E-Assessment | Cengrow

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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Leverage Your Human Resources With Assessment Solutions

To retain the right employees and maximize their effectiveness in the business, you need to implement effective assessment resolutions. These are structured means of evaluating potential employees on a gamut of fundamental criteria. These ways can also be applied to subsisting employees too.

When used in the engaging and selection process, assessment solutions help you to pick the apt candidate for the role through the usage of a number of structured ways. Employing tested criteria ensures the people you hire are not only the suitable for the position in question but also decide whether they can match and thrive in your current company culture.

Hiring and Recruitment

When it arrives at employee selection and recruitment, many companies yet cling to the traditional methods of recruitment. These methods – interviews, resume critiques, background checks and so on – are still valid but are nowhere near enough to decide whether a candidate is fit not only to do the work you’re choosing them for but also whether they will fit into your organization and be engaged to its long-term success.

Contemporary assessment systems incorporate skills and abilities tests, behavioral and character evaluations, structured interviews assessments and simulations, cultural fit, job fit and career fit, practical job previews, administration evaluations and can hold custom-built assessments.

As for your existing employees, assessment systems comprising a range of tests, interviews, and simulations provide an ideal method to assess training and development needs. By correctly determining these needs, you’ll be in the perfect position to formulate a training program that improves your employees and thus your complete organization.

Examples are assessment centers and simulations. These enable you to evaluate performance levels and development changes for current employees as well as candidates. These contain a wide range of stimulating and practical activities providing presentation and role playing exercises, written analysis applications and workflow simulation exercises.

Performance Indicators

These allow you to foretell how well your employees will be involved in their work and if they are likely to stick with your organization.

Assessment solutions can also help with another problem that some firms face, that of employee retention. Employees leave organizations for many reasons, but job dissatisfaction is high on the list. Job dissatisfaction can result from many factors including not fitting in with organizational culture to feeling undervalued or in the wrong role.

Employee retention

Proper assessment can improve employee retention in many ways. For one thing, it can work in the hiring process by making sure that the candidate is someone right for the position s/he’s applying for and also right for your company culture. The modern assessment covers such factors as cultural fit, job fit and career fit, to make sure your new employee is with you for the long term.

Ongoing assessment can ensure employee satisfaction by making sure an employee’s talent is recognized and put to its best use.

Cengrow is one among global leaders in management consulting firms and has transformed businesses in all sectors and regions in India and across the planet. They have partnered with a range of clients to develop need based assessment solutions for employees at reasonable costs.

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Choose The Assessment Tool Vital to Your Success

The objective within most organizations is to employ a happy, productive workforce that remains on the job longer and provides more. That mission is often tough to implement without personality assessment of your employees that is determined to foretell a candidate’s on-the-job performance and security. Volumes of research show that an evaluation technology-when positioned and deployed correctly will reduce turnover and improve while creating a reservoir of objective performance data designed to identify prospective employees who are good fits in specific job roles.

A Personality Assessment is proven to predict employee performance. Assessment techniques are designed to assist organizations in recognizing candidates who will be active on the trade. To find out which assessment can completely meet your organization’s requirements, you must be satisfied with the system’s capacity to foretell performance. From an intention, scientific perspective, performance predictability of an evaluation solution is very often reported through two concepts: reliability and validity.

How Does the Assessment Work?

Validity responds to a very different question. Does it work? In the game of golf, some strokes to complete a round of golf offers an efficacy estimate of a player’s golfing abilities. It is necessary to understand that one game of golf at one golf course does not offer an accurate representation of one’s golfing ability. Golfers attain different scores depending on the course played, weather, type of course, the difficulty of the course, some holes played, the number of strokes required to make par, etc. It is not one round, but the body of evidence collected over time that provides the validity of a player’s golf game.

It enforces continuous workforce improvement

To stay aggressive, every company must desire to watch continuous improvement in the workforce. The benefits that an organization obtains through the hunt of continuous improvement are many: more productive artists, real process efficiencies, lower overall costs, and higher incomes, to name a few. The answer to that kind of long-lasting improvement lies in bettering the performance of every member of the organization. After all, people make up teams, teams make up departments, offices constitute company divisions, and units from corporations. Individual performers are the building bricks of the complete structure.

It focuses on fit; more is not always best

More is always better! Typically, assessments measure a collection of characteristics referred to as factors, dimensions, etc.. Many people assume incorrectly- that it is always better to be on the higher side of a characteristic the More is Better Syndrome.

Cengrow is a well-established organization that deals in providing services that include employee satisfaction survey, employee engagement solutions and projective techniques like an e-assessment form. Visit www.cengrow.com for more.

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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What Happens in the Graduate Assessment Centre?

The recruitment process is a herculean task, along being an interesting one too. Every recruitment center goes through various stages before the final list is presented, which can be challenging and you might be wondering what lies ahead at these centers. Cengrows is here to solve your queries regarding the same and how one should prepare for it in the best way.

Assessment Centre

Various levels involved:

Group exercise: this constitutes the larger part of the assessment center, along with being the most exciting level as you get to interact with other candidates of/in different teams and get involved in the group activities, challenging your personal skills. Here, probably, you ought to focus on good communication, sharing, negotiation, planning or even leading your team at some parts. If the things are taking unusual shape, one can be tested to demonstrate conflict management when there is the lack of planning and lots of arguments taking place in the team.

An experiment was conducted in U.K based company- Novo Nordisk, where all these steps are performed.

Case study followed by presentation: this is an intellectually challenging part of the program, where you can be asked to resolve an actual real life business case while being an active member of the team. As this isn’t a single case study, hence you must dedicate yourself in planning and coordinating various tasks. This is just not a SINGLE MAN show, where you can solve the problem on your own having sufficient time. You must be able to plan the things well and divide the task equally efficiently among the team members.

The important thing to be noted here is, you should be an active team worker, who doesn’t impose his ideas on other members. You should be open for discussion as well as sharing. You must know how to listen, instead of just speaking.

Nobody is testing your financial or technical skills in the business case, rather your ability to think logically, planning and engaging is what decides your selection. And YES, your presentation skills and ability to state your idea in more organized and confident way is what matters.

Interview: this is the last step for the recruitment and the most uncertain too, as you will be asked different questions. The interview is all about competency mapping and is conducted to judge your smartness on how best you can get fit in the required program. All you need is to have a sure shot career goals, and the things should be clear in your mind. Many times, you may even have to go through the stages in the interview as well, or maybe your interview is conducted by more than one person. Just be yourself in such a case and be easy. You go through psychomotor testing on the whole in the interview.

All these steps, though, constitute the recruitment procedure, nowadays; it is all about networking and socializing on a larger front- where you can interact during coffee breaks, or meals or even a fag. Hope, this piece was of some help to you and was an answer to most of your queries. Though the actual situation will be completely different, still, you can assess it via information provided.

Employment Engagement: Powerful & Insightful Way of Assessment

considerations-before-promoting-or-rec-ruiting-a-person-in-your-organizations-cengrow1 Business performance is driven by its employees and its clients. Organisations are now focusing on enhancing employee engagement and attracting employees that are committed. Businesses look out for employees that can achieve the organisation objectives and also initiate their own personal growth within the organisation.

Organisations are now aware on the importance of employee engagement and are conducting engagement surveys and implementing E-Assessment solutions that help improve employee motivation, retention and spurs up key business outcomes in a short span of time. With the emergence and innovation of new technologies, there are numerous tools for measuring and improving employment engagement including happiness surveys, feedback tools, E-assessment solutions and capability enhancement tools.

How Employee Engagement Impacts Performance Management:

Continuous employee survey and e-assessment surveys need to be conducted over the year. Engaging employees will provide organisation insight into their role clarity and translate goals into day-to-day key work areas. It will help align employees to work and perform better and influence their capabilities and interests. The informal feedback would also improve performance management and build positive networking.

Times spend on one-on-meetings, ad-hoc meetings and other events also increases engagement. It also creates a positive impact in enhancing a healthy communication between leaderships and gives employees an exposure to colleagues that are positioned on their top. Remember, the managers need to spend more time with their tram members in order to create connected teams and increase engagement. It is a conscious effort, that happens over time and helps build better stronger teams.

Businesses need relevant and feasible strategy that accelerates and meets competitive challenges and enhance employee engagement for a motivated and self-driven performance every time. Understanding and knowing what employees think and feel needs to be valued. It also increases the employee’s collaboration with clients and discretionary efforts that most often are not credited by the organisation. This approach benefits in measuring engagement over a self-perceived employee engagement.

How Do Organisations Work Towards Employee Engagement

It is crucial for organisations to build up a healthy engagement culture. Employee engagement also helps drive talent and business outcomes. For this they need to be prepared to pour in a substantial investment and efforts towards the planned engagement efforts.

There is a high-demand for the right engagement framework and companies like Cengrow are leveraging with organisations to effectively implement customised employee engagement applications and e-assessment surveys at all levels. It is an honest feedback system that is without bias and gathers relevant feedback from peers, focused groups etc. The application offers actionable data via a report generated and helps highlight on the issues of retention and employee engagement.

Cengrow is a management consulting firm that develops need based solutions for driving business objectives and offers customised solutions including Competency Mapping, Employee Engagement tools & methods, Assessment Center, Psychomotor Testing and Capability Enhancement services globally.

Organisations need to input engagement as a business decision and leverage the organisation, team, managers to build a result driven engagement culture. This will help organisations significantly improve productivity and achieves business goals.

Remember, increased engagement drives better results! So boost up productivity and profitability no matter what your business is about and reap in the benefits of an engaged employee culture.