In our last article Is The Interview A Roll Of The Dice? we thought that Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s VP of Talent Solutions, was a little behind the times in saying “Recruiting has always been an art, but it’s becoming a science.” We believe recruiting already is a science and has been for some time, decades even, and with our leadership assessment we put the science in and the guessing out.
What is more, it is not just leadership assessment; leadership development and talent management have also benefited from modern psychometric techniques. And then the explosion of the internet meant that services could reach globally. hfi has been delivering scientifically validated leadership assessments for over 30 years and the psychologists who contributed the standardized measures of personality hark back well before that, for example, Raymond Cattell in the 1940s.
Recently hfi ran a regression to demonstrate the remarkably strong relationship between our leadership assessment and later performance – how well we predict performance in the role. The result was conclusive and showed with statistical significance that our Leadership assessment predicted performance in the role 1 and 2 years after being selected.
In other words, if you give us half a day with a candidate, we will tell you if they will succeed. No talks about their childhood, just rigorous, standardized, objective assessments. The best part is that the candidates can complete the assessments anywhere in the world, in over 30 different languages.
So imagine you are looking at your talent pool and considering who to promote or develop – who to invest in – we can identify who has future potential and would be more suitable for progression. In fact, a recent study concluded with a presentation to the client that identified their top 20 high potentials identified by our leadership assessment. Their response was that the very top candidate was leaving, cue a look of concern.
The accuracy of this result in part is attributed to hfi’s leadership assessment being reliable and valid to begin with; you need to be cautious when using psychometrics as there are, just like any other product in any other market, less ‘good’ examples. The rest of the result comes from the accuracy of our interpretation and the ability our psychologists have to spot talent.
The benefits of a leadership assessment are huge: targeted, focused succession planning, consistent success throughout the talent pipeline, a reduction in failed promotions and the retention and nurturing of top performers. It also avoids large scale, sheep-dip leadership development and focuses resources where they are really needed, especially important when HR budgets are constantly under scrutiny.
As you can see, selection, development and talent management is a science – and one we have invested our time in developing and delivering, with success, to our clients.
At hfi, we have a new online talent platform called PeopleFactors. PeopleFactors benchmarks leadership potential. It is very easy to use, cuts time and is cost effective. PeopleFactors is being used by Talent Acquisition, L&D and HRBPs in local companies and global multinationals, to support their talent decisions.
To find more about our services, leadership assessment and the PeopleFactors online talent platform, please contact us.
