Industrial psychology and behavioral science are a ‘mature’ body of knowledge. The models that have been in use for more than three decades are tried and true, and the vast majority of the assessment products in the marketplace today are built on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits – Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Stability and Openness.
TalentSorter is different, in three important ways…
First, we have taken those five traits as our foundation, and added twenty more to help you get a real sense of the individual. This allows us to present you with a much more complete image of the whole person.
Second, the biggest complaint about assessment products is that they take so long. It doesn’t make sense that someone applying to a Housekeeping position should get the same questionnaire as someone being considered for a Sales Executive position. Each job requires a very different set of traits for the person to be successful… so we designed a patented process that only serves up questions related to the most important traits in any one job. It saves you and your candidates time… and gets you just the information you need.
Third, we believe that everyone is better served with better insight into fit. The company wins, the manager wins and the employee is better off also. The assessment marketplace is confusing today – there are lots of inexpensive tools out there that are mostly garbage, and the decent tools are too expensive to use with all your candidates. It was time to shake things up. Time to make this information available to everyone, affordably.
TalentSorter Measures What Matters
We help people and organizations make better choices, by collecting better information about the things that matter most and are most predictive of success. There are three levels of questions that need to be answered, and the résumé barely gets at the first:
• CAN this person do the job? – skills, education, availability… collected in the online application form
• HOW will this person do the job? – based on their personal traits and characteristics, are they a good fit for this particular job?
• WILL this person do the job, and WHY? – standards, attitudes, values… is this person a good fit for the environment here?
There is an assessment component to the application process, that is deeply rooted in some very advanced science. Because of the way the TalentSorter has been designed, it is able to compare the personality traits and other attributes of an individual to those of people who have been high performers in a given role, and generate a FitScore that is a very accurate predictor of success.
Conscientiousness
Openness
Acumen
Assurance
Resolve
Reliability
Creativity
Agreeableness
Gregariousness
Cooperativeness
Tact
Influence
Compassion
Teamwork
Openness
Creativity
Adventurousness
Teamwork
Extraversion
Intensity
Control
Decisiveness
Autonomy
Ambition
Adventurousness
Stability
Compliance
Optimism
Happiness
THE FITSCORE
As mentioned above, because of the way the TalentSorter has been designed, it is able to compare the personality traits and other attributes of an individual to those of people who have been high performers in a given role, and generate a FitScore that is a very accurate predictor of success.
You should know that the science this is built on has been evolving for more than 30 years, and it is rock-solid. TalentSorter has been thoroughly tested and validated to make sure there’s no hidden bias on the basis of ethnicity, gender or age.
We’d never claim it’s 100% accurate 100% of the time – that’s impossible, and there are way too many other variables involved. That’s why we only present it as a reference point, no more than a third of the total picture above. But it sure does improve the odds of making a better decision, for both the company and the individual.
The FitScore is a great tool to help you set priorities. And in many ways, it’s just a reference point.
As a candidate, what direction seems best for me to direct my career? Playing to my strengths boosts my performance and amplifies my success. Is there a better career strategy?
As an employer, I welcome the ability to prioritize my candidate list in a reliable way, so that I can invest my time first with those candidates who have the greatest likelihood of success. It just makes so much sense – and prioritizing based on FitScore is a whole lot more logical than relying on keywords and Boolean searches through résumé databases!
And even so, there’s no substitute for a good interview. We can generate interview guides for you, based on the unique relationship between each candidate and the job itself, or you can go it alone if you are confident in your interviewing skills. Think of the interview as an opportunity to dive below the FitScore, to explore their likely fit with the manager, the work, the people they will be spending their day with, and the unique culture of the company and the department they’ll be in. Probe to get a sense of their standards, their attitudes, and their values in the areas that will matter most to their success.
We often hear from our clients that because our approach leads with Fit first, they quickly start finding themselves in great conversations with folks who are a GREAT fit for their organization, but who they would never have looked at in a million years on the basis of their résumé.
If the fit’s right but there’s a gap in experience or a skill that’s missing, those can often be taught quickly in the onboarding process or the first 90 days.
If the fit’s not right… nothing else matters.
MORE ABOUT THE SCIENCE…
The TalentSorter is a 15-45 minute, self-administered psychometric assessment taken on a computer. The full version measures reasoning and problem-solving skills, plus 25 traits, or dimensions of personality, intended to measure an individual’s characteristics for the purpose of determining the best fit for employment in a specific position.
Assessments administered for particular jobs are customized based upon extensive locally validated job analysis procedures and analysis of traits of existing employees who have been successful in the position.
The TalentSorter includes a process for helping to determine the viability of assessment results. When respondents intentionally try to misrepresent themselves, have difficulty reading, or simply select item responses randomly, the resulting inconsistency of responses can lead to a warning in the report stating that the assessment results may not be representative of the individual and should be used with caution. This scale does not determine whether or not a person is lying, but rather refers to the validity of responses and the confidence which may be placed on results based upon the individual’s response patterns.
The key to the effectiveness of any assessment system used for selection and placement is local validation. That is, the assessment and resulting information must be relevant to the selected job for which the system is being used. To accomplish this, the TalentSorter uses a comprehensive Position Analysis Survey (PAS) along with concurrent study capabilities to identify the behavioral and cognitive factors which most greatly influence the potential success of a candidate in a specific job. While other assessment systems require test-takers to respond to all questions in all scales regardless of their relevance to the job in question, the TalentSorter only requires candidates to respond to items in those scales which have proven to be associated with success on the job based on the results of the position analysis functions.
Along with determining which scales need to be assessed for a specific job, the PAS also establishes a range of scores within those scales which have shown to be correlated with success on the job. This may be accomplished by having a person familiar with the demands of the job complete the PAS, which contains a proprietary algorithm for determining score ranges, or by assessing incumbents in the job and determining the range of scores most often reported for those who are or have been successful in the position. The score ranges for the scales assessed become the benchmark against which all future candidates will be compared to help determine their potential for successful performance in the job.
Each domain or scale in the assessment is scored separately on a percentile scale which has been normed on the working population of North America. Percentile scores are then compared to score ranges identified in the benchmarking process and an Overall FitScore is reported based on where the score falls relative to the benchmark range. If a candidate’s scores falls outside that range, the correlation will decrease more rapidly the further from the benchmark the actual score falls. A perfect correlation results in a 100 being reported with points deducted the further from the benchmark the score falls. A proprietary algorithm is used to calculate the Overall Job Correlation.
Regardless of the individual’s FitScore, the results of the assessment should not be used as the sole-basis in the decision-making process when hiring the individual. The TalentSorter provides a useful tool for the hiring process, and when used correctly, may provide valuable information for future placement and promotion. As with any assessment, the results of the TalentSorter should never make up more than one-third of the information used in decisions regarding the hiring process or the ultimate placement of an individual.