Finding top performers: Brunswick company helps employers make the 'right hire'
Photo / Tim Greenway
Art Boulay, CEO of Strategic Talent Management, with his dog Fenway outside his office in Brunswick. Boulay's company uses multiple assessment tools to create scientific and objective evaluations that are highly predictive of an applicant's likely success in a given job.
Hiring, developing and training the right people are the top three problems for most business owners and CEOs, says Art Boulay, CEO of Brunswick-based Strategic Talent Management.
Even so, he says, a surprisingly high number of them still rely heavily on the traditional personal interview and their intuitive 'gut instinct' to guide their hiring decisions. It's not surprising to Boulay, then, that when he asks those owners or CEOs what percentage of their employees would they rate as mediocre performers, the typical response is 60%.
If that doesn't get them thinking that there must be a better way of tackling their three top problems, Boulay drives the message home with this question: “How many dollars could you add to the bottom line this year if all the mediocre performers were replaced with top performers?”
“I think most people understand the importance of hiring the right person, who fits in perfectly and has all the right skills,” he says. “The problem is that people assume there's no way to measure which applicant is the best fit for a particular job.”
Boulay and his business partner, Bill Maloney, president and chief talent officer, started their company in 1993 on the premise that scientifically based assessment tools can take the fuzziness out of the hiring process. Such tools could objectively measure an applicant's below-the-surface motivation and capacity for performance as a complement to the traditional pre-employment reviews of resumés, interviews and reference checks. They have 75 regular clients, most being in the United States but a few are international. The company is currently involved in five recruiting efforts.
Boulay says what differentiates his company's approach from simple assessment tools — such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which identifies and describes 16 distinctive personality types, or the DISC Assessment centering on four different behavioral traits — is its use of multiple assessments that measure 93 distinct factors. That scientific and objective process, he says, is highly predictive of an applicant's likely success in a given job.
“I've done about 10,000 assessments,” he says. “It's taken me a lot of years to get here. The key thing I've learned is that there's no single instrument that can explain the full complexity of an individual.”
A story last year in the Harvard Business Review, “The Problem with Using Personality Tests for Hiring” by Whitney Martin, gives credence to the multi-assessment approach used by Boulay's company. Citing a 2013 update of Frank L. Schmidt's 1998 ground-breaking study of 19 selection procedures for predicting job performance, Martin reports that “multi-measure tests” have the highest predictive ability for job performance (71% effectiveness), followed by cognitive ability tests (65%), integrity tests (46%), reference checks (26%), emotional intelligence tests (24%), personality tests (up to 22%) and job experience (13%).
Fitting into a company's culture
Before beginning their search for the best employee, Boulay advises his clients that they should take time to identify the specific skills, knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and motivation required by the position. Doing so, he says, helps reduce the risk of trying to fit a “square peg into a round hole.” It also helps the hiring team gain a better understanding of their expectations for the position, the behavioral traits that will best fit the company's culture and how that position might help advance the company's long-term goals.
“The biggest thing I talk about is being clear about what makes a good hire, or, more specifically, what makes a problem hire,” he says.
He also differentiates between “technical skills,” which often can be taught, and the fuzzier notion of “fit.”
Hiring someone with the right skills but who doesn't fit in with a company's corporate culture can quickly lead to big problems not only for the new hire but, more importantly, for the company. One element of fit, he says, involves taking a closer look at the key people the new employee must interact with, including their behavioral styles, motivations and attitudes. Doing so will help the hiring decision-makers refine the specific qualities they need in a job candidate.
Once the preliminary groundwork is done, Boulay says his company can help craft a detailed job description, define performance requirements and benchmarks and even assist in or totally handle the interviewing and the screening process.
“Every company is different,” he says. “Some things are similar, but it's what makes you different as a company, your beliefs and values, that help us find the right candidate to hire or the right person to promote.” The company's business plan is one of those differences: “If you are planning to double business, or break into new markets, that may emphasize some qualities you want to see in the right candidate to help you reach those goals.”
At this point, the company is ready to advertise the job opening. What works best, Boulay says, is what he calls a “behavioral ad” — one that uses words “that will attract the right person and make the wrong person cringe a little bit.” He also encourages companies to consider an often-overlooked source of potential applicants: Recruitment from within.
The preliminary vetting of prospects, he says, typically follows the traditional approaches of analyzing cover letters and assessing resumes for the obvious essentials: Correct grammar and spelling; clear and concise statements about the applicant's interest in the job and their skills; evidence the applicant knows something about the company and is eager to contribute to its success. In today's hiring world, this is most often done on computers, which also allows for the use of filtering software that can quickly screen candidates according to pre-selected key words related to the vacancy.
From assessment to reference check
Boulay readily admits there are hundreds of software tools available to help companies do their own assessments of job applicants. He also notes that the larger the firm, the more likely it is to have on-staff someone with the kind of training and experience he has to conduct science-based assessments. “I don't have any companies larger than 500 employees among my clients,” he says. “For the most part, it tends to be smaller companies who use us.”
Strategic Talent Management uses multiple screening tools to assess top candidates' motivation and capacity for performing well (both being internal traits that are not always easily observable) as well as skills and behaviors that may determine how well they fit the company's needs.
But Boulay is quick to point out that those assessments are rarely “pass-fail.”
“Think of any position you know really well and you'll probably come up with a common behavior or skill associated with success in that job,” he says. “But we all know people of opposite behavioral styles who can be equally successful in that job. A quiet, reserved salesperson simply approaches the job differently.”
Assessing 93 factors, he says, gives greater complexity to each candidate's employment screening and helps to overcome those common biases. “We do a 10-point scale on each of those 93 factors,” Boulay says. “It's more expensive, but it's a more thorough assessment.”
Pre-screening interviews conducted by phone provide the opportunity to weed out applicants who lack strong verbal and communication skills or who give answers that suggest they're not a good match for the company. Their primary purpose, Boulay says, is to identify a red flag that would make a face-to-face interview a waste of time for both parties.
In interviewing a small group of final candidates who've completed the screening assessments, Boulay offers these tips:
• Be as skeptical as you can be. Put a challenge out there and see how the person responds.
• Keep in mind you will tend to be attracted to people who share your behavior style, and that behavior is a poor predictor of success on the job. On the other hand, behavior questions are useful in identifying how an applicant will perform when faced with specific situations or workplace challenges.
• Keep in mind it's better to have five or six good question or scenarios than 10 or more vague questions. Also pay attention to body language, eye contact and the applicant's interest and interpersonal skills during the interview.
• The only way to compare applicants is to have pre-determined questions and a ranking system on an interview sheet with room for notes.
• Interview as if your bottom line depends on it. It does.
Second interviews, he adds, offer the opportunity to affirm the rightness of the top candidate, typically by giving others the opportunity to meet that person and ask additional questions.
Finally, Boulay says, before hiring, always check references, starting with verification of factual information and then proceeding to questions about the applicant's behavior, attitude, capacity, communication skills and job performance. Once the hire is made, Boulay encourages his clients to use the candidate's assessment report as a kind of “owner's manual” that will help both the employer and employee achieve their mutual goals.
Hiring the right person is critical, he says, given that hiring errors typically cost seven to nine weeks of pay for an entry-level person, a year's salary for a professional and several years' salary for senior executives and senior salespeople.
Asked if every job opening warrants the full array of assessment tools his company offers, Boulay replies: “I tell them what my dentist once told me, 'Floss only the teeth you want to keep.'”
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