This is the conclusion of “The Entrepreneur’s Plateau” blog series. The plateau is the state of a relatively new business (started and run by an entrepreneur) with stable and profitable operations but stalled growth.
How can you avoid the plateau or leave it behind if you find yourself there? Here are key strategies to follow:
·Know the Risk – The critical knowledge is that growth cannot continue in the same way your business grew during the initial start-up phase. If a business does not continue to grow it risks being sidelined and left behind as the market changes.
·Balance Your Leadership Style – The key personal qualities that make an entrepreneur risk a business start-up can create leadership issues as the management challenges change with a growing organization. A larger organization needs leaders who can either balance their own personal instincts with learned behavior or create a team and undertake executive team building so others can provide that balance.
·Motivate – Entrepreneurs are by definition “self-starters” and as such it can be a baffling concept that other people need external motivators to excel. The exact same things that energize an entrepreneur – independence, action, challenge – can stymie others. Giving other people what THEY need to perform should be the challenge for the entrepreneur who wants to avoid stalled growth.
·Communicate – When a business grows beyond “line of sight” management, one of the primary challenges to succeed is effective communication. Delegation of both authority and details becomes necessary in a growing business and the trust required in this effort is not possible unless communication is excellent.
·Plan Ahead – The problems highlighted in this series are predictable and foreseeable. Constantly assess your situation with strategic planning methods that will identify the points where organizational change will be necessary and plan for them. When you add people who will be responsible for delegated authority or details of execution, conduct due diligence to ensure you’re putting the right people in those roles and that you know how to manage them.
Clarity regarding self-knowledge on personality traits is a valuable commodity for any entrepreneur. Using external, objective personality assessments can provide this information for yourself as well as candidates for key managerial positions. This knowledge also points the way toward how to supervise people that will avoid the typical roadblocks to growth.
About “The Entrepreneur’s Plateau:” This ADVISA blog series by Paul Dumouchellefocuses on common organizational alignment challenges encountered by new business initiatives after the initial start-up phase. Please add your own insights about entrepreneurial challenges - I welcome your comments!
Consider these 10 reasons for using using personality assessments in your candidate screening process.
The business needs a stronger workforce.
You want more meaningful interviews.
You've had a series of disappointing hires.
You need help articulating the demands of the job.
You need help discerning what candidates can meet those demands.
Hiring is happening with little objectivity.
You are overwhelmed with the time consumed in interviewing.
Personality confliect is rampant among employees.
Departments/teams are not meeting performance objectives.
Turnover is too high.
Do any of these apply to your company?
If so, reigster here for ADVISA’s next free webinar on Using Personality Assessments in Hiring on September 21st at 9:30 EST. Or if you can’t wait, contact me and we’ll get started today.
I was really impressed today to read a posting by Kevin Wheeler called "10 Questions to Help You Hire Better People." It caught my attention as being especially clear in presenting ideas for identifying and articulating your company culture and employer brand, which can be frustrating to define, but important for developing a strong recruiting strategy and for actually recruiting employees.
Have you ever had an experience where you didn't fit into a company culture? Or where what was described as being the culture didn't bear out to be true from your perspective? Even if the work itself and compensation and location may have been great, what was the toll that the misfit culture took on you? If you left the company, what were your feelings about it afterwards?
Being in touch with your business culture, articulating it to candidates and assessing culture fit can be just as important as knowing what you'll pay and what skills you need from a candidate. Is your head spinning trying to sort this out? ADVISA would love to help.
Getting to the top matters - A LOT! At least for the ambitious and competitive. Yet, we never want to lose sight of the fact that how we get there, and remain there, matters just as much.
Compromising the values of your organization, or your own personal values, is never the way to accomplish this. Does anyone really want to be that man/woman who is unaware of the conversations about their lack of leadership and management training or questionable ethics when they aren't within earshot? No. While their "work" or accomplishments may be noted or "respected", those close enough to know how they do it don't respect them as an individual or true professional.
In navigating success we need to have an idea of the perception we create as seen through the eyes of those around us. A 360 assessment provides access to this candid, and essential, information. It's confidential for those who provide the 360 performance feedback, allowing an individual to truly know how they are viewed by colleagues; subordinates and even those they do business with outside of their organization. Then, our 360 Feedback Process can create a strategy for improvement, along with the data.
Respecting your work, you, and the means by which you accomplish your business results defines you as a professional.
I am working with a client in helping them to fill a key management position within their organization. One element of this particular search is that there are members of the team who have been with the company for a period of time who are interested in this opportunity. This is a not-so-unique challenge that hiring managers face when key positions become available - do we promote someone from within because they have earned it by putting in their time? The way this particular client chose to handle the situation is unique. Rather than just "giving" the position to an internal person they opted to have these individuals go through the same assessment and selection process that other candidates are going through. This means that the resumes of those internal candidates came into my inbox just like everyone else's and even I did not have a heads up that the internal candidates were interested! I found this to be a particularly interesting piece of the client's recruiting strategy. It allowed all candidates to be placed on the same playing field and all of them were put through the same applicant screening process. It may not seem unique but even though a best hiring practice is to hire the best person for the job sometimes hiring managers settle for the "best I've got" right now. They take this approach in order to take the hiring project off of their plate and move on to new and usually more exciting things. Hats off to those hiring managers and companies who take hiring seriously enough to make sure that the person they bring in to a key position fits well with the bigger picture of their organizational alignment.
I couldn't pass up sharing this article by Dr. John Sullivan about recruiting strategy and what we can learn from the Miami Heat landing LeBron James. It is a great example of how best hiring practices start long before a job is posted or interviews begin. Indeed, strategy is what's key. On a personal note, I have to share that this is what I really love about hiring: firguring out what a company really needs (this article talks about "game-changers"), strategizing how to get it, and then screening to make sure they do.
This article also caught my attention because there is a natural overlap with Predictive Index®, a personality assessment tool that can significantly impact hiring. There are key drivers and subsequent behaviors one must have in order to be an effective game-changer on the court, in the boardroom, or in any setting. Predictive Index helps capture these behaviors and lets one "look under the hood" to see how naturally a candidate will display them.
If you're ready for a game-changing hire, ADVISA would love to help you out. and we'll get started!
Strong hiring is critical for company success. But I’ve found that great hiring is less about applicant screening and recruiting strategy and more about simply knowing what you need.
For example: You need someone to answer the phones, so you need a receptionist. But will he/she work with a 60-line phone system with 300 calls/day, or manage about 25 calls a day, but be expected to “triage” customers? These are two very different positions, and being clear about the needs of your position will guide the rest of the process.
Here is a framework I find helpful for defining a job and capturing that in the format of a job description:
1.Position Summary (2-3 sentences) – Why does this position exist? How is it critical to the company’s success?
2.Responsibilities (3-5 broad areas with 3-12 detailed bullets in each) – What does a person in this role do? What are the 3-5 areas into which their responsibilities naturally fall? What will they be evaluated on?
3.Core competencies (6-12) – How should this person perform their job so that they align with the company overall? What behaviors must one exhibit in order to fit into your company culture and meet your definition of professionalism?
4.Position specific competencies (3-6) –What traits must someone have in order to be successful in this specific role? HINT: Personality assessments like Predictive Index® can be very helpful for defining these.
5.Critical skills & knowledge (3-6) – What are the teachable skills or formal knowledge that one must have for this position?
6.Working conditions – How will this person work on a daily basis? How much travel and what kind of travel is involved?
When you can clearly answer these questions, you’ve done half the work necessary for strong hiring. You can use the information from these question to guide where you post the position, how you screen resumes and how you interview candidates.
One of my clients recently contacted us looking for assistance in recruiting employees. We were able to help them with assessment and selection of sales staff and a network engineer position. I was pleased but not surprised when I was copied on the following e-mail this morning:
"Sally,
Tony is going to start with us on Monday. Thanks for all of your work on this! You did a great job! You have kept me informed throughout the process and you were very thorough. Just to be diligent, I asked the candidates what they thought about Advisa and the process up to that point during the face-to-face interviews. They all had positive things to say. You made this easy for me. If I need anyone else, I’ll definitely give you a call. Thank you."
Sally Jacobs handled this particular position but this is reflective of the work and results of our entire ADVISA hiring staff. They continue to amaze clients with the quality of their work and the low cost at which they are able to provide those results.
If you are looking for top notch assistance with your efforts to attract and recruit new personnel then contact your ADVISA hiring team to explore how they work with clients.
According to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Hence, we must strive to, "Know thyself". Whether or not we agree that it determines the worth of life, many view it as vital to making it a fulfilling one and put forth effort into doing so. All types of avenues are taken in this pursuit. Is feedback from other sources a requirement on the journey to "know thyself"? Could 360 performance feedback or a personality assessment actually help an individual know themselves better than they already do?
At first, it seems somewhat odd to assume anyone else, or anything, could know us the way we know ourselves. We are always there. We know why we take action, or choose not to. We are fully aware of the reasons behind the choices we make. We know where all of our strengths lie, right? When other people don't laugh at our jokes, it's just because they didn't get it...isn't it? Okay, maybe comedy isn't one of my strengths.
Truthfully, most of us need feedback on a regular basis to provide objectivity that isn't filtered by our own perceptions of ourselves. People simply aren't that good at it - when it comes to ourselves. 360 Assessments are great for this because they provide you with the candid feedback to "know thyself" that we need for professional improvement. It alleviates the anxiety most of us would have about providing honest, unfiltered feedback to anyone we anticipate seeing again - especially in a professional environment. Truly understanding how you are perceived by those you interact with; report to and manage is unquestionably pertinent and relevant to your work.
Personality assessments are also helpful here in adding perspective to your own point of view. After we better understand ourselves, comes an increased ability to manage ourselves and our interactions with others for the business results we hope to achieve.
In my Organizational Behavior class last Saturday (I'm slowly, but surely, working on my MBA), my professor uttered a line that I'll be quoting for years.
"If you need a squirrel to climb the tree, hire the squirrel. Don't hire the duck."
Ding, ding, ding!!!!
We were talking about the use of personality assessments, which is a niche of the professor - his work in a Fortune 500 company includes determining what assessments to use and managing their use, especially in hiring. He gave very specific examples that quantified the impact of using a reliable and valid assessment in hiring. Fascinating and meaningful, but the squirrel/duck analogy said it all. Don't hire the duck.
There are several layers to why I found his summation so powerful. These relate to previous posts I've done about best hiring practices.
Know what you need. In this case, a tree must be climbed.
Any personality assessments you use should help you quantify and "package" the behaviors you need.You need a squirrel.
Then the candidate assessment should help you see what you have in front of you. You have a duck.
Finally, you have to do the fit/gap analysis. Can the duck climb the tree?
Of course, this is easier to say when you're a Fortune 500 company. You have many more resources in order to get the squirrel.
So what can a small company glean from this example? There's actually a lot here. Look at what you can change:
Is your search attracting squirrels? Do you need to do more to attract a squirrel (e.g., offer stronger compensation or add relocation)?
Can you wait it out until a squirrel comes your way?
You need a tree to be climbed because you need to get what's at the top. Is there another way to get what's at the top? What about a bird that can fly more than the duck? It's not a squirrel, but it'll get the job done.
If you're interested in getting some help distinguishing squirrels from ducks and attracting squirrels, give us a shout.
Just Google "hate recruiters" and you'll see hundreds of links to blogs, forums and screeds describing candidate and hiring manager negative experiences with recruiters. Is the term "recruiter" destined to join "car salesman" in eliciting derisive comments when spoken? Are recruiter's the Herb Tarleks of the HR world?
Most of the derogatory comments issued from experiences with outside recruiters who work on commission. Some of the complaints:
Recruiters don't seem to truly understand the role they are recruiting for or that much detail about the clients needs.
I am not sure if the post-interview feedback is honest or I don't get feedback at all.
Most headhunters don't return my calls or acknowledge that I applied for a job.
As a hiring manager, I hate when recruiters sling resumes at me and don't take the time to understand my needs."
Dishonesty about a position, company, or the requirements for a role
Recruiters seem unethical and will do anything to make a placement; their tactics to recruit or develop accounts are dishonest.
I feel like job postings are not real jobs some time, the Bait and Switch.
Recruiters are only working for the company and aren't looking out for my best interest through the offer stage.
Reasons to love our ADVISA Hiring Partners
Let me introduce them:
Gina Sally Beth
Each of these individuals specializes in executing searches. They are highly adept at understanding your company and what you need – your Partner will take great care of you utilizing best hr practices and hiring assessments.
They instill confidence that a thorough assessment of the candidate pool occurs, and that the process is as efficient as possible.
If you are a PI® client, your consultant receives communications about the progress of your search.
Gina, Sally and Beth are committed to representing you accurately and we will always have your needs and desires at the forefront as we review candidates.
Keeping you informed is important to us, so each week you will receive a summary of the search, including the number of applications received, the strength of the candidate pool, and how many candidates are in each process of the screening.
The ADVISA Hiring Partners are not compensated by commissions. They work for their clients as if they are on the clients' payroll. Like all of us, they put pressure on themselves to please our clients, but they don't feel any pressure to submit unqualified candidates.
The candidates, both successful and unsuccessful are treated professionally, with respect and sensitivity to their personal situations.
Ah, the delicate process of locating top talent that is a true fit for your organization and the role you need to fill; bringing the core values, skills, education and behavioral assets you are seeking; when you think about this...
...does your company approach employee recruiting with confidence? ...do you have access to an applicant screening process run like a well-oiled machine? ...do you have the staff to dedicate attention to assessment and selection? ...are you confident about the criteria on which a candidate assessment is made?
Actually, you can answer "yes" to all of these questions because ADVISA Hiring is a resource available to you. AH is the arm of ADVISA dedicated to applicant screening, assessment and selection, on behalf of our clients. Virtually all of my clients have worked with ADVISA Hiring. They can rely upon our team of experts to utilize HR best practices; advise them on pre-employment assessments and applicant screening; and, hopefully, locate just the right candidate for their organization.
While they never guarantee that they can pull rabbits out of hats, I'm always confident about recommending this team, their work and their services to every client with employee recruiting needs - from executive level and confidential searches, to multiple entry-level positions. I am fortunate enough to rely upon them as an additional resource who, like me, are focused on my clients' best interests with the highest of standards. I owe our ADVISA Hiring team sincere gratitude. They make me look good and add even more value. What more could I ask for?
When a client recently contacted me for help in finding a bilingual (English/Chinese) mechanical engineer with deep experience in metalworking and manufacturing for a LEAN team leader position located in Asia I must admit the challenge seemed a bit steep for ADVISA Hiring.
With the help of ADVISA Hiring Manager Dana Harrison and Hiring Partner Sally Jacobs, though, we developed a recruiting plan that has generated several viable candidates. In addition, our knowledge of the client's unique situation adds depth to recommendations regarding the person who might be the best fit. Our expertise in hiring assessments improves the odds that our client will end up with a person who succeeds in this demanding position.
Beyond such exotic situations though, I've also recently seen how our hiring experts can help clients with relatively simple situations. Just last week a client asked me how we handled background checks. They needed to start conducting these and simply did not know where to start. Again, our role as a trusted business advisor allowed us to play a role. Lead Hiring Partner Gina Bindley quickly explained our own process - which provided the client the information they needed.
Finally, our Marketing Coordinator, Beth Claflin has done a remarkable job in 2010 pulling together a consistent look and feel to our ADVISA Hiring (and other) programs. This makes it easier for all of us to understand and appreciate how our consulting and hiring services Create Confident Organizations!
This is one of my mom's favorite phrases. "Don't get the cart before the horse," she'd say. I think of this often because, admittedly, I'm inclined to do so. Why? I get busy, impatient, jumbled in my head, etc. and it just happens.
Recently, I saw this happening with a client who uses Predictive Index® as part of her company's applicant screening process. Here is her process:
Review resumes
Conduct interviews
Review the pre-employment assessment that's done by Predictive Index.
Make the hire or put the candidate in the "thanks, but no thanks" pile.
Upon learning this process, the client and I started a good dialogue about steps 2 and 3. Why do the assessment after the interview? Why should she invest her valuable time (and possibly the time of others at the company) before she has all the information?
Lately I've been using the analogy of buying a car. Is it worth your time to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon at the car dealership driving cars before you've gotten a sense of the cars' cost and safety records? Would you just drive down the street and pick a dealership to pop into? Your more likely course of action would be to do at least some basic research (even just talking with friends) and then do the more time-intensive work visiting dealerships. You would opt to get as much info as you could before going to the dealership, right?
So why is hiring different? When doing candidate screening, why not front load the process with tools to efficiently learn about candidates (such as with personality assessments and questionnaires) and reserve your time for candidates you've soundly vetted?
After talking this through with our client, it sounds like she's going to reverse steps 2 and 3, which means that she'll get the personality information and match it against what the job demands before she does interviews. This will give her more information about who to spend time interviewing and more insight as to what to delve into. The horse will be in front of the cart...and the client is more likely to get to her destination: a successful, efficient hire.
Contact me if you'd like to see if we can add both efficiency and effectivess to your hiring process.
Last week a client who has been using Predictive Index® in her company's candidate screening process stated, "Using the assessment is slowing us down."
She went on to explain that she was referring to the hiring of sales professionals (which, in her case, must be highly strategic and meticulous to detail, which weeds out a lot of people who are successful with sales in other environments). She said that by using Predictive Index, it takes a bit longer to find a candidate who meets at least most (if not all) of the selection criteria.
"Is the extra time worth it?" I asked.
"Oh, yes!" the client enthusiastically responded. She shared that while the candidate screening is taking a little longer, they are making much stronger hires. The new sales reps are producing faster than before and turnover is down. Success!
This was a great example of some of the realities when one uses a candidate assessment tool. Using the car purchasing analogy from a previous post, are you better off taking a bit longer in your search and having a mechanic look under the hood and screen out the lemons? Or quickly buying the first car that looks and feels right?
We're now going to help our client educate others in her company on the merits of a little more patience during the assessment and selection process, and the reward that doing so is already yielding. Contact me if you'd like to talk about how Predictive Index can impact hiring in your company.
One area that managers are always held accountable for is a budget, right? As a manager have you ever given thought to the cost of making the wrong hire for a position? I talked with a client last week who learned this lesson the hard way - they hired someone for a key position within their organization who had worked with them in a consluting capacity and at the time it seemed like a natural transition. Now, two years and thousands of dollars (and many headaches!) later they realize that investing the time and money on the front end to make the right hire would have served them well. Best hiring practices such as utilizing a strong candidate screening and assessment program as part of your recruiting strategy will go a long way. This will not only help avoid spending money on a salary for the wrong person but also help to avoid the problem of managing difficult behaviors that come out of making the wrong hire. It's your money . . . you decide what makes the most sense for you and your organization!
I'm a sports freak...I love every sport and I'm an excellent, knowledgeable spectator. Football, basketball, tennis, baseball (well, just the playoffs because the regular season is simply too long at 162 games) - the list goes on and on. The only sport I actually play is tennis and I can tend to be just a tad too competitive on the court but I love being out there. Plain and simple, I like winning but more than that, I hate losing.
My job at Advisa is a Hiring Partner. I'm here to assist clients in hiring selection, utilizing applicant screening, the PI® behavioral assessment tool and best hiring practices to help them fill positions. These could be any positions, such as a Synergy Group Leader position in China or a Network Engineer in Dayton.
I take great pride in filling any position, but especially the "needle in the haystack" ones where our clients have come to us because of our expertise and ability. I'm always aiming for a 1.000 batting average and when I'm not able to find the perfect candidate and my average slips a little, as occasionally happens, it bothers me...a lot.
Nobody throws a touchdown pass or hits a home run or serves an ace every single time but that doesn't mean they're not trying to. And it's the same with not only me but the entire Advisa Hiring staff as all of us are committed to providing you with the highest, most professional assistance with employee recruiting...every time out.
Yesterday, I met with a recruiter who must be especially good at his job - his company is growing like crazy and turnover is under 3%. He said that the idea of using personality assessments had come up, but why would they add in that to the hiring process when attrition was so low? We talked through Predictive Index® including how the PRO tool helps define a job, and the lightbulb went off. "Ah ha! This can help me 'look under the hood' when I'm considering a candidate so I can more quickly and more deeply determine if they're a fit!" YES!
Have you ever bought a used car? You can drive it and listen to it, but nothing compares to having a mechanic look under the hood. When it comes to candidate screening, Predictive Index lets you be the mechanic - and makes you less likely to come out with a lemon.
Contact me at ADVISA if you'd like to see how Predictive Index can help define a position and more.
Today's business environment is busier than ever and hiring is no exception! We frequently run into situations where it is evident that even though making a new hire is important it often does not make it to "urgent" status until it is almost too late to be effectively managed. This is true for both replacement and newly created positions.
With employee recruiting, finding the time to simply post an ad and look at a few of the resumes that come in is tough enough let alone adding hiring assessments and interviews to the list! At ADVISA we realize this struggle and in an effort to always look out for the best interest of our clients, we advise companies to have a strong selection policy created in advance to avoid the situation described above. This will help hiring managers avoid the trap of hiring the first qualified candidate for a position and allow them to have systems in place that will enable them to hire the best qualified candidate. Doing this takes some time up front but it is definitely worth it in the end and will ensure long-term success for the company, the hiring manager and the new hire.
I've been working with a client this week who started using Preditive Index® in their applicant screening process after ADVISA took them through a custom training program. Recently, there had been a hiccup and some less than ideal communications around one recent hire, so they were coming back for guidance. We sorted through the bumps they'd had and here's a truth that emerged: there are some very delicate aspects of hiring, regardless of if you use personality assessments and which one you might use.
When you're doing candidate screening, you have to know what you need and you have to know your deal-breakers, but you also have to know where you have wiggle room. In other words, you have to apply wisdom. For example, you say you need 10 years experience, but this is actually one you can fudge on when you get somone with 8 years experience with really tremendous work during that time, right? But you know that someone with only 2 years experience just won't work - deal-breaker. Same thing if you're using personality assessment: you have to know the critical personality traits you need, and then you have to consider where you have wiggle room.
Reprioritizing is a reality. You can start a search knowing that you want a certain kind of experience, a certain personality, and you're willing to pay a certain amount, but you may have to move around on some or all of those as you look at your candidate pool. This happens in the hiring process with or without the incorporation of a personality assessment.
Hiring decisions and search status should be communicated by Human Resources (or one designated person who's coached on how to do this, if there's no HR). This helps protect the company against risk and helps provide the best experience for candidates.
When you reject a candidate, resist the temptation to explain why. This really gets hard when a candidate comes asking why they weren't offer a job. The best answer is always, "Another candidate fit our needs better." Or, if no one was selected, "We just didn't find the right candidate." In both cases it's good to add, "You're welcome to apply again in the future." That's it.
Nothing too earth-shattering here, right?! In the midst of all the craziness of our days, it can be easy to lose sight of these points. If you'd like to talk more about best practices in hiring, I'd love to have the conversation - you can reach me here.
I was really impressed today to read a posting by Kevin Wheeler called "
I am working with a client in helping them to fill a key management position within their organization. One element of this particular search is that there are members of the team who have been with the company for a period of time who are interested in this opportunity. This is a not-so-unique challenge that hiring managers face when key positions become available - do we promote someone from within because they have earned it by putting in their time? The way this particular client chose to handle the situation is unique. Rather than just "giving" the position to an internal person they opted to have these individuals go through the same assessment and selection process that other candidates are going through. This means that the resumes of those internal candidates came into my inbox just like everyone else's and even I did not have a heads up that the internal candidates were interested! I found this to be a particularly interesting piece of the client's recruiting strategy. It allowed all candidates to be placed on the same playing field and all of them were put through the same applicant screening process. It may not seem unique but even though a best hiring practice is to hire the best person for the job sometimes hiring managers settle for the "best I've got" right now. They take this approach in order to take the hiring project off of their plate and move on to new and usually more exciting things. Hats off to those hiring managers and companies who take hiring seriously enough to make sure that the person they bring in to a key position fits well with the bigger picture of their organizational alignment. 
According to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Hence, we must strive to, "Know thyself". Whether or not we agree that it determines the worth of life, many view it as vital to making it a fulfilling one and put forth effort into doing so. All types of avenues are taken in this pursuit. Is feedback from other sources a requirement on the journey to "know thyself"? Could 360 performance feedback or a personality assessment actually help an individual know themselves better than they already do? 
In my Organizational Behavior class last Saturday (I'm slowly, but surely, working on my MBA), my professor uttered a line that I'll be quoting for years. 
Is the term "recruiter" destined to join "car salesman" in eliciting derisive comments when spoken? Are recruiter's the Herb Tarleks of the HR world?
With the help of 
not know where to start. Again, our role as a trusted business advisor allowed us to play a role. Lead Hiring Partner Gina Bindley quickly explained our own process - which provided the client the information they needed.
Finally, our 
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