I was in my 20s when I had my first experience with talent assessment for selection. I was introduced to it by my friend and supervisor, Monte Amundson. He was my boss in a firm dedicated to training and placing leaders in non-profit and religious institutions. During my brief tenure in recruiting leaders for the program, we encountered several busts. The financial and emotional toll of these mistakes was high, and they personally bothered Monte.
Then one day, Monte arrived in the office more optimistic than usual. He met someone at Thrivent who was trying out a new solution: profiling candidates using personality tests. In 1994, this was an innovative idea. Later that week, we met with one of Thrivent’s executives, who explained that they were building a persona from successful financial advisors and they would use it to select future candidates. At the time, they thought it could be done with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which has since been ruled out as a selection tool.
It was an exciting idea in 1994, but a fatal mistake that is still repeated by hiring managers today. There is no single type of person who excels at every job, a lesson we learned and had confirmed over and over again in the process of delivering more than 1,000 executive interviews and over 150,000 online assessments.
So, how should assessments be used?
Imagine you were trying to assess whether a piece of music was jazz. You would consider musical elements like melodic improvisation, rhythmic syncopation, and chord progressions typical of the genre. Because of the many styles within the genre, a simple analysis of these basic elements might not lead you to a clear conclusion. For example, some avant-garde jazz has little harmony but lots of improvisation and interaction. Others (like smooth jazz) downplay swing but keep improvisation and jazz harmonies.
It seems relatively simple, except history shows that what counts as jazz has always been debated—from early recordings and swing, to bebop and free jazz. These disputes reveal that jazz lacks a fixed essence and is better understood as a conventional concept based on family resemblances and community agreement, not inherent traits.
Identifying effective candidates, which has four key factors, is a lot like identifying jazz. The same is true with good candidates, they also have a relatively small list of necessary factors. Typically, these factors are skills but may include character traits like reliability or empathy. Whether or not someone has the basic skills to do a job can often be discerned by their potential supervisor. If the position is more senior, I agree with Stanton Chase that executive ability can be summarized within four factors:
- Learning Velocity: Speed to adopt new learnings and mental models
- Managing Paradox: Considering competing concepts and identifying a third way
- Signal Detection: Identification and discernment of what data is importantÂ
- Influence Multiplication: The ability to build influence networks
Understanding the job, having character and possessing these four skills are table stakes. They should be assessed and the four executive traits likely need a professional to be accurate. However, most failures are not due to lack of intelligence or technical skill but rather to behavioral and relational traits
In other words, more people lose their jobs based on how they manage themselves, adapt, and work with others. In high-performance environments, derailment often stems from ego, rigidity, or a failure to manage stress, even in highly intelligent individuals.
This is where defining jazz and defining a good candidate intersect because it is harder to define what jazz is than what it is not. If I hear Violent Femmes, maybe they are punk, maybe blue grass, Neil Young is maybe rock, maybe yacht rock, or Chris Stapleton maybe country, maybe southern rock. I may not be sure of their musical genre, but I am sure it is not jazz. In the same way, I may not need a perfect persona match of the perfect candidate, but I need to know what they are not.
Identifying the few traits that are key to success and the many traits that could derail success in a role has been the focus of Psynet Group since its inception. It is core to the philosophy behind our software tool, Psybil and focuses on our executive interview platform. Whether you partner with us or another consulting firm or build your own process, consider abandoning the persona match, identify the few non-negotiable factors and then rule out derailers.