OPUSBOB: Can a bad personality be fixed?
July 27, 2010 – 10:04 pmI want to talk with you today about whether or not a bad personality can be fixed. It’s an interesting concept and it’s something that we’re probably all familiar with at some level. I was in an Executive Suite for a number of years, and we had a receptionist who was a very sharp person, but also highly critical. If she liked you as a tenant, you got very good service. But if she decided, in her infinite wisdom, that you weren’t very capable in what you did, you got lousy service, and I watched this happen.
Of course I was on the side of getting very good service, so I was okay. But it clearly was not an okay situation. And really, the nature of this person was that she had a critical nature and you could say that she couldn’t help herself. Or of course she could. But it raises the point when you have someone that has a personality style that’s not fit for a particular role; can you as a leader fix that personality?
Well, to an extent you can, but you need to realize that there’s only so much elastic that you’re able to get out of somebody. So asking somebody to be so different from what their natural style is, is a very uncomfortable place to put people. In fact, our role as a leader is to be able to find the right fit for people.
Now maybe in this case, there wasn’t a right fit for this particular person in this organization and you need to look at that as reality as well. We only have a certain amount of flexibility and we all need it, because there isn’t any such thing as the perfect personality for a job. We all need to recognize there is a time and a place where we need to modify what our own nature is to accommodate the requirements of that position. In some ways, we all have bad personalities for what we do. Hopefully, it’s more good than bad and we can take advantage of the good and when we need to, adjust, so we could be effective in our role.
Thanks for your time.
Tags: Bob Kreisberg, candidate assessment, OPSUBOB, Performance, personality
OPUSBOB: Are personality profile tests legal?
June 23, 2010 – 8:50 amThe topic of our blog for today is one that comes up very commonly in conversations regarding personality profiling tools and what some people call personality profile tests. And that is: our personality profile tests legal? Well, you’ll often get a very abrupt response from people in the trade, and they say, of course, they are legal. We wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t legal. The reality is the topic deserves a serious response and here’s what you need to be able to understand. Personality profiling can be used in two ways within an organization. It could be used as an inclusive tool or it can be used as an exclusive tool.
It’s very simple to understand the difference. If you’re using the tool as an inclusive tool, it means that you have already evaluated your candidates at some level; you’ve reviewed their resumes, perhaps you’ve talked to them on the phone, maybe you’ve even met with them in person. You recognize that this is a person that you are actively interested in including in your organization. The profiling tool provides you with new information that allows you to better understand the nature of that person. You want to know how to better manage them, how to provide leadership, how to provide guidance and direction, and to understand a comparison, in some cases, between them and other candidates that you are looking to include.
In that situation, utilizing a profiling tool is very easy to build into your overall evaluation process. Using it as an exclusive tool is completely different. That means that you’ve made a determination that you want to exclude candidates for no other reason than their behavioral profile results. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re hiring flight attendants and you’ve determined that your top flight attendants all have patience as a high trade. And you’ve said we are going to use a profiling tool and anybody that has patience as a low trade is going to be excluded, no matter what else may exist.
Well, in that situation, then an organization need to be prepared to show that your evaluation of that top performer trade crosses across all minorities, all ages, all genders, you need to be able to show that you are excluding people in a fair and proper way. So, utilizing a tool as an exclusionary tool really takes a bit more work, and it’s a completely different application. Our clients and the nature of the work that we do are utilizing our tool as an inclusionary tool. They’re looking to understand the strengths of an individual and evaluate that how person can fit into their organization. It makes the process much easier and much clearer from a legal perspective.
Should you have additional questions about this specific topic, please feel free to reach out to me, and I’d be happy to respond to you one-on-one. Thank you.
OPUSBOB: Hunter vs Farmer definitively defined
June 6, 2010 – 1:27 pmProbably the most typical vernacular that I hear when discussing the personality profile of a salesperson is using the phrase hunter versus farmer. And more often than not, a vice president of sales or even a CEO will say, “What we really need around here are some hunters. We’ve got farmers but we really need hunters.” Help us find some hunters and in fact, it’s one of the critical reasons why people work with us and utilize our candidate assessment and personality profiling services is to be able to determine whether or not the candidate is a hunter or if that person is a farmer.
Now we can talk about whether or not a company really does need hunters versus farmers because we’ve definitely found situations when companies are looking for hunters yet, in fact, their top performers are farmers. But that’s a topic for a different video blog. We’re talking today about understanding the personality profile difference between a hunter and a farmer. And it’s very simple and it’s very clear. There are four behavioral traits that get measured in a personality profiling tool. Dominance, which is the level of aggressiveness, extroversion, which is for sociability, haste, which is rate of motion, be it fast pace, go – go or slower moving, slower going, and then structuring detail. Detail oriented or not detail oriented. What’s very clear to define a hunter versus a farmer. Hunters are aggressive personalities – so their dominance will be high. Hunters are impatient personalities, so they will be fast-paced and they will be action oriented. And hunters are traditionally big picture oriented people, so their conformity will be low.
Farmers on the other hand, are consensus oriented people. They are collaborative and consensus oriented, therefore their dominance is low. They are typically good listeners and they pay attention to what is important to the client’s needs and they take their time to understand. Therefore, their patience is high. More often than not, they are process oriented and procedural and they will follow the steps necessary to do what needs to be done. Therefore, their conformity is high. We didn’t talk about the extroversion trait because in both cases hunters and farmers, more often than, not the extroversion trait is high. That’s not the measurement that makes the difference between a hunter and a farmer. What we look at in candidate assessment, personality profiling is the positioning of the dominance trait, high is hunter, low is farmer. The pace trait – high is farmer, low is hunter and the conformity trait – high is farmer, low is hunter. It’s very easy to define and it’s also very easy to be able to see the grey areas as to when somebody combines certain traits of both hunters and farmers.
Thanks for listening.
Tags: aggressiveness, behavioral traits, candidate assessment, conformity, dominance, extroversion, Hunter vs Farmer, personality profiling, sociability, top performers
OPUSBOB: Can you fool a personality profile?
May 15, 2010 – 10:21 pm
Our topic today is talking about whether or not an individual can fool a personality profile tool. Here is how this topic came up. I received a call from one of my clients, it was a VP of Sales, and he said to me, I was just talking to a candidate that I think I like for a sales position in our organization and I told him that I wanted him to take the OPUS personality profile. The candidate said, “well don’t waste your money on that because I know how to fool those things. I can have that turnout to be exactly the way you want a sales person to be.” So Bob, what should I do? So I said to the manager, “here is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to go tell that candidate to fill out the personality profile, so that it is exactly like they think a terrific sales candidate for your company would be. Don’t worry about what they really are, just fill it out so they think that they are filling it out like a perfect candidate would fill it out. And then wait 10 minutes and then fill it out to be exactly the truth, tell us how they really think they are.”
So let me ask you a question. Do you think that the results would be significantly different because in one case the person thinks they are a good candidate and they are filling it out the way a good candidate would be and then they are filling it out for themself? The answer is the two results were very, very consistent. And oh by the way neither one looked anything like a top performing candidate for this particular company. Its interesting to know that what a person fills in when they think it’s the right candidate is in fact their perception of what right is and what wrong is. So even when somebody is deliberately trying to fool a personality-profiling tool, it still comes out reflecting their values. Thanks for your time. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
OPUSBOB: Resumes – Bold or Bull?
April 20, 2010 – 3:59 pmI want to talk with you today about a situation that just recently happened with a candidate. I had an opportunity to do a personality profile and candidate assessment for a person who is applying for job as product development manager. We reviewed the personality profile, and as we always do, talked about his career path. When I asked him to recount his work history, the candidate said to me, “Gee, I don’t know which version of my resume you have in front of you,” which I thought was a pretty interesting statement. So, I had him talk to me about his career and what he did, and while he was talking, I flipped open his LinkedIn page. When I looked at that, it made perfect sense why he asked about what copy of the resume that I had, because his experience on the LinkedIn page didn’t really bear a whole lot of resemblance to the resume that I was looking at.
For instance, it did show that they had been a product manager back in the early 2000’s, 2001 to 2004. It also showed that he had been the senior VP of sales and marketing since 2005 and the VP of finance for that time as well. Well, neither of the sales and marketing role or the finance role were listed on the resume. The only thing on the resume showed from 2000 to present was the role of being a director or VP of product development. So it raises the question, what do you really expect to see on a resume? Do you expect it to be geared for you, only focused on the things that are important to you and your job, or do you expect the resume to be an accurate reflection of that person’s work history. Does it concern you when you realized that not everything is listed on the resume and that goes to job functions, job titles, dates; and maybe even leaving off certain jobs that they have determined are not relevant to the position that they are applying for. So take a minute if you will, fill out the survey on these questions and let everybody else know what your perspective is.
Thank you very much. We’re really trying to figure it out that as it relates to a resume, should it be bold or bull? Thank you.
Tags: Candidate Assesment, career path, LinkedIn, Personality Profile, Resume, Work history
OPUSBOB: Pink Bra Dilemma
March 24, 2010 – 5:26 pm
I want to talk with you today about an incident that just happened recently with me and one of the candidates from one of my clients. OPUS is a company that provides candidate assessment services, and one of the important tools we provide is a personality profiling tool. Let me provide you just a little bit of background on the operational side. When a candidate fills out their personality profile they go to our website, fill in their responses to a URL and click the ‘Submit To’ button. When they do that the OPUS staff gets an e-mail. We use Outlook and we have a product that we use as well called Xobni, which is an add-on to Outlook which organizes e-mail files. It brings together any other e-mail we have ever received from that person plus any other files. The other thing Xobni does is it goes out to the internet and grabs a picture of that person from their public file. So it would be their picture on Facebook, their picture on LinkedIn or any other picture that’s available to the public without a password. We received one of these e-mails from a female candidate, and with it was her picture, and in her picture she was wearing what appeared to be nothing but a pink bra.
Now we are able to look at that picture because it is her Facebook picture and you could see that behind her she has somebody standing there that clearly has some form of a drink in their hand and it was a “happy time” kind of a picture that was taken. That’s what we received. As I normally do when somebody does their personality profile, I talk to the individual, review the results of that profile with them, make sure that they feel that it is an accurate reflection of who they are, talk to them about their past, what they have done – and then have a one-on-one conversation with the hiring manager, sharing the results of the profile, talking about the strengths, talking about how the person aligns with other successful people they have in their organization and sharing my perspective on the fit for the candidate.
So here are the four questions I would like you to consider from this particular incident.
Number one, should I have talked to the candidate about the fact that their picture appeared?
Number two, should I have talked with the hiring manager about that particular picture?
Number three, if you were the hiring manager and you found out that the person had a picture like that, would it have effected your decision to hire or not hire the person?
And number four, should either the hiring manager or human resources make it a practice to check the social network of a candidate or before extending an offer to that person?
One last point, this is not a candidate that’s in the United States.
Take the Pink Bra Dilemma Poll:
Tags: candidate assessment services, Facebook, hiring manager, LinkedIn, personality profiling, social network background check
OPUSBOB: How do you like your candidates, with or without lead?
March 2, 2010 – 5:14 pm
So here’s today’s question. Would you rather have an individual that you are adding to your team that is not very assertive and you know that you are going to need to work with this person to make them more assertive in order to be effective on the job or to have somebody that you are adding to your team that you know is extremely assertive and you know that you’re going to need to tone them down. I had both of those incidents happen one right after the other just recently.
In the first case, I had a client that was trying to hire a sales person for their operation in Brazil and the manager knew that he wanted a very strong, very direct, independent assertive person for the job and low and behold, he found a candidate that really fit the bill. This person had dominance as their highest trait and everything about them in the conversation, in their resume and their results showed that they are a very strong, very assertive person. And with that we know there is good and there is bad that can come along because the nature of that person although they can be very strong, can also be a bit challenging to work with on the inside. They perceive other people that don’t see things their way as potentially being incompetent and they have a really difficult time dealing with anything that they see as interference or micromanagement. So, we know that going in and so the manager and I had a very good conversation about the nature of this person and the manager said to me, “You know what Bob, I’d rather worry about taking a little bit of lead out of the person’s pencil than trying to put the lead in” and I said, “You know, I understand right where you’re coming from.”
Well right after that phone call, I had another conversation with the manager that was trying to hire somebody to work for them to run a program running alliances in Europe and this person was going to need to work with country managers all over Europe working with different partners and different areas of their business and in conversation with this manager, the manager said to me, “I am looking for somebody that’s very collaborative. I need somebody who is a consensus oriented person who knows how to get things done while not making waves” and low and behold, he found himself a great candidate for that role. This person’s dominance was by far their lowest trait and their patience was their highest trait, but when you take low dominance matched up with high patience, you definitely have a consensus oriented collaborative oriented person.
So we had a conversation and said all of that is great, but some times the person who may need to know how to break a little glass and you’re going to need to coach them on that and the manager said, “No problem, I am great at breaking glass. I don’t have any problem in working with somebody that I am going to need to coach them to be more assertive than is their natural style.” So it was a great lesson. In both cases, mangers would go in to get what they think they were looking for, but they knew going in what the nature of their candidate was and they knew exactly what they were going to need to do to make this person more effective. And isn’t that what leadership is about? Understanding the strengths of the people that we have on our team, knowing how to position them to take advantage of what they do well, but also knowing where they may have difficulties and being able to anticipate that and coach them on that, so they can work through those areas that are not as natural for them.
Thanks for your time.
Tags: assertive, behavioral traits, dominance, leadership, patience, Performance
OPUSBOB: Personality and Performance
January 23, 2010 – 12:03 pm
The purpose of this video broadcast is to talk about how personality impacts performance and the topic came up in a conversation that two of the hiring managers from one of my clients were having. Where one of the managers said you know I think personality is overrated. You can have all different types of personalities that can be successful and the other manager said you are really looking at this in a way that can get in your way because it is not a matter of being able to say personality A is good or personality B is bad. It is not a matter of lining up a personality and predicting their performance. It is how the personality will predict their behavior. It is not how they are going to do. It is how they are going to attempt to do it. So here is some of the related factors when you look at.
Whether or not personality is important. You have to determine whether these factors are relevant to the success of your people within your organization. Does it matter whether people have good people skills. Whether they get along well with other people or whether they really want to be able to go playing their own corner by themselves. Doesn’t matter whether they are patient people or whether they are always in a hurry. Doesn’t matter whether they have good attention to detail or if they are big picture oriented people. It is not a matter that one trait is necessarily good or bad as a human being but certain traits will make a difference in how a person approaches a problem or how they approach a task. For instance if you know that one of your people are very hard and critical on other people that don’t get their job done right, internally you may need to coach that person a bit if they don’t want to turn off the resources that they are really going to need to have in hand. If you know in advance that this is a challenge then you can coach in advance.
The personality doesn’t necessarily determine whether they get the job done but it does determine how they are going to approach it and as a result of that it has a direct impact on your ability to be a proactive leader. For after all what is leadership as it relates to people if it is not being able to provide people with the coaching of the guidance that they need so they can be successful and to be able to recognize what people naturally do well and the areas that they may naturally have more difficulties in and position people appropriately. Jim Collins had it right. We first need to figure out who we want to have on our bus and then we next need to figure out what seat of the bus they need to be sitting in. That is our job and so much of that has to do with understanding the personality nature of the people that we have on our team or the candidates that we are assessing, thanks for your time.
A Holiday Gift from OPUSBOB: Interviewing Skills
December 18, 2009 – 1:08 pmFor the holidays OPUSBOB gives the gift of understanding candidates and the interviewing process.
The topic of this video blog is Interviewing Skills and specifically what I want to talk to you about today is how to look for evidence of behavior in the interview process. The areas that I am focusing on have to do with important skill sets that an individual needs to have in order to be successful in a job that you are hiring them for and when we think about the sales position, certain areas which really standout that you can’t look for evidence of behavior or listening skills, writing skills, presentation skills and closing skills and the reason I say that we can look for evidence of behavior is because these are all areas that you really don’t need to question your candidate about almost any good sales candidate, I have to say they are a good sales person but a good sales candidate if asked the question are you a good closer, we will say yes I am an excellent closer but in fact the interview process and the hiring process is very much like a sales process and so instead of asking the question are you a good closer, you can look to see how the person closes you and here is where it really gets interesting.
There are very different closing styles and a closing style has more to do with the behavioral style then it does whether one is right or wrong. For instance people that are very assertive and people that are impatient may go to close early and often. People that are more patient, people that are more consensus-oriented may allow the process to go on a bit longer and in a sense allow you to extend the offer to them versus them closing you.
Now is one style better or worse well that really depends but what traditionally happens is if one style is the way that the manager is and that persons closing skills measured up and narrowed the manager style, they will be more comfortable with that and the manager, if the manager is a high dominance, low patience person themselves we said well I love the way that person really came after me. But if the manager is more laid back then that high dominance, low patience person may have been a huge turnoff for them so our ability to read good or bad, right or wrong is really more tied into how we match up with our candidate and as a result of that we have a tendency to hire people that are more like us and sometimes we end up passing on the candidates that although their style is different from us, it can actually be more effective. The more you know about your own personality style and the more you know about your candidate style, the more effective you can be because it’s not really whether the style is right, it’s whether they are able to use that style to their benefit. Thanks for your time.
OPUSBOB: Would You Hire a Known Conniver?
November 6, 2009 – 3:51 pmBob Kreisberg asks your opinion. Would you hire a known conniver?
I want to talk to you today about an interesting conversation that I had with a candidate who is applying for a position with one of my clients. I had a chance to review her personality profile with her and she liked the results very much and she was very animated, so she went on to tell me that she has always been a top sales person, everything that she has every done is life, she has always been the best. In fact Bob, she said to me that I was the very top girls scout cookie sales person, when I was at girls camp. And I said, oh! That’s great. She says, yeah, let me tell you how I did it. On the days that the girls scout cookies were delivered to our house, I faked being sick that day, so I could go home from school early and get a head start on all of the other girls that were in my troop and as a result of that I got out to all the houses first and I got all my cookies sold. And she was obviously very proud of this otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up.
Now, when I had an opportunity to talk with my client to review the personality profile, and the conversation that I had with the candidate, my client was a bit perplexed about a person who would readily admit to being devious in selling girls scout cookies. And they said to me, we’re a very high integrity organization and if this person who readily admit to being devious about selling cookies, I don’t know that I can trust her when selling my software. I said, well, I understand where you stand. So later that day I had another conversation with another hiring manager and talked about the conversation regarding the girls scout cookies. That manager’s reaction was completely different. That manager said, that’s exactly what we need. I need people that think outside the box and you know what if they are a little devious I think that’s okay. So interesting conversation, curious to know what you think, do you think you’d be interested in going after the person who figured out a way to sell more girls scout cookies by faking being sick or would you see that as a behavioral trait that you would want to avoid in a person? Thanks for your time.