The Importance of Observing Behaviour
Employees are distinguished by the results they generate, however, before those results come in, as work is being done the observation and identification of winning behaviours (those which you know from experience produce great results) becomes the principal method of assessment alongside the monitoring of output. Moreover, in professional roles where relationship building and team working skills are critical, the output before a result is often intangible and significantly determined by behaviour.
For example, whenever you see an employee step up and own the resolution of an important team task in a way that elicits effective teamwork from others towards the collaborative resolution of that task, you know those behaviours are likely to have a positive effect on the outcome, and you know they are transferable generally to other team tasks.
This insight explains why behavioural assessment and work sample tests, taken together, prove to be the most effective known methods of candidate assessment (link Google articles 1 and 2 and 3). Moreover, whenever work sample tests fail to predict future performance, experience tells us it’s probably because the candidate’s behaviour wasn’t suited to their work environment (i.e. a mismatch in respect to the company’s culture).
Indeed, if work sample tests may be created, they are not too difficult to administer, especially if they’re written or require only individually isolated work / responses. Moreover, one-to-one behavioural interviews and especially surveys don’t primarily seek to observe behaviour, they instead evaluate the candidate’s response, which may be rehearsed (this is called interview preparation). Although behavioural interviews are very much better than surveys since you do at least observe and engage the candidate in a conversation.
The closest corporations have got to evaluating candidates based on observing their behaviour is the ‘group assessment interview’ (where multiple candidates are placed in a room and given a group task and watched as they work together to solve a problem or resolve an issue). Also, when translating work sample tests into group tasks, they’ll inherently be governed by the behavioural dynamics which occur within that team, and this is why group assessments, when they are administered, focus on tasks that are able to elicit the winning behaviours typically required within teams in their corporation, such tasks are almost always unrelated to core business operations because the work sample in this case is actually the ability to work in a team.
Administrating real world work sample tasks for groups of candidates over an extended period would be quite onerous, and indeed they’re called internships! Also, doing well on internships is the most effective way to secure a job because contextual group observation is so useful to our understanding of people in the world of work.
This leads us to the conclusion that if candidates may be observed and evaluated as they work within teams to achieve tasks that require ‘winning behaviours’, that would be an excellent assessment practice, and we’ve already acknowledged that group assessment interviews aim to do just this, but they certainly aren’t scalable to millions of candidates simultaneously… but what if they were?
If so, then as the first layer of candidate assessment, the results of any subsequent test (work sample or cognitive ability tests as the corporation so wishes to administer) would be much more worthwhile in the knowledge that all candidates have already been prescreened for winning behaviours, and thus effectively also for cultural fit.
The Real Enders Game for Corporations
You may recall watching a sci-fi movie called ‘Enders Game’ set in a future where the Earth is at great peril from an intelligent alien species that resembles insects. A sustained war ensues after first contact, and the military generals of Earth are required to find the very best possible solution to their talent acquisition problem, that of searching for and finding the next great commanders to successfully co-ordinate armies of spaceships in battle against the aliens.
The talent acquisition process that ultimately saves Earth boils down to an advanced game assessment process where teenagers and young adults across the world are being observed during their time at school and then recruited into military gaming theatres where battlefield and team coordination strategies are tested to find those who have the behaviours and intelligence required to lead teams into victory.
The great insight here is that recruitment, where team working skills are critical, netted over a large population base, when you absolutely need results, becomes a game of observing behaviours in a scalable way, a fact that should be accepted, acknowledged and embraced to win (sports recruiters already do this quite well at ground level, and enterprise clients are very interested in extending this effective process over the internet in a way that is suitable for them).
Science fiction is beloved by many technology founders because great truths about our humanity are explored in depth, revealing many insights that may be applied to the real world. We’d never have wished to reach for the stars nor land on the moon unless we first dreamed and created stories exploring ways of doing so.
At Veraxis (https://angel.co/veraxis/), we’ve built an in-depth maze navigation game functioning as a virtualised group assessment vehicle eliciting and evaluating team-working experiences that are stored in the cloud for computational analysis as directed by HR heads.
In our game, candidates must work together in teams to achieve goals in such a way that the exceptional ability of any one individual, whilst potentially adding excess value to the team, will not be sufficient to complete a task where co-ordinated team management is required to generate results.
Candidates rotate their participation across different teams as they play through increasingly difficult levels to determine whether they, relative to all their peers, are likely to add above average value to any given team dynamic they are placed in. Difficultly gradually increases until the candidate is either unable to cope or enters a team whose combined skill surpasses their ability to add additional value, determining a ceiling.
The high level winning behaviours observed in our flagship game include integrity, delegation, leadership, resource management, team coordination, team efficiency and emotional IQ.
In this way, we deliver radically better predictive people analytics with direct applications in recruitment and team optimisation to create the foundations of a truly effective talent management solution. The game is also fun and easy to administer.
This is the future of HR and it is already here for the pioneering SaaS clients leveraging our product.
