We've all heard the truism: “Your staff are your most valuable asset” - and for most organisations in most markets in most industries, they are!

 

After all, it is your people who interface with customers, design and cost the product/service, carry out the work, check it's satisfactory, ensure delivery and chase the money, etc, etc.

 

And it's people who make decisions at all levels - from the strategic to the mundane operational.

 

So getting the right person for a particular job has been a key concern for just about every enterprise pretty much from the time primitive men first began banding together to hunt for food and collectively defend their families.

 

For much of the 20th Century the emphasis was on the acquisition of pertinent skills & knowledge - often signified by qualifications - for the job. By the late 1980s a new emphasis on attitudinal factors was beginning to emerge.

 

Unfortunately all too often someone unsuitable for the job ends up with it and recruitment and promotion activities are loathed usually by those who have to do them. The cost of getting recruitment/promotion wrong can be enormous -and not just in terms of expenses like having to advertise again but also factors like the effects of incompetence - eg: wrong specification, poor product/service, underpricing - and antagonised relationships - eg: outraged customers, uncooperative suppliers and disrupted internal teams.

 

In frustration, larger organisations often contract out recruitment and promotion processes to recruitment agencies. Usually having greater specialised expertise than the in-house people - particularly in the application of Psychology - such agencies often carry out a key role in the process. But usually they are very expensive and they do not always work with the most advanced psychological tools.

 

Clearly I do work with some of the most advanced sociopsychological tools currently available.

 

                                                                                     So how can I help you and your organisation…?

• Assistance with drawing up an appropriate job description and person specification
  Filling a vacancy should rarely use the existing job description automatically. Rather a vacancy should be seized upon as an opportunity to review the job and whether it is still appropriate to keep it as it is. Especially if the organisation has shifted on its LifeCycle.
  Then there is the person specification. What kind of person with what sorts of values and beliefs is best suited to the position as it has been reviewed?

 

• Assistance with creating an 'attracting' advert
  Whatever media you use to advertise your vacancy - newspaper, internet, specialist agency, jobcentre - your advert needs to be one that attracts the kind of person you want. It must intrigue intellectually while appealing emotionally. The choice of words you make and the graphics you employ could make a major difference as to whether you do/don't get the person you want.

 

• Design of psychometric assessments
  Psychometrics can be customised from templates to assess temperament (Dimensions of Temperament), motivation (vMEMES) and key preferences in working patterns (Meta-Programmes).
  Psychometrics should always be used with caution as they are 'snapshots' of an individual at a moment in time and a margin of error of around 15%(!!) is generally considered acceptable amongst occupational psychologists. Nonetheless, they can provide valuable insights into how somebody is likely to behave once in post and they can stimulate invaluable secondary lines of questioning at interview.

 

• Assistance with Interview Design and Procedure
  In these days of equality of opportunity, interviews not only need to be effective but transparent. Being able to ask questions that get you the answers you need while adhering to mandatory requirements is not always easy. Interview procedures need to comply with requirements yet contain enough flexibility to enable interviewer(s) and interviewee to explore specific areas of common interest.
  By using carefully-designed hypothetical situations - scenarios - it is possible often to tease out of someone information they might not otherwise reveal, even via direct questioning.

 

• Assistance with the Interview and Selection
  It can be very helpful to have a 'people expert' sit in on an interview.
  A non-participant observer can watch the candidate's body language and dissect their speech to look for those near-hidden clues which reveal so much more of what the interviewee is really thinking and feeling.
  Additionally a participant observer can throw in supplemental questions from a different perspective than that usually taken by the organisation.
  When it comes to selection itself, an independent assessment of the candidate's performance and any issues that came to light can be invaluable in helping senior management make the right choice.
  
                                                                                            The internal candidate

People who excel at the jobs they are currently doing all too frequently get promoted into jobs they have no real aptitude for, only to fail horribly and end up really stressed. It's all too tempting to 'shoe in' a favoured internal candidate without really assessing the individual's suitability for the new job you want to do.

 

As for the internal candidate who desperately wants the position and doesn't get it…. If their perceived rejection is not handled carefully, they all too easily descend into bitterness and become a poison within the organisation's culture.

 

Before an application is encouraged, it can be invaluable to undertake a joint assessment of the individual's aptitude and suitability for the position with a 'people expert' such as myself.

 

Equally, where an employee is valued for their current level of contribution but has not succeeded in a bid to be promoted, arranging a counselling session with an independent advisor such as myself can help prevent rejection turning into bitterness and then poison.

 

 

Contact me now to discuss your staffing situation and how I can help you.