Webhelp Case Study: Successful Job Placement with Soft Skills
The Challenge: Lack of Insight into Top Performers’ Skill Sets
With thousands of new hires annually, streamlining the recruiting process had become a critical challenge for Webhelp. In need of a better process to identify top performers for key positions, Webhelp turned to Talentoday to help optimize the job placement process as soon as candidates passed the generic corporate recruitment phase.
The Solution: Optimize Job Placement with Thorough Assessment
Leveraging MyPrint, Talentoday conducted a massive soft-skills assessment campaign with employees to collect soft skills data. Coupling that with company performance data, Talentoday created a replicable roadmap using traditional descriptional statistics methods and complex machine-learning techniques to identify key soft skills for critical roles.
The Results: More Successful Job Placements Driven by Data
With nearly 4,000 completed My Print assessments, Talentoday was able to provide two to five key soft skills for the top seven positions in the Webhelp organization. This roadmap is used to help Webhelp make personalized job recommendations to candidates based on their MyPrint soft skills assessment. In addition, this study assisted the company in identifying top performers, as well as individuals who needed improvement, in seven critical positions while taking into account cultural differences between countries.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Webhelp is a global customer experience and business process outsourcing company, operating across a range of digital, social and traditional voice channels. Webhelp is present in 29 countries, with more than 90 customer experience and payment service centers and over 35,000 people serving 500+ clients.
Soft skills are a key focus in the roles at Webhelp, and Webhelp’s top managers strongly believe in the importance of behavioral science to improve the efficiency of their Human Capital Management practice.
Ready to Start Your Transformative Talentoday Success Story?
Ask the Right Questions with Talentoday’s Interview Guide
Resumes are the best tools available to hiring managers for evaluating candidates’ hard skills. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the likelihood of success in a job is dependent on more than just technical qualifications alone. In fact, according to a LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report, “89 percent of recruiters say when a hire doesn’t work out, it usually comes down to a lack of soft skills.” That’s why Talentoday has introduced our Interview Guide, a new tool designed to improve the job interview process with a candidate’s soft skills in mind.
Introducing the Talentoday Interview Guide
Talentoday’s Interview Guide is generated based on an individual’s MyPrint results. After a job candidate completes their soft skills assessment, hiring managers can now access sample interview questions based on behavioral work styles, including:
- Learning Style
- Conflict Management
- Communication
- Decision Making
- Work Style
- Leadership Style
- Creativity
- Risk Orientation
- Team Participation
- Change Reaction
- Rule Consciousness
In short, our Interview Guide brings together key structured questions for all of the behavioral styles found in the MyPrint results specific to a candidate's profile in one easy-to-use format.
When coupled with a soft skills assessment that’s backed by the science of people analytics, structured interviews have proven to be one of the best predictors of future work performance. A clearly defined structured interview process also ensures that the candidate experience remains consistent and unbiased.
How to Use the Interview Guide
This guide is meant to be used alongside the MyPrint One Pager report in order to provide holistic understanding of a candidate's predominant soft skills and help to inform the interview process.
The sample questions provided allow hiring managers to go above and beyond the analysis of the soft skills results in order to zero in on behavioral takeaways. They can help interviews to identify the behaviors that are most relevant to the job description, then support the process of asking for relevant and concrete examples from previous professional experiences. The questions generated in the Interview Guide can be used both in behavioral and structured interview designs.
It’s important to note that the results provided for each candidate should not be utilized as a coaching tool; it is not for those being evaluated, but for the evaluator! Whether being used to gain insight during recruiting interviews or to support development during the annual review process, the interview guide acts as a tool to support decision making driven by the science of soft skills.
Ready to Get Started?
If you’re ready to gain a deeper understanding of your job candidates and improve decision making by asking the right questions, click here to learn more about Talentoday’s Interview Guide. Then, experience Talentoday’s people analytics for yourself by signing up for a free trial.
Rethinking Retention and Reining in the Great Resignation
If you’re an HR professional, you are well aware of the stats by now. A majority of employees (65 percent, according to PwC) are on record saying that they are at least entertaining the idea of leaving their workplace for a new job. This August, a record 4.3 million workers actually took the leap and quit their jobs. In short, businesses in all industries are facing an employee retention crisis.
The question is no longer, “Is the Great Resignation really happening?” In the wake of the effects of COVID-19 and the economic uncertainty that has come with it, the U.S. workforce has answered that question with a resounding, “Yes!” For organizations looking to stabilize their teams, the billion dollar question now is, “How do we rein in our great resignation with a healthy dose of great retention?”
One thing is clear: The old ideas for keeping employees engaged and employed simply are not cutting it anymore. Thankfully, three building blocks for rethinking retention - identifying what makes your situation unique, reevaluating career paths and getting creative - provide a starting point for leaders in need of continuity in their workforce.
Identify What Makes Your Situation Unique
The Great Resignation may be a catchy name, but lumping together millions of life-altering career decisions into one neat package can be misleading. Buried within the shocking statistics and clickable headlines are millions of individual personalities, motivations and behaviors driving these choices. The reasons for increased turnover can vary widely from company to company, team to team and person to person. Therefore, it’s important to zero-in on what makes your situation unique.
Employing quick-fix solutions, like increasing compensation for particular high-turnover roles, may be tempting, but can also prove to be short-lived in effectiveness. Instead, consider utilizing company-wide surveying and soft skill assessments. These scientific tools can give leaders measurable insight into what’s driving change, as well as what might be more likely to encourage employees at a team and individual level. After all, if the factors driving employees to leave aren’t one-size-fits-all, why would a single solution get retention back on track?
Reevaluate Career Paths in a Changing Workplace
A recent survey commissioned by The Conference Board revealed that 58 percent of talent acquisition and HR leaders report that their employees are concerned about upward mobility if they are not physically in the workplace. These results highlight that the disconnect from the shift to remote and hybrid workplaces runs much deeper than missing out on water cooler conversations; employees are increasingly losing a grasp on the opportunities for growth available to them within their organizations. If employees cannot see a future for themselves where they’re currently at, it stands to reason that they’d look elsewhere for fulfillment.
How can companies counteract resignations stemming from this disconnect? The report goes on to recommend that organizations reward leaders for facilitating internal movement of employees, develop a cross-functional talent mobility program and find ways to give virtual employees added exposure to these opportunities for mobility. The motivations that drive an individual’s career decisions naturally change overtime. For better or worse, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these changes for many people. Before losing talent to greener pastures elsewhere, leaders need to provide their employees with opportunities for upskilling, growth and lateral moves internally.
Get Creative Early and Often
When an employee decides it’s time to move on, there are plenty of options available to organizations trying to find ways to keep the talent in-house. While money can be enticing for many employees, it’s not a panacea (and some organizations simply cannot withstand a counter-offer war for top talent given their current financial situation.) It’s time for companies to become creative when finding ways to retain employees. Using people analytics derived from surveying and soft skills assessments, HR professionals can better identify incentives that are personalized to the individual. For example, while an increased annual salary might be a key driver for one employee, more flexibility in scheduling and work environment might rank higher for another.
However, one major takeaway for the HR Community in light of the Great Resignation should be that preventative measures need to be taken before workers begin to leave en masse. Let your creativity shine long before it needs to be used in a last-ditch effort to hold onto employees! According to Inc.com, some CEOs have begun relying on exercises such as “anything but work” check-ins, gratitude sharing sessions and games to connect with employees on a personal level in the era of hybrid work.
Will these efforts help boost your organization’s employee retention in the face of the Great Resignation? The only way to know is by building personalized solutions tailored to the needs of each employee. Otherwise, you'll be resigned to riding a rising tide of turnover.
Are you ready to identify what motivates your candidates and employees? Experience how MyPrint can uncover a better way to hire and retain a top team by clicking here!
Why Upskilling is Crucial for Hybrid Teams
There were a lot of things I didn’t know I could do before COVID-19 upended the way we live and work. For example, I already knew my way around the kitchen, but I had no idea I could make tasty banana bread! I also learned how to cook a spicy jambalaya, brew my own beer and, when I wasn’t eating or drinking, I figured out how to use a 35mm film camera to expand upon my interest in photography. In my home life, I would call these achievements “little victories.” Little did I know that, were I to do the same sort of expanding of my talents in the workplace, it would be known as “upskilling.”
Upskilling is the process of using training and education to deepen an employees’ abilities within their area of expertise. This is slightly different from reskilling, which is when an employee is trained on an entirely new skill set in order to move into a different role. Instead, upskilling is all about building upon an employee’s existing skills in hopes of enhancing their impact on an organization.
While my personal upskilling may not have major implications for the workplace (even if some morning meetings are greatly improved by the addition of banana bread), upskilling has the potential to reshape the way organizations recruit and develop talent – especially as teams embrace hybrid work models.
The Skills Gap Continues to Expand
As the modern workplace undergoes unprecedented changes, existing skills gaps across all industries are widening. While employees may have entered into the workforce with skills that were in high demand at the time, the rate of digital transformation has increased sharply in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving many of these employees behind. According to McKinsey & Company, 87 percent of companies say they have skills gaps or expect to within a few years. Jobs are changing fast, and employers and employees are struggling to keep up.
There are a few options at organizations’ disposal for dealing with these gaps in needed competencies. In less competitive hiring markets, one appealing course of action would be to bring in new talent to fit the needs. However, today’s recruiting landscape is characterized by a dwindling supply of talent and an aggressive influx of demand from employers. These conditions have forced many employers to look inwards when determining how to address their skills gaps in the years ahead.
Employees are Looking for a Change
To exacerbate the problem even further, this expanding skills gap comes at a time when workers are beginning to quit jobs at extraordinary levels. In April 2021, the number of employees leaving their companies spiked to approximately 4 million according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), leading many to refer to the phenomenon as, “The Great Resignation.”
In truth, does anyone ever really want to be forced to find a new job? In the same way that employers would rather retain talent than search for replacements, employees are hoping for reasons to stay at their current organizations before making a drastic move. Take the results of a recent PwC survey into consideration. Their findings show that the majority of workers are open to change, citing that 40 percent of respondents successfully improved their digital skills during the pandemic and over 90 percent of those who adapted to remote work would prefer to continue working in this style of environment. On top of that, 77 percent of workers are ready to learn new skills.
The issue is not a lack of willingness to learn on the side of employees but, rather, the lack of opportunities for upskilling offered by employers. However, if organizations are serious about closing their skills gap and retaining employees in the face of an explosion of resignations, it’s time to make learning and development programs a real priority.
Make Upskilling a Priority
While employers seem to recognize the problem they face, there remains a gap between this recognition and an understanding of how to address the underlying causes. According to a 2021 survey conducted by Gartner, 68 percent of HR leaders cited building critical skills as a top priority. However, more than 30 percent of the same leaders say that they don’t know what skills gap their employees have, how to effectively integrate learning into employee workflows or can’t create skill development solutions fast enough to meet evolving skill needs. In short, employers know there are skills gaps to address, but are uncertain where they lie or how to fix them.
The way forward is two-pronged, based first on assessment then solidified with commitment:
- Assessment: First and foremost, organizations need to utilize tools to empower them to better evaluate their candidates and employees. Knowing the current capabilities of a team is important, but identifying the potential for growth can be critical. While necessary technical skills can be assessed through traditional means, such as verifying education and certification backgrounds, this must be coupled with a deeper understanding of soft skills. Scientifically-based soft skills assessments can provide insight into an individual’s capacity to upskill into a role over time.
- Commitment: Once the workforce has been properly assessed, organizations must then approach upskilling differently than standard onboarding and other job-specific training opportunities. Instead, upskilling opportunities must be treated like the valuable benefits they are. As noted in Fast Company, “For the top tier of talent, upskilling is emerging as a must-have employee benefit, like a retirement saving plan, employer subsidized health care, or paid time off.” In other words, these education programs cannot be haphazardly inserted into existing workflows. Rather, time and space must be set aside for employees to truly feel as though upskilling is a top priority.
As the way we work continues to change, teams are struggling to keep up. However, by devoting time and effort to upskilling programs, there are win-win solutions available for employers and employees alike.
Are you ready to evaluate your team’s soft skills to determine upskilling opportunities? Discover the powerful science of people analytics that drives MyPrint by clicking here.
How Culture Add Goes Beyond Culture Fit to Support Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace
For years now, organizations have been stressing the importance of using company culture to drive recruitment and team management efforts. The theory being that hiring individuals that align with the elements that make up a company’s culture - like preferred work environment, company mission, leadership style, values, ethics, expectations and goals - will lead to a happier, more productive workforce.
It’s why most HR professionals have seen (or have had a hand in crafting) recruiting pitches like these:
“Be a part of a fast-paced team!”
“Join our values-driven organization!”
“Are you looking to work in a collaborative and creative environment? Apply now!”
While these culture-driven hiring efforts may be well meaning, there’s growing research indicating that making decisions based on “culture fit” alone may be missing a bigger point. Instead, the real key to unlocking a productive and diverse workforce may be what’s known as “culture add.”
What is Culture Fit?
To begin, hiring professionals need to assess how the industry has been operating in order to determine the best path forward. When culture fit first gained momentum in offices, the idea seemed both groundbreaking and simple. Instead of only relying on hard skills and job description qualifications when determining the best possible fit for a role, HR teams decided to go further. Now, how people go about their work was just as important as what they were doing. Since the style and approach required for being successful at one organization may not transfer to another, culture fit aims to assess whether a candidate’s attitude, motivation and values are aligned with the culture.
Where Does Culture Fit Fall Short?
Unfortunately, hiring for culture fit does not always add up to the ideal workforce its proponents claim to deliver. While the attention this methodology brought to historically under-evaluated areas of candidate profiles, such as personality, motivations and behaviors, was an improvement, it also led many hiring managers into a dangerous trap known as affinity bias. According to LinkedIn, “Affinity bias is the tendency to have a preference to people like ourselves. In hiring, affinity bias can mean leaning toward one candidate over another because they have a relatable background, belief, or appearance.” In other words, while organizations may have thought they were hiring the best candidates for the job thanks to how well they “fit” into a culture, they may have unknowingly been building a homogenous workforce lacking in true diversity. This same research goes on to note that inclusive companies are nearly two times more likely to be innovation leaders in their market, and these same companies outperform industry norms by an average of 35 percent.
Clearly, while hiring for culture fit can have its benefits, companies that do so may be leaving countless amazing hires behind due to rigid match criteria.
How is Culture Add Different?
Today, the practice of hiring for culture add aims to improve where culture fit strategies fall short. As a recent article in Fast Company puts it,” Assessing for culture fit can unintentionally encourage managers to pick candidates that look like everyone else. But looking for culture add helps managers to determine how a candidate’s individuality and differences can make a company better and stronger.” Rather than stifling the things that make a candidate unique, culture add aims to find ways to embrace that individuality within the existing framework of a company’s culture.
In truth, getting to this point can be challenging - especially for larger organizations with deeply ingrained cultures and hiring processes. Culture change takes time, and there needs to be top-to-bottom buy-in to ensure everyone moves in the right direction to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion at scale. LaFawn Davis, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Indeed.com, offers these best practices for companies looking to move towards culture add-based hiring:
- Empower recruiters to push back. When culture fit is given as the reason to decline an offer, recruiters should be able to ask follow-up questions to ensure this reasoning is not being used as an excuse to make decisions based on bias or emotion.
- Ask for more details. Sparking a deeper conversation about a hiring manager’s desired attributes and skills, and how the candidate may meet or miss these marks, could be another way to get beyond a cultural fit impasse.
- Use rubric-based scoring. Go beyond gut-feeling! Having a reliable scoring system can point to where candidates may have fallen short or, if the hiring manager can’t point to something specific, give the recruiter a reason for challenging biased thinking.
As organizations continue to recognize the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in all industries and workplace settings, the concept of culture fit may be coming to an end. Instead of only hiring those who can fit themselves into a tidy box of strictly defined cultural norms, it’s time for human resource professionals to tap into the power of embracing what makes each of us truly unique.
After all, where’s the fun in just fitting in anyway?
Are you ready to build a diverse workforce through the power of science-driven people analytics? Discover the science behind MyPrint by clicking here.
Medix Case Study: 68.9% Decrease in New Hire Turnover
Medix implemented the use of MyPrint into our onboarding programs and we’ve seen a positive impact on how we get to know our newest teammates. From personality styles to motivators, the MyPrint Collaboration Report has helped our new hires cultivate strong team relationships, leading to higher levels of engagement, retention and success in their new roles.
– Megan Steiger, VP of Human Resources.
– Megan Steiger, VP of Human Resources.
THE CHALLENGE: NEW HIRE TURNOVER
With a higher than desired turnover rate for new employees in the first 90 days, Medix turned to Talentoday to determine how to better use soft skills data to reduce turnover rates.
THE SOLUTION: INNOVATION WITH COLLABORATION
With HR working as a strategic business partner, Medix was able to empower managers and their direct reports to have enhanced collaboration with soft-skills data. Medix’s HR team implemented proactive collaboration sessions between managers and new hires based on Talentoday’s Collaboration Report, a 1:1 report designed to compare two individuals’ similarities and differences. The report provides guidance on how they can work better together better based on their unique MyPrint results. By implementing these sessions as proactive and voluntary, the buy-in is high among internal employees.
With HR acting as the facilitator, the manager and new hire are able to use the report to talk through examples that can help motivate them, and what discourages them, empowering engagement to work together towards business goals.
THE RESULT: A 68.9% DECREASE IN NEW HIRE TURNOVER
As a result, Medix saw a significant increase in employees staying with the organization past the first 90 days of employment. In fact, the organization experienced a 68.9 percent decrease in new hire turnover!
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ABOUT THE CLIENT
Medix, a US-based staffing organization, has been pioneering staffing and digital services over the past twenty years. Being a purpose-led organization, Medix is guided by their core purpose to positively impact lives. In putting people at the heart of what they do, they take an innovative position as both an employer and staffing provider of choice by leveraging soft-skills insights as part of their holistic employee, talent, and client experience.
Since 2018, Medix has been leveraging Talentoday’s soft-skills assessment, MyPrint, and its personality, motivation and behavioral insights as part of their service offering to both talent and clients. Additionally, Medix designated an internal HR representative to champion MyPrint initiatives and infuse people analytics even further into Medix’s employee culture.
Ready to start your transformative Talentoday success story?
Behaviors Uncovered: Decision Making, Rule Consciousness, Risk Orientation and Change Reaction
So far, our Behaviors Uncovered series has explored seven total areas of observable actions made by individuals in conjunction with their work environment. Part one focused on Leadership Style, Communication Style, Conflict Management and Team Contribution. In part two, we highlighted Creativity, Work and Learning Styles; these are the behavior patterns that shape the ways individuals expand their knowledge base and work together to invent in the workplace. In this third and final entry in our series, the ways in which individuals relate to organizational structure and make choices take center stage. It’s time to uncover the science behind Decision Making, Rule Consciousness, Risk Orientation and Change Reaction.
As with the first two entries in this series, key information in the following descriptions is drawn from the Talentoday MyPrint® questionnaire. The behavioral dimensions found within the assessment are displayed as score matrices resulting from the combination of personality and motivational results. In short, our behavioral styles are predicted based on the scores (high or low) that an individual has obtained on these two dimensions crossed together. Think of these analytical grids as a way to gain a deeper understanding of why an individual prefers and maintains a particular pattern of actions.
Decision Making
When you start adding up the total number of decisions we make in the workplace on a daily basis, the results can be truly staggering. From soft balls like, “Hot coffee or iced coffee?” to everyday preferences like, “Does this request warrant a meeting or will an email suffice?” employees are constantly faced with choices to make. Eventually, some of these decisions can have a major impact on an organization. Having an idea of how an individual might go about this process can be key when building the right team for your goals.
Decision Making can be described as the set of processes, either intuitive or reasoned, by which an individual ends up choosing between two or more courses of action.
There are four ways individuals can approach decision making, derived from the “Perspective” dimension of personality and the “Need for Autonomy” dimension of motivation:
- Analytical (Big Picture, Need for Support): Individuals who are Analytical decision makers tend to consider multiple points of view in order to frame a situation very broadly.
- Strategic (Big Picture, Need for Self-Reliance): Individuals who are Strategic decision makers rely on their own assessment of a great deal of information to build solutions that stand the test of time.
- Deliberate (Focused, Need for Support): Individuals who are Deliberate decision makers consider just enough input from others to make a plan, but are ready to quickly adapt to the situation if need be
- Efficient (Focused, Need for Self-Reliance): Individuals who are Efficient decision makers value efficiency. They make up their minds quickly and move on to the next decision.
Rule Consciousness
How does your team approach structure? Any leader that has attempted to manage each employee with the same meeting schedule, expectations and firmness knows that, when it comes to workplace rules, it’s never truly one-size fits all. Rule Consciousness can be summarized as the way an individual interprets, judges and reacts to the organizational rules in place.
There are four behavior types when it comes to rule consciousness, derived from the “Critical Thinking” dimension of personality and the “Need for Belonging” dimension of motivation:
- Challenger (Critical-Thinker, Need for Freewill): Individuals who are Rule Challengers evaluate the rules and norms that are in place with great objectivity, and might choose their own way of doing things.
- Follower (Critical-Thinker, Need for Affiliation): Individuals who are Rule Followers go along with the rules, as it is a way for them to feel connected to others.
- Adjuster (Conventional-Thinker, Need for Freewill): Individuals who are Rule Adjusters are likely to try to bend the rules they strongly disagree with, or adjust them to their advantage.
- Advocate (Conventional-Thinker, Need for Affiliation): Individuals who are Rule Advocates show a strong respect for authority, and promote the existing rules or norms of any organization they belong to.
Risk Orientation
The decision to take a leap of faith in the workplace can be a stressful one for many employees. This takes rook in the ways that employees approach risk. Risk Orientation can be described as the way an individual invests energy in response to perception of significant uncertainty, namely in seeing either the opportunities or the obstacles. In some cases, a career defined by taking bold action can be beneficial. In other situations, a more conservative approach may be more warranted. Determining the outlooks held by members of a given team can help managers better chart the direction and pace the organization should be taking in order to maintain team confidence.
There are four ways an individual can approach risk, derived from the “Optimism” dimension of personality and the “Need for Excitement” dimension of motivation:
- Risk-neutral (Positive, Need for Safety): Individuals who are Risk-neutral strive to minimize their uncertainty by searching for the most rational solution.
- Risk-taker (Positive, Need for Adventure): Individuals who are Risk-takers expect positive outcomes from risky opportunities, making them typically go for them in order to maximize the gains.
- Risk-averse (Apprehensive, Need for Safety): Individuals who are Risk-averse focus on negative outcomes in risky opportunities, which typically makes them avoid them and choose safe alternatives.
- Risk-tolerant (Apprehensive, Need for Adventure): Individuals who are Risk-tolerant are open to deal with risky situations as long as they can determine solutions that reduce their potential losses.
Change Reaction
Change Reaction can be described as the typical response of an individual to the unexpected events or situations arising in their environment of work. Considering that a recent survey of half a million U.S. employees discovered that almost one-third of them do not understand why organizational changes are happening at any given time, it’s clear that employers need to do better when implementing change. One way to get there is by better anticipating the ways in which individuals might react when confronted with the news of adjustments to the workplace and processes.
Change reaction can be broken down into four possible patterns, derived from the “Grit” dimension of personality and the “Need for Variety” dimension of motivation:
- Conservative (Determined, Need for Consistency): Individuals who are Conservative in their reaction to change need to be convinced of the necessity of changes prior to overcoming them.
- Resilient (Determined, Need for Diversity): Individuals who are Resilient in their reaction to change tend to recover from changes by finding new ways of reaching their initial goals.
- Adaptable (Opportunistic, Need for Consistency): Individuals who are Adaptable in their reaction to change quickly adapt to changes occurring in processes, since they may represent an opportunity to adjust their goals.
- Promoter (Opportunistic, Need for Diversity): Individuals who are Promoters of change enjoy celebrating new events, and they typically welcome
If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that workplaces of all kinds need to be ready to tackle tough decisions and major transformations at any given moment. To navigate these fluctuations with skill, it pays for employers to have a deep understanding of the ways in which the individuals on their team approach the decision making process, rule consciousness, risk orientation and react when confronted with change.
When taken together with the personality and motivation dimensions of the MyPrint assessment, uncovering the behaviors of the individuals on your team can help you unlock the true potential hiding just under the surface.
Interested in uncovering more about how behavior profiles can help you understand how someone will act in a professional setting? Discover the science behind MyPrint by clicking here.
Race to Reshape Your Dream Team
As organizations anticipate post-pandemic life, business leaders are assessing their talent management challenges, looking to (re-)build a dream team and optimize performance. Companies are competing to hire top talent.
The workplace terrain has changed, and employers need to navigate the new normal of virtual work. Do you have who and what you need for your organization to be successful?
Talentoday offers insight into what to consider when building and shaping your team
- Use our checklist to shape your dream team.
- Get our coach’s guide on characteristics and traits to look for when hiring new employees in a remote work environment.
- Gain insight into how soft skills can help in hiring and motivating your team.
- Learn what traits support innovation, strategic thinking and problem solving.
- Find tips on cultivating an inclusive culture.
Click here to download our new infographic today!
Behaviors Uncovered: Creativity, Work and Learning Styles
In the first entry in our Behaviors Uncovered series, we investigated four key dimensions for employers focusing on better understanding group dynamics within their teams: Leadership Style, Communication Style, Conflict Management and Team Contribution. In part two, our attention turns to the behavior patterns that shape the ways individuals expand their knowledge base and work together to invent in the workplace: Creativity, Work and Learning Styles.
As a recap, behaviors represent the ranges of observable actions made by individuals in conjunction with their environment. The Talentoday MyPrint® questionnaire provides 11 behavioral dimensions displayed as score matrices resulting from the combination of personality and motivations dimensions of the assessment. Therefore, our behavioral styles are predicted based on the scores (high or low) that an individual has obtained on these two dimensions crossed together. In short, these analytical grids give insights for understanding why an individual tends to foster a particular pattern of actions and how they maintain it.
Creativity Style
Time and time again, creativity is cited as the skill most sought after by employers. After the ways we work were upended due to COVID-19, is it any wonder that companies are looking for ways to boost their knack for finding novel solutions to problems?
How, exactly, you define creativity is key when uncovering the science behind the behaviors in this area. Creativity Style can be described as the set of processes that an individual takes to produce something that is new and somehow valuable, whether it is intangible or concrete.
There are four styles of creativity, derived from the “Abstract Thinking” dimension of personality and the “Need for Reward” dimension of motivation:
- Visionary (Imaginative, Need to Contribute to Society): Individuals who have a Visionary creativity style are imaginative and aim for groundbreaking changes that will contribute to the improvement and betterment of others.
- Innovative (Imaginative, Need for Tangible Benefits): Individuals who have an Innovate creativity style like to think outside of the box, and aim to develop new and profitable processes or technologies.
- Functional (Practical, Need to Contribute to Society): Individuals who have a Functional creativity style are realistic, and their creative actions might take place in everyday activities, such as by using existing tools or methods in new and original ways.
- Interpretive (Practical, Need for Tangible Benefits): Individuals who have an Interpretive creativity style are typically looking for quick solutions, and usually come up with more advanced and profitable interpretations of existing techniques or devices.
Work Style
Whether a job requires multiple simple tasks or challenging projects will strongly influence the type of person that you want to work in certain roles. By taking the time to learn about what work style a person uses, you can help to assign roles on certain projects or keep it in mind when hiring for different roles. Work Style refers to the way in which an individual tackles their tasks and projects, as well as the pace at which they complete them.
There are four styles of communication, derived from the combination of the “Thoroughness” dimension of personality and the “Need for Challenge” dimension of motivation:
- Rigorous (Precise, Need for Attainable Goals): Individuals who have a Rigorous work style are thorough and task-oriented, and ensure high quality and error free work.
- Dedicated (Precise, Need for Personal Achievement): Individuals who have a Dedicated work style like to work on challenging projects and provide high quality work.
- Steady (Easy-Going, Need for Attainable Goals): Individuals who have a Steady work style value realistic goals and deadlines, and favor consistent productivity by focusing on bottom-line results.
- Responsive (Easy-Going, Need for Personal Achievement): Individuals who have a Responsive work style like challenging goals, and favor multi-tasking in order to do a higher quantity of work in a shorter amount of time.
Learning Style
It’s clear that uncovering the science behind behaviors in areas like learning style will play an integral role in the future of work. In fact, recent reporting indicates that companies are transitioning from hiring based on existing education to focus on skills-based hiring. For this expansion of upskilling efforts to work, employers must first learn how to tap into an individual’s preferred learning style
For our purposes, Learning Style can be summarized as the set of processes that an individual uses to acquire or develop skills or knowledge..
There are four styles of communication, derived from the combination of the “Structure” dimension of personality and the “Need for Recognition” dimension of motivation:
- Studious (Orderly, Need for Intrinsic Enjoyment): Individuals who are Studious learners like to learn things that they find interesting, and prefer learning through methods that allow time to reflect and go at their own pace, such as reading books or articles.
- Sequential (Orderly, Need for External Acknowledgment): Individuals who are Sequential learners are structured and learn best in a lesson format, with clear goals and positive feedback validating their progress.
- Conceptual (Spontaneous, Need for Intrinsic Enjoyment): Individuals who are Conceptual learners like to learn things for fun and do not need structure, but rather will feel like they’ve mastered a topic once they know its full context.
- Experimental (Spontaneous, Need for External Acknowledgment): Individuals who are Experimental learners tend to be intuitive and learn best through group interactions, where they seek positive feedback while testing their new knowledge or skills on others.
As the workplace evolves, employers are putting higher premiums on hiring individuals with the capacity to grow and find new ways to solve problems in their given roles. Understanding the behaviors behind creativity, work and learning styles is an important first step towards building an adaptable team ready to take on the future of work.
In the final entry of our three-part Behaviors Uncovered series, we investigate four areas of behavior that get to the heart of the ways individuals calculate their responses to high pressure situations — Rule Consciousness, Decision Making, Risk Orientation and Change Reaction.
Interested in uncovering more about how behavior profiles can help you understand how someone will act in a professional setting? Discover the science behind MyPrint by clicking here.
How to Conduct a Soft Skills Interview in 4 Easy Steps
If you have been following our blog then you know how important we think soft skills are to incorporate into your daily work lives.
“Hard skills will get you the job, but soft skills will make you successful.” -Me, at least 3 times per week
However, sometimes this can seem overwhelming. Where should you, as a manager, start? In this blog article we will take a step-by-step look at how to use soft skills from the very beginning of the employee lifecycle: the interview process.
Step 1: The Job Requirements
At first glance, you might think you know what goes into a position. Maybe you have been hiring for this position for quite some time, or you have worked with individuals in this role before. Although you might think you know all of the important requirements for a role, it is still important to take the proper steps to evaluate a job description in order to make a more informed decision on what the role entails.
Once you have determined what hard skills and qualifications are necessary for a position, it is time to determine what soft skills will help someone be successful in this role. There are many ways to find this information. Here are a few of the common ones:
It is very important that you are using a scientifically reliable and valid method to assess your teams’ soft skills. For the purpose of this article, we recommend using the MyPrint® assessment to assess your current workforce and using some of our tools available through Talentoday Manager to determine what to look for during the interview process.
An important note here: although you are looking for commonalities among your top performers, that does not mean that you want a cookie cutter of those individuals. One of the most important things for a team’s success is having diversity among group members to help fill in skills gaps and increase creativity and innovation¹.
Step 2: Preparation
Now that you have determined what the important soft skills are for the position, you need to prepare for the interview. Having a set interview process helps to ensure that you are making more informed decisions for your company and not using personal judgments or unconscious biases when hiring. Topgrading² is one example of an interview methodology that is intended to help identify top talent, and incorporating soft skills into this methodology is seamless.
Prior to the interview starting, you will also want your candidates to complete a MyPrint® assessment (check that their results are from the past 6 months to ensure accuracy). Make sure that the hiring manager and anyone involved in the interview process have taken the time to review the candidate’s MyPrint® One Pager (soft skills summary) and are familiar with the soft skills that have been determined important for the role.
To prepare for the soft skills portion of the interview, we recommend that you have the Premium Report version of the candidate’s results handy and review their top 3 personality strengths, motivators, and behaviors (as shown on the One Pager report). Then ask yourself the following questions:
Lastly, take a look at the candidate’s behaviors. The MyPrint® Premium Report has two interview questions tailored to each behavioral style to help gain a better understanding of how that individual showcases those styles. Make a note of any behaviors that you would like to dig deeper on, and have those interview questions ready to go!
Step 3: Conducting the Interview
When conducting a soft skills interview, it is important to stay open minded. If someone’s top three MyPrint® traits aren’t the exact three that you are looking for that does not mean they are not going to be a good candidate. Instead, look at their Premium Report to see where they fall on the scale for each of those traits. Take the time to ask questions around those topics, and make sure that you are being clear about the role expectations and see if that matches what they are looking for.
Step 4: Scoring the Interview
Once the interview is completed and the candidate has left, it is not time to make a decision quite yet! Take the time to review your interview notes and apply some quantitative metrics to what you were looking at.
To ensure fairness between candidates, use a standardized method of scoring the interviews. Grading methods can include ranking responses or finding the difference between ideal scores and actual scores in their MyPrint® scales.
To Sum It All Up…
Using soft skills in the interview process can help you make more informed hiring decisions, and help you find candidates who will be more successful in their role. The interview process is an investment for everyone involved, so it is not something that should be done without careful evaluation and purpose.
Remember to be open-minded when it comes to soft skills; you won’t have all of the answers right away. As you gather more information over time you will learn more about what personality traits, motivations, and behavioral styles can be attributed to success in a role and sometimes, what you find might surprise you!
Want more information about soft skill interviewing, or to receive a copy of our template? Email Talentoday at customer@talentoday.com to learn more about our assessment and services!
Sources
¹https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/listicle/the-five-business-benefits-of-a-diverse-team/
²https://topgrading.com/
