Blog

Several years ago, Joyce and I visited the maximum security prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, and talked with some dangerous prisoners. Several of them asked us if we would hire them when they were released. This was the first time I thought seriously about “employability”.

The concept of employability is interesting for several reasons. First, it implies that there are individual differences in employability—which also means that people are to some degree responsible for their own employability. Second, if people are responsible for their own employability, then that creates a role for assessment—enhancing employability through strategic self-awareness. Third, although the concept of employability has been around in applied psychology since the 1920s, it has been almost entirely ignored by the academics. And finally, the changes in the world economy that have been going on since the 1970s have created widespread unemployment, job insecurity, and churn in the labor markets, all of which highlights the importance of employability.

Little is known in an empirical way about the determinants of employability, so the following comments are necessarily speculative. It seems to me that employability has three facets. The first concerns the characteristics that people need in order to get hired. This in turn means having the characteristics that hiring managers want to see in applicants. What might they be? Joyce Hogan has done the only systematic research on this topic (which she could not get published in an academic journal). She subscribed to the major newspaper in each of 11 census regions of the United States for one year. She collected the employment ads, and then content analyzed them (there were several thousand) to see what employers wanted in new hires. Her major finding was that the most important thing employers wanted to see at any hiring level was social skill—the ability to get along with colleagues and clients and work productively with others. Conversely, cognitive ability was not a priority for employers. In a nutshell, getting hired depends on bright side characteristics.

The second facet of employability concerns the characteristics that people need in order to retain their jobs. This, in turn, means having the characteristics that supervisors want to see in incumbents. And this is where the literature on derailment and the dark side becomes important. As most people know, dark side characteristics: (1) co-exist with attractive bright side characteristics; (2) always have a valuable component to them; but (3) end up eroding relationships over time, leading to job stagnation or dismissal.
The third facet of employability concerns the characteristics that people need to manage “career transitions”—to find another job after a company is downsized, to find another job after retiring from the first one, to succeed after being promoted to a job with new demands, etc. What seems important here is: (a) the desire to do well in a new job; and (b) flexibility, adaptability, and the capacity to change. The reader will note that all three facets concern personality and not cognitive ability.

Although academic psychology has largely overlooked the employability issue, real job seekers and job holders usually get the point. There are many non-profit and for profit organizations that help the unemployed find work. Training for finding employment focuses on impression management and networking, two major aspects of social skill. People are taught strategic self-awareness—how they will be perceived during an employment interview and what to do about it—and the importance of taking ownership in their job search by making constant inquiries and developing contacts. In one job search club for unemployed professionals, members are told that they are their own worst enemies when it comes to finding new jobs, that there is something about their attitudes, fears, and expectations about what they deserve from a job that explain their inability to find work. The task is to reconstruct and reinvent themselves, to learn to project a positive and optimistic attitude during the job search, to emphasize their flexibility, and downplay their need for stable, continuous, and predictable employment.

Managers and executives seeking new employment need to work on strategic self-awareness—how they are perceived and how to change the perceptions when they are counter-productive. Knowledge workers—network engineers, system administrators, IT specialists, and software developers—must take an entirely different approach. For them the key is to stay up to date regarding industry changes and new technology. Smart players are obsessively concerned about obsolescence, and develop multiple strategies for staying current. They are so sensitive to this issue that they engage in constant skill development even when they have excellent, well-paid, and desirable jobs. Knowledgeable readers will immediately recognize that the syndrome of obsessively staying up to date is a function of the HPI dimensions of Ambition, Inquisitive, and Learning Style, and not a function of cognitive ability.

Finally, it is worth noting that the best predictors of income or net financial worth are educational level and number of hours worked per week. Education level is related to cognitive ability, but so are conscientiousness and ambition and the correlations are about the same. Number of hours worked per week is almost entirely a function of conscientiousness and ambition. In the long run then, as Epictetus taught us, “Character is fate.”

— Dr. Robert Hogan

After two pre-dawn trips to retail Mecca, I became the proud owner of the much-coveted iPhone 4. It’s the first smart phone I’ve ever had, and its innovative design, personalized features, and functionality leave me impressed. Now I’m free from my desk and laptop when I want to check e-mails from work, catch up on online banking, or just goof off on Facebook. It would appear that I’ve finally become one of the “cool” people. Or maybe not.

Here’s the problem – I don’t have a case for my new phone. Although a few cases are available for the iPhone 4, they are less effective protection than the one I’d prefer, which won’t be available for anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. So while I wait, I’ve relegated my slick new phone to the box it came in, a temporary case to protect it from bumps, scratches, and my two kids, either of whom could strike at any moment. It seems ironic that such an investment is limited to the protection offered by a cardboard box. When my preferred case finally does become available, the condition of my iPhone will determine whether I made a good or bad choice. Either way, it’s a gamble.

Unfortunately, many organizations throughout the world make similar gambles, only with much greater investments and potential losses. Every organization is after the latest “iPhone 4” available to them, which may include new trends in assessment-based selection, High Potential identification, or other such programs. However, after investing considerable resources into selecting and otherwise identifying these individuals, some organizations don’t make further investments to protect their purchases. So instead of investing in assessment-based development programs to coach new hires, provide insights into derailing behaviors, or groom top talent, these organizations gamble on employees developing themselves. When employees take the initiative to develop critical competencies, the gamble works out. But when the employee fails to reach their full potential – or worse, turns over – the gamble fails.

Whether it’s on-the-go access to technology or a better solution for identifying and selecting organizational talent, making significant investments across personal and organizational levels delivers certain advantages. However, if we don’t protect those investments, we risk significant damage or loss.

Come to think of it, maybe I should buy that temporary case after all.

Blaine Gaddis
International Research Manager
Hogan Assessment Systems

The concept of validity is at the core of any personality assessment. There are many approaches to developing a valid assessment, and unfortunately, in an industry with very little regulation, validity varies greatly between providers. From the user’s perspective, validity should be measured simply by the assessment’s ability to accurately predict what the publisher claims it will predict.

Read More »

Our clients often request a benchmark against which to evaluate their employees on our personality assessments. A common statement is “we want to see how our sales force compares to other sales forces.” Some are even more specific, such as “we want to benchmark our managers against other managers working in large, pharmaceutical companies in East Asia.” Although we always want to be accommodating, we tend to shy away from creating such benchmarks for multiple reasons. The most important reason is that, devoid of the relevant contextual information, benchmarks using personality assessment are not very useful and can lead to false conclusions.

The desire for benchmarks in personality assessment is likely a product of normal business thinking. As organizations, we are always comparing ourselves to our competition to know where we stand. Stock price, annual revenue, number of products sold, customer retention rate and satisfaction ratings, safety violations, and employee turnover rates. These are all things that indicate a clear winner when we are benchmarking ourselves against our competitors. Relative to other organizations, we want higher stock value, revenue, sales, and customer ratings. We want lower safety violations and employee turnover.

Being better than your competition is not as clear when it comes to personality assessment. The general bias when interpreting personality assessment scores is that higher scores are better. This bias stems from our orientation to other standardized testing; we know that higher scores are generally better when evaluating ourselves on tests of intelligence, aptitude, skills, and abilities. The reality is that there are strengths and shortcomings associated with any score on any scale from most decent personality assessments. No one gets off the hook. Although people who score high on our Ambition scale have more natural drive and goal-orientation than the population, they may not recognize when it is time to let others lead and may be perceived as poor team players. For example, let’s assume that an oil company has requested a personality benchmark for their safety inspectors relative to other safety inspectors. We create this benchmark, present it to the oil company, and they see that their safety inspectors are higher on a scale measuring creativity than other safety inspectors. Higher is better, right? Not really. Safety inspectors shouldn’t be creative. Instead, good safety inspectors should be more practical, less creative…following the letter of the law. In this case, lower scores on the creativity scale would be better.

Another bias is that client organizations (and people, in general) often assume that any comparisons we, as experts, make must be relevant and attended to. When ESPN reports on the average number of water bottles kept on the sidelines by World Cup teams, we assume that this has some bearing on the success of the team, or else why would they have reported it? Naturally, the googlesphere will activate with fans searching to find out how many water bottles their team keeps on the sidelines. Companies could compare themselves on the number of staplers they have but what does that matter as a metric of business performance? Further, is it better to have more or less staplers? When it comes down to it, not all comparisons are meaningful. As it applies to personality assessment, not all personality characteristics are related to performance (relevant) in a given job or industry. How important for job performance is it for a custodian to be sensitive to the feelings of others? It is likely irrelevant, but we can still create a benchmark that compares the interpersonal sensitivity of one school’s custodians to all other school custodians. When we provide this benchmark, the client organization is likely to assume it has relevance, or else why would we have reported it?

We feed into these biases when we provide benchmarks without the necessary contextual framework. When an organization sees their employees’ personality data plotted against an industry/subgroup benchmark, they may make inaccurate inferences because a) we always assume higher is better and b) we assume that all reported comparisons are important. We can create meaningful benchmarks with personality assessment but it takes the right kind of data. If we have sufficient data, we are able to indicate what personality scales have the strongest and most consistent relationships with performance in these jobs; hence, relevance. In addition, we can indicate whether higher, lower, or even moderate scores are better. Obviously, the thinner we slice the world (e.g., marketing coordinators at mid-western hotel chains), the less likely it is that we, or anyone, will have sufficient evidence to reliably indicate predictors of performance and create good benchmarks. Further, such specific benchmarks lack relevance and applicability. Truth be told, there probably isn’t much difference in personality between marketing coordinators at mid-western hotel chains and marketing coordinators in general. With all stated caveats, we can help clients benchmark their employees on characteristics that matter for performance, as long as it is a worthwhile endeavor and we have the data to do it. Even then, we should not be creating stand-alone graphs or tables that simply plot group averages against each other. We must tell the story around and behind the graph or table to focus attention appropriately. Only then can a personality benchmark be meaningful, impactful, and actionable.

Because items on personality assessments have no correct or incorrect answers, users must apply norms to interpret scores. Norms exist largely behind the scenes, and aren’t as sexy as other issues. As a result, they receive little attention relative to other issues, and many do not consider their importance. However, norms can determine whether a person gets a job, receives admittance to academic programs, or is deemed clinically “disordered.” These examples show why test takers should care about norms, but why should test users care?

The answer is simple – validity. Put simply, validity concerns the accuracy of assessment-based decisions, or whether the instrument does what it’s designed to do. Because norms inform decisions based on a person’s score, they impact validity. As an example, consider two assessments designed for adult working populations. The only difference between the two instruments is their norms. Norms for one instrument come from an anonymous sample of Internet users. Norms for the other assessment come from working adults sampled based on labor force and demographic estimates. Because both assessments are intended for adult working populations, the validity of decisions based on these assessments depends on how well the scores reflect the intended audience. Here, norms for one assessment give users confidence in making decisions based on an apples-to-apples comparisons; norms for the other do not.

Hogan takes great pride in the quality and continued accuracy of our assessment norms. We continuously monitor our norms, completing incremental updates as necessary. More importantly, we obtain proportionate representation across occupational and demographic categories to make certain that our norms accurately reflect intended audiences. Internationally, we also develop local norms to give our clients and partners confidence that results reflect intended audiences in local populations. Collectively, these efforts ensure that Hogan remains an industry-leader in assessment norming practices.

Blaine Gaddis
International Research Manager
Hogan Assessment Systems

It’s surprisingly easy for busy organizations to overlook the importance of fundamentals, even when it comes to something as critical to reputation and profitability as safety. And safety starts with talent management.

While safety training certainly helps, what organizations need most are employees who think and act safely in the first place. If an organization doesn’t have proper insight into how individuals contribute to the safety climate, even the most extensive program will deliver limited success.

Continue reading the article “Building a Safer Climate Through Talent Management.”

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted something new. We’ve been taking some time to get our bearings and to discuss some new possibilities for this blog space, beginning with some different voices and and expanded content scope.

To kick things off, we’re linking to a recent article on changeboard.com that discusses the use of Hogan assessments in preparing participants for 2009’s Rivers of Ice expedition in Patagonia.

While it’s true that Hogan’s assessment tools were primarily developed for (and are associated with) workplace applications, they’ve proved extremely useful over the years in a variety of “extracurricular” environments ranging from professional athletics to reality television to high adventure.

From the changeboard article Applying the Hogan tests to extreme conditions:

The 2009 Rivers of Ice expedition was the first attempt at an unsupported crossing of the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap by a team of two adventurers, Tarka L´Herpiniere and Katie-Jane Cooper. For many different reasons and on many different levels this was to be the most extreme and challenging expedition for both of them.

As their coach Sarah Fenwick (a Getfeedback Associate) worked with them on tools and techniques to maximise their strengths and minimise the potentially dysfunctional aspects of their personalities that when stressed, tired, cold, hungry, etc. might potentially have eroded the quality of their relationship, or worse, derailed the expedition.

Read more.

The concept of “engagement” has become a hot topic in applied psychology over the past two years. Like competency modeling and personality assessment before it, HR practitioners have forced the academic community to pay attention to engagement—it is not something that the academics discovered on their own.

The concept of engagement was first described by Yale organizational psychologist William Kahn. Kahn suggests that engagement occurs when a person’s identity and job role “exist in [a] dynamic…relation in which a person both drives personal energies into role behaviors and displays the self within the role.” Such role expression “fulfills the human spirit” at work. Kahn defines engagement in terms of four components: (1) Cognitive (the role is consistent with a person’s identity); (2) Emotional (the person likes the role); (3) Physical (the person will work at the role); (4) Existential (the role provides personal meaning).

There are two big reasons engagement matters. The first is “philosophical”; the second is financial. Concerning the first reason, Karl Marx was right—working in modern business organizations is inherently alienating; in many organizations, people must surrender their humanity in return for a paycheck. When people are not free to defect from organizations, their participation in it is inherently alienating, and engagement is a powerful and humane way to resolve the problem of alienation.

Second, the data overwhelmingly indicate that when the morale of a business unit is low, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go up, and productivity and customer satisfaction go down. Conversely, when morale is high, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go down, and productivity and customer satisfaction go up. Morale and engagement are pretty much the same, and there are clear financial consequences associated with high and low engagement. Engagement is the “g” factor in organizational life; it is correlated with (predicts) every important business outcome at the individual and the business unit level.

The concept of engagement has four important implications for management practice. First, there is such a thing as good and bad management; good management creates engagement, bad management destroys it. Second, because engagement is a function of how managers treat their staff, there are no cookie cutter solutions; engagement depends on building relationships with the staff, one person at a time. Third, not all managers can or will do this. And fourth, not all staff members are willing to engage with their managers.

Assuming that an organization decides to pay attention to engagement, assessment will be at the core of any implementation. Assessment can identify managers who are good at building engagement, managers who could build engagement but don’t, and managers who have no talent for building engagement. Assessment can also identify employees who are capable of becoming engaged, and employees who are, by virtue of their basic psychology, constitutionally alienated.

— Robert Hogan

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating (and often humorous) autobiographical piece that Dr. Robert Hogan wrote for the Journal of Personality Assessment in 2006. During the course of the article, Hogan describes his upbringing, his education, and the curiosity and conviction that led to a life-long career as a preeminent personality psychologist.

My parents were from farm families in the Texas panhandle; they moved to Los Angeles during the great depression of the 1930s with little money or prospects. I was born there in 1937. When I started kindergarten, the little girls could already read, and I realized that they knew something I didn’t. They still do.

In 1942, we moved 50 miles east of Los Angeles to the hard scrabble town of Fontana. Henry Kaiser had built a steel mill there and staffed it with ethnic families from the rust belt—tough, no nonsense people with strong religious convictions. Money was always a problem at home, and I was encouraged to start working early—but such is the tradition of farm families who can’t survive without a stern work ethic. I found my first paying job when I was 13 and have continued to work since then.

By the second grade, I was a voracious reader. School, however, was boring, and I was an indifferent and disruptive pupil for several years; I became quite familiar with paddles and principal’s offices. From early childhood, however, I was fascinated by “animal behavior” and spent a lot of time gathering and watching insects and various critters. In the sixth grade, I started a Biology Club and persuaded other kids to bring in specimens—mostly desert reptiles. In high school, I discovered girls, alcohol, and geometry and found them all as interesting as animal behavior but for different reasons.

I began reading evolutionary theory (George Gaylord Simpson), which seemed intuitively correct and thrillingly controversial from the perspective of Christian fundamentalism— which I had abandoned when I was 10. During the summer before the 12th grade, I read Freud’s (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, and I was hooked. Many of Freud’s claims were implausible, but the idea that the mind can operate outside awareness seemed obvious, and the notion that one could trace errors and mistakes that seemed random back to underlying erotic preoccupations was a revelation. I wanted to be a psychologist and decode the secrets of other people—to what purpose, it wasn’t clear.