Something that always triggered my frustration and confusion was to witness managers trying to decide which candidate to hire, promote or, invest money in for training, without any kind of pre-determined criteria or alignment with a mission or corporate/group objectives.

At this point cognitive biases usually kicked in and people chose people based on heuristics, generalizations, or their own personal challenges – who looks the most like me; who has a similar name to mine; who has a familiar story that resonates with mine; or worse, they allowed racial, gender, and other stereotypes to taint their decisions. Managers, Leaders, and famous social media pundits are quick to state that recruitment is a guessing game so you should give people a chance. Upon a deeper dive, one can see why this is such a dangerous statement.

Let’s assume a few things:

• The average hiring manager out there doesn’t hire a lot of people – they don’t get a lot of practice
• Our conscious brains are “off” most of the time in the average human. This means that during that interview, one-on-one meeting, or development coaching session, you probably missed most of what was said, visual cues that were given, and as such aren’t going to have great information to make a decision
• Our brains are terrible at multi-tasking – we simply switch attention from one thing to the next (some faster than others). Managers, Leaders and staff are overwhelmed with to do’s, distractions (cell phones, emails, social media, people who need them, etc.), so it’s hard to them to focus on what’s important regardless of how good they are at switching from one thing to the next.
• Human Resources departments are not, when they even exist, staffed by elite recruiters who know how to source, screen, qualify, and select people to send out to hiring managers
• Studies have shown that the average recruiter is only successful about one third of the time when predicting hiring success
• Studies have also shown that adding some psychometric profiles (to a trained user) help improve the batting average significantly to about 2/3’s of the time.
• Employee recruitment, training, and turnover is expensive and exposes your organization to risk that is hard to manage
• It’s really hard to change human behavior. Past behavior is still the best predictor of future behavior. We have a hard time going back in time to see behaviors and rely on stories, recollections, and flat out lies to understand a person’s past behaviors. Time machines for humans have not been invented yet. (although we have somehow been able to get subatomic particles to “time travel”)
• Employee training is critical to a company’s success, mandated by law in some areas, and very costly with ambiguous results to say the least. Most companies are clueless as to how you should manage training, measure training effectiveness and implementation, and how much should be invested
• Prediction at a high rate of accuracy is important, but it’s important that a company or person is able to do something with those predictions. No one is perfect, so psychometric instruments must be used with care, by qualified professionals

Why is it then, that many leaders within organizations refuse to use psychometric instruments behavioral tools, and qualified professionals to enhance their Human Capital? My guess: it’s complicated, they don’t understand it, and most psychometric instruments and professionals still try to put people into boxes that fail to tie into business objectives – that is – there is no mission, no actions tied to results, and as such it’s not worth it.

What if I was to say that there are a few amazing, credible, and proven Psychometric instruments and professionals out there that DO help organizations maximize their Human Performance and that these organizations have seen incredible results? Is it mere coincidence? The world’s largest military superpower, large professional services organizations, Fortune 500 companies, Olympic associations, professional sports teams, startups, small and medium businesses, and governments would say it’s no coincidence.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m going to share concrete examples of how Psychometric Instruments, tied to trained professionals, were able to help organizations maximize human performance, change behaviors, and increase returns on recruitment, training, and development investments.

Enjoy!

Gabriel

If you’re interested in knowing more about how I can help your organization find, select, on-board, train, develop, promote, and manage Humans better, more intelligently, with less pain and risk, please contact me at [email protected]