What Does It Take To Predict Job Success?
By Bill Schult, President Maximum Potential Inc.

The answer is a job related and validated assessment. There are plenty of assessments that are validated for other purposes. Many of these can be categorized as Style or Type assessments. This group of assessments are most often used for team building, identifying a person's leadership style, behavioral style or type, communication style and perhaps his/her sales style. It is important to understand that while these are very good things to measure, a person's style or type may not be a factor in determining job performance.

We have all witnessed the consultant who has attempted to convince his/her client that his/her assessment has credibility. They will say the assessment has been given to a similar group of workers, the scores have been calculated and a benchmark created. Be careful of this approach! That average or benchmark means nothing. It is the average of the best, the average and the below average. It does not mean it predicts job success.

Since becoming certified in identifying, understanding and appreciating behavior in the mid 70's it has become agonizingly apparent to me that attempting to hire a job candidate on behavior alone is courting disaster.

A person's behavioral type or style, by itself, is not a valid indicator of his/her potential for success in a specific job. There are many tools in use that predict behavior in a general or overall sense, but they do not predict job performance or are they job related. In order for an assessment to predict the potential for job success they must be validated against job performance.

So does this mean you can't use personality assessments to predict the potential for job success? Not at all! But, you will need to use personality assessments that were designed for the selection process. The assessment must be job related and validated against a given job and the performance required to be successful in that job.

This will almost always eliminate the use of Ipsative assessments for selection purposes. This type of assessment uses the Most - Least word descriptor approach to identify a person's personal preferences. It can provide insight into the person him/herself, but not validated information to be used to make a selection decision. This type of assessment does not provide the necessary or right type of information to do a true validation study.

Good assessments consist of measuring the factors that contribute to job success. These factors tructed job studies to determine the personality traits that actually contribute to job success. They gather data of on the job performance for top and bottom performing job incumbents, along with collecting performance ratings of supervisors and managers.

Why collect data for a validation study on top and bottom performers? Good question! A well-validated assessment should have the ability to predict potential success, as well as the potential for job failure.

Don't be fooled or talked into "benchmarking" your top performers. They are good compared to what? What if your top producers looked exactly like your bottom producers? Was the benchmark valid, did it predict success? Maybe and maybe not! Benchmarking only your top performers is a formula for EEOC disaster.

Yet, a client will say, "I want to test my top performers and create an average, so I can hire more people that look like the average of my top performers." That's not a good idea. Averages can mask the differences between co-workers. In a recent article averaging was described by saying, "If you averaged the athletic ability of all the members of the top soccer team and compared that to the average of the bottom team in the league, you would see very few differences. Both numbers may be fun, intellectual exercises, but tell you nothing about test scores and performance." A good validity study will demonstrate that high scores match high performance and low scores match low performance. That's validity, developing averages is not validity.

It is true, that in every job, some people get the job done better than others. Top performers possess characteristics that set them apart from average performers.

In a 1998 article in The Herald, Harriet Johnson Brackey talked about the importance of competencies by saying, "Competency is all about treating people as a company's most important resource. It's a forward looking process that evaluates a person's behavior, rather than college degrees. The point of a competency model is often to rate the employee's potential rather than measure what happened in the past."

Many organizations are becoming aware of the importance of competencies. We must know what competencies contribute to success on the job? These must be identified and defined. Once those steps have been completed, a competency model can be developed that can be used to compare a candidate's results to the competency model developed for a specific job.

Most competency models contain a description of the specific competencies that includes observable behaviors that indicate the demonstration of a competency.
This process provides an organization with the ability to identify the important competencies necessary for successful performance in nearly every job situation.

Given this information, the selection, training, retention and performance management systems can be used to attract and retain top performing employees.