How To Hire Team Players

Teamwork is proven to be a far more important selection factor than technical skills, and hiring processes that are too technically focused, while sacrificing a teamwork assessment focus, are unlikely to correctly separate star performers from the mediocre. I think that assessment processes should incorporate a huge team-working assessment element, and below I have described how to do this.
1. Team activities and  games: if the budget allows one can incorporate a few business games that involve team work and identifies the team spirit if existing in the person.  situational tests that enable individuals to let their guard down are the best indicators for team work.
2. Interview questions: questions that involve decision making and identifies the thinking process of the person are great identifiers of team spirit.
3. Critical incident tests:  where some situations are given and the participant has to make decisions related to team work.
4. Group discussions: an easy and cost effective method to gauge the team spirit and leadership initiative of an individual. Often the participant is unaware or so caught up in scoring Browney points that he forgets that he has to make the group discussion successful rather than proving how great is his thinking and reasoning ability.
5. Observation method: just observing how a person interacts with people he encounters in the process of his interview and visit to the organization.
Candidates with good collaborative and interpersonal skills should excel in this kind of environment. Great team players will be able to build a fast and strong rapport with all members of the group, and will be comfortable disagreeing with certain suggestions or raising potentially controversial questions without antagonizing members. They’ll also be comfortable with expressing their opinions and will be able to do so in an appropriate way.
Another behavior that you are likely to observe in great team players is an ability to work well with peers, subordinates and senior staff. So, try and have a diverse interview team in terms of grade so you can observe the individual’s ability to collaborate effectively at all levels of the hierarchy. Great team members will be able to develop a good rapport at all levels of the hierarchy.
You might also want to bring in a representative from outside the immediate team in which the candidate would be working. Perhaps you could include a representative from an internal customer or department that the job incumbent’s team work closely with. This enables you to observe how well they can build a rapport with looser connections/weaker ties and avoid developing a silo mentality with the close, stronger ties in their team.
At some point in the interview (perhaps at 2^nd interview stage), you might want to do an office tour so you can see them collaborating with team members in the actual team environment of your office. True team players and workers will excel in this kind of team interviewing environment as it will give them the opportunity to display their social team-working skills and mentality.
I believe that the most reliable way to assess team-working skills is to observe them interacting in a team setting as I have shown earlier in the article. Good luck with your next hire.

About AQumen : Should Job hoppers be ignored?

About AQumen : Should Job hoppers be ignored?

Should Job hoppers be ignored?

In the not so distant past loyalty was a valued asset and the employee serving a long tenure in an organization was well rewarded with promotions and increments. Today with the  advent of competitive cut throat environment. Loyalty take a back seat to competency and performance. Recently I sat in to counsel an employee who had been a non performer in the same company for 11 years. What do you do with such people? and should these people be preferred only by the merit of them hanging on to the same job due to  his lack of competence or initiative? should this mans credentials take precedence over another performer who may have jumped jobs in the interest of his personal growth but in process also grown an organization that he worked in?
Should a recruiter blindly reject the job hopper?
Some reasons why I feel we should consider them...
Adaptability:
Job hoppers can gain more experience and skills from each new environment they work in, so more roles, environments and sectors means more experience. As well as this, job hoppers may have honed their relationship building skills, being able to quickly integrate into teams and build rapport. And using their skills in different jobs and environments will have helped to keep their skills sharp.
Signs of ambition and high achievement:
In the throes of competition a change in job could be a sign of takeing innitiative and being ambitious for progress.
Risk Taking Ability:
The old is known and the new can be a risk. The ability to leap into the unknown and make a chance of it can speak for itself. Job hopping can also show that a candidate is courageous and not afraid to take a risk. Many employees stay in roles they are not happy with because it’s the path of least resistance and they are not comfortable with the risks associated with moving. Job hoppers are often bold enough to take the risk of making the move. It means they may be more flexible and may be prepared to take on new roles in your company.
There is an obvious criticism of job hoppers in that they may be unsettled and aimless, but, many people go through a phase in their career when they are simply searching for the right role and this is commonly seen at the start of one’s career; so, don’t frown too hard on graduates who change roles very frequently in the first five years as they may just be looking for the right fit – and who knows your company could be it. This can also happen to candidates who are in career transition. Just make sure you interview them closely to ensure your role is right for them.
Also, don’t over look the fact that job hopping could be simply as a result of the difficult climate – and the job hopping may have largely been out of their control, e.g. relocation, redundancy, mergers and acquisitions, reduction in permanent contracts, etc. In these circumstances, job hopping does not necessarily suggest a lack of commitment or focus, which means they can still be an asset to your business.
looking forward to your views on this ...............

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Exp.: 4,5 years in respective field.

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Can Leadership Abilities be Detected in Brain Scans

Can leadership abilities be detected in brain scans?

Whilst the debate about good leadership source is engaging a larger and larger number of HR professionals and business leaders, and is becoming the more and more passionate in a bid to ultimately find out if leadership is an inborn quality or can it actually be learned, scientists are investigating if it is, instead, a cerebral matter.

Debate about leadership has so far being limited to two main aspects: the “human factor” and the “trainability factor”, scientists believe that leadership abilities might, instead, relate to a “biological factor”.

If a day will come in which head-hunters, in order to take decisions about recruiting senior managers, will be prompted to ask brain scans instead of scrutinising CVs and organising assessment centres is anybody’s guess. Nonetheless, the pioneering study underway at Reading University (UK), whatever the outcome and although it is too early to deem it promising, seems to be, if anything, really interesting.

The investigation is conducted by Dr Kevin Money, of Henley Business School, now part of Reading University, who explains the aims and objectives of the investigation: "We hope to look at how leaders from different sectors make decisions, what actually leads people to move from making good to bad decisions, what goes on in people's minds and how they make those choices."

The outset of the investigation has seen protagonist Sir John Madejski, a leading British business leader, who after having been prepared by a team of scientists was gently wheeled into a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan, where he spent 45 minutes.

During this time Sir John Madejski was not just passively waiting for the machine to perform its scan activities, on the contrary, he was called to perform decision making activities, by completing a number of exercises.

The activities carried out by Sir John were looked on by Professor Douglas Saddy of Reading's Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics.

Sir John was basically taking a series of financial decisions which were confirmed pressing the buttons of a special keypad put inside the MRI scanner.

"In this case", explains Professor Saddy, "what he is being asked to do is make a judgement about whether given a certain set of information a short-term reward would be better than a long-term reward".

While Sir John was performing his decision making activity into the scan, by pressing the keypad, his brain activity was measured by the cutting-edge £1m MRI scanner.

Obviously the investigation carried out with the help of Sir John will not be enough to reach reliable conclusions; he was, in fact, the first volunteer who contributed his availability to start the experiment. It must be said that Sir John was not a completely casual choice; in fact, Sir John endowing a Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School is one of its main, possibly the main, University’s private supporter.

Sir Madejski was enthusiastic about the experiment and has promised to support the study encouraging other leading businessmen to lend their brains to the University for scanning purposes.

The experiment will, in fact, be obviously replicated a number of times in order to gather a relevant quantity of results which will, then, be aggregated in order to find out if it is actually possible to draw out some significant lessons from the experiments.

More specifically, neuroscientists, psychologists and management experts at Reading University aim to examine the brains of business chief executives and leaders in other field like the military or voluntary organisations.

Dr Money, who suggests to treat the experiment with some caution at the time being, especially as for what concerns the immediate results of the study, stresses the importance of carrying out a relevant number of experiments before being able to draw conclusions: "It's way too early, we can't look at one person's brain and conclude too much. What we can do is look at different groups, say military and business leaders, and compare leadership education within those different groups."

Using technology to examine what makes a good leader is not actually a completely new technique. For decades, in fact, organisations around the world have used psychometric tests to select candidates for senior management positions, and to try to understand what constitutes a good leader.

However, psychometrics is a controversial science, having supporters and detractors as well.

Professor Peter Saville, who belongs to the former group, claims that such a technique stretches back to the techniques used by Samuel Pepys to select naval officers, and insists that psychometric tests make a valuable contribution to the process of selecting right candidates to fill available roles: "You still find interviewers who judge people on the first minute of an interview", he says (which definitely is a no-no). "All we are doing is reducing the odds of choosing the wrong person. It's science versus sentiment".

It is difficult to say today if it is, actually, realistic believing that there is a chance that the recruitment industry, which already uses psychometrics, will have the option to resort to brain scanning or other technological means in the future.

Virginia Eastman head-hunter of Heidrick and Struggles, who recruits candidates for senior roles in global media organisations, for instance, appears to be pretty sceptical. She claims that new technologies are helping to make the process of communicating with and assessing suitable leaders more rapid, but it only goes so far: "Our whole profession is built on one thing, the consensus that we all know what good looks like, and that we make that judgement. No machine can replace that".

According to Mrs Eastman, although neuroscientists and psychologists believe they can make a real contribution to head-hunters’ understanding of what makes leaders effective, those whose job it is to select leaders still believe it is more of an art than a technology.

However, it is extremely important do not forget that, whatever technology will be able to achieve and bring to the profession, brain scans (provided the final finding of the study carried out at Reading University will be successful) and tests, of whatever kind they could be, should not be used to make final selection decisions.

Both the CIPD and the British Psychological Society (BPS), in fact, recommend that tests have not to be used in a judgmental, final way. Torrington et al. (2008) stress the idea that tests results have to be used only to stimulate discussion with candidates and that every time recruiters use tests, feedback needs to be given to candidates.

The CIPD also warns that using test results to take final recruitment decision could contravene legal regulations (in the UK the 1998 Data Protection Act), so that they can only be used as part of a wider process where suggestions and indications received from tests results could be backed by other resources.

Additionally, Ceci and Williams (2000) have also warned of the risks related to the use of norm tables, pointing out that norm tables change over time, so that using an old test with old norm might very likely result to be deceptive.

Tests and scans might possibly be used with moderation and even when using them, especially if you are an experienced recruiter, do not neglect what your personal feelings and sensations suggest.

Last but not least, brain scans are very likely to be extremely expensive if you require a £1 m scanner to perform them and, very likely, also not so immediately available even once you have decided to resort to them. To cut a long story short, it is not likely that you will be able to use them any time soon.