Welcome to the April 27, 2005 issue of The Total View

Your resource for cutting-edge news, tips, and tools to help you hire, manage, and motivate top-performing employees.

If you are receiving this issue as a forward, and want your own subscription, visit
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=11&c=292

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In This Issue
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1. Cognitive Skills: A Smart Way to Hire Employees.
2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #389 to #394.
3. Liar, Liar Pants on Fire.
4. How Can You Change The Way You Deal With the Flood of Resumes in Just 7 Minutes?
5. Test Your Interviewing I.Q.

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The Total View is written and published each Wednesday by Ira S. Wolfe, founder of Success Performance Solutions. (Yes, Ira writes every article, every week!) and is distributed with permission by The Chrysalis Corporation.

Ira S. Wolfe 2005 - All Rights Reserved. Reprints and other distribution by permission only.

To learn more about The Chrysalis Corporation or to read back issues of The Total View, visit our web site at
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=12&c=292

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1. Cognitive Skills: A Smart Way to Hire Employees
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What manager isn't thrilled to hire a quick-thinking, articulate, fast-acting employee? When you come across an employee like this, you instantly begin dreaming about him hitting the ground running and leaving the training gates in a burst of dust. But all too often, a few months pass and your world crashes. This up-and-coming star resigns and leaves for greener pastures.

Many organizations are learning through job analysis that a significant cause of high turnover is due to hiring individuals with general, or cognitive, abilities too high for the job. It's nice to hire "super-star" employees but only if you can put their extra horsepower to good use.

Hiring fast learners has its advantages. Employers can cut down training time. These high ability individuals absorb and understand new information quickly.

The downside is that these same super-smart employees get bored easily as soon as the job is no longer challenging. By hiring quick starters for a moderately challenging or routine job, you bore the employee to tears as soon as they learn the job.

One client recently found this out the hard way. After a quick start, she discovered that an employee was absent from work more and more often. Ironically, the employee applied for a promotion. Expecting she would be a terrible job match for the new position, her employer fully expected to lay her off. Was she ever surprised!

After receiving her TotalView Assessment Benchmark score, her employer was shocked to learn that her abilities placed her in the top 30 percentile of the population. When asked during the interview why she should be considered for a promotion when she missed so many days at work, the employee admitted she was able to do the five-day job in only two days. She just stayed home those extra days rather than be bored at work. The employer agreed - her work was excellent.

Instead of losing this employee, they tapped her potential by increasing her responsibilities and putting all those "smarts" to good use.

Assessing cognitive skills today provides information to the employer as critical as personality traits when hiring candidates and promoting employees. But cognitive skills shouldn't be confused with "IQ" or education. What most managers mean when they talk about "smart" is general abilities or cognitive skills, not IQ. Cognitive abilities suggest how quickly and accurately an individual can think logically and sequentially through formulas, read and comprehend directions, think on his or her feet, visualize in three dimensions and think in the abstract.

How do cognitive abilities affect work performance? Let's compare the careers of two physicians. Both have graduated college and medical school with honors. Both have completed residencies at world-renowned medical centers. One became a pharma researcher, the other an emergency room physician in a trauma center.

The researcher has abilities in the 3 to 4 range, in the lower one-third of the population. After completing the TotalView Assessment, he was upset about his "scores". He argues, "I have never failed a test before in my life.(FYI - you don't fail personality "tests". They just compare your style and abilities to the rest of the population.) I have a 200 IQ and am one of the top scientists in the world. The test must be wrong."

Actually the "test" was right. While described by colleagues as brilliant, he was also described as thorough, meticulous, and fastidious. He checked, double-checked, and triple-checked all his work, perfect for a career in clinical trials and research. Fast and "quick on the draw" were not descriptors ever used to describe his behavior.

The ER physician had abilities in the 9 and 10 range, or the upper 10th percentile of the population. Put yourself in the shoes of an ER doc in the trauma center of a major metropolitan teaching hospital wedged between the interstate and inner city. Imagine how many fast decisions need to be made after a major traffic accident or gang was. Trauma and emergency physicians don't have time to think, they need to react....fast. They also don't have room for error. ER docs don't get many second chances nor the time to study options when someone's live in hanging in the balance. They don't get to contemplate "what ifs". They don't always get a chance to practice before they treat.

While both physicians are very skilled and respected, making different choices about their specialty tracks could have resulted in very different outcomes. When I asked the physician who chose the career in research why he didn't choose emergency medicine, he replied, "I could never keep up with that pace. I hate to be rushed into making the wrong decision." That's EXACTLY what cognitive skills measure! Cognitive abilities don't measure learned intelligence or knowledge, they measure how quickly people can process what they know and learn what they don't. For research the work requires a more structured, methodical, formulaic approach. In the ER, the workload is fast, furious and unpredictable.

Cognitive skills played a major role in helping these physicians choose the right career tracks. Cognitive skills help employers match the right people to the right jobs, reduce employee turnover and improve job satisfaction.

Hire employees with the "right" skills and personality. Learn more about TotalView Assessment System and view sample results at:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=23&c=292

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2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #389 to #394.
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Fact #289: The aging population could result in rising average patient acuity, which could in turn requires higher nurse and physician staffing levels. (Source: HRSA)

Fact #290: Total requirements for FTE RNs are expected to increase from approximately 2 million in 2000 to 2.8 million in 2020 (a 41 percent increase). Requirements for FTE LPNs are expected to increase from 618,000 in 2000 to 905,000 in 2020 (a 46 percent increase). There is an expected increase in FTE nurse aide and home health aide requirements from 1.5 million in 2000 to 2.3 million in 2020 (a 50 percent increase). (Source: HRSA)

Fact #391: Our society is aging. Between 1870 and 1990, the number of U.S. citizens aged 65 and older grew from 1 million to approximately 32 million. By 2030, the proportion of people over 65 will be 20% of the population. (Source: U.S. Census)

Fact #392: As a result of an aging society and more active lifestyles for "older" Americans, the above 55 years old crowd described as follows: aging boomer (ages 55-64), young-old (ages 65-74), old-old (ages 75-84), and oldest old (ages 85+).

Fact #393: Baby boomers has 27 million more people than the one that preceded it and about 10 million more than the one that follows.

Fact #394: As 38 million baby boomers reached employment age in the 1970s and 1980s, the workplace exploded by 50 percent. In the decade following 2010, the portion of the population under age 45 - the principal talent pool for managers and workers - will shrink by 6 percent.

Don't be caught in storm without all the facts. "The Perfect Labor Storm Fact Book: Why Worker Shortages Won't Go Away" is a must-read leading edge forecast that predicts workforce trends for decades to come. Get a copy today - $7.95 includes shipping. Follow this link to learn more:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=7&c=292

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3. Liar, Liar Pants on Fire.
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How many people lie?

- 10,000,000+ taxpayers -lie on their tax forms" according to the IRS.
- 6,640,000 job applicants based on "80% of all resumes are misleading".
- 489,530 attorneys, they mostly "work to benefit their clients, not to arrive at truth".
- 67,050,000 workers based on 50% or "half of American workers".
- 100% of dating couples surveyed lied to each other in about a third of their conversations.
- 20% - 30% of middle managers surveyed had written fraudulent internal reports.
- 95% of participating college students surveyed were willing to tell at least one lie to a potential employer to win a job, and 41% had already done so.
- We are lied to about 200 times each day.
- Most people lie to others once or twice a day and deceive about 30 people per week.
- The average is 7 times per hour if you count all the times people lie to themselves.
- We lie in 30 to 38% of all our interactions.
- College students lie in 50% of conversations with their mothers.

Source: The numbers above are based partially on information at the 2000 Census web site and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Looking for an assessment to help you screen out dishonest candidates? Visit the following link to learn more about the Counter-Behavior Index (CBI) -- You can even view sample report online:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=4&c=292

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4. How Can You Change The Way You Deal With the Flood of Resumes in Just 7 Minutes?
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The Resu-mess is back! If piles of resumes and crowded e-mail in-boxes have got you frustrated, you NEED to preview Total APS in action.

What is Total APS? It is an applicant tracking and assessment system that puts your recruiting and selection efforts on auto pilot. Total APS even provides you assess to the TotalView assessment (see the first article in this newsletter).

Total APS frees up your time to communicate with only QUALIFIED candidates and helps you ensure a good job fit between a person and the job. Total APS can save your company is to experience the system in action. View our online7-minute, no-obligation video demonstration of the Total APS system here:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=26&c=292

Can't view it online? Contact us today for a Free CD-ROM on How to Screen and Interview Candidates Online. Follow this link and type APS in the comment box:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=18&c=292

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5. Test Your Interviewing I.Q.
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Interviewing is still the most commonly used selection tool even though the traditional interview is effective at identifying a top performer as few as 1 in every 14 times. It's not always the fault or due to the inexperience of the interviewer either. The laws are complicated, time is always too short and the candidates are a lot more savvy and have more time to prepare.

Test your interviewing skills on us (see link below).

Take this test and determine how well you know the ins and outs of effective interviewing.

Don't hesitate to forward this test to your manager or boss. We won't tell where it came from! Follow this link to test your Interviewing IQ:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=10&c=292

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Contact Information:

The Chrysalis Corporation
2001 Hammock Drive
Valdosta, GA 31602
229-257-0665