What drives your potential new employees and your existing team members? Knowing this before you hire is extremely important for job fit and to keep people engaged and motivated in their work.

How can you find this out in a one or two hour interview? Most small and medium size businesses people and managers do not interview everyday and often do not have a well planned interview approach that gives answers to everything you need to know in order to make the best decision.

The focus is usually on skills and work experience, which you can easily get from their resume, so why spend a lot of time asking questions about this. As I suggested in a previous article about hiring star employees, prepare a simple skills test to see how they can handle that task.

I remember working with a small business owner who had interviewed a person to be his executive assistant. Her resume showed that she had the skills for the job and after the interview he was ready to hire her. I intervened and asked her to compose a business letter to a supplier on a frequent business matter that required a simple understanding of the business that her research should have provided.

The candidate had difficulty formatting the letter and articulating the message and was clearly not fit for the job. Yet my client would have been ready to hire her because he liked her and believed what was on the resume and what she was saying.

Once we have checked for skills and company fit we want to verify job match and this requires another type of test to measure thinking style, behaviour and occupational interests.
People usually list their interests on their resume. But this does not tell you what their occupational interests are. General interests can be misinterpreted and often we don’t pay enough attention to their job interests.

The Profile XT assessment provides six occupational interest fields and determines the candidates top three interests and matches them to the profile of the job. When the most important activities we must perform for job success meet our top three interest area needs, we feel motivated and passionate about our work.

On Thursday March 12th at 1:00 PM EST I will make a presentation by webinar on hiring and developing star performers using the Profiles XT assessment and explain all the components of this tool including the occupational interest fields.

Using assessments for hiring can save you big bucks by reducing turnover because you will have people better fit for the job. This saves you valuable time that can be put to more productive use. Also hiring and training new employees today is very costly and it usually takes three to six months before they fully understand your systems to become fully productive. The more complex the job the longer it takes.

To attend the webinar you must send me an email request to sgoldberg@optimusperformance.ca and I will send you the details.