Job Fit or Mis-Fit?
Jay Werth, First Sun Consulting
"I'm sorry, but this just isn't working, I think it's best that we part company." Have you ever been on the giving or receiving side of that statement? Do you recall the sense of regret, and no doubt the foreshadowing that led to those words?
This scene plays itself practically every day at a radio station somewhere, particularly within the sales department.
Before a performance based dismissal, there typically is a period of discomfort when all parties realize that there is a bad fit between employee and employer. Remedial steps are taken in the interest of fairness, but there is a sense of foreboding that the situation will not improve. During this interim period, productivity continues to dive, momentum is lost, and morale in a department deteriorates as members watch and wait for what they believe will be the inevitable.
Since dismissals commonly play out like this, it becomes paramount to simply put the right person in the right place from the start. One way to determine whether or not there is a "job fit" between the prospective employee and the company is through the use of assessments.
Assessments measure an individual's attributes and accurately describe those attributes. "The appropriate use of professionally developed assessment tolls enables organizations to make more effective employment-related decisions than the use of observation or random decision making," according to the Department of Labor.
Assessments should be integrated into business operations from pre-hire through retirement. The goal is to address people challenges before they negatively impact the business. With information provided by assessments, negative impact can be diminished or completely avoided.
Properly used, assessments help managers better understand themselves and the people they supervise through awareness of their capabilities, capacity, behavioral style, compatibility with the organization and management perception.
The effective use of "human capital" in organizations is the key to productivity. Assessment tools provide information to help managers make more intelligent hiring decisions, be better coaches and motivators, and manage people more effectively.
Typically, 60% of a manager's time is spent fixing people problems and 40% reaching the company's bottom line oriented goals. Using assessment tools to reduce people related problems gives managers more time to work toward achieving strategic goals.
Decision making improves when a company has more complete information about job candidates and employees. Promotion and succession planning decisions are enhanced. Training programs become more effective when they can be tailored to the specific needs and characteristics of an individual because the "occupational DNA" of the person has been revealed through an assessment.
There's tremendous potential for increased revenues when assessments are used to improve the likelihood of the match between the prospective employee or existing employee's talents and the talents required by the position. Many employees do good enough jobs to avoid being terminated. But that only results in a reluctant acceptance that "average" job performance is an acceptable standard.
By using assessments companies can provide the "right fit" for their people and move that average performance to winning performance. People are happiest and most productive when their competencies and core behavioral traits and tendencies are properly aligned with their jobs.
Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
