Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Human Resources

We know HR. Read our Human Resources blog archives for stories and best practices from our work with real clients and personal experiences in the world of HR.

5 Tips for Using Assessments in Hiring
In a difficult hiring market, it is hard to think about adding another layer to your hiring practices that potentially screens people out instead of in. As one hiring manager said to me last week, “I just need people with a pulse.”

But one reason why you may be hunting for people that are alive and not much more is because you aren’t hiring the right people to begin with, so turnover is a challenge and a cost to you in more ways than one.

If done correctly, assessments can be a valuable part of your hiring strategy. To maximize assessments:
1. Don’t test selectively. You need to determine which assessment(s) you are going to use and when in your process you will use them, then test all candidates that get to that step in the process. Deciding to assess some and not others can open up a lot of problems in 1) finding value in the tool(s) 2) defending you hiring practices in the case of any legal issues.

2. If using a self-report assessment, use a normative assessment. Normative assessments are those that are normed to a sample population. This is different than a self-report assessment that isn’t compared to a fixed standard.

Examples of popular tests that aren’t normative are DiSC, MBTI and Strengths Finder. These assessments, while valuable given the correct usage, aren’t designed to make hiring decisions. They can be useful in the hiring process to consider a person’s personality/style and ask good questions in an interview, but they aren’t for screening candidates in or out because there isn’t a comparative standard to do that.

3. When you use a normative assessment, you need to create target ranges (scores) for the assessment dimensions for the positions you are hiring for. For example, if you are hiring a customer service representative for your company and you are considering using an assessment that has the dimension of “conformity” on it. The scale is 1-10 ranging from 1 requires structure to perform to 10 not comfortable/successful performing in a structured environment. You have a very structured script and process for how your representatives answer the phone, talk to customers, and document issues and resolutions in your system. Therefore, you may set your target range that the person needs to score between 2-4 to be an ideal candidate for your position of a customer service representative.

All this being said, there are a variety of ways to set the targets including subjective analysis by managers, job analysis, generic industry models, and/or by comparison to your current top performers. We recommend a combined job analysis and comparison to your top performers’ method.

4. Check for Validity & Other Important Factors. There are a variety of types of validity and important considerations:
- Face Validity– Does it really measure what is says it measures? Does the conformity measure actually measure for conformity?
- Predictive– Does it predict success on the job? 1) Is exhibiting conformity relevant to success as a customer service representative at your company? To what extent do customer service representatives need to be 1 to 10 okay or is conforming to be successful here? Is a 6 on a scale of that too high?
This is why we recommend setting your ranges based on comparison to your top performers.
- Reliability: Are scores consistent? Will the same person taking the test multiple times get the same score? If I take the test today when I’m in one mood where I’m feeling rebellious because of someone trying to control me, will I get the same score on conformity when I take the test a week later and I’m at work as a customer service representative that requires conformity?
- No Adverse Impact: The test does not discriminate against any protected class. Will Caucasian females scoreless on my measure of conformity than Asian males on my measure of conformity as a population in a way that is statistically significant?
- Administrative: Is the test easy to use and administer in terms of giving the test, receiving results, and understanding them? In this day and age, is the test mobile friendly, does it have features that accommodate for people with disabilities, etc.? These are all things to be considered.
5. Train hiring managers on using the assessment. If those making hiring decisions don’t know about the test and/or understand it, they won’t use it or they will discount its value.

Set up training to walk through details of the assessment with all hiring managers, get their input and feedback and help them use the assessment to their advantage. Keep data on the value of the assessment and share it with hiring managers at regular intervals and set-up a time to onboard new hiring managers on your entire hiring process, including the selection instrument.

We are excited to announce that Horizon Point has launched a sister company, MatchFIT, LLC, that applied these best practices in the design of an assessment to help companies find the right talent through a work values-based approach. In addition, the assessment will help companies diagnosis their organizational FITness in order to determine if they are a place that will attract the right kind of talent.
May 14, 2019
5 Ideas for Retaining Talent in a Tough Labor Market

Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent. If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent.

Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things.

But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be implemented? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Customized total rewards/benefits. In other words, what a 20-year-old wants/needs are different than what a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old need and want. You could use other criteria besides age to illustrate this point as well. One-sized fits all benefits don’t work anymore. Ala Carte benefits and pay are more effective.

For more thoughts on this, you might find these posts helpful:

A Look Back On the Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

2. Two-way senior leadership exposure. Senior leadership needs to be exposed to front line staff and vis versa in order to identify and develop high potential employees and align them for growth opportunities. Set-up a time where senior leadership regularly “walks the floor” and interacts with the front line.

3. Link all practices and rewards to company values.

For more thoughts on this, you might find these posts helpful:

Marketing Your Core Values and Culture

6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values

4. Implement “buddy systems”. This is a system where HR or bosses are not involved but where people can connect with others at work about problems or issues and work them out with their peers. These could be work or non-work related. Allow latitude for those solutions to be implemented.

5. Capture learning while it is being made. Make videos of products being made and designed especially if you deal in customized things that aren’t produced regularly (processes not on paper but in the video). This can help people who are creating the learning be able to meet number two and three above and also help people who are learning from them fulfill need three.

With turnover costing companies 100-300% of the person’s annual salary, not to mention the challenge of finding people in this tight labor market, it is worth implementing things that make sense for your business to help you retain and train those you already have.

Which of these five things makes the most sense for your organization to help you retain talent?

May 7, 2019
Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak with you” and then me sitting in Virginia saying “I’m sorry but we’ve got to let you go.”

There was no personal connection there. It was a very sterile way of conducting those terminations, and I dreaded it every time, regardless of whether it was related to their performance or something else.

I recently read an article about Amazon’s employee tracking system. It tracks productivity, automatically creates and issues warnings, and determines when an employee should be terminated for performance issues. In one facility alone the system led to the termination of 300 employees in one year! Granted the manager makes the final termination decision, but does so without having been present for the events that led up to that termination recommendation.

AI in HR is a huge topic these days. And I definitely believe that HR needs help in automating some of our processes. But it needs to be used in a way that compliments the HR function, not one in which it eliminates it.

Take for example recruiting. Many applicant tracking systems now have the functionality to scan resumes for key words in order to weed out those candidates who do not meet the skills requirements of the job. A candidate has six seconds to impress a recruiter and convince them to dig deeper into their qualifications. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you have 300 applicants for a job that time adds up. Being able to eliminate those candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications without even having to review their resume can be a huge time saver. It can also help you determine those candidates who are the best match and allow you to focus on their applications first.

But what if AI in recruiting went a step further and an automated system conducted prescreens or took the candidate through the entire hiring process and made the hiring decision for the organization? Think it couldn’t happen? Well, let me introduce you to Tengai, the robot interviewer.

So at what point does AI become a hindrance to HR instead of a help? When it takes the human out of human resources, as in the examples with Amazon and Tengai.

Amazon’s performance management system doesn’t account for human factors. What led that person to perform below the standards? Do they have something going on in their personal life, do they have an undisclosed illness or disability, or maybe they are struggling to learn the job. You find these things out by speaking with the employee, not by producing an automated warning or write up.

Tengai conducts the interview then creates a text of that interview for a human to review. That human bases their hiring decision solely on the text provided to them. But hiring decisions aren’t based solely on what a candidate says, they are also based on those non-verbal signals an interviewer provides during the process. If you’re hiring someone for a sales role, you watch them during the interview to see if they appear confident, make eye contact, cross their arms, or even fidget a lot. Tengai isn’t picking up on these non-verbal cues, only what the candidate says. It’s also not picking up on how it is said, which can also be an indicator to an interviewer.

Limited AI can be very helpful to HR, but as with technology in general, it easily has the potential to eliminate the human aspect. How many times have you seen or heard people complain about self-check out lanes at retailers (personally I LOVE self-check out) or the self-order kiosks at McDonalds. AI in HR has the potential to have that same effect for organizations. People want, and need, human interaction and AI unchecked can easily take that away.

May 2, 2019
Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business
In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week.

Her employer, a nationally known retailer, gave her an occurrence against her attendance record for leaving work early.

A co-worker of hers received an occurrence a few weeks before for leaving work early as well. In her case, she had a heart attack during her shift and was carted out of the building on a gurney and into an ambulance.

While these are two extreme cases, attendance occurrence programs are bad for business. Here’s why:
1. Occurrence programs discourage employees from taking sick days. If you get an occurrence for calling out sick, you’re more likely to go to work sick and suffer through. As a result, you’re less productive while at work, it takes you longer to recover from an illness, and you end up passing your germs on to everyone else you work with. And if you offer sick leave, but punish employees for using it, what message are you really sending?
2. They penalize employees for things outside of their control. Life happens. You get sick, your kids get sick, you get stuck in traffic because of an accident. Whatever the case, sometimes life just happens. And occurrence programs penalize you for those things that may be completely out of your control.
3. They’re counter-intuitive to a culture of work-life balance. Most companies today promote a culture of work-life balance. But if you punish employees when life does happen, you’re showing your employees that while you talk the talk you don’t really walk the walk.
4. Occurrence programs punish all for the actions of a few. While I fully believe in addressing attendance issues, many companies that implement an occurrence program have done so as a result of the actions of just a few employees. Attendance issues should be addressed individually. Occurrence programs punish good, productive employees just the same as it does those poor performers. Which then leaves those good performers wondering why they try so hard.
5. If you’re concerned about lost productivity as a result of absenteeism, why aren’t you worried about the cost of turnover that results from an occurrence system? If you analyze the data of lost productivity due to absenteeism and compare that to the lost productivity as a result of termination due to that occurrence system (also add in there the cost of replacing a termed employee), what you may find is that it’s costing you more in turnover than it is in absenteeism.
Again, I’m not saying let attendance issues go. I fully believe in addressing attendance problems individually with those employees who abuse the system, and it’s usually pretty easy to determine when the system is being abused. However, attendance policies need to be flexible, they need to allow for the unexpected. They need to show employees that while they are expected to be at work and be productive, the organization understands that life happens and that when life does happen they can go and take care of it without the added stress of wondering if their job is in jeopardy as a result.

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April 25, 2019
Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has. They exceed every performance expectation, get the job done faster than anyone else, and they are a subject matter expert.

You go to leadership and voice the concerns you have and the complaints you have received regarding this employee and their toxic behavior and the response you get is “we can’t lose them, they are one of our top performing employees and we couldn’t possibly lose their expertise.” And so nothing is done. Maybe your told to have a conversation with them regarding the feedback you’ve received, but if they fail to change their behavior, it is allowed to continue and expected to be tolerated.

I recently came across a video from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, in which he talked about why you might need to fire your top employees (warning: he uses very colorful language to get his point across!) I found myself nodding my head repeatedly during the three and a half-minute clip.

According to Vaynerchuck, “If you tell your people that you care about them, but you ‘look the other way’ when certain employees are mean to everyone else, you’re sending a very clear message.”

In today’s world, company’s are built on their culture. If your actions or the actions of your employees do not match your core values, your company culture will suffer and in turn so will your bottom line. Employees will spend more time lamenting over how unhappy they are in their jobs or the company and less time being productive.

Retaining an employee because they are a key performer or a subject matter expert may seem like the right decision, but the consequences of doing so may cost the organization more than that one individual is worth.

According to SHRM, the cost to replace an employee is between 90-200% of their annual salary. Imagine how much it would cost your organization if five employees resigned as a result of your decision to keep one toxic employee. In addition to the cost of replacing them there is also the cost of lost productivity caused by their departures.

Do you have a top employee that is toxic? Are they single-handedly destroying your company’s culture?

April 9, 2019