Checkster Blog

The latest research conducted by the MIT center of collective intelligence and published in Science last month is a gem for talent management leaders.

In short: team performance depends on the social sensitivity of the group; teams containing more women had a higher social sensitivity.

These findings can change the way you put a team together, how you select interview panels or who should be in the executive team.  As the performance variation was not small, according to the researchers the group’s collective intelligence accounted for about 30 to 40 percent of the variation in performance.  These conclusions are based on two studies in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five and worked on a number of tasks.

So what can you do in order to improve the performance of your team?
1. Make sure that when teamwork is needed you value social sensitivity as much as pure expertise when selecting team members.
2. Respect the basic principle of collective intelligence when collecting data, like we do at Checkster for our 360 and Reference Check 2.0, namely: diversity, authenticity and discernment.
See more on the collective intelligence research here.

Jason Buss the VP of Talent Acquisition at Ameriprise Financial (Fortune 296) wrote recently a posting on what was in the mind of the Fortune 500 talent acquisition leaders.

The full posting here.

The section that we like:

Over the past month at a couple of networking and educational sessions I’ve
had the opportunity to spend time with 50 other Fortune 500 Recruiting
Executives and Leaders. The time, the networking, and the conversation were
all invaluable. So, what’s on the top of everyone’s mind?
[...]
Reference Checks: There was a lot of discussion in using services for
background checks. The one company that everyone was talking about was
Checkster, and the value they’ve seen from their investment in addition to
the capacity it’s given recruiters to do their day job… Recruit.

A recent article from McKinsey offered some guidelines and 4 tests to use in order to validate your gut instinct. This is a review of said guidelines and tests, as applied to the Talent Management field.

How often does a hiring manager or recruiter claim that a candidate will be a star based on his or her gut instinct?  Can you trust it?

We must first acknowledge that gut feelings are prevalent in any decision making process, even if we portray them as rational.  Indeed the “latest findings in decision neuroscience suggest that our judgments are initiated by the unconscious weighing of emotional tags associated with our memories rather than by the conscious weighing of rational pros and cons: we start to feel something—often even before we are conscious of having thought anything.”  In short, our gut feelings or emotions will stir us towards or away a candidate for reasons that are not based on facts.  So, how does one avoid such biases?

The following are 4 tests that you or your team can take to ensure that you are not biased in your decision making process when hiring new recruits:
1. The familiarity test: Have we frequently experienced identical or similar situations?
More specifically: has the manager or recruiter interviewed often in the past for similar jobs?
2. The feedback test: Did we get reliable feedback in past situations?
More specifically: Did the manager or recruiter have the opportunity to know  if the hire was a success?
3. The measured-emotions test: Are the emotions we have experienced in similar or related situations measured?
For instance, have you been verbally abused by a similar candidate?
4. The independence test: Are we likely to be influenced by any inappropriate personal interests or attachments?
For instance, is this candidate related to you or a close friend?

In our opinion, it is test 2 (feedback) that most speaks to where the recruiting process falls short.  We can easily assess familiarity, emotion and independence, but too often the recruiter is shielded from the true performance of the new employee once the hiring process is complete.  That is why at Checkster, we believe that quality of hire is critical to the talent acquisition department, and offer tools that assist recruiters in measuring a candidate’s performance post and pre-hire.
This also, may be the best case for integrated talent management.

Full original article here.

I was pleasantly surprised when I read the following excerpt in neuroscientist Daniel Amen’s book titled Magnificent Mind at any Age:
“When interviewing people for a job position in your company, it is critical to know about their past jobs.
Remember, the best predictor of current behavior is past behavior. You want to know what they excelled at, what, if anything, went wrong, and what other people thought of them. Many people have blinders to their own weaknesses, so talking with others can provide essential information. Reference checks are a key component of good business.”

We cannot agree more, and this is why we have made the reference check process easy for hiring organizations to perform. With our talent checkup, individuals can remove those blinders grow and prove their worth to employers.

Managers using 360 tools should not forget one critical element for successful implementation: A Growth Mindset.
Watch this video of Carol Dweck, Stanford psychology professor, especially 3:07-3:40 if you are a manager.

I recommend her book. And of course our 360 tools.

Watch the video here: Carol Dweck

When does reference checking meet leadership?
Often people ask us why we provide reference checking AND 360 feedback tools?
The obvious connection can be seen on slide 42 of one of the most downloaded leadership presentations on the web.
Note that Checkster doesn’t only allow you to run reference checks but also allows you to get free simplified feedback on yourself or more complete feedback on your team.

Peter Cappelli is releasing his new book in a couple of weeks on the state of the talent management industry. He will be presenting a new model for talent that impacts organizations, employees, job seekers, coaches, counselors and anyone involved in the world of talent. We can already see his view in action in many organizations today.
Cappelli’s approach borrows from the principle of the supply chain and the manufacturing just-in-time revolution, but changes the language from an engineering certainty to a market-based approach with intrinsic uncertainty.

This new workplace dynamic revolves around 4 principles:
1. Make and buy talent: Internal talent development is still the preferred method as it is the cheapest and least disruptive for an organization. Yet, since the cost of unused inventory is a burden too heavy to carry, companies need to undershoot what their talent predictions are. Why undershoot? Because we have to accept the imprecise nature of talent forecasting.
2. Reduce uncertainty in Talent Demand: We have to accept the imprecise nature of talent prediction at its essence. Instead of going after the highly specialized developmental programs, we’re looking at providing training, tools, and framework that can apply to large employee populations and not small sections of your organization. We like this one, as it is exactly what Checkster is providing—a tool that helps all individuals grow!
3. Earn your ROI when you develop employees: Employees will have to share the cost of training, by either investing more of their personal time for training, or paying off the training investment if they leave. Note that new employers hiring employees could pick up the tab, making the reluctance or current training investment disappear. We like this one very much, as it is for the good of all parties!
4. Balance Employer/Employee interest: The internal job market within organizations places career management in the hands of employees. That’s one very efficient way to make a market-like approach to career evolution. Plus, it enables others to access a new realm of possibilities without being stopped by a rigid deterministic system. The only element that could stop us: our ability to produce results!

Order your copy of the book here.

If you like novels but need to look serious on the plane, try reading the entertaining book, “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job,” and learn a new word: Immeasurement.

Among the three signs of a miserable job are:Job Misery

1. Anonymity: human beings are social animals and need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities

2. Irrelevance: Everyone needs to know that their job matters, to someone.

3. Immeasurement: Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves.

We found the last one to be the key for misery and mediocrity. Indeed, how do you know if you are doing well if you have no measures?

This is exactly why Checkster has been built. So today, if you are a manager, you can push the 360 Checkup to your team to get a personal confidential view of their performance. If you want to use it personally, just invite yourself!

If your manager sucks and doesn’t even think about measurement, use our free simplified version called the Talent Checkup.

The latest book from Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, (Details from Amazon here) has a great chapter on the subject of feedback that to some extent relates to Checkster’s 360 feedback.

Since Checkster has been offering several tools with which organizations and individuals can request feedback on their job performance, we have observed some of the same reactions to the feedback process as is described in Goldsmith’s book. The first and obvious one is that many ask for feedback but choose to only listen to that which falls in line with what they want to hear. In other words, many will agree with feedback that is consistent with the image one creates for oneself, or better yet, one’s ideal self, and reject what one sees as inconsistent with that image.

The second view expressed by Goldsmith that is even more destructive to one’s personal development than the first is for one to request an opinion regarding his or her work, but then argue about it. What’s even worse is when one goes as far as to discredit the person having given the view simply because it isn’t in line with one’s self perception.

The issue that arises from the two aforementioned responses to feedback is that the perception others have of us or our behavior is not something we can agree with or not—it simply is what it is. As hard as it can be sometimes, it helps to be aware of the perceptions others have of us so we can better understand, adapt and reach whatever it is we are looking to achieve. Arguing with it is useless even if we think others have described someone that is not us, because as the saying goes, “perception is reality!”

The first step in bridging the gap between self perception and public perception is to become aware of those perceptions. In order to do this and avoid the typical reaction of commenting on what is said about us, Checkster has made confidentiality the core foundation of its feedback tool. Thus, our raters will not be afraid to say what they really think and express their opinion no matter how many times we ask them. It can seem minor, but it is a crucial step to guaranteeing continuous, quality feedback. You can use a simplified, free version of Checkster here.

We recommend this little book from Goldsmith, and we hope you can come to the Linkage conference to see him and us speak (our session is just after his – details here).