Moving beyond the lies built into hiring

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Moving beyond the lies built into hiring

A recent article from the Economist.

Our guest writer, John Carlson, shared a recent article published in “The Economist.” He felt the content of “Moving beyond the lies built into hiring” would be of value to readers here at Learning Without Scars.

In “How to get the lying out of hiring,” The Economist makes a strong statement about lying on both sides of the hiring process: “You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.”

I can’t help but think about the more fundamental issue at the heart of hiring: does the employer just want to fill the position or to obtain someone who best fits the role and who has the greatest potential to perform well and stay? Our team at Reflective Performance, Inc. have been working to offer this better way based on the latest in cognitive science applied to the workforce.

Lies are only possible in a subjective world. Instead, employers and employees can benefit through objective measurement of how people process information, make informed decisions, and deal with fast-changing environments. We do this by determining the fit for a position and organization based on direct measurement of Executive Function skills and Cognitive Reflection abilities to determine human potential in all kinds of corporate environments.

These performance factors are nothing you can lie about or fudge when you are engaged by a software app that puts you through questions and situations that determine the accuracy and speed of response, simulating how your brain responds. Are you impulsive and don’t take valuable time to reflect? Certainly, our social media onslaught can be encouraging of such a response. Wouldn’t it be beneficial for employers to know how human performance factors are addressed based on real data, not subjective evaluations and impressions and past positions?

Able to customize our insights around an organization’s goals, Reflective Performance develops datasets for the performance of current successful employees, plus norms for functional areas to identify Fit Markers and KPI correlations related to the work that a potential hire will be doing. 

It’s time to move past subjective and untruthful information in the hiring process and to take the analysis of human factors out of research labs to apply in workforce optimization, ultimately able to eliminate so much embedded waste in terms of costs and lost productivity. Too much money remains on the line for organizations making bad and marginal hires as well as in so much employee turnover. Advanced brain science applied through data-driven systems analysis is where progressive employers are focusing, not in fooling applicants to join their organizations.

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A Wake Up Call

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A Wake Up Call

A quick update we wanted to share here from John Carlson:

 

People Are Assets to a Business, NOT Simply Labor Costs

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People Are Assets to a Business, NOT Simply Labor Costs

John G. Carlson is CEO & Co-Founder of Reflective Performance, Inc., a data and analytics company bringing a human-centered approach to increase productivity and corporate profitability. Informed by extensive experience in corporate turnarounds and operational improvements, Reflective Performance helps organizations enable a more stable and highly productive workforce — regardless of industry, products, or technologies — by applying the cognitive science of “executive function” (EF). In less than five minutes, a game-like software app called Reflect / EF unlocks previously unattainable insights about personal decision-making, life skills and workplace success.  Organizations benefit, too, through better management of the employment pathway for higher employee and customer retention and workforce development. He makes his first guest blog post with Learning Without Scars this week: “People are assets to a business, NOT simply labor costs.”

I’m glad to see Fortune call attention to the financial short-sightedness of organizations viewing their people as mere “labor costs.” Employees aren’t line items to manage, but people whose fundamental impact on the business can be enhanced through better management and tools that enable self-management. (This is what we’re doing with Reflective Performance, Inc. by using data and analytics to help organizations unlock the greater potential of their employees.)

As companies strive for profitability, they need to be able to seize improvements from a stable and highly productive workforce. This requires moving away from traditional financial metrics and management methods. People aren’t “capital,” but they can be understood as assets with an extended employment lifecycle in a way that parallels IT and other hard assets. Looked at from this perspective, costs can actually be measured from hiring to onboarding to training and then through high performance and retention, then analyzed through a Total Cost of Productivity framework.

Companies can greatly reduce so many wasteful costs and unnecessary overheads, not to mention “time sinks,” through lifecycle process management supported by investments in learning technologies and improved decision-making tools. These tools, data, and systems are readily available to enable this kind of system change, but first they require corporate leaders to change their perspective to build corporate profitability through human-centered productivity.

 

Companies don’t know how to measure their human capital other than as a labor cost–and it’s hurting profits

fortune.com

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