Welcome to the June 16, 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. Employee Interviews - Looking Through Rose-Colored Glasses

2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #161 to #165

3. 21 Reasons Why Performance Reviews Fail

4. Tired of Hiring Headaches? Start SELECTing top performers.

5. Create a Competency-Based Behavioral Interview Guide for as little as $60

6. What's The Most important number in your company? You May Be Surprised.

7. Complimentary Online Mini Behavioral Profile

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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

=============================
1. Employee Interviews - Looking Through Rose-Colored Glasses?
=============================

Continued from June 2, 2004 - Putting Observation to the Test.
To view Part 1, go to http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/tv_observation_and_interviewing.htm

Last week's column ended discussing how we see the world often biases our opinions and judgement, which significantly lowers the reliability of the interview in selecting the right people for the job.

-----------------
Employee Interviews - Looking Through Rose-Colored Glasses?
-----------------

In addition to looking through our own rose-colored glasses, how likely is it that your mood at any one moment in time might affect your ability to interview fairly and without bias?

Suppose for a minute that you have an interview scheduled in five minutes. Just as you are about to go down to the conference room, you receive a frantic call from your son who was just arrested for drugs. Or you are waiting on pins and needles to receive the results of a suspicious biopsy? Or you just got off the phone with your biggest customer and they cancelled the contract for next year - could any of these situations affect your interviewing and observation objectivity? If so, then the interview does not stand up to the test of reliability required to be used alone in hiring and promotion decisions.

Any time your opinions and judgment can be affected by your emotions and/or the emotions of the candidates, then reliability goes down the tubes. The lower the reliability, the less defensible is your decision. And the less defensible, the more risk you and your company are exposed to.

As a result of the Internet, the interview is becoming even more unreliable than ever. We have all read at one time or other the list of what you can and cannot legally ask a candidate. (Download Our SPS Interview Guide to Questions You Can and Can't Ask - http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/pdf/what_interview_questions_can_you_ask.pdf).

Frustrated by not knowing what to ask a candidate, many managers hop on the Internet right before the interview and download a list of questions. The problem with using the Internet to build your bank of questions is that many candidates have raided the cookie jar before managers get there. Candidates simply are learning the ins and outs of how to use the Internet to get jobs faster than hiring managers are learning to use it for hiring.

As an example of what's going on, we recently added the phrase "interview questions" to our list of targeted search engine words. This seemed like a great way to attract web searchers to our Interview Generator, a program to generate behavioral interview guides.
The good news was that our traffic doubled during the month of May. The bad news is that ten times more candidates found our site looking for the questions they would be asked than managers were requesting information about how to conduct a more effective interview. Candidates have the time and motivation to prepare for their interviews. Managers don't. They are so busy doing other things that their good intentions get waylaid.

When working with candidates, it is also not uncommon for them to complain about how unprepared or unskilled the interviewer was at running the interview. When well-prepared candidates meet the inexperienced or untrained interviewer, the candidate actually controls the pace and direction of the interview, impressing the hiring manager with his or her confidence but essentially biasing the whole process. Many organizations are losing the battle for top talent because their selection process turns off the candidate. For top talent, it is still a candidate's market and businesses can't afford to let the good ones get away.

Another problem with just using questions that sound good is that great questions for one job may just not be that predictive of success in another. For instance, many times managers ask us to recommend questions to uncover self-motivation and the ability to work independently.

Here's the rub. By asking a candidate how he or she took initiative in a prior job and worked independently is only the first step. You as the interviewer need to dig deeper which means that you not only have to be good at asking questions.but even more importantly at listening to how the candidate responds and then asking another question.

What happens all too often is that the inexperienced interviewer is impressed by the candidates first response and they move on to another question. The skilled interviewer knows better - dig deeper to learn the how, why, when and who else was involved.

By accepting at face value the candidates response to how they motivate themselves and work independently, managers often find themselves in for a BIG surprise. Those very employees who wowed you during the interview with their initiative often begin making decisions on their own without your permission and rarely asking for help, even when they need it.

That was probably not what you had in mind when you considered self-motivation. It's now apparent that taking initiative and willing to act independently have shades of gray and despite great questions and the right answers, the interview did not pull out the information that you really needed to know  that is, how will the employee follow policy when no one else is around and how effective will these decisions be?

Employee interviews on the whole test for past behaviors; personality tests can help preview how they will respond in the future.

And one more thing. What makes the interview even more unpredictable is that not only does the interviewer need to be unbiased and objective, but the interviewee must be honest in his/her responses. HA! Isnt the job of the interviewee to sell you on their abilities? What are the chances that a candidate has not prepped for the interview, especially for more key and strategic positions, or will not stretch the truth anywhere from just a bit to pure fabrication in order to put his/her best foot forward?

The interview is laced with traps for falsehoods and inaccuracies and yet it remains in the minds of many managers as the best predictor of success and the safest choice for employee assessment.

What can a hiring manager do to lower the risk of hiring the wrong person? You'll have to wait until next week's issue of The Total View.....or call us today for a no-cost consultation.

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/pdf/Testing_and_Assessment_Guide.pdf.

Reduce your risk and hire competence with confidence. Visit our assessment center at .
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/mgt_sales_pre_employment.htm.

=============================
2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #161 to #165.
=============================
Fact #161
In 1950, there were seven working age people for every elderly person in the United States. By 2030, there will be only three.

Fact #162
Since 1950, the number of people aged 65 and older in the United States has increased from 8% to 12%.

Fact #163
By the end of 2002, the number of older workers in the labor force aged 55 to 64 - employed or seeking work - increased to 62.9%, the highest level during the postwar era.

Fact #164
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 25% of the working population will reach retirement age by 2010, resulting in a potential worker shortage of nearly 10 million.

Fact #165
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people aged 55 and older will increase to 73% by 2020, while the number of younger workers will grow only 5%.

=============================
3. 21 Reasons Why Performance Reviews Fail.
=============================

1. The reviewer and employee have a personal friendship outside of work and both individuals can't differentiate their manager-employee role from their friend-friend relationship.

2. The reviewer and the employee see themselves as part of a team. Team members are supposed to encourage one another, be supportive in good and bad times. But when the manager has to provide negative feedback or discipline the employee, these actions are viewed as divisive.

3. When not provided regularly, annual (or even less periodic) reviews can be based on most recent performance, not performance over the course of the year. The results go both ways. Employees who put on their best behavior around review time get favorable ratings and the employee who has a bad couple of weeks gets punished.

4. Performance reviews are only scheduled when an employee is not performing up to expectations or a company needs to terminate/lay-off the employee.

5. "You know nobody's perfect and there is always room for improvement." The manager doesn't believe in rewarding an employee with a "10" (out of 10) even when he/she deserves it. Some employers actually use a rating scale of 1 to 9 because no employee deserves a 10 in their minds.

Source: Ira S. Wolfe.

To read more, follow this link below:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/why_performance_reviews_fail.htm

=============================
4. Tired of Hiring Headaches? Start SELECTing top performers.
=============================

SELECT!
A pre-employment screening tool to identify work-related behaviors such as Positive Service Attitude, Accountability, Frustration Tolerance, Acceptance of Diversity, Multi-tasking and more.... plus a Validity Check and Integrity Index.

Each customized report includes a step by step interview guide including recommended interview questions.

SELECT is scored on-line but can be administered on paper or computer.

The following report versions are available:

--Customer Service
--Administrative Support
--Retail Sales Associates
--Entry Level Retail Management
--Call Centers
--Production & Distribution
--Healthcare
--Personal Service
--Convenience Store Associates
--Hospitality
--Office Staffing

To learn more about SELECT and view sample reports online, visit:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/select_main.htm

=============================
5. Create a Competency-Based Behavioral Interview Guide for as little as $60.
=============================

Interviewers need to know what to look for in a candidate's response. Online Interview Generator(r) pairs specific "target behaviors" with each interview question.

Online Interview Generator(r) (IG) provides users with highly customized behavioral interview guides for interviewing job candidates. IG users are hiring managers, employers, human resources professionals, and consultants.

As an IG user, you can choose an already- developed interview guide from our Job Library of over 40 standard job titles, then quickly and easily edit to fit your open job. Or, you can choose to design your own interview guide from "scratch" using our extensive database of 65 competencies, and over 1,500 different target behaviors (interview "answers"), and corresponding interview questions.

IG is extremely versatile and flexible - it can be used for selection in every industry, business and organizational environment. IG is inexpensive and cost-effective; clients can purchase interview units separately, or through a site license.

To View a sample Interview Guide created with Interview Generator, follow this link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/pdf/IG_sample_mgr.pdf

=============================
6. What's The Most important number in your company? You May Be Surprised.
=============================

That number is, how much does it cost you every time an employee quits or is fired? The facts may surprise, or worse yet, scare you.

A conservative estimate of the cost of turnover for hourly employees is 25 percent of the annual salary. Personally, our experience places the actual cost closer to 50 and higher when you consider lost opportunity costs, lost productivity and even theft, absenteeism, and other counter-productive and disruptive behaviors.

The costs for salaried employees has ranged from 1.5 times annual salary to upwards of 14 times annual salary.

But high turnover costs are not isolated to big business. A small business paying an employee an hourly wage as low as $5.25 per hour incurs the minimum cost of $3,528.58 (25% x $14,114.10) every time an employee turns.

Other examples of turnover costs are:

$7.00 per hour = $4,704.70 in turnover costs
$10.00 = $6,721.00
$15.00 = $10, 081.50
$20.00 = $13,442.00

Follow this link to anonymously calculate your company's cost of turnover:
Click Here

=============================
7. Complimentary Online Mini Behavioral Profile.
=============================

We often get requests from our readers asking if we have a "quick and dirty" complimentary behavioral profile that they and their co-workers can experience -- WE DO! Follow the following link to respond to a our mini DISC based profile. It will take you less than 30 seconds to respond, and the accuracy will amaze you. Feel free to forward this link to your coworkers and boss.

Here's the link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/behavioral_profile.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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