Selecting new employees for talents/strengths?

[Matthias Olavi]

Does anyone use a (more or less) formal system to select new employees either for talent or for strengths? What is your experience?
I know that Gallup does not recommend using the StrengthsFinder as a selection tool, but then again, the book "First Break All The Rules" gives some examples of how to select for talents. What is your experience? Do you select for talents or strengths? And if you select for strengths, how do you define what you want? Do you know if there is any "vocabulary" or taxonomy for strengths like the 34 talent themes of the StrengthsFinder?

[Matthias Olavi]

Let me start with my experience. My business is in Diabetes Care (more products than services). Last year, we started to explore innovative ways of providing a much better diabetes education as a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition. One of the key questions was: what profile should our Diabetes educators have?

My managers and I had just done the Streghtsfinder and we were so fascinated about it that we could not help thinking in terms of talents when we tried fo define the ideal profile of our diabetes educators. However, Gallup does not recommend using the StrengthsFinder as a selection tool, as it is supposed to be a tool for self-understanding and coaching. I took me some time to understand this, and eventually I got convinced of selecting for strengths, not for talents. But which strengths?

I decided to ask Gallup for help. They use a system called SRI. So what they usually would do is to interview 100 or more of your employees that do the job for which you want to create the strengths profile. And with your help, they identify the high performers in this group of 100 (or more). Then they would compare the answers of the high performers with the rest of the group to find out whether there are certain questions that the high performers consistently answer differently than the rest of the group. A nice example is written in the book "Discover Your Sales Strengths": if you ask sales people the question how they feel when clients doubt what they say, the high performers feel bothered, while the mediocre or underperforming sales people would say that they don't bother.

I find this approach most interesting. However, I also see some problems:
• First of all, Gallup is everything else than cheap and so usually only large companies can afford this SRI.
• But apart from the cost, the fact that you need a larger number of people to interview also makes it difficult for smaller companies to do an SRI. If have your own small business or are a manager of a smaller business unit in a large company, you may not have 100 employees and at least 20 high performers.
• And even if you are a large company or have 100 employees, you still may have a problem when you realize that things are not going well and that the root cause of this is a mismatch between the strengths of your employees and what the company really needs. In such a situation, you want to define the strengths required for the company’s new strategy or vision, but how do you do this if few of your existing employees seem to have these strengths? The SRI won’t help you here.
• A similar problem can occur if you want to develop an innovative new service, something that has not been done before in your company. That was my case with the Diabetes educators. But I didn’t have any Diabetes educators with whom we could do an SRI! So what do you then?

Ever since, I have been thinking about ways how small companies (or small business units in big companies) can define the strengths that they need for their jobs, their strategy and their culture; especially so if they are in a turn-around situation or want to venture into innovative new fields.

When I came across the book “FYI – For Your Improvement” my Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, I read with great interest their list of 166 competencies such as “action oriented”, “command skills”, "listening", "patience" and "humor". If I understand the strengths literature correctly, the term “competency” is a bit muddled in that it can be talent, strength, knowledge, skill or a blend of them. Still, this list is the closest thing of a strengths taxonomy that I have found so far. I wonder whether anyone of you has experience with this?

Ok, let me stop here, this is already an awful lot of text. If you would like to learn more about my experience and thoughts of this, check-out my blog on:

strengthsblogger.blogspot.com

[Jay Forte]

Matthias
I teach a program on Millennial Management that uses Rath's Strengthsfinder 2.0 as a critical resource to first show participants their most significant strengths, then to become familiar with the language of talents (they complete the evaluation to see the questions and to connect to the outcome). I then have them identify the five top talents needed to perform selected (ultimately all) roles in their company and add three talents that would make the candidate fit in well on the team. This creates a talent profile of an ideal performer. This is then used to create a sourcing strategy to locate this kind of talent.

The one other thing I do is help participants create talent-based questions - questions that should be asked during an interview instead of the usual experience and skill based questions - to assess whether the talents they need for the role exist in the candidate. So far, this approach has been working well and has changed the hiring and recruiting process for the companies I work with.

There is more information on this on my site at www.humanetricsllc.com or www.fireupyouremployees.com. On either site, go to "how to fire up your employees" to see my tools to help companies get better at hiring on talents and driving performance.

To date, I use Strengthsfinder 2.0 for a robust list of talents - it seems to be the best so far in creating and defining the language of talents. And so far, it works really well in creating a clearer profile of the attributes needed for success in particular company roles. I always applaud the Gallup Organization for the work it has done on talents and how it has set the stage for us to use it and then to take it to a new and more practical level. Their terminology is good and easy to understand. Its value is in helping others use it to make better decisions in hiring and in managing effectively today.

[Matthias Olavi]

Dear Jay

thanks for your valuable insights. I have some questions:

1) I understand that you are in favor of selecting for talents (the 34 talent themes of the Strenghtsfinder) instead of strengths. How do the companies you consult do this? Do they buy staples of the book "Strengthsfinder 2.0" for the recruiting process and have all candidates do the test? Or do you do it through interview questions?

2) If you do it through interview questions, what technique do you use? Something like behavioral-based interviewing?

3) Based on what grounds do you define which position needs which talents? Your experience, discussions with the client or have you found any interesting literature about it?

4) What about the company culture and strategy? I understand that it is almost as important to match talents with the job as it is to match talents with the company's culture and strategy? What concepts or literature do you use to find the best match here?

[Jay Forte]

Hi Matthias
In response:
#1 - Companies I work with buy the book for their employees for two reasons - first, they see the value of talents as they inspire performance and they insist that their organization learn and use the language of talents, second - the more familiar they become with the language of talents (each employee completes their evaluation on-line from the code in the book) the more they can start to see the behaviors that the talents evoke and start to more clearly define the talents or attributes that are needed in specific roles.

#2 - I created a list of talent-based questions, questions that look to elicit whether the specific talented defined as necessary for the role exists in the candidate. These questions focus on the critical core attributes of a talent, as explained by Rath, in a way that a candidate can not prepare for. According to what the Gallup Organization and Buckingham say about talents as top-of-mind reactions, then the success of these questions must be in their ability to zero in on an anticipated set of responses that must be the candidate's first thoughts. The questions mostly focus on specific behaviors that exhibit the existence of or lack of a talent- without expressly indicating the talent they are assessing. This way, the candidate cannot plan future responses in a particular line of questioning. During the programs that I teach, I have the participants host mock interviews with several "candidates". Based on their responses to the new talent-based questions, they must select one of the candidates to hire and defend the hiring selection based on observed specific talent behaviors.
I know Tom Rath indicates that his 34 talents are not specifically designed for hiring criteria - but they do provide a very clear definition of critical thinking that can be assessed using questions that focus on seeing specific behaviors, posed in a way that the candidates cannot prepare for. In actual practice, the managers I have worked with have found them capable of better assessing core thinking and have been pleased with the results.

#3 -There are two ways to proceed here. I created a form that I call the Talent Matrix. This form identifies the top 5 position (to perform the role) talents, three team (to fit into the culture and workplace environment) talents and then skills and experience. This creates a one page look at the criteria for success in a particular role. This process can be completed for every position. I realize that if you give this task to 10 managers, you may have 10 variations in the core list of 8 talents. But what seems to hold true over time, when many are involved in the process, that 3 or 4 role talents and 1 or 2 team talents recurr. This is how companies have created the Talent Matrix for their roles.

To date, I have not seen any others use this informaiton in this way, or create a talent profile/Talent Matrix by role. It works extremely well - in fact, it also helps because it creates a bias-free role description that can be used for talent sourcing.

#4 -This relates partly to what I said in #3. Since my Talent Matrix has a section for the talents (attitude, strengths) that work well with the current culture, it can clearly define not only someone well suited for the role, but someone also capable of fitting in well in the culture. For example, let's say that your business is leanly staffed, where all employees need to handle many things at once. In this workplace, the talents of maximizer and arranger may be critical for the employee to handle the workplace speed and focus. Again, the more clearly the roles and culture attributes can be defined, the better chance that the team will be able to find and hire the right candidate. From my perspective, one of the primary reasons managers continue to mishire is that they do not have a clearly defined list of talents they need (for the role and for the workplace) and therefore do not have a plan to the right people