AWWA ACE65095

Great organizations, like successful athletic programs, recognize that meeting the challenge to deliver ever increasing returns to shareholders in the private sector or ever increasing value to customers in a public utility all begins with their players. Sometimes the need is to find and hire that "blue chip player" for a specific need. Often you want to find or develop the equivalent of the "great athlete" that has the potential to fill a number of roles in your organization. And, as an organizational leader, you're always expected to deliver results by making the most of the talent already on your team. Unfortunately, unlike athletes, employees and potential employees don't usually come with measurable statistics to help assess whether and where they can best fit it into your organization. Research has shown that typically available information such as grades, resumes, job application information, even prior experience and that gained from most interviews are unreliable predictors of performance in a job. This is where progressive organizations have found that today's whole person assessments can provide information that goes below the surface. These tools allow you to understand your people as well as or better than they understand themselves including thinking style and speed, behavioral characteristics and motivational interests. Armed with this reliable and objective information and knowledge of what specific jobs require, organizations maximize the most important factor in determining long term job success, that is, a person's fit with the job. Whether it's a hiring decision, a promotional decision, succession planning or determining the right coaching or development actions, learn how this type of assessment system allows leading organizations to acquire the information needed to unleash the full potential of their Human Resources. In the author's opinion, the finest system for whole person assessment is an assessment called the Profile XT™. This assessment measures a person's thinking style (verbal skill, verbal reasoning, numerical skill, numerical reasoning and learning index), behavioral traits, and occupational interests. More importantly, this assessment system provides the mechanism to compare individual results to what a particular job requires for these same attributes. Because of numerous user friendly reports, this comparison can easily be used for hiring or promotional decisions, coaching and development, succession planning, and career planning. This paper explains how such a system can be integrated into an organization's personnel planning systems.