Welcome to the August 11, 2004 issue of The Total View

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

=============================
In This Issue
=============================
1. Five Real-Life Lessons MY Clients Learned From Using Online
Personality Tests.
2. Best Practice Tips and Resources
3. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #196 to #200.
4. How Much Time Are You Wasting Sorting Through Unqualified Resumes?
5. Select and match entry-level applicants to the right job.
6. Problem Drinking Staggers Business Bottom Lines.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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 2004 - 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/remote.html?ltk=1222681_31118923

=============================
1. Five Real-Life Lessons MY Clients Learned From Using Online
Personality Tests.
=============================

At least once a day I'm asked this question: "Is there an online
personality test that can evaluate an employee for everything from honesty to
drive?" I love that question. After all, it is my business to know
the answer.

For two years, I have enjoyed good fortune and opportunity to assess
applicants for positions in sales, management and supervision. Each
company that hired me wanted the magic bullet that only hits a bulls-eye
when hiring or promoting employees.

I cannot share everything I know because of proprietary and top-secret
competitive information. (My clients use the term top-secret.) They
believe the information I provide gives them a distinct competitive
advantage in recruiting top talent and retaining them. A few clients have
agreed, however, to allow me to share five critical lessons learned from
working with Success Performance Solutions.

These lessons save time, money and resources for those who use them.
How? By teaching employers how to hire and retain employees who exceed
expectations. Equally important, employers can learn how to avoid hiring
or promoting folks who "talk the talk, but can't walk the walk."
First, learn these lessons. Then, for those who missed it, read last week's
column, "What You Don't Know About Hiring Costs Can Hurt You!" This
can be found at
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222682_31118923.

Five Lessons to Learn

Lesson 1: Identify complacent applicants before making a job offer.
Sometimes the barrier between being a star and poor performer is
complacency. Experience and high-level ability can be overshadowed when the
person ranks high on the stability factor. More than 50% of the
employees who under-performed in our clients' predictive studies frankly are
okay-not-being-okay and lack any urgency to change. Then, there are
employees who believe they should be evaluated for effort even though the
employers measures success by outcome. These categories of people,
tagged poor performers, believe tomorrow is another day meant to make up
what can't be accomplished today.

Lesson 2: Always put a round peg in a round hole.
For one-third of employees who failed to meet expectations, factors
affecting performance included lack of experience, job dissatisfaction,
career mis-matches, and manager-employee personality conflicts. By
re-assigning several of these employees to different managers, branches, or
jobs, at least half of these employees remained with the organization to
become productive employees.

Lesson 3: Learning curves keep employees challenged. Bored employees
move on to other companies.
Managers often describe their top performers as smart and intelligent.
Our studies show this just isn't true. Although hiring applicants with
more skills than necessary to do the job decreases training time, that
tactic increases the likelihood for boredom and disenchantment with the
job with the predictable result of high turnover. You should hire
applicants with the right skills rather than applicants with "excess
capacity" just in case you need the additional skills. If you hire individuals
with more ability than the job requires, you must have challenging
responsibilities or rapid opportunity for advancement. Otherwise, these
employees soon leave for more challenges and are likely to be hired by
your business competitors.

Lesson 4: Personality tests provide a deeper applicant pool.
Do not fear that personality tests will screen out qualified
candidates. Actually, experience proves the opposite. Based on an accurate top
performer profile and looking back at screening criteria, our clients now
realize they often unintentionally and mistakenly bypassed or
overlooked several qualified people in the past. By looking for people with the
right abilities and personality trait types, the size of their
qualified labor pool expanded.

Lesson 5: Successful hiring decisions hinge on choosing people with the
right employee motivation, core competencies, and behaviors, not
special people with extraordinary skills and talents.

Hiring the best and the brightest is not as important as hiring
individuals with appropriate skills and a good personality job match. Keep in
mind, most top performing salespeople and managers had just average
ability and a good job match. That's good news for hiring managers. As one
manager told us, "We now know that we don't need to be recruiting MBAs
on college campuses but setting up a kiosk in the mall."

How can you learn more about the tools and techniques used by our
clients? See "Best Practice Tips and Resources" below.

=============================
2. Best Practice Tips and Resources.
=============================

To learn more about hiring best practices, download the U.S. Department
of Labor publication, TESTING AND ASSESSMENT: AN EMPLOYER'S GUIDE TO
GOOD PRACTICES
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222683_31118923.

Interviews Questions - What You Can and Can't Ask.
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222684_31118923

Test your Interviewing IQ at:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222685_31118923

=============================
3. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #201 to #205.
=============================

One imminent threat for employers is how to continue funding employee
health care premimums and still remain profitable. To add fuel to this
fire, worker shortages in several high demand specialty areas will force
employees to take off more time from work in order to get the proper
care they need due to a lack of providers. This is occuring just at a
time when new births are higher than they have been for years and more and
more health care providers will be needed to care for our aging boomers
and old-old population. Fewer providers also means the cost for
services will only increase.

Fact #201: Since 1996, graduates of U.S. medical schools who enter
obstetrics and gynecology training programs has dropped 23 percent.

Fact #202: The number of residents training in orthopedic specialties
dropped from 3,029 in 1993-1994 to 2,759 in 1998-1999,

Fact #203: Residents training in the area of cardiovascular disease has
been steadily declining between the same period, from 2,440 to 2,055.

Fact #204: In radiology, 4,236 residents entered the field in 1993-1994
compared with 3,687 in 1998-1999.

Fact #205: The number of oncologists in training dropped from 659 in
1992-1993 to 247 in 1998-1999.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association.

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
your copy today - $7.95 includes no shipping costs for limited time
only. Follow this link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222686_31118923

=============================
4. How Much Time Are You Wasting Sorting Through Unqualified Resumes?
=============================

Time is money -- and you may be wasting too much of both if you are
having to manually deal with stacks of resumes from unqualified
applicants.

Eliminate The Hassles and Headaches Associated With Screening Candidate
with Total APS.

The Total Applicant Processing System enables the small and medium
sized employer to do online recruiting and screen applicants with
customizable and scorable filtering questions with a click of the mouse.

Several pre-employment assessments are built right into to the system,
which helps to streamline your recruiting and selection process. Total
APS was designed for small to medium size business and has pricing
options to meet any budget.

Use Total APS to recruit and screen applicants for your next job
opening. View more information at:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222687_31118923

=============================
5. Select and match entry-level applicants to the right job.
=============================

The FirstView Job-Fit Indicator is an entry- level pre-employment
assessment that measures:

--Rules
--Extroversion
--Assertiveness
--Teaming
--Sensitivity
--Organization
--Social Desirability
--Cognitive Ability

It's quick to administer and deliverable online. It's an EXTREMELY
cost-effective solution that help you take the guesswork out of selecting
candidates who are well-matched to a position. The includes 15
predefined entry level job profiles (follow the link below to view the jobs
represented) that enables you to implement a selection solution fast.

Follow this link to view sample FirstView reports online:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222688_31118923

=============================
6. Problem Drinking Staggers Business Bottom Lines.
=============================

Health care costs are skyrocketing. Layoffs are increasing. And whether
or not job and personal stress is enough to drive people to drink, the
cost of problem drinkers to businesses is staggering.

Problem drinking is the primary or secondary cause of many medical
conditions, including heart and liver disease and cancer.

Problem drinking also contributes to unintentional injuries like car
accidents, burns and falls. In addition, alcohol interferes with many
medications making them either useless or toxic or both.

Problem drinkers also use the emergency room 70 percent more often than
people without drinking problems and stay in hospitals almost two days
longer.

Problem drinkers don't only boost health care costs but kill
productivity as well. Hangovers and health related problems drive problem
drinkers to call in sick or just skip work altogether 2 times as often as
workers who don't have a drinking problem. They also tend to arrive late
and leave early.

How common are alcohol related problems in business? For every 1000
employees, there are:

--84 problem drinkers.
--127 employee family members who are problem drinkers.
--453 lost work days due to sickness, injury and absence as a result of
problem drinking.
--417 work day of lowered productivity.
--55 extra nights spent in the hospital.
--41 extra emergency room visits.

How much does alcohol-related problems cost businesses each year?

--For a 1000 employee company:
--$56,686 in work days lost to sickness, injury and accidents.
--$66,083 for extra nights spent in hospitals
--$265,762 in extra health care costs for employers and employees for
treatment of alcohol- related health problems.

To learn how much problem drinking might be costing your business,
follow the link below.

Source: Ensuring Solutions to Alcohol Problems, George Washington
University Medical Center

Calculate how much problem drinking is costing your business. Follow
this link for the "Alcohol Cost Calculator":
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222689_31118923

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Contact Information:

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

e-mail: mike@chrysaliscorporation.com

To learn more about The Chrysalis Corporation, visit:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222681_31118923
To send this message to a friend, please go here:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/remote.html?ltk=1222690_31118923