Using assessments for development is a critical component in developing your workforce. These types of assessments can be used in a variety of capacities, including preparing for succession planning, identifying employees fit for promotion, or providing coaching and feedback in order to foster and create a more productive employee.

Employee assessments are on a strong up-swing as national organizations begin to staff up.  Assessments, once perceived as a cold, impersonal substitute for an interview and handshake,  are now being used by the world’s leading employers as part of their comprehensive pre-employment hiring process.  After all, human capital is the most important investment you can make.

In the past several years, executive search firms have been presenting themselves as being able to both provide candidates for organizations and assess candidates’ capabilities through an executive assessment process.

It’s graduation season! If you are a hiring manager that means one important thing for you:  recent grads are entering the workforce and you have to interview them.  Entry-level hiring can be frustating.  On the one hand you don’t have much to screen and, on the other hand, you know that not just anyone will be a good fit.

Here are a few tips to help you sort through the new grads: 

Screen only on job-relevant criteria 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of screening candidates on qualifications that are not needed for success, such as asking for qualifications above and beyond what is needed or requiring years of experience when skills can be trained on the job. We do this because we’ve been burned before (e.g. verbal altercations or bad attitudes within the probationary period). 

Recently I read a couple of provocatively titled articles in major online business periodicals:

Over the past few weeks I have found myself in the uneasy place of a hiring manager. As a human resource consultant, I’m usually giving advice. In my job, I design and develop the assessment tools that help organizations make the best hiring decisions. I just am never the one having to make the actual hiring decision. You’d think I would be immune to the games that some candidates play. I should know what to look for and how to flesh out the truth – I am a psychologist, right?

Finding the right assessment can greatly increase the accuracy and efficiency of your hiring decisions. Assessments come in many shapes and sizes, so how do you know if you are using the right one to fit your hiring needs?

Processing a large amount of candidates is one of the biggest challenges facing hiring managers in today’s workplace.  On average, organizations can expect to receive 30-50 applicants for every job opening – in most cases, that number is much larger. 

Select would like to extend a big thank you to everyone that stopped by our booth at the SIOP conference to learn more about our organization, listened in on our symposium, stopped by to ask questions about our posters or interviewed with us at the placement center. It was good seeing you in Houston! We sincerely hope that you left us knowing a little more about why we love the work that we do and how passionate we are about Industrial & Organizational psychology.

Ever wonder why some people succeed in sales while others don’t? Perhaps a more perplexing question is why someone who succeeds in sales in one job is a complete failure in another, or vice versa. Is there a way of dramatically increasing your odds that someone is going to succeed in a sales role? We’re going to be providing answers to these questions in an upcoming presentation at Selling Power’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Monday April 8th from 1:55 to 2:40 p.m.

There is no magic fix all. There’s not even one profile that guarantees success in sales. If it were that simple then we wouldn’t be asking questions about success in sales. Instead, we’re going to be talking about what results from over 600 studies of over 450,000 salespeople tell us about the factors that help determine success in sales. What those results tell us is that there is no one single factor or one single profile that predicts success across all sales positions. The combination of Competencies, Sales Styles and Drivers (i.e. motivators) provides a solid foundation upon which to accurately identify who is likely to be successful and who is not.That’s the basis for the Select SalesPro® assessment.

For some positions, a number of the key sales competencies are likely to be unrelated to success in the job, while for other positions those same competencies emerge as the best predictors. The same is true for Sales Styles and Drivers. It’s important not to assume that because someone is in sales that their primary motives are to make a lot of money, and they have to be extroverted and great at reading people. In some cases, that combination may be a fine match. In others, it might be that successful individuals are more motivated by being recognized for their accomplishments and tend to be adaptable and good at time management.