For centuries, leaders of all types have struggled with making good people decisions. Accomplishing the goals of any organization is impossible without people. When you look at what it will take to achieve an organization’s purpose, it becomes obvious that some people are more capable of helping with that than others. Why is that? A few of the reasons are:

• They have experience in similar jobs elsewhere.
• They have better knowledge that can be applied to the job.
• They have physical or mental skills that should help them perform the job better.

If you’ve had much hiring experience, you know that, despite these obvious advantages, a lot of the people you hire for a job still don’t turn out to be successful. Why is that? There is, at least, one more predictor of success that hasn’t been evaluated.

Look at it this way. The three qualifying factors listed above are an indication that a job candidate should be capable of performing your job from a mental and physical perspective. In other words, they can probably do the job. But will they, in fact, do a good job?

Since the middle of the 20th century, the science of psychology has developed the analytical discipline called psychometrics, a way of identifying and measuring human behavioral factors. As an example, in the early 90s, Dr. Dan Harrison, an organizational psychologist, developed the Harrison Assessment system. It can measure up to 175 human behavioral factors. These factors are found in all humans to varying degrees. In addition, Harrison has analyzed over 600 occupations and identified each of their unique combinations of these factors. 

Not only are the factors contributing to job success known for each of these occupations, but also the strengths of these factors can be measured. An actual numerical rating can be calculated that translates into the probability of success in a particular job! We refer to this as the suitability of a person for the job. The higher the score, the more suitable the candidate is, and therefore, more likely to succeed in the job.

Highly qualified candidates with low suitability scores will tend to struggle to succeed in the job. If you’ve done much hiring in your career, you have seen this happen. Most of the time we just scratched our heads and moved on to the next candidate. Or…we just settled and kept the ill-suited, poor performing person in the job knowing it was hampering overall organization performance. Why settle? Mediocrity shouldn’t be considered an option.

The idea of assessing job-related behavior has been very slow to gain traction in many industries, including print and related industries. There are several reasons.

• Most of these companies are small, with from two to 50 employees.
• The sophistication that comes with professional Human Resource managers is absent. In large companies this technology is sold to the HR department. It is not generally sold at the C-suite level. Therefore, the natural “bridge” into these smaller companies does not exist.
• Selling the benefits to the owner/CEO of the typical print company is difficult. They don’t have the time to deal with it. They may not have the caliber of people who can understand and use the technology.
• Many of these owners look at the cost and don’t consider the bigger picture where the returns on investment will materialize. An assessment will cost up to $500 per average employee. The average won’t be that high, but some jobs will require it. This, on its own, is a lot of money that the average small company owner will struggle to justify.
• The returns come from several things and are perceived as “soft” and hard to measure. However, savvy business owner/operators know, intuitively, that:
  1. The ramp up to desired productivity levels will come faster with new hires both qualified and better suited behaviorally for the job. The bottom-line impact of saving just one month to full production is worth the cost of assessing 3–4 candidates to pick the best fit. It is poor practice to consider only one candidate for an open job.
  2. The bottleneck threshold for this employee will be much higher than the poorly suited one. In other words, much more work will pass through this stage of the process per unit of time and reduce waiting in downstream work centers. Savvy operators understand and know the value of this.
  3. Peer group impacts that other employees will feel and be motivated by will fall to the bottom-line also. Many people resist “stepping it up” until someone starts to put a light on it.
  4. Smart hiring of new employees has a noticeable but subtle effect that some call “raising the common denominator.” As more new employees enter the company with high suitability scores, the cumulative impact is not manifested in the rise of a linear average of suitability scores. Higher scores follow a power law curve and start to accelerate geometrically. Depending on the average suitability score at the start, what looks like a 5% rise in the average could be a 20–30% rise. This is a game-changing improvement in productivity and overall performance.
  5. NOTE: Everything in this section also applies verbatim to the process for making decisions on promoting internal candidates. The one caveat is that often there may not be three internal candidates to consider but, however many there are, they should be assessed using this process to determine if they are behaviorally well-suited for the job they may be promoted into. It is important for your current employees to know they were considered for the opportunity even if they are passed over. It’s also a great chance to have a conversation about where they can improve to help the odds of landing the next opportunity.
• Entrepreneurs who own and operate small businesses and have everything they own “on the line” are normally skeptical of new things. They should be. They need proof—and lots of it. They don’t completely trust salespeople, consultants, trade associations, etc. If they are interested in new and untested ideas, technology, materials, equipment, and methods, they will want to try it out experimentally (at no cost to them is preferred) or talk to someone they trust who has tried the new thing and liked it.

 So where does this put us? As a leader, if you’re like most of us, you want to leave a legacy that you passed this way. I’ve discussed some of the ends and outs of developing that legacy in previous articles. See “The Competent Business,” “Competence in Leadership,” and “Making Your Business Future-Ready.” These would be helpful in rounding out the context and catalyst for this article. There is at least one more consideration for you to think about. The old saw about “It’s lonely at the top” comes to mind.

You need someone on your level to talk to, especially when you’re swimming in cold, uncharted waters. I have an idea. It’s an exciting twist on an old idea. Read on…

Let’s create people-building peer groups. These consist of company owners who believe in finding, developing, and keeping better people. These owners are interested in:

• Reducing/eliminating hiring, promotional, and developmental mistakes.
• Helping their employees realize their full potential; helping them grow as individuals and improve their performance; creating a win-win bond with the company where everyone comes out ahead.
• Learning to use a state-of-the-art behavioral assessment tool to improve culture, engagement, and team cohesion.
• Collectively learn better approaches to human resources management, improve productivity on an employee-by-employee basis, and discover techniques for digging out unforeseen productivity advances through employee development and growth.
• Finally, in today’s tight, increasingly expensive labor market think about having a group of peers who can learn from each other and build more competent and productive workforces by pooling their learning and experience.

I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. You can respond in the box below. If there are questions about how to get started with this, please email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.