Hiring Assessment Tips and Tools

If only hiring people were as simple a process as evaluating a business, having one's own practice would be much easier. Most of us have had the misfortune of finding the "perfect candidate" only to discover later that the individual was literally too good to be true. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at finding qualified new hires, we knew we had to find a better way to evaluate potential employees beyond just hiring them to see how they would work.

We have identified six key elements that are critical to consider when evaluating a new hire:

• Values systems and personal ethics
• Perceptions related to compensation and money
• Work habits
• Career and personal goals
• Strengths and limitations
• Personality roles - dominant or subordinate

We have found one tool that has been very helpful in the screening of potential applicants. We were made aware of Staff Development Services (SDS), an organization that could surprisingly accurately identify how a person would behave within our organization before we ever hired them. There was a bit of skepticism on our part initially so we decided to perform the survey on several people already working in our firm in order to evaluate the instrument's accuracy.

SDS utilizes the Simmons Personal Survey and can be administered to any level of staff. We found that the instrument provides an accurate portrayal of the person by measuring 13 different behavioral tendencies, such as energy and stress levels, optimism, self esteem, assertiveness, tolerance, etc. But the greatest benefit we derived was from having SDS compare the person to the role we expect them to fulfill. The SDS survey measures a person’s character rather than personality and the depth of information has helped us to avoid making critical hiring mistakes.

In one instance we had had a bad experience with a previous partner and Staff Development Services discovered that we were excited about hiring another person who was coincidentally quite similar to the partner from whom we had such a painful disassociation. After a bit of self examination, we decided we did not want to risk bringing someone on board that conveyed tendencies that were similar to those we had just spent months trying to distance ourselves from. John Beane, President of SDS says their survey provides something similar to an X-ray of a person’s character and that accuracy permits them to achieve a better than 90% success rate on identifying superior candidates for a job once they understand the position.

After we began to identify the positive characteristics of our best associates, it then became a more routine process for SDS to compare a new candidate to those behaviors and make their recommendations. John Beane, who has 20 years of experience in these types of assessments, indicates that people with the appropriate behaviors have a far better opportunity to succeed than those who simply have the necessary skills.

According to John, most tests are not sophisticated enough to achieve much more than a 50% accuracy factor whereas his survey can predict behaviors that may not be seen for years. He has told us of one instance where a gentleman had been employed for over two years and his survey indicated a certain negative behavior could occur, but the firm had never seen him behave that way. Shortly after the firm told John he was wrong, the man acted exactly as had been predicted.

We have used these resources both as a mentoring resource for individuals already in our firm and to screen candidates for positions ranging from administrative assistants to potential equity level lateral hires. So if hiring the ideal candidates to support your BV practice is giving you a challenge, we suggest you contact John Beane through his website www.staffdevelopmentservices.com and he will respond to your questions and discuss how his organization can be of assistance.

There are other similar tools available including the Predictive Index Survey (www.piworldwide.com), the Kolbe Index (www.kolbe.com), Harrison-Innerview (www.harrison-innerview.com), HireSelect by Criteria Corporation (www.criteriacorp.com), and many others that can be considered as well. Many of these testing resources leverage off of the work done in the 1960s by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (www.myersbriggs.org ), which actually is an offshoot of their study of C.G. Jung and his pioneering work on psychological personality types that was first translated into English in the 1920s.

Submitted by: Brenda M. Clarke, CPA/ABV and Ronald L. Seigneur CPA/ABV
Seigneur Gustafson LLP / www.cpavalue.com
 

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