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Guest: CEO Coaching International’s Sheldon Harris, a successful entrepreneur and leader who coaches business owners and executives to achieve greater success.
Episode in a Tweet: Hiring the wrong people hurts. Use Talent Insights to hire the right people and get them in the right roles.
Quick Background: Bad hires don’t just drag down your business — they can be expensive to replace. Using Talent Insights assessments can help you get the right people in the right jobs the first time, which is why they are a key component of CEO Coaching International’s best practices methodology.
On today’s show, Sheldon Harris walks you through using Talent Insights to assess potential hires, break down their strengths and weaknesses, and determine who is the best person to help your company hit its goals and make BIG happen.
Key Insights on Using Talent Insights to Evaluate Potential Hires
1. Start with the interviews.
No evaluation tool or assessment can replace a thorough interview process. Make sure your HR department does all its homework — background checks, references, etc. — and ideally, a preliminary interview before you sit down with any serious candidates. Remember: you’re the CEO. Your time is valuable. Weeding through potential talent is not your job. Sitting down with someone who might be your next CFO, is.
2. Assess the best.
After you’ve had face time with the narrowed talent pool, give a Talent Insights assessment to anyone you’d seriously consider hiring. This is a series of questions that reveals how people behave, and what motivates them, both in their natural state, and in their adapted state when under external pressure. The assessment is only fifteen minutes long, but the results are revealing, easy to interpret, and reliable.
At the end of the assessment, each candidate’s behaviors will be scored from 0-100 in four categories for both their natural and adapted states: Dominant, Influence, Steady, Compliance.
3. Examine the motivators.
In addition to behavior scores, Talent Insights also break down a person’s motivations into six categories and rank them:
- Individualism – Wanting power and control.
- Utilitarian – What do I get for what I give?
- Theoretical – A thirst for knowledge and learning.
- Aesthetic – Appreciating form over function.
- Social – Mindful of one’s impact on others.
- Traditional – A worldview committed to a particular belief system.
4. Crunch the numbers.
The Talent Insights report gives you a lot of data to work with, and reveals behaviors and motivators that might not be apparent from reading a resume, or even sitting down with a potential candidate.
Have you had power clashes in the past with an ambitious CFO? Beware high Dominance scores and Individual motivators.
Do you want someone who’s low on Compliance running your accounting department?
Is the Socially motivated millennial going to pound the pavement to hit your sales targets, or would that person be better off at a non-profit?
High Steadiness sounds great in a vacuum, but does that candidate have a potential blind spot for change? Will he or she adapt when your business needs to?
Analyzing candidates’ behaviors and motivators can give you really powerful insight into why people work the way they do, and how well those characteristics align with how you want a particular position to operate.
5. Focus back on the person.
No, I have never hired or not hired someone based solely on a Talent Insights report. And neither should you.
At the end of the day, people are not printouts. The best use of Talent Insights is to inform the questions that you’re going to ask potential candidates in the final interview. Maybe you’re wary of hiring someone whose behaviors and motivators are too different from your own, but in that final interview, you realize a culture shake up is exactly what your company needs. Maybe a person’s behaviors and motivators align perfectly with your vision for the position, but face-to-face, the chemistry just isn’t there.
Talent Insights can be a tremendous help informing your judgement, but they do not replace your judgement. This is your company, your vision. Get the right people in the right jobs to make that vision a reality – a BIG reality.
Top Takeaways
- Talent Insights reveal behaviors and motivators that are not always apparent in a resume and cover letter.
- People are not printouts. Assessment tools can help narrow your talent pool, but they don’t replace the careful judgement of a good CEO.
- Get hires right the first time. Replacing bad employees stalls your business and costs you money. Make sure your company has a good hiring process in place.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
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