Hire the right people in this buyers market!

Find the right people for your job openings and improve onboarding, teamwork and retention with PXT Select™. This is powerful selection assessment that measures a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behaviors, and interests and equips your hiring managers with easy-to-understand information about the candidate, as well as providing intuitive questions to strengthen the interview process.

One assessment produces a suite of reports to help you select, onboard, coach, and develop employees:

o Comprehensive Selection Report

o Multiple Positions Report

o Multiple Candidates Report

o Team Report

o Manager-Employee Report

o Individual’s Feedback Report

o Individual’s Graph

o Coaching Report

o Performance Model Report

Contact me for more info and a demo!

Hire, manage and retain your best associates.

The PXT Select suite of solutions provides you with accurate, objective, and reliable data so you can confidently hire, manage, and retain productive employees. With the right people in the right roles, developed to their full potential, you can build a high-performing culture where people thrive.

With PXT Select™, we specialize in a comprehensive suite of talent management solutions designed to help you hire smarter and engage your workforce to drive business results.

PXT Select at a Glance

• Over 20 years of experience

• Over 42K organizations assisted

• Presence in 93+ countries worldwide

Whether you’re filling an open role, designing effective teams, identifying talent gaps, or developing your leaders, the PXT Select suite of assessments helps you fuel the growth of your people and your business.

Data from our assessments helps you understand:

• How people think and solve problems

• How they work and interact with their coworkers, managers, and customers

• What motivates and interests them

• Attitudes toward important performance-related issues.

By understanding your employees at a deeper level, you understand how to help them thrive. And when your employees thrive, they experience a greater sense of engagement and interest in their work. In the end, that leads to a healthier work environment, greater productivity, and an increase in your organization’s bottom line.

Make hiring decisions based on data not instinct

Hiring managers and employees alike are susceptible to unconscious bias and may unknowingly make decisions and choices, both personally and organizationally, that can exclude certain individuals based on a single characteristic or trait. In this way, unconscious bias could derail your organization’s ability to be diverse, equitable, and successful. The stressful experience of being understaffed can leave many organizations feeling dire, making speed the predominant criteria in the selection process. This leaves proactive efforts to hire for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) placed lower on the ladder of considerations. But choosing this route not only increases your organization’s risk of unconscious bias but may also have a long-term effect on your ability to attract and retain quality talent.

In order to better understand the impact of unconscious bias on hiring and selection and its long-term impact in the workplace, Wiley Professional Learning surveyed over 5,000 working professionals. Survey respondents included individual contributors (43%) and managers or other leadership positions (57%). About half of all respondents had some involvement in the hiring process, with managers representing the largest portion of this group. In The State of Hiring 2022 Report, you will see Wiley’s findings and see the actions they recommend that you can take to combat unconscious bias in hiring and selection. Reach out to me to see this report!

How Having a Talent Management Strategy Helps Employer/Employee Breakups

Employer/Employee Breakups are the Worst

“I’m so sorry, but it’s just not working out.”

Those breakup words are nothing anyone wants to hear in their dating lives. But, in a professional setting, they can be equally—and in some cases more—concerning and frustrating. Each time an organization drops this phrase in a discussion with one of its employees or has one of their team members break things off with them, it leads to a loss in productivity, time, and, most of all, money. That hurts. No matter how you spin it, employer/employee breakups are the worst.

No one wants to receive this news. And, no one wants to deliver it either. But the fact is, without an effective talent management strategy, organizations will likely continue to deliver this news to employees who fail to meet expectations. Or, worse yet, they’ll have to hear it themselves from talented but disengaged employees who decide to leave after feeling unnurtured and unsupported in their roles.

The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way. With a talent management strategy in place, office breakups (and their repercussions) don’t have to happen nearly as often as they might otherwise.

Developing and implementing a robust talent management strategy—that’s the key to avoiding them.
So, What Do We Mean by “Talent Management Strategy?”

Simply put, businesses with a talent management strategy make strategically planning and envisioning talent needs a top priority rather than shunting those needs off as a secondary (and reactionary) thought. Talent management means preventing turnover and addressing lack of engagement. It means acting to achieve consistency in executional excellence. It requires managing speed and flexibility rather than letting the pace of work pull the rug out from underneath you. For organizations looking to drive results, putting in the effort to hire and engage the right people makes all the difference.
Here’s Where to Start—Answer the “What” Piece of the Puzzle

It’s no secret—companies that embrace strategies to hire and retain talent find themselves better suited to drive results and deliver on expectations. Creating those strategies begin by taking the first step—designing the right organizational structure.

Start by asking questions like:

1. What are the goals the organization is trying to achieve?

2. What roles need to be created or filled based on those goals?

3. What traits does the perfect employee need in order to fulfill the role?

4. What tools does the organization have for identifying top performers?

5. What cognitive and behavioral traits do we need to find in candidates here?

When mapping out how to build and design an optimal workforce that can get the job done, organizational leaders need to consider these questions first.

While HR departments, like Recruiting, Organizational Development, and Training support these aspects of hiring and developing an organization’s workforce, the “people strategy” component of the equation requires leaders to map out.

Diving into the “Who” Component of the Equation

Once leaders design their organization’s structure and map out what roles are needed, they need to figure out the “who” piece by asking questions like:

1. Who is the right person for the job based on the specific job requirements?

2. Who can do this job while finding it interesting and engaging?

3. Who will enjoy growing and challenging themselves in this position?

4. Who might have the skills or potential to succeed even if they don’t have the obvious experience in their background?

5. Who could move within this organization and provide a good fit in future roles that arise?

6. Who are the right team players for highly visible projects?

7. Who is ready for their next career move, promotion, or stretch assignment on a new team?

8. Who needs training or additional resources to do their job well?

9. Who needs supplementary support in order to stay engaged?

Getting the “who” component down from day one sets a company up for short-term success. Long-term success, however, requires long-term thinking and planning.

Even after organizations hire the right individual for a role they know is a good fit, the work doesn’t end. In fact, it only begins. Nurturing and developing an employee—even a seasoned veteran—plays a critical role in empowering them to perform their job successfully throughout their entire time within your organization.
Over time, talent needs change. And, your company needs a way figure out how to move their talent to meet these shifting needs. New teams, new special projects, opportunities for promotions, or lateral moves all require the ongoing attention of your organization. Optimizing your talent management strategy to account for change and considering how candidates or existing employees match to new opportunities helps your organization adapt to shifts in circumstances, business strategies, and talent needs.

Here’s the Bottom-line

Without a proactive talent management strategy, tools to measure and decide which candidate best fits a role, and methods for keeping employees engaged, business leaders and companies tend to make talent decisions on an as-needed basis. Doing so is natural, but it can create gaps within a workplace and increase room for error, not to mention cost an organization time and money. Lack of planning upfront increases stress, extra workloads, and internal conflict as existing employees buckle under the weight of an enlarged workload assumed from vacant positions.

How PXT Select™ Offers a Proven Talent Management Solution

Serious challenges, like talent acquisition and retention, require equally serious solutions. That’s why we developed PXT Select™. With over 20+ years of research behind it, PXT Select starts from the very beginning by helping you identify the “who” and “what” aspects of the puzzle.

After helping to create a model of the perfect candidate, the PXT Select assessment utilizes psychometric data to help organizations understand how individual candidates or existing employees think and work. From there, a company can place individuals into positions they’re more likely to engage with, succeed in, and stick around for.

To us, that’s a much better alternative than repeating those uncomfortable workplace breakups over and over. They’re possible to avoid. It just takes a little planning and the right information to get there.

I am a PXT Select Authorized Partner and can help you put this in place so you win the competition for talent.

How to Keep your Top Talent

A 2010 HBR article by Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt lists 6 mistakes organizations make in focusing on their top talent which has the most impact on results:

1. Assuming that high potentials are highly engaged. The Corporate Executive Board's research revealed that 1 in 4 intends to leave their organization within a year, 1 in 3 admits to not putting all their effort into their job, 1 in 5 believes their personal aspirations are quite different from what the organization has planned for them, and 4 out of 10 have little confidence in their coworkers and even less confidence in the senior team.

2. Equating current high performance with future potential. The "high potential" designation is often used as a reward for an associate's contribution in a current role, but most people on the leadership track will be asked to deliver future results in much bigger jobs. Knowing their aspirations is critical.

3. Delegating down the management of top talent. High potential employees are a long-term corporate asset and should be managed accordingly, not hidden in functional areas managed by line managers.

4. Shielding rising stars from early derailment. The very best programs place emerging leaders in "live fire" roles where new capabilities can and must be acquired.

5. Expecting star employees to share the plan. Under normal circumstances, higher potentials put in 20% more effort than other employees in the same role. Sweetening the bonus pool or differentiating compensation for them makes their rewards in line with their contributions.

6. Failing to link your starts to your corporate strategy. Confidence in their managers and in their firms' strategic capabilities is one of the strongest factors in top employees' engagement. Develop ways to share your future strategies on a privileged basis with your high potential leers and emphasize their role in making that future real.

Tools to engage your stars

Everything DiSC® solutions provide rich, versatile learning programs that offer personal insight for learners at every level of an organization, using a consistent language of DiSC®. Using a research-validated learning model, each solution provides in-depth information including tips, strategies, and action plans to help learners become more effective in the workplace. All Everything DiSC solutions include unlimited access to complimentary follow-up reports and MyEverythingDiSC®, the interactive learning portal exclusive to Everything DiSC.

Tools to discuss future potential

Use the PXT Select assessment for selection, onboarding, development and future potential assessment.

*Get a clear picture of candidate’s thinking style, behaviors, and interests, giving you a meaningful edge in making the right hiring decision.

*Start the selection process on the right foot. Explore an expanding library of job functions to which you can compare candidates.

*Interview with confidence by asking tailored questions and keeping an open ear for “what to listen for” based on a candidate’s assessment results.

*Identify ways to enhance performance and maximize an individual’s contribution to an organization.

*Match people with positions in which they’ll perform well and enjoy what they do.

*Reduce critical turnover and boost employee engagement. 

Tools to engage high potentials with their teams

The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team is an assessment-based learning experience that helps individuals and organizations reveal what it takes to build a truly cohesive and effective team in the most approachable, competent, and effective way possible.Powered by Everything DiSC®, the profiles help participants understand their own DiSC® styles. Bringing together everyone’s personalities and preferences to form a cohesive, productive team takes work, but the payoff can be huge—for individuals, the team, and the organization.

Why the Pre-Hire Process is Really About Planning

Think about the last time you ventured out to find a new job. Did you come across postings that seemed as though they were written a decade ago?

You know what we’re talking about, right? It’s not that the job descriptions are entirely out of date, though sometimes they are. It’s more that what was once an emerging skillset is now an accepted norm in the workplace. Yes, we do know how to use the Internet! Does that mean we get the job?!

Perhaps the company that posted the job descriptions from 10 years ago hasn’t given much recent thought into what they are now and who they want in the new role. And they really haven’t considered how the needs of the position have changed with time. For a prospective candidate, that would be a turn off. And if you’re the one doing the hiring it might just limit your pool of candidates.

To find the right person, you need to know what you’re looking for. To understand what you’re looking for, you need to know what the company needs, and have clear alignment on the core characteristics most important for someone to be successful in the role.

Put more simply, employers need a pre-hire plan. Robert Half, the founder of the first and largest accounting and finance staffing firm, once said, “The time spent on hiring is time well spent.” And that time starts well before the candidate comes in to interview.

Studies show that the lack of organizational alignment on expectations for success in a given job is just one reason that one-third of new hires quit their job after about six months. The exact same ratio of employees knew after the first week if they would stay at their new company for the long-term. These employees could see quickly that they weren’t the right fit. Why couldn’t the employer avoid that before they made the hire?

Think about how different your job is now compared to the one you did a few years ago. Even if it’s the same title, you’re probably learned or applied new skills. Even more, you’ve changed in how you learned to adjust to the changes.

Now think about the traits and behaviors in yourself that enabled you to make the changes, to get along with that new manager (accommodation!), to engage with your team (sociability!). Perhaps in some situations your innate behaviors needed to shift. And you handled it well.

Did your company use science and data to predict these innate traits and behaviors before they hired you? Or, did they use gut instinct and got lucky? Without the right tools making objective hiring and selection decisions can be risky, and expensive.

Mmanti Umoh, a renowned leadership and management consultant, said the optimal talent selection process comes down to planning and having stakeholder alignment early in the process.

By planning ahead with pre-employment due diligence, you can: 

• Reduce hiring mistakes

• Accelerate the hiring process

• Improve hiring precision

• Minimize the costs of a bad hire

• Save costs on recruiting

At PXT Select, we help hiring managers and recruiters align on the expectations of job requirements, by finding out what the behavioral and cognitive traits, and interests, are needed for someone to succeed in that role and at that organization. With this, they can develop a job description that clearly states what they are looking for from a prospective hire.

Candidate data sets from the assessment are compared against a Performance Model of the preferred traits for a given job. If the model suggests that an individual whose results fall in the higher range of the scale for a given trait tend to be most successful in the position, then organizations want to hire the people with those similar traits who fall on the higher end.

If the Performance Model calls for scores on the lower end of the scale for a given trait, a lower result is what an organization wants to see. No matter where the range falls, the more similar the candidate is to the performance model, the better the chance they will be successful on that role. PXT Select allows you to create custom models, replicate top performers, or use a performance model library so you can tailor your model to your needs at the time.

Whether you’re hiring from the outside, or selecting existing employees for new roles, a performance model helps you identify top candidates. When used with the rest of the PXT Select suite of reports, performance models can be used to help organizations build career paths for their employees, think about succession planning and build bench strength in their organization.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree,” Abraham Lincoln opined on the concept of planning and preparation. “And I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

How prepared is your organization? Do you have a plan in place? Is it adaptable? If you don’t know, maybe it’s time to invest in finding out. Start planning now.

Call me at 704.372.9842 or email kag@mindspring.com.