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Focus on Assessment – Persuasiveness

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Persuasiveness is using appropriate interpersonal styles and communication methods to gain exceptions of an idea, plan, activity, service, or product from prospects and clientele. This dimension has a “outward” orientation within or outside an organization. It can replace the concept of individual leadership for many positions and, of course, for sales positions. It is important to recognize that taking orders and selling/persuading are not the same thing. When assessing persuasiveness, you should be listening for evidence that the candidate has actually caused someone to change his/her mind.

When evaluating persuasiveness, you must realize there are several competencies that should be evaluated. Competencies such as how one works with different types of buyers; how one uses different sales approaches in order to address a problem; or how one uses training to improve their own persuasiveness is very important. It’s also important but a person understands failure and appreciates winds when persuasiveness is being assessed.

Be sure to think about the type of function or servicing, and what the end goal would be on how to use persuasiveness. Someone can persuade somebody to buy a product may not be as good as persuading someone to buy an idea.

About Rounded Assessment and its Value to Recruiting

Assessment comes in many forms. Our contention is that competencies need to be identified for each position at an organization, and a level of mastery for some or all of those competencies needs to be identified for each candidate that has applied for the role – whether they are internal or external.

It is the hiring manager’s responsibility to then understand which competencies to leverage, which to develop, and which to avoid in order to have the new employee reach desired productivity in the desired timeline. Competence needs to be assessed, but assessing experience, work habits, cognition, intelligence, and other areas are also critical. We believe that the advocacy of a combined assessment, or “Rounded Assessment” is the job of every recruiter. It is not necessarily their job to assess everything, but rather make sure that the assessment is performed and documented so a hiring manager or business leader can make sound decisions.

This blog post is part of a series of posts that are set to release over a long period of time. In each, Aspen provides insight on the elements and assets within Rounded Assessment.

Linking Interviews with Performance

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Take out one of your team member’s last performance review or their development plan. Now go ahead and pull out the screening questions and interview questions that you used to hire one of your team members.

Is there ANY linkage whatsoever? Well their should be. Interesting how we tend to measure performance after we hire someone but we tend not to directly ask or measure performance capability during the interview process.

When you hire, you are not only measuring the ability for the candidate to perform against the tasks, you are measuring the gaps they have so you can build a strong development plan for them so they can be a strong performer for your team. That builds a stronger ROI on the hire, and better retention of the employee.

Try Problem Solving as a competence. You know your team should be able to solve problems for business leaders, and create strong solutions for their needs. As such, see if you can list the following:

  • What interview question (and follow up deep dives) would you ask to determine if the potential employee has mastered problem solving?
  • What development tools or techniques would you use to increase the competence of your team member regarding problem solving?
  • How do you measure their ability to problem solve, and will you grade it objectively come performance review?
Of course this linkage needs to be done across dozens of competencies – but its straight forward – and important to the development of strong players and future leaders.

John Smith, VP of Social Geekness

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I am not sure that title will stick, but its true that social media in talent/recruiting is here to stay. If you do hundreds of hires a year, its likely you are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others to find candidates and break into the elusive passive candidate marketplace. If you are doing dozens of hires, you are likely considering using these tools, and if you are doing thousands of hires, this is probably a hot topic between you and your corporate communications group.

Over the past few years, and we just celebrated our fifth year, we have taken an unusual position on social media – i.e. we really don’t have one. We don’t endorse any particular theory, system, community or whatever mainly because we hold firm to our original concept that each organization has a unique mix and makeup of tools and resources that will work effectively for them. Not to mention that we are not in the business of selling short term strategies or technologies. Social media is going to be around for a while, but the players and features and leverage points change faster than the seasons.

Back to John…social geek. You will need him (or her) someday. You will need to control your brand on these mediums, and use them to attract, source, and even retain talent. So let’s forget about what John should be doing each day, and lets talk about what competencies John will need. Here are just three:

1 – John can interpret current and new features of social mediums to your brand easily and demonstrate value quickly. John is not simply a LinkedIn LION network holder. Or has 3000 facebook friends. Or has a YouTube channel. Please don’t measure the value of a social media expert on the size of their network. You don’t know its relevance, how well those people are in contact, or why they are in contact with John to begin with.

2 – John knows how to translate the processes of social media to lamen, and educate executives effectively and efficiently. My mom could probably run my facebook page if I taught her, but it doesn’t mean that she can explain why, how, and instruct the value to executives. John is a poised speaker, and can answer questions diplomatically and with ease. Realize that some social media experts are so because they are introverted and lack the ability to deliver ideas in person, thus they stay in front of a screen all day.

3 – John can design strategies and processes, and teach to others well. He is not especially fond of maintaining or executing the actual social media plan. Are you really going to hire someone to place status updates on FB all day? Or are you going to hire someone who can show you how FB, YT, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to drive 30% more passive candidates towards your staff up in sales through a campaign they have designed and can be automated?

These are just a few – but hopefully I got you thinking. When you find your “social geek”, make sure you are designing that job to be strategic and customer facing on purpose. John’s expertise is in managing change quickly and effectively – not posting on your Wall.

Unified Software for Talent – well…what’s “Talent”?

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Usually talent=employees. But inevitably you know better. There are more than just employees doing the work that your company needs. Contractors, consultants, vendors, temp labor, outsourced partners, and so on.

They are all part of the human capital chain. Simultaneously, lots of companies are unifying their talent / HR systems. You know – using something like SAP or SuccesFactors and using one program for all things “talent”. The recruiting, performance management, payroll, and so on.

That totally works. We have a baby sized business, and even we are unified into one system, so I would imagine at larger companies the benefits are even greater (and I have witnessed that). So lets assume that your company does have a unified or best in breed combination of systems to give you visibility to your talent…

How did you define talent? Can you tell which consultants have done what or have which expertise that you rely on? What about the competencies of your engineering contractors in the plant? How about the successes (or failures) of your outsourced partners that you rely on? Are these things in your unified / best in breed system, and can you produce reports or business knowledge that can be leveraged?

What if 20% of your human capital is outside the system? It could be. Take a look. Here is a clue if you have a gap – if you can’t quickly understand the competencies and experiences of your OWN internal employees, then you probably can’t tell me the competencies of the talent you use that are non-employees…

Something to add to the to-do list. Define what your unified system DOES tell you in regards to talent, and more importantly, what it does NOT tell you.

Talent Acquisition has four distinct set of processes (IMHO)

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In no particular order, and without vast detail on each, organizations should consider that there are really four different facets of Talent Acquisition.
Notice that I did not say Talent Management, or Talent – those concepts are broader. And this is more like 500 words…

Staffing. Using various tools, processes, resources and personnel to render an applicant into a position at a company. The defining characteristic of staffing is that the applicant has a general interest in the position, and has shown voluntarily and formal entry into a company’s evaluation process to determine if that applicant is a match for the respective position. The position has been deemed as worthy of the company’s typical investment of resources and development. The activity is performed repeatedly and results in filling said position.

Recruiting. Using potentially a different set of tools, processes, resources and personnel than those used in staffing, this is the rendering of a prospective or potential applicant into an actual applicant. It is arguable that once a person is already an applicant and they had to be “recruited” into the staffing process that additional efforts are required to keep them in the staffing process. The activity is performed and may result in filling said position, but there is no guarantee. The position is also worthy of a company’s typical investment or resources and development.

Scouting. Using again a set of potentially different tools, processes, resources, and personnel than both staffing and recruiting, this is the gathering of data, information, and the inevitable identification of talent in the marketplace in order to make recruiting and staffing decisions. This activity is typically done for certain roles or groups of roles in the organization where the ROI is differentiated somehow from other roles. Think baseball here. Its understanding what is actually in the market, and then making a determination what you will choose to go after should you be given the opportunity. The activity is performed and rarely results in filling a position, but when it does, the potential impact to the organization is much higher than recruiting activities. Additionally, the targeted positions are worthy of additional investment, resources, and/or development.

Contingent / Outsourcing / Temp Labor. A final set of tools, processes, resources and personnel potentially different from staffing, recruiting, and scouting are used to fill positions at a company. A decision has been made that the assignments that need to be done on behalf of the company do not require certain management, development, and other investments. The positions that are filled can be done so with a third party resource that will be charged with making those investments themselves OR a shorter duration is given to the assignment such that those investments are not done because the impacts would never be realized in that period of time by the company.