steve

Lots of way to get in touch with us and learn more about talent management and the wonderful world of people performance.

Jim

That's right. So, we have a special guest today?

Steve

We do, we have Teresa Fearis all the way from England.

Jim

So Teresa's here with us in the studio, and we're going to talk to her about her company, SHL, right after these words.

Young man

I've been using the internet since I was so young, I can't even remember the first time I used it.

Young woman

There's always been technology right at my hands.

Young man

I've been using the internet since I was nine.

Young man

Basically my entire life has been in the digital age.

Young woman

So much of our life is online now.

Young man

We are so familiar with all the resources that are out there already and so we're probably not really bothered by inefficiency.

Young woman

The applications like Facebook or Twitter allow me to know what's going on with my friends, even if we don't talk for weeks at a time, or even months.

Young man

My family keeps in touch with blogs, websites and even with Facebook.

Young woman

I started this new job and I had this huge project coming up, so I reached out to a friend of mine from college who had a similar experience. and she was able to help me out and give me great pointers, and we did it all on Facebook. It would be awesome if I had that same level of collaboration with my co-workers.

Young man

When we take our first job, we're like, "Yeah, I'll probably work there for a year, maybe two". A lot of companies recognize that, and if you can create an environment where you get to interact with smart, capable people, and you feel like you're making a difference, we're not going to want to leave, we're going to want to say there so we need to create environments that foster this sort of collaboration and fufilment.

Zak

Are you ready for tomorrow's workforce?—check out employee profile at www.successfactors.com.

Jim

We're here today with ‘The Doctor', Steve Hunt, and Theresa Fearis from SHL. We're going to talk a little bit to Theresa about her experiences, and what SHL does, so Steve, why don't you take it away?

Steve

Sure, I think today we have a very exciting guest, we're very excited to have Theresa Fearis all the way from England here in our studio. We're actually doing this live today, Jim, which is a nice change in terms of face-to-face. Normally I can't see Jim, so I can't see his eyes roll to the back of his head when I say something boring, which happens all the time, but very briefly, Theresa is from SHL. This is a company that SuccessFactors is partnering with, because they have some really interesting and unique content that really works well within our technology, and so that being said, Theresa, can you tell us—what is SHL?

Theresa

SHL are a world leader in assessment, providing competency, language and measures of potential against that for organizations who are looking to maximize their talent and who recruit externally into positions that maybe they have found difficult to fill.

Steve

So for somebody who doesn't know what HR stands for, what would that be? What is SHL?

Theresa

SHL is an assessment provider, I mean we do primarily work with the HR community, and really we're about helping them to identify what good looks like within roles within their organization, and then help them find people that meet those criteria and develop them into that role.

Steve

So you provide tools that basically help identify people that are high performers, low performers—how does it actually work? How can you tell if somebody is going to be successful in a role?

Theresa

Well, typically the starting point for most of our customer engagements would be maybe an HR challenge in terms of retention or under-performance, or maybe the team aren't working as well as they could be together. We will work with that customer to try and identify, in terms of what are the functional competencies required to be successful in the role, but more importantly what the behavioral competencies are, so what people need to be doing, bringing to the table to ensure maximal productivity. We look at things such as behaviors and aptitude as ways of predicting those, and I think it's pretty well established now, certainly on the academic and research side, that looking at potential in terms of behaviors and aptitude is a very strong predictor of future performance in the role.

Steve

We'll sort of bring this down to a more concrete example, so imagine Jim: Jim, I don't know how you were chosen for this role as far as podcast announcer, but …?

Jim

It was self-chosen.

Steve

Self-chosen?

Jim

I said we should do a podcast, and nobody really volunteered, so I volunteered myself.

Steve

So imagine that Jim …

Theresa

So everybody stepped back one!

Steve

Exactly.

Jim

And I roped Zak into doing the hard stuff behind the scenes and here we are, and then I grabbed you.

Steve

Cool, so imagine, and you can pick either Jim or me that if you were the hiring manager saying, "I want to do a podcast", and SHL was going to say, "Well, let's make sure you get the right people on the other end of the mike for this"—what would be the process? How would SHL help a company do that?

Theresa

I guess one of the first things we would look at is what makes a successful podcast host, maybe referencing in terms of our own experience, or the experience within the company already, or where we've done this before.

Steve

I have to stop you, can you tell us what that is when you find out what makes a successful podcast host, because we really don't know!

Jim

I'm afraid that if we ran this test on me, there's absolutely no way I would pass.

Steve

Let's continue, maybe not, let's see!

Theresa

I'm imagining now, and maybe the IO psychologist within SHL can validate this and confirm it, but from this very brief experience on this podcast, wwould be dealing with ambiguity first off, perhaps not so much forward planning, maybe that's not a key requirement of the role.

Jim

Ouch!

Theresa

And certainly high on influencing, because you got me from missing my nice run down on the waterfront there to being in this room still in the manufactured air conditioning of the hotel, so you obviously did a good job in influencing me in choosing one over the other.

Steve

Well, we're still hoping to be efficient and to get you out in time to go running with that note.

So, basically as I understand it, SHL comes in and it helps companies really understand what people really need to do to be successful, and then I think the part that is really unique to a lot of other companies is SHL's ability to predict, if you will, predict the future of what somebody is going to do if you put them into a role, if they've never done it before—is that correct?

Theresa

I think one of the really nice things about looking at measures of potential is that we're all very comfortable, whether you're a corporate recruiter or a talent manager within an organization using retrospective information to make decisions.

Steve

What would be retrospective?

Theresa

Things like the skills that they've acquired or certifications, professional training, even if you think about the external recruitment scenario, someone's resume or CV. So I think we're all very used to using that information in a way that says, "OK, I am looking for someone into this role, I'm looking for someone who has experience within this role, I'm looking for someone who has the professional qualifications required for it", but what we sometimes miss, because we're kind of blinkered on looking at that retrospective information is, does someone have the potential to do it, the aptitude and even the motivation? So it's taking it to another level, and it might mean, and certainly for some of the client organizations we've worked in, it may mean a completely shifted mindset in their talent management or acquisition activity. By that I mean that, we've worked with a couple of big retailers, for example, who were consistently looking for people with retail experience. When we actually analyzed what was required for the role, it was very clear that people with other industry or vertical experience would be ideal for retail, but perhaps they'd never considered it because they see either it, not as an industry that they would be good or comfortable in, or maybe because they've always been filtered out at the first stage in that process, and so what's really exciting about looking at potential is, we're not ignoring everything that they have done or that they're doing now, but we're actually measuring people against a much broader landscape in order that they can then consider and play out other career paths in a safe environment.

Steve

So it's a little bit like finding a diamond in the rough, if you will. It's like you can have people that traditionally would never have fitted into a role, but you're able to find out things about them that they might not even know about themselves.

Theresa

Absolutely, and beyond that even, if you're looking at—I mean that's down to the individual, but if you look at groups, quite often you can bring teams together that on paper look like a fantastic team to lead a specific project or an implementation, but in fact because of the behaviors they bring to the table, to the team, they're not going to be as productive as they could be. So again it's another piece of intelligence to help you understand how to put individuals in the right role to contribute towards the business, but also putting teams together for maximum productivity.

Steve

So what about the international aspect—you mentioned earlier that SHL has offices in 40 countries, is that right? What are some of the differences? I mean there must be differences in different countries, I'm sure you get asked that all the time. How is talent management different in the Middle East for example than it is in Europe versus the United States versus Japan?

Theresa

That's a big question, let me break it down.

Jim

She has a run to go on, you know.

Steve

Oh yes I know, I have ten more minutes, right?

Theresa

I'll give you maybe two examples at maybe the opposing ends of the scales. So if you're talking about individual behaviors, and there's some quite well-known examples I think maybe we can talk about which is, we have a personality assessment which has 32 different dimensions, one of which is optimism, and what we find is when we take the assessment in different countries, we have to localize the benchmark or the norm behind each of those tools in each country. So if you measured an American and an English person on that scale, inherently the American would come out as more optimistic on that scale than an English person.

Steve

Is that optimism, or cluelessness?

Theresa

Optimism, there is no brackets blind in front of it, so I can't comment on that, but typically you find that people who are living and working in America tend to come out as more optimistic on that scale than people who are living and working in the UK. We start to see those differences blurring when we actually talk about people who are working out of different countries.

Steve

What's the most pessimistic country, just out of curiosity?

Theresa

I don't have that information but I would imagine the UK is pretty much down there, we don't like to champion any of our winning teams, in fact we hate success. Another interesting one which we came across in some research was that in Japan, for example, they're very unlikely to talk about any business successes, so again they come out as very, very high on the modest scale compared to other countries, and again I guess that's reflecting more a cultural difference than the fact that they have had real business success.

So we have to, and for anyone that's thinking of getting into the assessment area, think again because, it's taken us 27 years to have enough data to be able to validate those differences, to be able to research the tools to make sure we can take stuff to market which doesn't bias any of those cultures, any genders, any ethnic origins, or any age groups. There's a two to three year research cycle behind each of the tools that we develop and take to market. Once you've done that, you then have to translate, back translate. I mean in Japan if we took an item out in a questionnaire which said, "I go on my gut feeling", for them it literally means, "The feeling within my stomach". So again we've had to make sure the item level that we can actually equate what we're using in other countries.

Steve

You can't just put it into what is it, babelfishonline, and just translate these over?

Theresa

Apparently not, no!

Steve

Wow, well before you have to go run, literally, Jim you've been remarkably quiet on this one—do you have any questions for Theresa? I think there's some really interesting stuff.

Jim

Yeah, I didn't really know all this was out there, it sounds really interesting. I'm wondering if the two of us took the test if we would be … if we would jive or not, it's very interesting.

Steve

If we would drive like what?

Jim

Jive. See, we didn't jive right now!

Steve

I don't know, no, I think it is very interesting. I've actually personally done a lot of work, because I wrote a book on this called "Hiring Success" that talks about these assessments, but I think that one point Theresa made which is, it's very difficult to make these and have them work. It's very easy to make them and look like they'll work, but they won't necessarily will.

Jim

Are they mostly for identifying the right people to hire?—or is there, it seems like there would be a lot of value in figuring out teams to put together once everybody is already on the team.

Theresa

Yeah, I mean right now about 60% of our business tends to be assessment for recruitment, and around 40% of our business is assessment for talent management or development post-hire, so people actually moving around within their existing organizations. But we're seeing a shift in the opposite direction, certainly as the labor force tightens and people are starting to focus a lot more on their own talent and how to grow and retain those people and I think, as a consequence of that, companies are much more open now to looking at potential, ie future performance potential, rather than keeping people in a specific business function or role that they've traditionally done, so that's really exciting that one day, in fact there are a couple of companies, who, you know, who are already playing out this vision. One day we should be able to all log on as self-service with SuccessFactors and in our current role take an assessment which helps essentially show our career DNA, and from that point press a button that compares us to every single job within our current organization, potentially even organizations outside of our current employer, and look at how well we match those roles, whether they be current vacancies or they be vacancies that will come up a year from now, and I can start to take much more ownership, control over my career development, rather than waiting to be done to by HR, or if I'm very lucky have a conversation with my line manager at some point, once a year.

Steve

Wow, that sounds really cool. Well we're very excited to be partnering with SHL. People that track such things will be seeing things coming out in the very near future, what we're doing with SHL, and they're one of our many great partners, and thank you very much Theresa, for taking the time before your run, hopefully can still fit it in.

Theresa

Now you keep mentioning the run, I'm going to have to go!

Jim

Just run faster, right.

Steve

There you go, you'll get more fit for having done this interview.

Theresa

OK thank you, that's a nice spin on it too.

Steve

Well thanks.

Jim

Alright, thanks Theresa.

Theresa

Thanks.

Jim

And we're back, Steve, that was a great interview.

Steve

That was, I loved her accent.

Jim

Yes, it was very nice.

Steve

It must be nice having a British accent, because everywhere you go in the United States people are always commenting on how charming it is. I don't think we get that reaction when we go to other countries.

Jim

I don't know, maybe I think we have some UK listeners, so if you're out there listening drop us a voicemail at 650-425-7474 and let us know how you're feeling about Steve's American accent.

Steve

Yeah, you can let us all know how we're doin'.

Jim

So, there was some interesting stuff in there, I'd say probably our most interesting interview to date, at least for me.

Steve

Yeah, how so?

Jim

I didn't really know that they had all these ways to sort of gauge future performance, and I didn't really know there was this whole world out there.

Steve

Yeah, I think the whole world of assessments, it's been around for a long time and it's now getting a lot more used for a variety of reasons, one, the internet's making it a lot easier to deliver assessments to a lot more people, it used to be used by large companies who could afford to maintain them, but the internet's making it more accessible.

The other thing is the talent shortage, increasingly companies are having to say, we can't hire ready-made talent, we have to find people that have the potential to become the skilled labor that we need, and so there's a lot more focus on using tools that don't just look at what you have done, but they really look at what you could do, which is very exciting, it's very much about discovering your diamond in the rough, your person that, if given the right opportunities, they could achieve a greater things.

Jim

So I have a couple of questions, for example, what I guess, in these assessments, what type of things do they ask? Are things straightforward, or is it like when you go into an interview and they tell you you have this table with 100 marbles on it and 50 are white and 50 are black, and how do you make 75 of them black, and then based upon what you answer, they decide if you're going to be a good hire?

Steve

What are you like, trying to interview to go and work with the mah-jong parlor or something?

Jim

About four years ago I interviewed at Amazon.com, and it was some crazy question like that. I had no answer, and so I think that's why they were like, naah.

Steve

There's a lot of crazy questions, actually that's one of the nice things about the growing use of assessments, because assessments, there's a lot of questions which sound like that might work, but they don't necessarily work at all and that sort of question probably falls into that category, although I'm not even sure why that would work to begin with, unless you were sorting marbles as part of the job.

The thing about assessments that they, what assessments basically do when they're well designed is, they ask questions that measure underlying knowledge, skills, personality traits, interests, and there's a lot of work that goes in to make sure these questions mathematically, statistically predict actual job performance, so a big part of designing assessments isn't just coming up with the questions, it's then having employees or candidates answer those questions, we're talking about hundreds of employees and candidates, and then measuring those people's job performance and finding the questions in a statistical association with success on the job. So in that sense these tests are very unbiased, they're sort of… we just look at the people that have statistically the greatest likelihood of success in this job, and it's that mathematical part that is the really important part of a well-designed assessment, so SHL does tons and tons of work on making sure their tests actually do what they're intended to do, and that's something to be really aware of if you're ever looking at assessments, it's not just that assessment sound good, it's have they actually done the hard research of making sure these questions truly in fact do predict job performance?

Jim

Interesting, very interesting.

Steve

But as far as the kinds of questions, there's all different kinds of questions, because it depends on what you're measuring. I mean a lot of them are just simple self-description questions, they range from… the funniest, I think, there's test that are called "overt integrity tests" that ask people questions like, "Do you use the following on the job – crack, PCP, Quaaludes", and certain people actually answered, "Yes, why yes, I do use Quaaludes" – well, don't hire those people! Amazing enough though, in certain candidate populations, people will openly admit they use drugs on the job, and that they steal, so that's the very simple ones.

They also get very, very complicated, you have ones that ask logic and reasoning questions, you're asked to interpret financial graphs and things like that that look at your ability to process information and data, and there are questions that look at sort of personality characteristics like, "Do you like to take risks? Are you a person that acts first and asks for permission later? Do you like to give people candid feedback, or is it better to not tell them what you think?" It's hard to say what the right answer is for that, and what those are measuring at is natural personality tendencies and characteristics that again are associated with success in jobs.

Jim

In some cases, I guess you've got to be really careful with the questions, because if it's, for example, a sales position and you said, "Do you like to talk to people?", and maybe I'm like a five on a one to ten, I might say, "Well yeah, I love talking to people", because I want to get this job, because I need to pay the rent or whatever, maybe.

Steve

Well no, that's exactly right, that's why you have to do that empirical work, that's why that's so important with a lot of assessments, especially the ones that measure things that you can't see visibly, not hard skills. I mean if there's questions that have a right or a wrong answer, like two plus two equals what, there's a right and a wrong answer—that's one kind of test, and that's called a knowledge or ability test, but when you get into tests of things like personality like, "Are you outgoing? Are you calm in the face of change?"—that's where it gets a lot harder, because if you ask people, "Do you like to take risks?", one, people may try to guess the answer, two, it's hard to say what the right answer, in reality the right answer to that's probably going to depend on one job, and some jobs may be for sales jobs, saying "yes" to that is good. I tell you for air traffic controller jobs, probably yes, that is probably that is not so good, and, if it was on a one to five scale, well is five really what you're looking for?—and that's where the hard work of building these assessments comes in which is getting the data, having people answer those questions, thinking you're measuring the job performance and doing some pretty complex statistical analysis to make sure the questions actually do predict. Not just the questions but the answers, certainly answers to those questions are associated with success on the job, and they're not perfect, but they're a lot better than the alternative, which is usually some untrained hire manager kind of looking at a person going, "Hmm, you kind of look like me", and basing their decision on that.

Jim

Right, very interesting stuff.

Steve

Yeah, I obviously could talk about it for a long time, I've done a lot of work in this area.

Jim

Yeah well Steve, people can email us at podcast@successfactors.com if they want to talk to you about that, because I'm sure you will talk all day long. So anybody who is out there who is interested, Steve is like the guru, so give us a call 650-425-74741, and I think that's going to do it for today's show.

Steve

Thank you Jim.

Jim

I'm glad to have you in studio today and hopefully in a lot of the shows coming up, we will continue to do that.

Steve

Cool, that'll be great.

Jim

See you guys next week.

Speaker

If you would like to be a guest on the show, or sponsor, please drop us a line at podcast@successfactors.com, or you can leave us a message at 650-425-7474. This podcast is copywritten by SuccessFactors. The views expressed are the individual’s own, and do not necessarily represent those of SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors’ partners or customers. See you next week.