Out of the Box Solutions
Assessments
"Who are you?" is a line from a song made famous by the Who that was asked when I was much younger. Had they also asked "who am I?" They would have isolated the keys to communication and predictive behavior. Studies indicate we as human beings establish our values and attitudes by the age of 14 years old. This is our internal make up, our filters if you will that define how we like to receive information, express ourselves, our internal make up if you will. The profound impact however is if we desire to effectively communicate with others we must understand or gain some insight into their values and attitudes and speak to them when we communicate. Communication is truly an art form in and of itself. The root of all communication, the secret if you will is presenting your ideas in a form and style that speaks to the other person's attitudes and values.
Good salespeople do this intuitively. Often times when hiring managers would say "this candidate looks good on paper and interviews well…" yet they wish to dive a bit deeper. What are the main reason new employees do not make it? Is it training, work ethic, lack of knowledge, lack of industry experience? No. The leading reason new employees fail is they lack a predictive fit with the team they are joining. This is often preventable with the use of pre employment profiles. Profiles help better understand the root of this individual in their values, attitudes, and how they prefer to communicate. Couple this with assessment tools that have already profiled your organization, its leaders, other team members individually and we can establish a predictive indicator of new candidates propensity to add value to the team.
The type of questions answered by our assessment tools include:
- How will this candidate accept supervision?
- What are their true attitudes towards absenteeism and tardiness in the workplace?
- What are the applicant's attitudes towards drugs in the workplace?
- What are their attitudes towards theft in the workplace?
- Will this applicant stay with the company?
- Will customer satisfaction be a high priority?
- What is this applicant's attitude about workplace safety?
Here are two examples of some of these reports and how they look and what they provide:
Personal Interests Attitudes and Values
What if they are already on the team? In addition to pre employment screening assessments, we offer over 2,000 strategically selected assessments to help our clients most frequent needs; building a team that trusts one another enough to engage in constructive challenges, have strong accountability and ultimately drive sustainable results. Once we start the process we thoroughly review the findings and create customized developmental programs that grow areas that add value as well as balance those areas that may need further development. In Jim Collin's book Good to great he discusses the true role of a leader is to first get the right people on the bus, then make sure they are in the right seats. Assessments and our experience insure our clients follow Collin's advice. For companies that desire a much deeper understanding we provide ASSES that not only reviews personality profile traits but also incorporates intellectual capabilities and potential. This state of the art system administers scores and evaluates the results of an assessment battery and writes a report much like an industrial psychologist would, however at a much lower cost to our client partners.
"I want more sales!" usually is presented to our team within the first 20 minutes of engagement. One of the best tools we have found is a tool titled SalesMax. Candidates are able to log in to the testing site from virtually anywhere around the world. SalesMax subscribes to the American Psychological Association and EEOC guidelines. Having led sales and marketing teams for over 20 years himself, our founder put it this way; "for years I wished I could have a crystal ball before I was engaged with a salesperson. Often they look good on paper, they interview well, but I really do not see their ability until they are in front of my customers, and that used to disturb me until I found Salesmax."
Salesmax measures the key dimensions to the Sales Personality.
- Energy level
- Enthusiasm, hard work and follow through
- Completes tasks, follows through on commitments, self reliant
- Takes charge and gets things don, self reliant
- Able to handle rejection and bounce back, serious minded
- Responsible, business like professional
- Optimistic
- Positive, weathers adversity, sociable
- Outgoing, enjoys client customer contact, assertiveness