We all have unintended biases about who we hire, and there is a tool I offer called PXT Select™ that helps make the very human decisions about hiring simpler and smarter. It is a powerful selection assessment that measures a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behaviors, and interests. It equips you and your hiring managers with easy-to-understand information about the candidate and provides intuitive questions to strengthen the interview process. Purchase one meter and generate up to 13 reports over the life of that employee. DM me for more info or a demo!
Make your hiring simpler and smarter!
PXT Select™ helps make the very human decisions about hiring simpler and smarter.
- It is a powerful selection assessment that measures a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behaviors, and interests. Assessment results equip organizations and hiring managers with easy to understand information about the candidate, and provides intuitive questions to strengthen the interview process.
- PXT Select measures a candidate’s thinking style, behavioral traits, and interests: three areas that impact an individual’s approach to situations in the workplace.
- PXT Select provides data about a candidate’s cognitive abilities, behavioral traits, and interests, providing organizations with insights to make smart, wellformed hiring decisions.
- PXT Select - One Powerful Assessment – A Suite of Reports. For the price of just one assessment, PXT Select’s suite of reports help you select, onboard, coach, and develop employees. PXT Select offers the following reports:
Comprehensive Selection Report. Is the candidate a good fit? This powerful report helps you make smarter hiring decisions with confidence. Featuring dynamic interview questions and tips on “what to listen for” with each candidate, this report gives you a meaningful edge in your hiring process.
Comprehensive Selection Report: Sales. This powerful report helps identify a candidates fit to a role. It features dynamic interview questions to help strengthen the overall hiring process. With a focus on sales, this report highlights critical sales practices and describes how a candidate might demonstrate them, helping you select the right salespeople for your organization.
Leadership Report. This report is designed for selection but may also be used for coaching or development purposes. It provides one candidate’s results presented in graph form and linked to narrative about their possible approach to six leadership skills commonly required of organizational leaders. Each of the six leadership skills are illustrated in relation to the candidates results. The report includes a candidate’s potential leadership strengths and challenges, as well as customized questions that can be used to interview the candidate or analyze their leadership potential.
Multiple Positions Report. What’s the best fit for a particular individual? Compare a candidate or employee to multiple jobs in your organization.
Multiple Candidates Report. Make hiring decisions with ease. Compare multiple candidates for a single position.
Team Report. See how a potential candidate fits an existing team or address your current team’s dynamic and strengths.
Manager-Employee Report.Discover how a manager and employee can work more effectively together.
Individual’s Feedback Report.Candidates can learn from PXT Select, too! This narrative report doesn’t reveal scores and is perfectly safe to share with applicants.
Individual’s Feedback Report: Sales. Candidates can learn from PXT Select, too! This participant report offers personalized feedback to the candidate or employee using common sales language and does not include critical sales practices.
Individual’s Graph. Are you more of a visual person? The graph illustrates a candidate’s results that you can view at a glance.
Coaching Report. Wish you had coaching advice tailored to each employee? This report gives you exactly that and more!
Coaching Report: Sales. This report provides tailored coaching guidance giving managers personalized tips and strategies to develop their sales team members.
Performance Model Report.Understand the range of scores and behaviors for the position you’re trying to fill. Learn about the ideal candidate for that role.
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!
Minimize Unconscious Bias in Your Hiring with this effective Tool.
It’s tricky to identify and counteract unconscious bias. In hiring and selection, unconscious bias can lead your organization to inadvertently overlook great candidates. Learn how to use data and a structured hiring process to reduce bias with the PXT Select suite of reports all based on one candidate profile.
It's a buyer's market out there.
Hiring people who want to work, who are committed to your organization’s goals, and who work well within your culture is today’s challenge for lots of reasons. So focusing on tools that cause the hiring process to be more thoughtful and exact, cause people to understand each other quickly as they are onboarded and assigned to various teams, and building fast and effective teamwork will make you and employer of choice. Call me to learn more about these tools.
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.
Hiring the right people for the job is the most important gift you can give to the person hired, the team they're hired to be part of, their manager, and most importantly, your organization's results. This tool makes your hiring thoughtful and effective.
Deliver Effective Onboarding in a Fast-Changing Work Environment
Companies today are in the midst of transforming their business models, restructuring their teams, and rethinking how they service their customers. Many have also permanently integrated hybrid or remote work arrangements, moving away from an office-only structure. Employees who work in these environments, where there is constant change and poor communication, are experiencing high stress levels and burnout. Many are reacting by Quiet Quitting or pulling back from collaborating and communicating with their colleagues.
What would it be like as a new hire starting out in this kind of environment, when more than ever, job seekers are demanding a great deal from potential employers as far as culture, work/life balance, and support from their managers? This scenario is happening to millions of new hires all over the world. What's clear is this: Coming off the pandemic and The Great Resignation, the number of new hires, as well as the stress associated with starting a new job, has skyrocketed. How are HR teams dealing with this unprecedented number of new hires and how can they adjust their processes so that people don’t fall through the cracks?
The struggle to keep new hires is real: almost 30% of people will quit a new job within 90 days. According to Gallup, the estimated cost to replace an employee ranges between one-half to two times their annual salary. That’s a huge and recurring hit to the bottom line.
In this time of uncertainty, we wanted to know if HR teams were able to deliver an impactful and effective onboarding experience to new hires, one that makes them want to stay well beyond the onboarding period.
Reality of the New Hire Experience
We surveyed 6,000 people through Wiley Workplace Research, of which 1,266 were new hires, to learn more about what people experienced when they started a new job. What we found is that the job market continues to be highly competitive. Given that nearly 25% of those we surveyed said they started with a new company in the last year, HR professionals and managers have been busy.
According to our findings, 75% of respondents said that some form of onboarding happened at their new company. For more than half of new employees, this experience lasted a week or less. The process varied greatly, too. Some received zero direction or guidance while others received a highly structured and planned experience. Critically, although almost all felt welcomed and accepted, only 38% finished their onboarding experience with an understanding of what was expected of them.
Onboarding in a Rapidly Changing Workplace
Consistency is key to delivering on expectations and ensuring that every new hire has a meaningful first experience that makes them want to stay. In fast-changing environments, this can be more challenging. To be successful, today’s onboarding process must be agile but well planned. So how can HR professionals adapt?
One thing we know for certain is that employees want a positive work culture and an impactful employee experience. Your responsibility for this starts the minute you extend an offer to a candidate and continues throughout the employee’s tenure.
Make sure there is a hiring and onboarding process in place that is more than a simple orientation and communicate it to everyone who will be involved. Hiring managers, for example, might need training on how to conduct interviews. Frontline managers should also know how to assess the candidate to identify skills gaps and recommend individual training so that the new arrival feels confident and prepared for their role. This will ensure a seamless experience that gets the new hire ready for what’s next.
HR should also be clear to hiring teams and frontline managers about what the new hire was offered so that expectations are met, and promises are delivered. In a hectic or fast-paced workplace, this information can be missed. Misunderstandings will leave a bad impression and can lead to the new hire feeling misled or duped about their new job or company. People want to work in a role where expectations meet reality, and this is one way to make certain that happens.
Ultimately, your goal is to deliver a meaningful and individualized onboarding experience that not only helps new employees acclimate to the company, but also lays the groundwork for a positive work experience long term.
Pre-Boarding: Take this opportunity to connect with your new employees before they start to create a sense of belonging. This can include sending a care package, proposing a meet and greet, and keeping them updated via emails or video calls. This is also the perfect time to assign a buddy so that they have someone to reach out to who’s not in HR.
Orientation: This phase starts on their first official day on the job and should focus on logistical and administrative processes and procedures. Employee handbooks, paperwork, and mandatory training should help with acclimation. Let the new employee know how to give feedback and ask for help or support as they navigate their onboarding experience.
Foundation Building: This is the time to set the new hire up for success in their role by communicating about the company culture, brand values, opportunities for personal and professional development, and most importantly, how their role impacts the organization. Ensure your new hires know how to engage with their team effectively to jumpstart collaboration. Tools like Everything DiSC and The Five Behaviors can help set the foundation and continuously reinforce your culture.
Community Building: The key here is to help the new arrival feel welcomed, supported, and included within their team and the company. Providing opportunities to socialize with colleagues, build relationships, and take part in team bonding will help them connect on a deeper level, fostering better team collaboration and communication. For remote or hybrid employees, virtual activities will increase a sense of comradery and prevent a feeling of isolation or disconnectedness.
Post-Boarding: This phase is particularly important if your company is going through major changes or where employees feel burnt out and have high stress. While the onboarding process is officially over, HR teams should seek feedback on the new hire’s experience to confirm you delivered what was promised. Stay in touch to provide any additional support, information, training, or guidance if necessary. HR can also ask for feedback from hiring teams and frontline managers to continually improve and refine the process.
As you can see, this multi-prong approach requires more time and a detailed plan to successfully implement, but it is critical to go the extra mile in an environment of burnout and rapidly shifting priorities. Ideally, the onboarding process should be a month or longer, starting before the first day of work. This should be expanded in a workplace where significant changes are happening, or employee morale is low.
Whatever the environment, HR professionals and hiring managers should always focus on giving new arrivals a memorable and lasting experience that feels tailored to their individual needs. New hires are seeking an onboarding process that focuses on building connections and aligning with the culture, all while learning about how their role affects the company and contributes to outcomes.
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!
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.
