Profiling tools : Divine or Devil ?

What are profiling and assessment tools, and whatis their role in your organization ?

It’s a pretty confusing world out there. In theinformation explosion there have been a profusion of “best in class” tools thathave become available for businesses around the world. The most confusingaspect of these tools is that the majority have no right or wrong answers andare generally profiling tools. An assessment implies that there is a correctanswer and that the person taking the test is graded against some form ofmarking key.  The assessment tools aregenerally used to compare someone against a set benchmark for a variety ofapplications.

In a broad sense, this article deals with thepeople in the organization and looks at a variety of profiling and assessmenttool categories and their usage.

These tools can be broken down into three categories.

• Individualassessment tools
  • These are centered around producing some form ofprofile about an individual. These are often mistakenly called “personalityprofiles”. Each tool measures something different and provides a separatedimension to the profile. Most of these tools are a reasonably accurateassessment of the person taking the assessment as long as they have been honestand forthright in their answers. Over the years, many of these tools havedeveloped variants that measure different aspects of the base.
• Fit tools
  • This group of tools are an extension of theindividual assessments that allow recruiters or organizations to assess wherethe team members “fit”. Even this measurement of fit, has multiple dimensions.
    • Fit to a profile – this type of tool assumes thatthe organization has a good definition of the ideal “type” of person that theyare seeking (or want the employee to be) The ideal standard could be definedassessing some high performing team members as the “ideal” and then comparingthe individual to a “standard”
    • Fit to a group – This type of tool assumes that theorganization is seeking high functioning teams. Many teams are high functioningdue to the convergence of habits of diverse team members. Despite diversebackgrounds, teams will function successfully if the team members have adominant set of common habits.  Thesetools assess whether individuals’ dominant habits in the workplace are similarto the dominant habits of the team. This has applications in recruitment orpotentially allowing employees to shift teams to a team more suited to theirdominant habits.
• Organizationalassessment tools
  • Organizations traditionally measure performance onfinancial data and that data reflects what happened in the past. Sometimes thistime lag can be large, and the lagging nature of the measure does not provideuseful and immediate direction. Organization tools that look at the “soft”aspects of the organization, areas that are traditionally hard to measure andquantify provide leading indicators of performance. These measures can providea set of non-financial key performance indicators that more accurately reflectthe current and future state of the organization.
  • Engagement or disengagement measures are anotheraspect of organizational assessment tools. These tools look to measure, down toteam and individual level, the levels of disengagement and potential cost tothe organization of this disengagement.

After reading all of that, you may have realizedthat this merely scratches the surface of the tools available.

Each set of tools provides a different, yet similarview of people and the organization.

Part of my role as a mentor and trainer is toprovide clarity and seek out the best tools for your organization to be usingfor profiling and assessments.

The key factor to consider is that any peopleassessment or profiling tool only gives you a portion of the answer. The toolswill not provide 100% of the answer when recruiting. They will indicate somethingabout the person being profiled and whether it appears to fit the role or team.The organization assessment tools allow companies to place a numeric measure ondata that previously was not part of the data set provide a leading indicatorof future performance.