Personality: the Best Kept Secret

Your company has a job opening for a key employee. You advertise the position hoping to meet Mr. or Ms. “Right”. Before you know it, your desk is piled high with resumes; each one proclaiming the talent, ambition and experience to solve all of your problems. You sort through the resumes and begin to make calls to setup interviews. Let the games begin!


Sound familiar? It doesn’t matter whether you have a Human Resources Department, or if that’s just another of the “hats” you wear every day. When a good job is available, you’ll find plenty of “applicants” but often very few “candidates”. How do you sort out the qualified candidates from the pile of resumes?

Most people try to determine from the resume if the person has the background, education and experience sufficient for the job. However, these qualities are often over-embellished on the resume so you’ll have to rely on a good interview process to help select the gold nuggets from the rest of the crowd. Do you have all of the tools you need or is the interview conducted by the “seat of your pants”?

One of the most important tools you can use in making this process more efficient and effective while quickly and easily identifying the top candidates is using a Personality Profile. Personality profiling has been around for years, and it has generally been quite expensive and reserved for only the highly paid positions and usually the final candidate or two. If it’s a good tool for the most important positions, doesn’t it go without saying it could be just as important for every job? After all, the costly high turnover is normally in the entry level through middle management positions, not the executive offices.

Meeting this challenge is precisely why an Indianapolis, Indiana company, Decision Support Technology, Inc., developed a far-sighted new product back in the 1990’s to help businesses of all sizes achieve this goal. They developed the “Hire Success” Employment Testing System. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of Internet Technology, Hire Success was the first fully automated online testing system on the market. Where companies were used to paying hundreds of dollars per test for a Personality Profile, Hire Success offered affordable solutions where most customers paid under $25 per test and delivered it over the Internet via e-mail in less than 3 minutes.

Why Is Personality So Important?
Consider some common reasons employers report that employees don’t work out:

They spent too much time socializing on the job and lowered everyone else’s productivity as well.
Some employees just can’t seem to get organized. They miss important details and have to redo their work.
I can’t let some deal with my customers because they don’t seem to care enough and cost me good customers and repeat business.
He was a good worker until I promoted him to Manager. Now he wants to be everybody’s friend and lets people get away with minimal productivity.
The problems described here are all related to Personality, not the background, education and experience you would have read about on their resume. You need to know if they are outgoing and like to socialize; are they organized or unorganized, and if organized, could they be too organized and spend too much time putting everything in its place and never get anything done? If they’re in a customer service role, are they caring and compassionate, patient and friendly? Are they too patient and tolerant and let subordinates get away with too much while they try to be their friend instead of their boss?

You’ve no doubt seen these problems manifest themselves in your company over and over. This is why the job applicant’s true Personality is the best kept secret in town. They don’t normally bring up their Personality characteristics and traits on the resume, and you don’t know enough about them to ask the right questions. The Hire Success Personality Profile not only provides you with an in-depth analysis of each candidate’s Personality, it also provides you with a full report of Interview Questions to help you conduct a more in-depth interview!

Try This Simple Exercise
Everyone has a “Dominant” Personality Temperament and different “dominant” Traits. Try this simple exercise to see how a “dominant” or “natural” characteristic plays an important role in your life.

Take a pen or pencil and sign your name on a piece of paper, like you were signing a check.
Now, put the pen or pencil in the other hand, your “non-dominant” hand, and do it again.
The second time wasn’t as easy, was it? Chances are, you had to concentrate on what you were doing, it was harder to do, it probably took a little longer and the quality of the product wasn’t as good. Right?

Now relate that to those people who are applying for that key job you advertised in the newspaper or on your web site. Each one of them has a different combination of “dominant” traits and talents to bring to the table. Some will help them perform the job, other may not fit at all, or even hinder them from being successful. It’s your job to put the proverbial “round pegs in the round holes”. We all know, if confronted about not having the right dominant traits, each person would no doubt tell you it’s “no problem”. They’re willing to “do whatever it takes” to do the job for you, even if that means doing some things that may seem uncomfortable, or unnatural for them. They promise to work hard and learn.

Some of them might be quite convincing and you may fall for it and hire them. Eventually, like all normal humans, when the pressure is off, we tend to fall back to our normal or more natural ways. After all, would you want to have to work all day writing with your non-dominant hand? Of course not. If you needed the job and the income to support your family, you might agree to almost anything, but the first opportunity to revert back to your dominant hand, you’d no doubt take it.

This is the same thing employees do once they get the job. Once comfortably in the job, if they’re not naturally organized, their organization slacks off. If they are not naturally patient and compassionate with others, their frustration may begin to show with coworkers or, worse, with customers. Then you wonder, “what happened?” What happened is, their true Personality was the best kept secret until you hired them and later saw it in action. Then, it was too late. You already made an expensive hiring decision.

The Hire Success Personality Profile helps business owners, managers and Human Resources personnel to quickly, easily and inexpensively identify each candidate’s key Personality characteristics and traits and select people who bring the natural traits to the job that contribute to their success. All of this is in addition to their background, education and experience. With the right tools in place, many costly hiring mistakes can be avoided. Saving just one bad hire can more than pay for all of the Personality Profiles you may use for the next decade!

The Hire Success Personality Profile test form consists of 100 adjectives. The candidate decides if the adjective is describes him or her, they enter a “1”; if it isn’t descriptive, enter a “5” or 2-4 to indicate some degree in between. Most people can complete the entire test form in 5-10 minutes. Because the test can be done online, candidates can take the test from home, a library or friend’s house, as well as in your office. When complete, the Hire Success Automated Scoring Center receives the form, processes the answers and emails you a complete report in about 3 minutes, anytime 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

How To Find 3 More Just Like Your Best Person
Have you ever wished you could find a few more people just like your top sales person, or administrative assistant? You try and try, but few ever measure up. Now, there’s a solution, and it’s FREE! The Hire Success System provides an initial period with almost all of its packages of test credits, to provide you with Free, unlimited Personality Profiles for a few days in order to test all of your best employees at no additional cost. Plus, you have free use of the Hire Success software that automatically evaluates the results of your best people, does a statistical analysis of their results, and automatically creates a “baseline” for you to use as a comparison for new applicants.

You can turn that stack of resumes into a helpful Report that evaluates the Personality temperaments and traits of all of those candidates, compares them to the baseline built on your most successful people, and lists them in order of who has the dominant traits most like your best people now in that job! Baselines are fully customizable and can be updated from time to time to make them even more accurate as your “best” employees get even better.

Summary
Take your hiring process to the next level by going beyond the resume and including the Personality Profile. With the advent of the Internet, it is now not only fast and easy to administer pre-employment tests like the Personality Profile, it is also affordable for businesses of all sizes. Why Hire Success? Because “the closest anyone ever comes to perfection is on a resume.”

People Management

How to Give Orders
A manager's most important, and most difficult, job is to manage people. You must lead, motivate, inspire, and encourage them. Sometimes you will have to hire, fire, discipline or evaluate employees. These points will help you find the best ways to handle these people management issues.

Many people believe that to be a good manager you have to give orders to the people below you. They are wrong. You do not have to give orders. In fact, you should not give orders.
Don't give orders
When you give orders, you tell someone to do something. "Put that file on my desk", is an order. So is, "put Roger on the late shift". When you give an order, you do not allow the other person any latitude to think about what to do or how to do it. All they can do to satisfy your order is exactly what you ordered. There are two reasons why this is bad. First, you do not allow the person to figure out the best way to do the task. Second, you do not let them learn.
Sometimes it is appropriate to give orders. In the military, there are times when a leader has to give orders. When you tell a squad to "charge that hill" you don't want them to think about it. You just want it done. However, even in the military, leaders don't give orders unless they have to. Instead of giving orders and telling someone what to do, good managers give instructions. Instead of telling them what to do, you tell them what you want done.
Give instructions instead
When you tell an employee what you want done, instead of giving an order, you give them the freedom to come up with their best way of getting that task done. It may not always be the best way, and you may have to do some monitoring and guiding, but there is also the chance that they will come up with something better than what you planned.
When an employee is given an instruction instead of an order, they have to think. They can't just do what they were told and say they were following orders. They have to think of ways to get the job done. They have to decide which is the best way. They have to invest a little of themselves in the solution.
Also, when you give an employee an instruction, instead of an order, and let them decide for themselves the best way to accomplish the task, you are more likely to get their buy-in and support. If they have made the decision about the best way to accomplish the task they are more likely to believe it is correct and valuable. They will defend it against others who question it.
Be clear
Orders are generally very clear. "Get the report to me by Thursday morning", does not leave much room for interpretation. So when you give instructions, instead of orders, you need to be as clear about what results you expect.
Instead of saying, "I'd like you to review the past month's data and get back to me on it", be more precise. For example, you could say, "Please review the past month's data. By Monday morning, I expect your recommendation of the best course and a couple of alternatives for ways to close more sales.” Or you could say, "By our meeting on Friday, I want you to have consolidated all the department's projects into a single master schedule. I want you to tell me where we are over committed and where we have excess capacity.”
When you give instructions instead of orders there is a tendency to be less clear about the expected outcome. A good manager makes instructions clear.
Give instructions, not orders
Your job as a manager is to get things done. However, it also means getting things done through others. When you give orders, you limit the group to your level of expertise. When you give instructions, you let the employees contribute whatever they can. It may not be as good as what you would have done, but that is an indication that you need to do further training. However, it also might be better than your idea. When that happens, you have an employee who feels involved and motivated and you look smarter.
The next time you start to give an order, give instructions instead. Tell the employee clearly want you want done. Let them figure out how to do it. It is a better solution for both of you.