Recruiting and Hiring – Lighthouse Consulting Partners LLC

Why Interviewers Tend To Hire Themselves and What It Costs

By Patty Crabtree, CEO Lighthouse Consulting Partners

One of the most consistent patterns in hiring is also one of the least examined. Interviewers tend to respond more favorably to candidates who think, communicate, and approach problems the way they do. The decisive candidate feels confident and capable to the decisive interviewer. The methodical, detail-oriented candidate impresses the interviewer who values thoroughness above speed. The relationship-oriented candidate connects easily with the interviewer who leads the same way.

This is not bias in the way most people think of it. It does not require conscious preference or deliberate comparison. It happens naturally, quietly, and often without any awareness that it is occurring at all. And it has a significant impact on who gets hired, who gets passed over, and how well the resulting team actually functions.

Why This Happens

People tend to find comfort in familiarity. In an interview context, familiarity often comes in the form of shared work style. When a candidate processes information the way you do, frames problems the way you frame them, and communicates with a rhythm and directness that matches your own, the conversation flows easily. You feel understood. You find their answers clear and compelling. The interaction feels right in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to act on.

The reverse is equally true. When a candidate thinks or communicates differently, the conversation can feel slightly off even when the candidate is highly capable. The more deliberate communicator may seem hesitant to the fast-moving interviewer. The candidate who needs to think before responding may appear uncertain to the interviewer who values quick answers. The big-picture thinker may frustrate the detail-oriented interviewer who wants specifics.

None of these impressions necessarily reflect the candidate’s actual capability. They reflect the gap between how the candidate naturally operates and how the interviewer naturally prefers to work. This is part of what is often described as the likability factor in hiring. But it runs deeper than personality. Much of what feels like personal connection in an interview is actually a response to shared work style.

What the Research Consistently Shows

Organizations spend significant time and resources developing job requirements, compensation structures, and onboarding programs. They spend far less time examining what actually happens inside the interview conversation itself. What happens is this: two people interact for period of time and one of them forms a judgment that is shaped as much by how comfortable the interaction felt as by what the candidate actually demonstrated.

Studies on interviewing consistently show that decisions are often made early in the conversation and that the remainder of the interview is spent confirming rather than testing that initial impression. When an interviewer is immediately comfortable with a candidate because of shared work style, that comfort becomes the lens through which everything else is interpreted. Strong answers are seen as confirmation of capability. Hesitant or inconsistent answers are forgiven or explained away. The result is a hiring decision that feels confident but may have very little to do with whether the candidate will actually succeed in the role.

The Cost to the Team

Beyond the individual hire, the cumulative effect of work style favoritism is a team that gradually becomes more homogeneous. Leaders who consistently prefer candidates who share their approach end up with teams that think alike, communicate alike, and solve problems alike. In the short term, this can feel efficient. Decisions move quickly. Communication feels smooth. There is rarely friction in how people work together.

In the longer term, homogeneous teams have well-documented limitations. They miss perspectives they are not naturally inclined to seek. They generate fewer genuinely different solutions to complex problems. They are less equipped to serve a diverse range of clients, stakeholders, and situations. And they are more vulnerable to shared blind spots that no one on the team is positioned to identify.

The candidate who would have brought something genuinely different to the team was often passed over not because they lacked capability but because the interviewer never felt quite comfortable enough to see past the difference.

What Interview Discipline Actually Means

Interview discipline is frequently discussed in terms of process: structured questions, consistent scoring, defined criteria, multiple interviewers. These elements matter and they work. But the foundation of interview discipline is something more personal and more difficult. It is the willingness to understand your own work style well enough to recognize when it is influencing your evaluation of someone else.

An interviewer who values direct communication and quick decisions needs to recognize that a more deliberate, methodical candidate may be equally capable, simply different in approach. An interviewer who leads collaboratively needs to recognize that a more independent candidate is not necessarily a poor team player. An interviewer who processes information quickly needs to recognize that a candidate who pauses to think before answering is not uncertain. They are thorough.

This kind of self-awareness does not come naturally to most people because the very tendencies that shape our interviewing preferences are the same tendencies we experience as simply normal. They feel like the standard against which others should be measured, not as one approach among many equally valid ones.

Building a More Disciplined Process

The most effective interview processes build in deliberate counterweights to the natural pull of work style favoritism. A few approaches that make a meaningful difference:

Define what you are actually evaluating before the interview begins. Not general qualities like communication or problem-solving, but specific behaviors that predict success in this role, with this team and in this environment. When evaluators know exactly what they are looking for, they are less susceptible to being swayed by how comfortable the interaction felt.
Include interviewers with different work styles in the evaluation. What one interviewer reads as hesitation, another may recognize as depth. What one reads as vagueness, another may recognize as big-picture thinking. Multiple perspectives help surface what a single evaluator might miss or misread.
Separate the conversation from the evaluation. Many interviewers form and share impressions immediately after the interview when the emotional experience of the interaction is still most present. Building in time and structure for individual evaluation before group discussion reduces the influence of one interviewer’s comfort level on the rest of the panel.

The Interview as a Two-Way Assessment

Effective interviewing requires genuine curiosity about how a candidate thinks and operates, not just whether they think and operate similarly to you. When interviewers approach the conversation with that curiosity, something useful happens. They ask different questions. They listen differently. They probe where there is a difference rather than concluding that a difference is a deficiency.

The candidate who communicates differently, processes information differently, or approaches problems differently may be exactly what the team needs. Recognizing that requires interviewers to understand their own tendencies well enough to hold them lightly during the conversation.

That is what interview discipline looks like at its most meaningful level. Not just a structured process, though structure helps. But a genuine willingness to separate comfort from competence and to evaluate the candidate in front of you, not the version of yourself you would most easily recognize.

The best hiring decisions are rarely the most comfortable ones. They are the most informed ones.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC

Testing Division provides a variety of services, including an In-depth Work Style Personality assessment for new hires, staff development, career guidance and team building. Our assessment is available in 19 different languages. In addition, we offer skills testing and 360 assessments.

Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division provides leadership and management coaching, a variety of workshops including team building, communication styles, stress management, leadership training, staff planning, operations, and much more.

For more information on our services, please go to www.LighthouseConsulting.com or contact us at Info@LighthouseConsulting.com.

What We Mistake for Leadership Potential and What Actually Predicts It

By Patty Crabtree, CEO Lighthouse Consulting Partners

Leadership potential is one of the most important things an organization can try to identify. It is also one of the most consistently misjudged qualities regardless of whether the search is happening in an interview room or across a current team.

Organizations face this challenge from two directions. The first is external: hiring leaders from outside who can bring new capability and perspective. The second is internal: identifying employees ready to take on greater responsibility and make the transition from individual contributor to leader. Both decisions carry significant consequences. And in both cases, organizations tend to make the same fundamental mistake confusing the qualities that create strong impressions with the qualities that actually predict long-term leadership effectiveness.

Understanding that distinction and building the discipline to act on it, is one of the most consequential things any organization can develop.

What the Interview Reveals and What It Misses

A well-conducted interview tells you a great deal. You learn how someone thinks on their feet, how they communicate their experience, how they engage under structured conditions. These are real signals.

What an interview reveals less reliably is how someone leads when the situation is genuinely difficult, when a decision is unpopular, when a team member is struggling, when the energy and preparation that accompany an interview are long gone. The interview is a snapshot taken under favorable conditions. Leadership plays out over months and years under conditions that are far less controlled.

Relying too heavily on interview performance to predict leadership effectiveness is one of the most common hiring mistakes organizations make. Confidence is visible and compelling. Articulate communicators stand out. People who project certainty and ease create positive impressions. These qualities matter but they are not the same as leadership.

What Current Performance Reveals and What It Misses

Strong performance in a current role tells you that someone is capable, reliable, and committed. These are genuinely important qualities. What strong individual performance reveals less reliably is how someone will lead when the role requires an entirely different set of behaviors.

The skills that make someone an exceptional individual contributor are valuable. They are also different from the skills that make someone an effective leader. The engineer who solves the most complex problems may struggle when the job becomes helping others solve problems rather than solving them directly. The top salesperson who consistently exceeds their numbers may find it deeply uncomfortable to invest in the development of a struggling team member. The detail-oriented analyst who produces flawless work may frustrate a team that needs direction more than precision.

None of this reflects a failure of character or effort. It reflects a mismatch between what someone does naturally well and what the new role actually requires.

The Traps Organizations Fall Into

In external hiring, the most common mistake is the confidence trap. Confidence is one of the most frequently misread qualities in leadership assessment. A confident candidate who lacks self-awareness may perform well in structured interviews while struggling significantly when the role requires adaptability, accountability, or the ability to develop others. Confidence without competence tends to become more visible not less as leadership responsibilities increase.

In internal promotion, the most common mistake is the top performer trap. Organizations promote their best individual performers and expect them to become their best leaders. This approach is understandable as high performers are visible, their contributions are measurable, and promoting them feels like a natural reward. The problem is that individual performance and leadership effectiveness draw on fundamentally different capabilities.

In both cases, the underlying error is the same: mistaking what is easy to see for what is actually predictive.

What Actually Predicts Leadership Effectiveness

The qualities that most reliably predict whether someone will lead effectively are often harder to observe than strong interview performance or impressive metrics. They require deliberate attention and the right kinds of questions.

Consistency. Trust is built through consistent behavior not through impressive moments but through reliable, predictable action over time. Whether evaluating an external candidate or an internal employee, the question is whether their behavior holds across different circumstances, different audiences, and different levels of pressure. Inconsistency between what someone says and what they do erodes trust quietly and often invisibly until the damage is significant.

Self-awareness. Leaders who understand their own patterns with how they communicate, how they make decisions, how they respond under pressure, how their behavior affects others are significantly better positioned to grow and lead effectively. Self-awareness is not the same as self-doubt. It is the capacity to see oneself clearly enough to make intentional choices about how to show up. In an interview it shows up in how candidates discuss their own limitations. In a current employee it shows up in how they receive and act on feedback.

How they develop others. Leadership effectiveness is ultimately measured not only by what a leader accomplishes directly but by what they make possible in the people around them. Leaders who understand the strengths of their team, who invest in others’ growth, and who find genuine satisfaction in the success of their colleagues build organizations that outlast any single contribution they could make individually. Whether you are interviewing a candidate or observing a current employee, notice how they talk about the people around them with specificity and generosity, or primarily in reference to their own contributions.

How they handle being wrong. One of the most reliable predictors of leadership growth is how someone responds when their approach is not working. Leaders who can recognize when they are off course, seek input, and change direction demonstrate the adaptive capacity that long-term effectiveness requires. Those who defend their position at the expense of the outcome tend to carry that pattern into leadership where the stakes are higher and the consequences extend to an entire team.

What to Look For

In an external interview, look for patterns rather than single impressive answers. Ask for a second example when a candidate gives a compelling response genuine competence holds up across multiple situations while strong presentation skills reveal their limits more quickly. Listen for how candidates describe other people. How they talk about former colleagues and managers reveals a great deal about their interpersonal awareness and their tendency to take ownership or assign blame. Ask what they would approach differently today and listen for genuine reflection rather than a well-rehearsed answer.

In assessing internal candidates, notice how the employee shows up in group settings. Do they create space for others or primarily fill it? Pay attention to how they handle feedback. Do they approach it with curiosity or defensiveness? Observe how they behave under pressure. Leadership amplifies existing tendencies. The employee who becomes less communicative or more reactive under stress will likely bring those same patterns to a leadership role where the pressures are greater and the consequences extend to an entire team.

In both cases, have honest conversations about what leadership actually involves before any offer or promotion decision is made. A clear-eyed discussion about the shift from individual contribution to people development, accountability, and sustained consistency reveals a great deal about whether someone is genuinely ready or simply ready for the next step.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

A failed leadership hire or promotion is rarely quiet. It affects the individual placed in the role who often finds themselves in a position that does not draw on their strengths. It affects the team which now reports to someone learning a fundamentally different job while trying to lead effectively. And it affects the organization which must invest significant time and resources supporting a struggling leader or make the difficult decision to move them out of a role they should not have been placed in.

The alternative is not to avoid external hiring or to stop promoting from within. Both are essential to organizational health. The alternative is to develop the discipline to identify leadership potential with the same rigor applied to assessing technical performance or interview presentation to look deliberately for the behavioral patterns that predict effectiveness not just the qualities that make someone visible.

The Leadership Identification Challenge

Whether the search is happening across an interview table or across a current team, the fundamental challenge is the same: separating what is easy to see from what actually predicts how someone will lead.

The best external candidates and the best internal candidates are not always the ones who impress most immediately. They are often the ones whose patterns across multiple conversations, across different situations, across how they talk about others and handle difficulty point most consistently toward the qualities leadership actually requires.

That kind of identification takes discipline. It takes the right questions. And it takes a genuine commitment to understanding people more deeply than a single conversation or a performance review typically allows.

That deeper understanding is where the best leadership decisions begin.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC

For more information on our services, please go to www.LighthouseConsulting.com or contact us at Info@LighthouseConsulting.com.

Why Most Interviews Feel Good—but Predict Very Little

By Patty Crabtree, CEO Lighthouse Consulting Partners LLC

Hiring decisions are often made with confidence—and regret. Leaders leave interviews feeling energized, reassured, and optimistic. The candidate communicated well. They were confident, articulate, and seemed to “get it.” The conversation flowed easily. Everyone walked away thinking, That felt like a great interview.

And yet, months later, the reality looks very different. Performance falls short. The role fit is questionable. Team dynamics suffer. Leaders find themselves asking the same quiet question: How did we miss this?

The uncomfortable truth is this: most interviews are designed to feel good, not to predict performance. They reward polish, confidence, and storytelling—but fail to reliably reveal how someone will actually think, behave, and operate once hired.

To understand why, we need to look at three critical factors that undermine interview effectiveness: impression management, the difference between polished answers and real behavioral patterns, and the widespread assumption that confidence equals competence.

What Impression Management Actually Looks Like

Impression management is not dishonesty. It is human nature.

Every candidate enters an interview with the same unspoken goal: present the most favorable version of myself. This means selecting examples carefully, emphasizing successes, minimizing struggles, and framing challenges in ways that align with what they believe the interviewer values.

Highly skilled impression managers tend to:

Speak confidently and fluently
Use well-structured stories with clear wins
Mirror language used by the interviewer
Offer socially desirable traits (collaborative, adaptable, strategic)
Avoid lingering on mistakes or tension

From the interviewer’s perspective, this feels reassuring. The candidate sounds self-aware. They seem emotionally intelligent. They “check the boxes.”

But impression management becomes problematic when interviewers mistake presentation for prediction.

The issue is not that candidates are managing impressions—it is that interviews often fail to challenge those impressions. When interviewers accept initial answers at face value and move on, they allow rehearsed narratives to stand in for real insight.

In other words, the interview becomes a performance, not an assessment.

Polished Answers vs. Real Patterns

Polished answers are specific, compelling, and often convincing. Real patterns are consistent, sometimes uncomfortable, and far more predictive.

Consider the difference:

A polished answer might sound like:

“I’m very collaborative. I believe in bringing people together and creating alignment across teams.”

A real pattern requires follow-up:

How does this person collaborate under pressure?
What happens when priorities conflict?
How do they respond to disagreement or resistance?
Do their examples reveal consistency—or exceptions?

Patterns only emerge when interviewers slow down and stay with a topic longer than feels comfortable.

Most interviews fail here. Interviewers ask a question, receive a strong answer, feel satisfied, and move on. The conversation becomes broad rather than deep. Many traits are mentioned, but few are explored.

The problem is not a lack of questions—it is a lack of follow-up discipline.

Real behavioral patterns show up when candidates are asked to:

Walk through situations step by step
Explain their thinking, not just their actions
Reflect on what didn’t work
Describe how others experienced them
Identify trade-offs, not just successes

These moments often disrupt polished narratives. Not because candidates are deceptive, but because rehearsed stories rarely account for nuance, stress, or inconsistency.

Predictive interviews focus less on what someone says and more on how consistently their answers align across situations.

Why Confidence ≠ Competence

Confidence is persuasive. It signals leadership, capability, and readiness. Unfortunately, it is also one of the least reliable indicators of performance.

Confident candidates tend to:

Answer quickly
Speak decisively
Use strong language (“always,” “clearly,” “successfully”)
Appear comfortable with ambiguity

These traits are often rewarded in interviews, especially for leadership roles. But confidence alone does not tell you:

How someone processes complexity
How they handle sustained pressure
Whether they seek input or override it
How they respond to failure or feedback

In fact, confidence can mask critical risks:

Overestimating one’s capability
Avoiding accountability
Minimizing interpersonal impact
Resisting course correction

Conversely, some highly competent candidates present with less polish. They think before answering. They qualify their responses. They speak in nuance rather than absolutes. In a fast-paced interview environment, this can be misinterpreted as uncertainty or lack of presence.

When interviews prioritize confidence over curiosity, they favor style over substance.

Effective interviewing requires interviewers to separate how someone communicates from how they operate. This means paying attention to:

Decision-making logic

Stress responses
Adaptability over time
Self-awareness around limitations

These signals rarely announce themselves boldly. They emerge through careful listening and follow-up.

Why Interviews Feel Good Anyway

If interviews are so limited, why do they feel so reassuring? Because they are socially rewarding experiences.

Good interviews feel like alignment. They feel like connection. They feel efficient. When both parties leave energized, it creates a sense of momentum and certainty. This emotional feedback often substitutes for evidence. But comfort is not correlation.

Interviews are inherently artificial environments. They are low-risk, short-term, and controlled. Most roles—especially leadership roles—are none of those things. Performance unfolds over time, under pressure, and in relationship with others.

Without tools that slow the conversation, test assumptions, and reveal patterns, interviews simply cannot carry the predictive weight we place on them.

Shifting the Interview Mindset

Predictive interviews require a different mindset:

From liking to learning
From answers to patterns
From confidence to capability
From speed to depth

This does not mean interviews are useless. It means they must be used appropriately—and supported by structure, follow-up, and data that interview conversations alone cannot surface.

When interviews are designed to challenge impression management, explore consistency, and look beyond confidence, they become far more effective.

Until then, many interviews will continue to feel good—while predicting very little.

What to Listen for Instead

If strong interviews are not defined by polish and confidence, what should interviewers actually be listening for?

The most predictive signals rarely sound impressive on the surface. They require patience, curiosity, and a willingness to slow the conversation down.

Here are five things to listen for instead:

Consistency Across Examples
Strong candidates show alignment in how they describe themselves across different situations. Their decision-making, communication style, and reactions under pressure sound similar—even when the context changes. Inconsistency is not a red flag by itself, but it is always a cue to ask another question.

Thinking Process, Not Just Outcomes
Pay attention to how candidates explain why they made decisions. Do they walk you through their reasoning, trade-offs, and constraints—or do they jump straight to the result? Predictive insight lives in the thinking, not the win.

Ownership of Impact
Listen for how candidates describe their role when things did not go well. Do they acknowledge their contribution to challenges, or does responsibility consistently sit elsewhere? Accountability patterns tend to repeat.

Nuance Under Pressure
When asked about stress, conflict, or failure, strong candidates do not default to perfect answers. They can describe tension, uncertainty, and adjustment without becoming defensive or vague.

How Others Experience Them
Candidates who understand their impact on others can articulate how teammates, peers, or managers typically experience them—both positively and negatively. This self-awareness is far more predictive than confidence alone.

Listening for these signals does not require more questions—it requires better follow-up and more attention to patterns than polish.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC

For more information on our services, please go to www.LighthouseConsulting.com or contact us at Info@LighthouseConsulting.com.

Why Defining Your Culture is An Important Step in Your Interview Strategy

By Patty Crabtree CEO, Lighthouse Consulting Partners LLC

Company culture is more than a buzzword—it’s the heartbeat of your organization. It defines how people interact, make decisions, resolve conflict, and contribute to shared goals. When culture is clearly defined and intentionally nurtured, it becomes a powerful magnet for attracting and retaining the right people. Yet too often, culture is left vague or unspoken especially during the hiring process. This is a missed opportunity.

When organizations clearly define their culture, they are better equipped to identify candidates who will thrive—not just survive—within it. Culture fit doesn’t mean hiring people who all think alike. It means hiring individuals whose values and working styles align with the way your team operates and grows together. Do you value transparency, initiative, collaboration, or curiosity? Do you have a fast-paced, high-autonomy environment or a more structured, process-driven approach? Candidates should know what they’re stepping into—and you should know how they will respond to it.

Incorporating culture into your interview strategy helps make these insights actionable. Instead of relying solely on resumes and credentials, interviews become a two-way dialogue that explores mutual fit. When you ask candidates behavioral questions that reflect your culture, you gain deeper insights into how they might contribute to—and shape—your workplace dynamic. Questions like, “Tell me about a time you received feedback that was hard to hear. How did you respond?” or “Describe a time you had to navigate a difficult team dynamic” reveal how someone handles the real situations your team faces every day.

Your culture should also inform how you interpret responses. For example, in a culture that values bold innovation, you might celebrate risk-taking and resilience even in the face of failure. In a culture that emphasizes precision and accountability, you may be more focused on how candidates ensure quality and prevent errors.

Equally important is transparency. Being honest about your culture—its strengths and its quirks—builds trust and prevents costly misalignment down the line. When candidates know what to expect, they can self-select into the opportunity for the right reasons.

Ultimately, defining your culture and using it to shape your interview strategy ensures you’re not just hiring for skills, but for lasting success. It helps build teams that collaborate with ease, lead with integrity, and reflect the core values that drive your organization forward. In today’s competitive talent market, a clear and consistent culture isn’t just a differentiator—it’s a strategic advantage.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC

Testing Division provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires, staff development and team building. LCP can provide these assessments in 19 different languages along with offering skills testing, leadership and management coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, communication.

For more information on our services, please go to www.lighthouseconsulting.com or contact us at Info@LighthouseConsulting.com.

Don’t Rush the Hiring Process: Bad Hires Are 3X More Costly Than You Think

By Dana Borowka, MA

There is an old adage that one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. A bad hire can be that bad apple for you.

by Natalie Grainger

Now contrast that to the famous words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This is the power of good hires. Team members working together in thoughtful, committed ways to the company mission, core values and objectives can change your workplace world for the better.

When our team has conversations with C-level executives, better hiring is on their minds. Research backs this up.

“Labor shortages are driving talent retention and recruitment to the top of the CEO agenda in 2022,” concluded The Conference Board in its 2022 “C-Suite Outlook,” it’s 23rd annual survey. The report reflects the views of 1,614 C-suite executives, including 917 CEOs globally.

The Conference Board report details the external stress points business leaders face and the impact of these stressors on growth strategies. It includes views on the benefits and risks of hybrid work models, and the struggles to find and keep good employees.

Finding good employees is noticeably harder these days. Research from Glassdoor says attracting the right job candidates is the most difficult task for 76% of hiring managers. A common woe is that the best hires are snapped up in the first ten days of actively being available on the market. This adds up to a hiring process that lasts 36 days, on average.

True Cost Of Bad Hires

Bad hires can cost your company more than you think. CareerBuilder reports that 74% of employers say they have hired the wrong person for the job.

by FIN

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.

When you examine the true costs broken down by hiring, retention, and pay, you might conclude the researchers at the Labor Department might be lowballing the true cost. Our team extrapolates the real cost might equal at least projected first-year earnings and maybe more.

Here’s why: Poor hires can result in lost productivity and expenses in hiring, recruiting, and training replacements. That can quickly add up.

Robert Half International reports in Fortune Insiders that managers assert lost salary isn’t the only money they lose by hiring the wrong person. Managers must also spend 17% of their time monitoring underperforming employees. In a typical workweek, that time suck equates to nearly a full day of wasted time.

A Harvard Business Review column by David K. Williams and Mary Michele Scott noted “that of nearly 2,700 employers surveyed, 41% estimate a single bad hire cost $25,000. A quarter of respondents estimate a bad choice has cost $50,000 or more.”

Not to mention the demoralizing impact on other employees.

”A hire that is going the wrong direction is bad for everybody involved,” writes Williams and Scott. “A dismissal is bad for the morale of the entire team. It’s even worse for the morale and future of the person you fire, who faces one of the most stressful events in human experience.”

by Tim Mossholder

Here are just some of the ways your company can suffer: lost productivity, loss of focus, poor execution, training costs, legal fees, damaged employee morale, damaged reputation in the marketplace, and lost manager supervision time.

Research by Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees in the United States cost businesses anywhere from $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity each year.

Plus, the number of bad hires is staggering. Think of how many new hires fail to meet expectations.

“Over 50% of newly hired employees fail to meet expectations,” says recruiting expert Barry Deutsch of Impact Hiring Solutions. “Most hiring managers don’t make a significant change by firing the person, putting a PIP together, or having a deep developmental program to improve performance or behavior. They just accept partially competent people, or take those elements off the plate that the employee can’t do – and the manager does it by allowing the monkey to be transferred onto their back.”

Deutsch says that is the definition of dysfunctional.

How To Avoid Bad Hires

Deutsch, coauthor of the book You’re Not The Person I Hired, offers several suggestions for avoiding bad hires.

“One of the most powerful interview techniques for measuring success is to probe for the ability to continuously learn and adapt it to their job and expectations,” says Deutsch. “Do you probe for deep and continuous learning from the professionals and managers you’re looking to hire?”

According to Deutsch, the interview, when conducted with focused structured questions that correlate to job expectations, can be a very reliable predictor of future success.

“Unfortunately, most hiring managers don’t define the expectations so the interview questions are in doubt,” adds Deutsch “Secondly, the biggest mistake is that most hiring managers have never been trained how to conduct an accurate interview – so they are just winging it based on their life experiences. No wonder, the studies show that interview accuracy is basically as effective as rolling dice.”

Deutsch believes a proper interview process includes in-depth work style and personality assessments. As with any business decision, having the right information is critical. Work style and personality assessment testing can help reduce bad hires in three main ways:

by Bernd Dittrich

Identify potential red flags. An In-depth Workstyle and Personality assessment can discover issues that are sometimes overlooked during the interviewing process and can quantify an intuition or feeling the interviewer may have about a particular candidate. It can be used to identify potential red flags concerning behavioral issues, help understand how to manage individuals for greater work performance and compare interpersonal dynamics of teams, departments, and candidates.

Optimize employees’ work performance. An In-depth Workstyle and Personality can provide extensive information on an individual’s ability to work with their job responsibilities, team dynamics and company culture. Additionally, the assessment can show effective strategies to gain optimal performance from that individual within their particular work environment. It can also be employed to quickly identify the most effective management style for a new employee or predict how team members are likely to interact.

Ensure you have the right people in the right positions: Additionally, an In-depth Workstyle and Personality Assessments can be utilized in rehires, or situations which call for employees to re-apply for their current jobs, as in the case of a corporate merger or restructuring. A personality assessment can also ensure that your company continues to have the right people in the right positions and distribute assets and talents effectively.

How does Deutsch define a good hire?

by Jackalope West

“I would define quality of hire as a candidate who hits or exceeds your specific quantifiable outcomes at the 90-day or six-month timeframe with a set of behaviors and style that is consistent with your organizational culture and values,” says Deutsch.

Assessments and professional feedback is not just for the Fortune 500 companies, but can help organizations of all sizes with avoiding bad hires.

Lighthouse Consulting Services helps a variety of companies avoid bad hires through in-depth workstyle and personality assessments and professional interpretation of the results. Not only does this help avoid bad hires, but these assessments also help companies get the most out of new hires from day one. These assessments are tremendous productivity tools for managers who want high-performing teams.

In addition, Lighthouse Consulting provides 360-degree feedback surveys. Be warned: The amount and level of training of those providing the 360-degree feedback can impact the level of accuracy of the feedback.

Without guidance from a trained professional, bias may distort the value of the feedback. To get the full benefit, leaders need to be debriefed on the 360-degree survey results by trained professionals such as those who are part of the Lighthouse Consulting team.

Bottom line: When professionally conducted and interpreted, the results assessments help produce can be significant. But without a trained professional to help interpret the assessments, the value of their results is severely diminished.

by Kyler Boone

Dana Borowka, MA, CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC and his organization constantly remain focused on their mission statement – “To bring effective insight to your business”. They do this through the use of in-depth work style & personality assessments to raise the hiring bar so companies select the right people to reduce hiring and management errors. LCS can test in 19 different languages, provide domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication, stress & time management, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills as well as our full-service Business Consulting Division. Dana has over 30 years of business consulting experience and is a nationally renowned speaker, radio and TV personality on many topics. He is the co-author of the books, “Cracking the Personality Code”, “Cracking the Business Code” and “Cracking the High-Performance Team Code”. To order the books, please visit www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC – Testing Division provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires & staff development. LCS can test in 19 different languages, skills testing, domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication. Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division provides stress & time management workshops, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills, leadership training, market research, staff planning, operations, ERP/MRP selection and implementation, refining a remote work force, M&A including due diligence – success planning – value creation and much more.

If you would like additional information on this topic or others, please contact Lighthouse Consulting Services LLC, Santa Monica, CA, (310) 453-6556, dana@lighthouseconsulting.com & our website: www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Beware The Shortcomings Of Adjective-Based Assessments

By Dana Borowka, MA

Pop quiz for business leaders. Complete these statements:

By Lindsay Jayne

A. If something seems too good to true, it ________________.
B. You get what you _______________________.
C. Haste makes ______________________.
D. Quality takes _______________________.

Many companies now use very simplistic adjective-only personality assessments. These quickie assessments are used for hiring, promoting employees, and improving team dynamics.

On average, some of these assessments only take only six to ten minutes to complete.

Typically, assessment takers receive two lists of adjectives. The makers of the tests claim the simple assessments measure four complex behavioral drives: Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality.

But a 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review raised a serious red flag regarding the adjective-based simplistic tests. In the article “The Problem With Using Personality Tests For Hiring,” Whitney Martin reported the widespread use of Four Quadrant (4-Q) personality tests for hiring is especially problematic. According to the article.

Generally speaking, 4-Q tools consist of a list of adjectives from which respondents select words that are most/least like them, and are designed to measure “style,” or tendencies and preferences. While they can seem highly insightful — not to mention being widely available and inexpensive — they have some severe shortcomings when used in high stakes applications such as hiring. For one, they tend to be highly transparent, enabling a test taker to manipulate the results in a way that they feel will be viewed favorably by the administrator.

Another popular test measures how much an individual matches to several personas. Though there are several variations of the assessment, a standard quiz presents statement prompts and asks respondents to rate the degree to which they agree. Assessment takers will also receive a diagram that represents how the personas react within the psyche.

Why You Need To Be On Guard

Not to alarm you, but don’t take choosing a personality assessment lightly. There are a multitude of assessments available out there, and the industry is totally unregulated.

So be wary. Sometimes cheap and fast is not always the best with so much on the line.

By Georgi Dyulgerov

Today there are approximately 2,500 cognitive and personality tests on the market. To understand how to choose from the cornucopia of assessments, it is helpful to understand the origins of these instruments.

The story begins with a University of Illinois professor, Raymond Cattell, who was able to use the first electronic computer, the Iliac I, to do a large-scale factor analyses of his personality testing theories.

The 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) was first published by Cattell, Tatsuoka, and Eber in 1949. Since then, there have been more additions.

The questionnaire is designed to measure normal behaviors and can be used for career development, employee selection and managing employees. The 16PF measures: warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism and tension.

Still in use today, in-depth assessments for screening candidates and assessing a team using 12-16 scales with 60-120 questions with more than 164 questions can take 30-90 minutes to complete.

There has been a 60-year quest to find a shortcut.

In 1963, W.T. Norman verified Cattell’s work but felt only five factors shape personality: extraversion, independence, self-control, anxiety and tough-mindedness. Dubbed the “Big Five” approach, this has become the basis of many of the modern personality tests on the market today.

There have been hundreds of studies validating the approach.

Different tests use different terms for the five factors. Some other terms include ambition, agreeableness, likeability, prudence, conscientiousness, adjustment, openness and intellect.

“This topic that’s been researched to death by the field of industrial and organization psychology,” said Wharton professor Peter Cappelli to Inc. magazine. “The amazing thing is how few companies take it seriously. It’s kind of mind-boggling that they would undertake such huge investments and not pay attention to what we know about how to pick out people who are going to be the best.”

But let’s say you take it seriously, then how do you pick the best assessment?

How To Evaluate Assessments

Here are seven factors to use to evaluate assessments:

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1. Interpreters. How much training or degrees are required to interpret the results? Data interpretation is the most important factor when reviewing results.

2. Scales. Are enough scales used to cover the human personality? Lighthouse Consulting believes a minimum of 12 primary scales are needed to get a complete picture, with 16 scales being optimal in order to get the clearest picture of the individuals. This is why we only offer an in-depth work style and personality assessment. Anything less can lead to costly mistakes in the hiring process.

3. Validation. Is the test properly validated and on what basis? Just saying it is derived from the “Big Five” approach is not enough.

4. Reliability. Is the test reliable and on what basis? Test reliability refers to whether the test is consistent in measuring personality.

5. Legality. Is the test legal? Has it been reviewed for ADA compliance and gender, culture, and racial bias?

6. Impression. Would the test leave a negative impression with job candidates? If it is too easy it might send the wrong message.

7. Versatile. Is it proper for both hiring and managing? The information needs to be detailed enough to measure a candidate and improve manager/team member communications.

Our Point Of View: Faster Is Not Better

We believe the best tests require someone with comprehensive psychological training or degrees for proper interpretation of the data. Weekend training programs can be problematic since testing and human behavior is a highly complex subject.

Secondly, the more personality scales, the clearer the picture of the individual’s personality and work style.

Using 12 or more primary scales is the more cost-effective method since the personality assessments can be used for both screening candidates and for team building. We feel this offers the best return on investment for a manager because they can first have their existing team of employees tested, and then use the data to best judge how new hires will work with the existing team.

Here was the bottom from for Martin in the Harvard Business Review:

When using any assessment, managers need to step back and ask themselves one basic question before giving it to a potential employee: Is this test predictive of future job performance? In the case of 4-Qs, probably not. They can provide tremendous value for self-discovery, team building, coaching, enhancing communication, and numerous other developmental applications. But due to limited predictive validity, low test-retest reliability, lack of norming and an internal consistency (lie detector) measure, etc., they are not ideal for use in hiring.

By Septimiu Balica

Just to be clear, the pop quiz questions at the article’s beginning are called business truisms for a reason. If something seems too good to true, it probably is. You get what you pay for. Haste makes waste. Quality takes time.

To learn more about how you might take advantage of services offered by our Testing Division and our Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division, please email dana@lighthouseconsulting.com.

Dana Borowka, MA, CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC and his organization constantly remain focused on their mission statement – “To bring effective insight to your business”. They do this through the use of in-depth work style & personality assessments to raise the hiring bar so companies select the right people to reduce hiring and management errors. LCS can test in 19 different languages, provide domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication, stress & time management, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills as well as our full-service Business Consulting Division. Dana has over 30 years of business consulting experience and is a nationally renowned speaker, radio and TV personality on many topics. He is the co-author of the books, “Cracking the Personality Code,” “Cracking the Business Code” and “Cracking the High-Performance Team Code.” To order the books, please visit www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC

Testing Division provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires & staff development. LCS can test in 19 different languages, skills testing, domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication.

Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division provides stress & time management workshops, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills, leadership training, market research, staff planning, operations, ERP/MRP selection and implementation, refining a remote work force, M&A including due diligence – success planning – value creation and much more.

Defining Your Culture and Hiring Strategically

By Patty Crabtree

Picture in your mind a race car speeding toward that waving checkered flag as it prepares to cross the finish line. If you think of a company like a high-performance car, culture is the oil that allows everything to run smoothly to help achieve your goals.

Culture reflects what is greatest, genuine, and noble about the company. It is the key behaviors an organization expects as the team works together and with its clients and vendors.

Culture establishes the foundation of the company and defines the qualities to be successful and help achieve its mission.

Overcoming A Culture Challenge

The culture journey for Bill’s company started with identifying the key attributes that they felt exemplified how they wanted to work together. Bill communicated it to staff and shared it with his clients. He posted it on the breakroom wall as a reminder. The company even branded it in their email signature blocks.

But the challenge was their behaviors did not reflect those defined values. It was not the heart of the organization. The words chosen were what they seen other successful companies using to define their values. It just was not who they were, how they were making their decisions and how leadership was supporting staff.

This misalignment led to a high turnover rate. A turnover rate that cost not only the hard dollars and time to recruit new candidates, but the soft dollar costs of repeated onboarding and staff scrambling to cover all the work. The situation had an adverse impact on company morale. Overall, the company had stalled in its growth.

Bill and his leadership team were puzzled. They felt they had a good work environment and didn’t understand what was holding them back. They were committed to creating an environment for growth and decided to take a step back to reassess their approach.

Bill’s team went through an exercise to help them identify the genuine culture for their firm. What were the core values that would drive their business, their team? Through this effort, they uncovered their own unique style and reflected it in their values.

Then, they took it one step further. Each value was clearly defined to communicate what it meant to the organization. Definition statements were created for each value to describe its intent. These enhanced values were shared with staff and communicated on a regular basis. Leadership reinforced them in their daily interactions.

The updated values were also more deeply embedded into their recruiting process. Behavioral interview questions were developed that focused on cultural fit which helped pinpoint the best candidates.

Over time, Bill’s company’s turnover was reduced by more than 50%. The recruitment process brought the right people to the team. Bill and his leadership team were successfully enhancing their infrastructure and teamwork which drove the growth.

Nurturing the culture and creating a stronger recruiting strategy took a focused effort to produce the desired results. In the long run, it paid dividends for them. Year after year they exceeded their goals and built a well-oiled machine.

Strong Culture Creates The Power of Alignment

One of the most powerful tools is alignment. Alignment brings a shared vision with everyone moving in the same direction.

Every company has culture whether it is by accident or by design. Some may be in that early growth stage and have been chasing the business opportunities, so culture has not been formally developed. Others may have determined their values but the day to day takes over and it isn’t nurtured.

If your company is being outperformed in the marketplace, you experience high turnover in key positions, financial performance is declining, or just want to move from good to great, often these issues are a result of an unhealthy culture.

Alignment empowers your staff with the knowledge of what to do, how to do it and why it is being done. It gives an emotional stability to their work world that encourages high performance.

Be Purposeful With Your Culture

Developing that path toward alignment is one part of the process. Being purposeful with it is another aspect. Leadership must walk the walk. If this does not happen, then your culture will struggle.

Once you have defined your culture and it has been effectively communicated to staff, a critical part of the process comes into play. To walk the walk. It starts with your leadership team embodying your culture in all their actions.

Clearly define how you want to lead, what is your purpose, something that rings true to the heart of the organization. Then, live by it consistently even though the hardest decisions.

Integrate Culture With Your Hiring Strategy And Beyond

At times, hiring can feel like a shot in the dark. You meet with the candidate, assess that they have the technical skills needed, you like them. So, you hire them and then 30-90 days you realize they aren’t fitting in and thriving in your organization. The situation can be confusing because on paper everything looked good though in execution it doesn’t meet your expectations

The missing piece here is understanding that person’s values and how it fits into your organization. Developing a recruiting process that supports your culture will help make it a more effective practice and lead to a stronger team environment. Hire people who believe in and display the values important to your organization. When someone comes onboard and does not embody your values, it can slow progress, disrupt teamwork, and cause morale issues.

Adopt Behavioral Interviewing

Once the core qualifications are met, the best interview questions are behavioral based. Questions around the candidate’s approach to certain situations or experiences.

In an interview, you want the candidate to speak more than you do. You want to know about their experiences and how they approach different situations. This does not come from asking the basic “tell me about yourself” or “where do you see yourself in 5 years.” This comes from “give me an example” or “tell me about a time.”

Ask the candidate to describe the culture at their last firm. Tell me about what worked well? What could have been improved? What are the elements of a company’s culture that they feel creates an excellent work environment? Have them share a story about how culture helped resolve an issue and what was their role in that resolution? Have them share a story about how culture inhibited a project they were working on and what happened.

Another approach is to interview your ‘A’ players about the qualities they feel makes them successful or someone successful in the position. Listen to their perspective on successful outcomes and teamwork. Use this information to build the behavioral based questions.

Open-ended questions are the best way to learn about people and determine their fit into your culture. Ask questions that tie into those success qualities for the position and have candidates share stories about their execution of the values most important to your organization.

Improve Onboarding Because Hiring Doesn’t End With An Offer Letter

Culture appears in every aspect of your organization. It flows through recruiting to onboarding and long-term retention.

The opportunity to instill your culture with a new team member is through a detailed onboarding process that reinforces your culture and expectations along with training on the systems and job specific tasks.

Many times, a company will bring someone in, have them complete the necessary paperwork, give them a quick tour, show them their desk, give them a quick overview and set them loose. This approach is a lost opportunity.

Developing a mapped-out onboarding process that includes learning about the organization, its culture, the different departments, and developing relationships along with the necessary job specific training can set a great foundation for success.

It helps create connection and enhance engagement. A well thought out onboarding process connects new hires to every aspect of the organization along with developing relationships throughout the firm. Many new hires express gratitude for this investment in their success.

Here Is The Bottom Line

Culture takes regular nurturing. Commit to creating an environment where staff will thrive, clients will receive excellent service and your external partners will feel valued and you will reap the benefits. Keep steering everyone in the same direction, toward the same goals and vision course correcting when needed.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC, has a team of inter-disciplinary specialists ready to help raise the effectiveness of critical functions within the organization, such as Sales, Customer Service, Operations, and IT. From team building to implementing cybersecurity technology, LCS consultants are uniquely suited to advise small, mid-sized and global companies. We can assist with in-depth workstyle and personality assessments along with skills testing for new hire candidates at all levels within an organization. Each is a former business executive with extensive strategic and tactical skills. Our consultants are poised to provide, on short notice, highly personalized and cost-effective guidance and tools to boost the performance of a department or organization. For additional information please email pattyc@lighthouseconsulting.com.

Patty Crabtree is a Chief Executive Officer at Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC with 25 years of operations and finance leadership experience along with building a successful remote workforce. She has extensive experience in successfully leading and growing teams. She was instrumental in the development of an operations infrastructure that resulted in consistent increased profits and employee engagement. Patty has also effectively navigated the challenges of change management in the ever-changing business world.

Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC

Testing Division provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires & staff development. LCP can test in 19 different languages, skills testing, domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication.

To order the books, “Cracking the Personality Code”, “Cracking the Business Code” and “Cracking the High-Performance Team Code”, please go to www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

If you would like additional information on this topic or others, please contact Lighthouse Consulting Partners LLC, Santa Monica, CA, (310) 453-6556, ext. 410, pattyc@lighthouseconsulting.com & our website: www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Stop Trying to Shortcut the Hiring Process

By Dana Borowka, MA

If they hadn’t gone on a “shortcut,” the world probably wouldn’t know who the Donner party is today. There is a lesson in this infamous tragedy for all hiring managers.

For the wagons of the Donner party, a group of 81 westward-bound pioneers who were stopped by a blizzard at the gateway to California in the fall of 1846, getting over the Sierra summit proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. In a 2008 book, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West, journalist Ethan Rarick chronicled the misadventures of the infamous group.

Rarick argues because of an ill-advised decision to take an untested shortcut earlier that summer—the wagon train, named after its leader, George Donner, was trapped by a severe fall storm. When their food ran out, they roasted shoestrings and ate animal hides to stay alive. Finally, snowbound, with little hope of rescue, they started to eat those who died by starvation. The 45 survivors were rescued in February of 1847.

But why did it happen? The members of the Donner Party listened to some hucksters on the trail who had an idea of a straighter route to try. The problem was that the shortcut went over the Wasatch Mountains and through the Great Salt Lake desert; however, these two barriers meant that straighter was not really shorter. The three-week delay led to disaster.

The Donner party was not a military expedition, band of gold seekers, or a group of explorers. These were ordinary people trying to find a better life. The tragic mistake was being duped into believing there was an easy shortcut.

Beware of Shortcut Hiring Hucksters Today

Not to alarm you, but don’t take choosing a personality test lightly. There are many services that boast a quick and easy way to profile a job candidate with personality testing. Taking these shortcuts can result in bad hires that have a negative impact on your bottom line and that won’t benefit you or your workforce.

According to the research in my book, Cracking the Personality Code, today there are around 2,500 cognitive and personality tests on the market. So how do you decide which one to use? An organization risks lawsuits if it fails to do proper due diligence in test selection. That’s because there are a multitude of assessments available out there and the industry is totally unregulated.

To understand how to choose from the plethora of personality tests, it is helpful to understand the origins of these instruments.

The quest began in a mental hospital in Minnesota during World War II. A test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was created to diagnose mental illness with yes-or-no responses to a series of questions. In an attempt to put some science into the hiring process, many companies start employing psychologists who in turn used this existing MMPI psychopathological test to screen job applicants. The test includes true-false questions like “I never indulge in unusual sex practices” and “I feel sure there is only one true religion.” Of course, this seemed strange and intrusive to most job applicants who took the test over the next six decades.

Meanwhile, a Harvard University instructor and psychologist named Raymond Cattell working in the Adjutant General’s office devised psychological tests for the military. After the war he accepts a research professorship at the University of Illinois where they were developing the first electronic computer, the Illiac I, which would make it possible for the first time to do large-scale factor analyses of his personality testing theories.

Cattell used an IBM sorter and the brand-new Illiac computer to perform factor analysis on 4,500 personality-related words. The result was a test to measure intelligence and to assess personality traits known as the Sixteen Personality Factor questionnaire (16PF). First published in 1949, the 16PF profiles individuals using 16 different personality traits. Cattell’s research proved that while most people have surface personality traits that can be easily observed, we also have source traits that can be discovered only by the statistical processes of factor analysis.

In 1963 W.T. Norman verified Cattell’s work but felt that only five factors really shape personality: extraversion, independence, self-control, anxiety and tough-mindedness. Dubbed the “Big Five” approach, this has become the basis of many of the modern personality tests on the market today. There have been hundreds and hundreds of studies validating the approach.

The five decades of research findings has served as the framework for constructing a number of derivative personality inventories. This is a topic that’s been researched extensively by the field of industrial and organizational psychology. Some clear dictates of what to do and what not to do have emerged.

Five Dos and Don’ts

Some personality testing services simply deliver a test score and guidelines. Others provide a superficial level of analysis that is not much to go on. What hiring managers really need is an in-depth analysis of the test in the context of the job description and the candidate’s resume.

Here are my top five shortcut don’ts:

• Don’t use a basic personality screening that takes 20 minutes or less as a final screening tool.
• Don’t skip a phone interview.
• Don’t try to shorten multiple face-to-face interviews.
• Don’t skip background and reference checks, and never skip financial background checks when appropriate for the position.
• Don’t skip giving someone homework during the interviewing process.

Here are five dos:

• Do use an in-depth work style and personality assessment.
• Do look for red flags in the results concerning behavioral issues.
• Do use testing to identify how team members are likely to interact.
• Do use testing to ensure you have the right people in the right positions.
• Do use a trained professional to review the testing results with you – they should have a copy of the candidate’s resume and job description for the debrief discussion.

The testing procedure that a company follows can send a message to candidates that the company leaders are serious about who they hire. Successful people want to work with other successful people. In many cases, the candidate may accept a position from the organization they perceive to be more thoughtful during the hiring process.

Conclusion

The astounding thing is how many companies undertake such huge investments in hiring and do not pay attention to what is known about using personality assessments to pick out the people who are going to be the best. An in-depth assessment is only one component needed for a successful recruitment and hiring program. Armed with accurate and quantifiable data from an in-depth personality assessment, the interview process becomes much more reliable. When it comes to limiting the potential for wrong hiring decisions, there really is no shortcut.

Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC – Testing Division provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires & staff development. LCS can test in 19 different languages, skills testing, domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication. Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division provides stress & time management workshops, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills, leadership training, market research, staff planning, operations, ERP/MRP selection and implementation, refining a remote work force, M&A including due diligence – success planning – value creation and much more.

Should Skills Testing be a Standard Operating Procedure for Hiring?

By Dana Borowka, MA

I’ve noticed an interesting trend that I want to share with you. In the past 12 months we’ve been receiving a lot more questions about pre-employment skills testing. We’ve taken notice. Something has shifted. Companies that had never before considered using skills testing in their hiring process, now ‘suddenly’ had an interest in learning more. Other companies that had used skills testing only sparingly were exploring what additional tests were available.

Yes, something was up alright. As I talked with these companies the reason behind their intensified interest in skills testing became clear.

Elephant in the room by David Blackwell

The Elephant in the Room

Every company I spoke to was having an exceedingly difficult time hiring people that had the right skills for the job, no matter what the job. The elephant in the room during these discussions was that companies were getting burned time and time again. The cost of the hiring mistakes was escalating. Too many candidates who went through the screening and hiring process failed to perform up to expectations once on the job.

Anecdotally, I knew this was a big problem. Employers can’t be 100% certain that a candidate has the right skills based on resume, references, and interviews. Even in-depth work style and personality assessments, like we do for our clients, aren’t designed to verify job skills. I wondered just how big a problem it is. I did some research.

The Department of Labor estimates the cost of a bad hire is equal to at least 30% of first year salary. “Wow”, I said to myself, doing some quick math in my head. Hire a $30,000 bookkeeper that doesn’t have the right bookkeeping skills, and there’s a $9,000 hit to the bottom line. Hire a $50,000 PC administrator without the right technical skills, write off another $15,000.

These numbers got me to think about what contributes to the high costs.

1. Lost time and productivity of the people involved in the hiring process
2. The new employee’s mistakes often have hard costs associated with them – poor service or product quality for example
3. The productivity of the new hire is well-below expectations
4. The possible negative impact on customers and your brand image
5. Training the new hire to achieve a skill-level they should have had in the first place
6. Replacing the employee

As managers we know the hassle and frustration attached to hiring someone without the right skills. What’s more, there are considerable hard and soft costs associated, too, as the list above shows and the Department of Labor statistics prove.

Is Skills Testing the Panacea for Hiring Mistakes?

With a problem this large we at LCS saw an opportunity. We’re now offering a catalog of online skills tests for our clients. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explore with you how skills testing is best used. I’ll debunk a few myths along the way.

How Skills Testing is Best Used

If you really want to improve the success of your new-hires, incorporate skills testing and personality assessments in the hiring process. Nothing is fool-proof, but believe me, if you do both types of testing together with smart interviewing, your new-hire success rate will go way up. The failure rate (and the costs associated with it) will drop like a rock.

I’ve been a proponent of skills testing for a very long time, IF they are used properly. Skills testing is a tool, like so many others available to managers. Tools can be misused. Tools can be trusted too much.

Here’s the point. Just because a candidate has the right skills for a specific role in your company doesn’t mean you should hire the person. A great skills test score doesn’t mean the person will be a great fit in your company.

The mistake that I’ve seen made by hiring managers is to place too much weight on skills test results. Good resume, good references, interviews went well, aced the skills test – fabulous, make that woman an offer fast!

Not so fast. Is her work style a good match for the role? Is her personality a good fit for the level of responsibility and interaction necessary? Skills testing doesn’t venture into these waters. This is the realm of the in-depth work style and personality assessment.

Skills Testing Only Works if you Know What Skill Level Matters

I can’t emphasize this point enough. If your company hasn’t identified the specific skills required for each position, a test is not going to be all that useful. Let me use a sports analogy.

A track coach has try outs for his sprint team. Five athletes show up wanting to make the team for the 100-meter event. The coach gets out his stop watch. Lines all five at the starting line and fires the starting gun. Bang. Off they run.

The coach looks at his watch as the first racer crosses the finish line several steps ahead of the others. Click. The fastest racer covered the 100 meters in 11.2 seconds. Better than the other four. Does the coach offer the racer a position on the team? He will if he doesn’t know what speed is necessary for his 100-meter squad to compete effectively. Sure, he’ll have a racer for the 100 meter event, but the team will never win. He won’t offer the position to any of the five candidates if he knows that a pace of at least 10.1 seconds is necessary to win in his conference. In this case the required skill is running the 100 meters in 10.1 seconds or less.

The Never-Ending Search for the Perfect Candidate

LCS is deeply involved in the active hiring processes of hundreds of clients. I make this claim just to point out that few companies are better positioned to observe and assess the hiring practices of so many companies. What we’ve noticed is companies tend to fall into two categories. Those that take too long to find and hire employees. And those who have found a way to hire more quickly and retain those employees. What is the difference?

There are many facets to this. Most are beyond the scope of this article, but one is very relevant. The companies who are the most successful realize that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist. They know it’s fool-hardy to spend valuable time and resources searching for the perfect person.

They identify the best person available and which areas will need to be developed in that person once hired. This change in strategy presents an integrated view of hiring and training. So, where does skills testing enter the picture?

Let’s go back to the race track. The coach has one athlete who ran the 100 meters in 11.2 seconds, a full second slower than a competitive pace. If the coach knows that a short period of training and conditioning can shave a second off the time, he’ll gladly bring the person onto the team. A diamond in the rough, so-to-speak.

Same philosophy holds with enlightened companies who use skills testing wisely. If you have a fabulous candidate who is missing a few skills that can be learned quickly, hire the person and build the training into the 90-day probationary period.

The skills test results tell you exactly what skills need to be learned. The training can focus on those areas.

This also makes it a lot easier and more effective when it comes time to buy the training, or arrange the mentoring in-house. You know exactly the skills to be gained.

LCS to the Rescue

After doing our research and talking with more clients about skills testing, we’re convinced this is a service we should be offering.
The catalog we’re offering has been hand-selected from tests Fortune 500 companies rely on in their hiring. These are time-proven, industry-accepted tests in the following categories:

• Accounting
• IT
• Office Software
• Language
• Industrial
• Customer Service
• Sales
• Math
• Honesty

I invite you to visit the Skills Testing page on our website that includes more information, including brief descriptions of the tests we’re offering.

If you would like additional information on this topic or others, please contact your Human Resources department or Lighthouse Consulting Services LLC, Santa Monica, CA, (310) 453-6556, dana@lighthouseconsulting.com & our website: www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style assessments for new hires & staff development. LCS can test in 19 different languages, provide domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication and stress management.

To order the books, “Cracking the Personality Code”, “Cracking the Business Code” and “Cracking the High-Performance Team Code”, please go to www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Our Sino-Am Leadership Program helps executives excel when stationed outside their home country. American managers in Asia and Asian managers in America face considerable business, personal, and leadership challenges because of the cultural differences. This unique program provides personal, one-on-one coaching. For more information visit, https://lighthouseconsulting.com/performance-management/talent-development/sino-american-management-style/.

We also have an affiliate in the UK who covers all of Europe so we are now a true multi-national company that can support our clients globally.

Five Biggest Mis-Hiring Mistakes

By Dana Borowka, MA

Ready. Aim. Mis-hire.

Unfortunately, that is a common problem for many companies. That mis-hire can have a big negative impact on your company’s bottom line. Worse, it could hurt work force morale.

Each mis-hire decision can cost your company well over two to three times the individual’s salary, according to author Barry Deutsch of Impact Hiring Solutions. This figure may be a conservative estimate because of factors like training, evaluation, termination, re-initiating the hiring process, and lost opportunity costs.

There is also an emotional factor involved in a mis-hire. Not only can it cause stress and anxiety for both management and employees, but it also takes away focus from your company’s primary goals.

According to research by Deutsch, co-author of the best-selling book You’re Not The Person I Hired, here are the five biggest mis-hiring mistakes to avoid:

Mis-Hiring Mistake #1. Not taking the time to define success. Not defining success up front is almost a guarantee of a mis-hire. Defining success is the number one issue behind problems with hiring, performance management, and engagement. Defining success up front dictates where you go to find the candidate, it provides 80 percent of your interview questions, and it lays out performance expectations that you can use in interviewing.

Mis-Hiring Mistake #2. No formal hiring process. If there is one key to overcoming most of the mis-hiring mistakes that managers make, it is by developing a rigorous and disciplined hiring process. This kind of process has two major components: a detailed step-by-step process, and written forms and questions prepared in advance. Although each hiring experience may have its unique aspects, most follow a consistent process. Best-practice information on hiring found in many books and websites can form the basis of your step-by-step process. But once you settle on a process after trial-and-error, it needs to be written down in the form of a checklist or procedure so that each hire follows a complete course of action.

Mis-Hiring Mistake #3. Not shaking the bushes hard enough to uncover the best candidates. Most companies post generic job descriptions on generic job boards and pray the best person drops into their lap. Sometimes, you might do a little superficial networking. The tactic of posting the job usually brings the bottom third of the candidate pool to your doorstep – all the worse candidates. Sometimes you get lucky. There is an old adage that goes: “Even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes.” It’s tough to build high performing teams based on luck and hope. Running generic ads on generic job boards shows up a small microcosm of the candidate pool – those who are unemployed, or desperate to leave their current organization. If you want to fill your funnel with outstanding talent, you have to work at compelling the best to come forward by writing compelling marketing statements to replace the disgusting use of job descriptions, networking, referrals, and direct sourcing using tools like LinkedIn.

Mis-Hiring Mistake #4. Ignoring character and values. Have you heard the expression, “People are usually hired for experience and fired for character.” With today’s emphasis on resume screening and superficial interviews, about the only information a hiring supervisor can glean from a candidate are the facts of past experience and skills. Talent, skills and experience are important, but after the hiring is done, real people show up with their own values, morals, and motivations.

Mis-Hiring Mistake #5. Failing to use in-depth work style and personality assessment. You must have an interview process designed to validate, verify, and vet whether the candidate can achieve your desired results, and whether they will be a good fit for your culture and values. That includes assessments. As with any business decision, having the right information is critical. Work style and personality assessment testing can provide insight into potential hires, as well as your current workforce, in three main ways:

1. Identify potential red flags. A personality assessment can discover issues that are sometimes overlooked during the interviewing process and can quantify an intuition or feeling the interviewer may have about a particular candidate. It can be used to identify potential red flags concerning behavioral issues, help understand how to manage individuals for greater work performance and compare interpersonal dynamics of teams, departments and candidates.

2. Learn how to optimize employees’ work performance. A personality assessment can provide extensive information on an individual’s ability to work with their job responsibilities, team dynamics and company culture. Additionally, the assessment can show effective strategies to gain optimal performance from that individual within their particular work environment. It can also be employed to quickly identify the most effective management style for a new employee or predict how team members are likely to interact.

3. Ensure you have the right people in the right positions: Additionally, personality assessments can be utilized in rehires, or situations which call for employees to re-apply for their current jobs, as in the case of a corporate merger or restructuring. A personality assessment can also ensure that your company continues to have the right people in the right positions and distribute assets and talents effectively.

Legal Guidelines For Assessing Recruits

A frequent question from companies and organizations concerns the legal guidelines in administering assessments to potential employees. Industry regulations can vary and the best option is to consult with your company’s trade association along with reading through the EEOC guidelines by visiting Additional information can be found online at the EEOC website, in the Disability-Related Inquiries and Medical Examinations of Employees section: http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/guidance-inquiries.html#2. The EEOC is the end all of end-alls. So, no matter what people say, always go by what the EEOC has outlined.

As a general rule if your company uses an assessment, any test or set of hiring questions must be administered to all of the final candidates in order to assure that discrimination is not present.

The Bottom Line

An in-depth work style and personality assessment is only one component needed for a successful recruitment and hiring program. It can provide valuable information for critical personnel decisions. Combined with an effective recruitment program and skilled interview techniques, it can benefit your company as a whole, in addition to your individual employees. Armed with accurate and quantifiable data from an in-depth personality assessment, the interview process becomes much more reliable. Ultimately, this only adds to your organization’s bottom line, allowing more effective management of your existing workforce and limiting the potential for wrong hiring decisions.

For more information, please visit our website, www.lighthouseconsulting.com to sign up for our Open Line webinars and monthly Keeping On Track publication.

If you are open to a conversation about how our in-depth work style and personality assessment could help your team, including pricing and the science behind the tests, please contact us at 310-453-6556, extension 403.

Dana Borowka, MA, CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC and his organization constantly remain focused on their mission statement – “To bring effective insight to your business”. They do this through the use of in-depth work style & personality assessments to raise the hiring bar so companies select the right people to reduce hiring and management errors. LCS can test in 19 different languages, provide domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication, stress & time management, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills as well as our full-service Business Consulting Division. Dana has over 30 years of business consulting experience and is a nationally renowned speaker, radio and TV personality on many topics. He is the co-author of the books, “Cracking the Personality Code”, “Cracking the Business Code” and “Cracking the High-Performance Team Code”. To order the books, please visit www.lighthouseconsulting.com.

Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style & personality assessments for new hires & staff development. LCS can test in 19 different languages, provide domestic and international interpersonal coaching and offer a variety of workshops – team building, interpersonal communication, stress & time management, sales & customer service training and negotiation skills as well as our full-service Business Consulting Division.

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