competency based interview

HR Focus in Start-ups to Succeed

Start-up companies can come in all forms and sizes. They seem to have high failure rates, but the minority who succeed can become large and influential.

It has been seen that most start-up founders more often have a casual or off-beat culture in their thinking, dress, office space, HR practices and Marketing, as compared to traditional corporations. Some of these casual approaches, such as the use of “flat” organizational structure, in which employees can directly communicate with the Founders or CEOs informally, are practiced to promote efficiency and to enthuse employees in the workplace.

Business Strategies for Finance, Marketing, Production, Product Development and Innovation are made without a robust HR and People strategy. The importance of this needs to be highlighted as this is one pillars of the foundation on which the businesses is built, and if this pillar is weak or not there the dangers will always loom. Having a HR and People plan is like a having Finance plan which is absolutely essential to a success of a start-up. If people are not the key focus area the start-up cannot succeed. The HRand People plan needs to be budgeted in the initial phase itself.

Hiring the right person is one of the biggest challenges for the start-up – it is not that getting people is a problem but getting the right-fit certainly is for most start-up organizations. Many a times compromises are likely to be made to get the organization moving quickly hoping that the incumbents will learn and adapt as we go along – something which a start-up needs to be careful about in my opinion.

All start-ups need people who are innovative, adaptable and flexible, analytical, emotionally intelligent, team players and have willingness to learn. They should be willing multi-taskers. Easily said than done – how do we find this out in an interview of an hour or two at the most? The founder’s or CEO’s experience or gut-feel may not be sufficient to make those judgements. There is a professional way of doing thisby putting the person through professional Competency Assessment or Personality (Psychological) Tests.

As the organization matures and grows retention of good people becomes the challenge.Attracting,developing and retaining an amazing team are the hallmarks of success for any start-ups success. If there are right people they will design and redesign success strategies and fight for the organization’s success.

What HR policies should be there? How shouldthe elements of legality, predictability, fairness, equity and control be built into them require in-depth thought and insight as does the business plan. What has succeeded in one organization may not in another as each organization have a unique character and personality. Having policies is not good enough it is their proper implementation which is the tougher part and leads to dissatisfaction in most organizations over a period of time.

Just like business strategies and plans change the HR policies need to be revised and re-engineered keeping in view the business needs.

Making sure that the there is adequate focus on people besides other areas is most important in my opinion.

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Making Performance Management Work effectively

Managing Performance and keeping the workforce motivated is becoming increasingly complex and difficult particularly for the young brigade who is far more mobile and impulsive.
No system is perfect and permanent in any organisation. We need to continuously improve and adapt our processes to the changing environment.
Most organizations do have some form of Performance Management System as in recent times even Performance Appraisal is called the same. Firstly, let me clarify that Performance Appraisal is only one of the elements of the Performance Management System.
A robust Performance Management System (PMS) has 4 distinct sub-processes:
1. Formal Target Setting Process cascading down from the Annual Business Plan. It encompasses a participatory approach and is an open, transparent,data-based and an alignedprocess wherein the organization seeks to set challenging but realistic targets for all its employees.
2. Monitoring and Control involves an institutionalised and an on-going process for giving feedback, coaching and counselling to keepthe performance on track. This is the most important part of PMS and the organization needs to build the competence of its employees – it requires specialized training. This has invariably been a weakness in most organizations we have worked for in the last 30 years
3. The Performance Appraisal against the targets set in step 1 and any revisions thereafter. This requires the elements of subjectivity to be reduced and objectivity brought in. For this the appraisal form needs to be well designed. Self-appraisal often helps to bring acceptance and reasoning in the whole process. Appraiser and Reviewer both need to be data-based and objective to keep personal biases out.
4. A clearly defined Reward and Recognition Policy linked with thePerformance Appraisal contributes to building a motivated work-force. This needs constant review and updating year on year.
It is desirable to have the whole process fully documented with timelines with responsibilities clearly demarcated.
Other process such as Career and Succession Planning need to be in place for Performance Management to be more effective. Some Organizations do keep the two processes independent. However, the retention of talent has thrown a big challenge to many organizations as they grapple with balancing these processes.
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How to Use Psychometric Testing in Hiring

According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, approximately 18% of the companies these days are using personality tests in the recruitment procedure, and surprisingly, this number is growing at the rate of 10-15% on an annual basis- as per many industrial and organizational psychologists and the Association of Test Publishers.

Psychometric testing proves that there are certain cognitive and personality tests which help the new employees to succeed in their field and boost them for their future. Since the cost of a bad hire is extensively estimated to be a year’s salary; there are huge incentives for organizations to get hiring right. Due to lack of knowledge, unfortunately, many organizations use the wrong psychometric assessments in a wrong way and here are the followings they ought to know to minimize the potential risks and maximize their predictive accuracy, as Cengrows is helping you to achieve:

Know the law: the organization ought to keep in mind, the legal compliance when they want to add psychometric tests to their pre-employment screening system. The assessment tools, especially cognitive ability tests need to be job- relevant due to the presence of anti- discrimination laws. Competency mapping is included too for psychomotor testing.
Business needs should be known: these tests won’t help you unless you don’t have well- established measures of job performance. These days, organizations are focusing more on the predictors or independent variables rather than concentrating on dependent variables. It is important to know that if an industry doesn’t have quantitative measures of employee performance on the job, then there is no source for statistical correlations of how good these tests predict their performance. In such a case, you need to be dependent on the assessment center.
Risk of cheating is reduced: the tests like cognitive ability tests are conducted in order to safeguard the candidate; organizations should ‘proctor’ the assessment test, either by monitoring him via video conference, or noting their activities directly. But keep in mind that some candidates may be tempted to play a smart act with the result. You must compare the reference of the candidate and his interview ratings with their results to ensure whether the two are consistent or not. Such things are useful in the sales department where to need to have a smart candidate and you can be easily fooled by people by ‘impression management’. Using multiple psychometric tests can actually help the organizations to get a more consistent picture. You have to perform such tests in limit and never try to over-do it because sometimes, even a well-developed, predictive assessment battery and legally defensible won’t be of any worth if the candidate feels it being over time-consuming.
Must share the results with the candidates: every candidate has the right to see their effect these days- as per “informed consent” and few organizations also provide access to the reports based on the psychometric tests that the applicants take. Whether the candidate accepts the employment offer or not, there are both- the ethical as well as the pragmatic benefits of sharing the result.
Test the tests: job performance of an individual must be evaluated quantitatively, which give the company criteria for correctness. While hiring managers and HR, one must consume the right methodology to select and retain the authentic psychometric tests.

To undergo all these points as mentioned earlier, one ought to know and understand the business needs and make sure that you find a test that evaluates the characteristics. Some laws prohibit the company from discriminating the privacy of the candidate, but no legislation prohibits the company from using strange assessment tools.

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Personality Tests – Better Evaluation for Qualitative Research

Personality tests help employers screen out desirable candidates in accordance to the skill requirement. It assists companies to make better choices while recruiting employees with specific qualities that can be enhanced as per the job roles & responsibilities.

Benefits of Personality tests

There are limitations to self-awareness and sometimes our brain needs to be stimulated for an adequate response. There are things each one of us intuitively ‘know how to do’ but may not know if we have that ability to perform that task. A face-to-face interview often limits the potential for being creative, imaginative and rational. Candidates undergoing personality tests are tested on their qualities including Determination, persistence and the willingness.

Projective techniques are a mix of tools and techniques that is based on evolutionary adaptive processes and behavioural economics. Projective techniques are typically divided into five groups and can each be applied as required. It includes Associative techniques, Completion techniques, Constructive techniques, Choice/ordering techniques and Expressive techniques. All these techniques consists of perceptions, impressions, emotions and heuristics to help analyse a candidates inner conflicts, habits, social behaviour, social influences, thinking style etc.

It goes beyond just communicating to what is asked and helps the candidate present themselves in a more transparent, logical and sensible sense. The test involves projective techniques, that help reveal candidates emotions and internal conflicts that may not appear easily while appearing for a competency based interview.

Helps Determine Leadership and Extraversion Qualities

A personality test helps determine qualities like Leadership and Extraversion in an employee or a new candidate. Both of these personality traits play an important role in a business environment. Remember, a leader is more than just a boss and leadership comes naturally to a person’s overall behaviour. How a person manages and be creative can determine how good a leader he can be. Additionally, his motivational spirit also adds to his personality and helps employers bring in better leadership qualities to their organisation workflow.

Similarly, for a sales profile, employers look at candidates who are extrovert and are confident communicators. Ever seen a sales person who does not talk! Qualities associated with sales profile need to include being cheerfulness, assertiveness, gregariousness and highly confident in the product he is representing. For employers, it is important that the candidates they select have the desired qualities that make sense in lieu to the job roles they are assigned with. Personality tests can really be helpful in choosing, recruiting and selecting the perfect employee. This will be a good future decision for the organisation that can further use the employee for other senior roles and enhance these attributes.

While cost of infrastructure, technology and even managing businesses may have gone down, the cost of recruitment & selection has seen a dramatic increase in recent years. The human resource development team spends a large amount of company’s expenditure and efforts on hiring employees and yet most of the employees chosen are not even committed to the company for long or not up to the required job preferences. Cengrow knows how important objective and quantifiable information can be for analysing an individual’s potential and therefore offers businesses psychometric inventories comprising of personality tests, questionnaire type inventories, tests of intelligence, analytical ability tests, competency based interview, general aptitude tests etc. Cengrow has the expertise to design and develop customized inventories, keeping in view cultural dynamics and client specific needs.

Projective Techniques: Yielding Benefits for Effective Workforce

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The projective techniques refer to a personality test that is psychological in nature and reflects the responses from an individual after viewing a set of images, words or ambiguous scenes.

In today’s global market, it is important that each business environment has the ability to correctly assess their workforce. Although there are multiple assessment tests, each of them have their benefits and disadvantages. But a projective test includes a behavioural interview that comes in use at work.

A projective test is a personality test that is conducted for understanding a person’s hidden psychological thoughts. The responses may be presumptions or assumptions that humans have in their conscious or unconscious mind. The test is non-verbal and the test results reflect on the individual’s spontaneous reaction and the real-time thought process of the person. That helps highlight the person’s reaction, behaviour and attitude.

Developed by a Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach in 1921, the most popular and frequently used test is Rorschach inkblot test. It is a projective test that requires highly skilled and trained interviewers and expert interpreters for analysis. The test checks and analyses based on how the person sees the plotted symmetrical ink blots. For example – If the respondent sees a fearful image, then he may be suffering from paranoia.

The results can help experts change a person’s behaviour and guide him on taking a positive attitude towards fearful situations.

The applications designed and created at Cengrow, a consulting firm helps organisations make sensible decisions when it comes to recruiting the right talent, getting relevant information or data of its employees from past and current and optimally utilizing the talented workforce to do better. Cengrow does it by implementing tailor made solutions including competency mapping, personality assessment, psychomotor testing and other assessment tools.

Competency based Interviews are More Responsive and Better Structured

Normal interviews are conversation based, where questions are random and may have a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, whereas; a competency based interview aims at testing one of more skills or individual’s competencies. They are more systematic and help explore the person’s behaviour in specific circumstances by asking them to back their answers with relevant examples or life based situations. It could need one to describe a scenario like dealing with a conflict at work or how one would react if faced with a real-life situation. Such questions test an individual’s psychological sense of response and help employer’s gain insight on how they think and may react if placed in similar situations both at work or elsewhere.

Competency based interview consists of a personality test too, that helps understand how an employee or a new candidate will demonstrate at work. Undergoing the test will reflect his ability to be adaptable, sensitive to others, lead the team as a mentor, influence communication and being resilient. Knowing all these traits beforehand, would benefit employers in making the right decision on selecting and recruiting their workforce.

Cengrow has developed a whole range of assessments that evaluates and analyse business challenges. They provide companies, a seamlessly integrated assessment platform that may be a knowledge test, a technical skill test or a competency mapping assessment tool to help identify, select, develop and retain the best talents within the organisation.