Do you tend to hire people of a similar type to yourself because you get on well in the interview? But are they actually what you need? Is it likely there might be challenges in the role for the new candidate because of their natural style? Could the candidate be quite different from the rest of the team and possibly need more support to integrate? So how should management prepare for this and understand what the new recruit might need in leadership going forward?
Many of these questions can be highlighted by using Extended DISC® profile as a source of discussion in the interview process. Recruitment, selection and on-boarding can be a long process but armed with critical additional information to build into interviews, the whole recruitment process can be a lot smoother and a more effective outcome.
Join Becky in looking at how these questions and more can contribute to finding the right candidates, and preparing the right on-boarding support for them.
The aim of the webinar today is to showcase some of the Extended DISC® tools that are available through the entire recruitment process. I won’t be going into all the behavioural style information today or the tips to do with recruitment, but more importantly, reminding you of the tools and the applications to know that they’re there when you need them.
Recruitment is a massive industry, as many many people know. However, many managers, HR professionals and consultants are landed with the job of picking the best candidate for what they need. That can be a real challenge without the right tools to access. I’ll be introducing you today to some new assessments explicitly developed for the recruitment area, such as a new recruitment assessment called Recruit and Select and a new onboarding assessment that pairs with that. We’ll be looking over how to use something called the research module, job templates and Open Preview, which can help you acquire extra information about the candidate to use in many stages of the recruitment process. We will briefly touch on the Work Pair and the Team Assessments and something called behavioural questions that many forget to use.
To clarify the role that Extended DISC® displays in the recruitment process. It’s vital you understand that you should not use Extended DISC® methodology and the assessments as the sole criteria of how you pick a successful candidate. However, the assessments play an integral part in complementing traditional recruitment practices and methods. It should aid you in discussions and insights, but you also need to use other methods and tools to evaluate skills, experience and abilities. You should also have things like resumes, covering letters, applications and contact their referees for supporting information. Using all these things will help you gain a well-rounded and formative interviewing or recruitment process on which to base your decisions.
Using DISC for Recruitment
How can Extended DISC® help? Well, there are so many areas, but for today I’ve reduced it down to a few. Firstly, too much disparity between a person’s natural versus their on-the-job behaviours, or what we know as adapted behaviours, can become stressful and quite difficult over time for an employee. A close orientation between the two is desirable. The recruiter and applicant can better discuss this alignment during the recruitment process with the candidate and role in mind. Extended DISC® helps bring this to fruition for you to be able to discuss.
Furthermore, information that comes to light around their strengths, motivators, development areas, teamwork, preferred working styles and preferred environments can also be explored during the recruitment process. That sort of information is all in the assessments. When used well, Extended DISC® can help to highlight behaviours that might not be evident until the candidate is already on the job. Therefore, Extended DISC® and all the different information it can highlight can be critical to the decision-making process that you will go through in selecting a potential new employee.
The Recruitment Process
The recruitment process can be a long cycle, as we know. However, armed with the right additional information to use in the different steps, the recruitment process can be a lot smoother and lead to a more
effective outcome. In the recruitment cycle, there are definite stages. Extended DISC® can help in practically all the steps, and it can even help establish the first one ‘needs criteria’. If you look on-screen (4:54), you will find a recruitment process flowchart. The steps include:
- Establishing the criteria and needs
- Searching, which involves advertising
- Screening and shortlisting
- Interviewing
- The final selection
- Offer and negotiations
- Onboarding
I have chosen a generic recruitment process. Yours may look a little different. Recruitment covers quite a few different stages, and I can guarantee that Extended DISC® will be helpful in all phases. Today I’m going to limit the steps down to five and discuss how you might utilise Extended DISC® in each of these areas. We’ll be looking at the criteria, the screening and shortlisting stage, interviewing, the final selection and the last one, onboarding. Now, you may call them slightly different names, of course, like induction for onboarding, but you’ll be able to see how Extended DISC® can help.
Recruitment Process Step One and Two: Needs and Criteria and Advertising
One of the most important areas is establishing the criteria or the client’s needs, so it’s worth taking your time to define the role before you start advertising. When I say client, it might be that you are in recruitment, or
it might be that you are the manager, so you know the needs of the role. You may already know most of the criteria in these situations as it may be an already established position. Still, it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself some basic questions concerning the expectations of the role. These questions may include what role entails (are there any changes if this is an already established role) and what outcomes do you expect from the person, especially if they want to be effective in this role. Another question might be what they need and what tasks and activities the new employee will perform. When thinking about the functions and activities, you can go a level deeper and think about what behaviours a candidate needs to be successful in the role. Analyse where those specific behaviours might come from concerning the Extended DISC® Diamond. Will some activities involve being an extrovert or introvert, or will some of them be required to be people-oriented or task-oriented. Does the candidate need to be detailed and comfortable with large amounts of information, or do they
need to be a big picture thinker and network with people? Ask yourself if it will be feasible to find someone that can perform all of these things well. In my assessment of many advertisements, there are times when our criteria can be pretty unrealistic. We advertise positions with huge job scope, meaning the person we want would ideally have behaviours from all over the Extended DISC® Diamond. We are basically advertising for a Superman or Superwoman to perform everything to the expected degree. It’s okay to have a considerable job scope, but you may need to consider what support or training you might need to implement once you find someone who can fit most of the criteria. Extended DISC® can help you do this, and I use this a lot myself, and we call it job fit.
Looking at the slide on screen (8:48), you can see on the slide here. Job fit is where you can look at each of the expected tasks and place them around the Extended DISC® Diamond to see what behaviours are required to perform them. The more you know about the styles, the easier it becomes. You can also create a Job Template in FinxS by matching the job requirements to specific competencies to help plot the personality profile type needed. There are also ten new diamonds with generic data regarding various roles such as leadership or sales. These diamonds have data describing the kind of person in each quadrant. The diamonds help you place tasks and activities a lot more easily. Once you lay the tasks around the diamonds, you can see how everything begins to link up. Later in the recruitment process, once the candidates are shortlisted and have completed a DISC profile assessment. You can do things like match their flexibility map to the job criteria and the job fit you plotted on the Extended DISC® Diamond. Looking on-screen (9:51), you can see how I’ve overlaid a particular person’s report and their flexibility map over some of the activities that I need them to do. I’ve put certain expectations around the diamond, and I’ve considered certain aspects of each task and linked it to the behaviour that the candidate might need. For example, good with detail, analysing things, presenting, socialising, networking and other aspects. Doing this helps you to see what you’re looking for. At this point, it’s good to know if you might need to adapt the criteria or job description. You may need to delegate parts of the job to others in the company that might have those natural strengths or keep it as it is but be prepared to offer support or training in specific areas for whoever you bring on. In the sample on-screen (10:41) is a real-life scenario of our candidate who we considered for this particular position. We overlaid their map with the job fit. You can see that when it came to things like big-picture thinking up the top of the quadrant and even looking over to the other side of the diamond, quality control in detail, the candidate would possibly need some processes or some support in achieving those. They may have already set up their own processes and have already experienced doing this. This is where discussion points come into play. If you have the Extended DISC® personal analysis in front of you, you can then bring it into the interview and ask further questions. This is an excellent way of analysing the required criteria and the needs fit and how Extended DISC® can help.
Recruitment Process Step Three: Screening and Shortlisting
It’s easy to be swamped by CVs that arrive when you advertise for a position during the second step in the recruitment process. How on earth do you pick the right ones to move forward with? Often we can assess and quickly build a picture of the candidate’s skills, abilities and experience from reading what they send us. We often can work out a shortlist of down to say three to five candidates by doing this. At this point, I can suggest that you put the shortlisted candidates through the Extended DISC® assessment. What tends to be a bit more challenging to identify from their CVs is how they might go about their role or tasks or why they might do things differently and have a natural fit for some tasks and not for others. Basically, where strengths, support or training areas might be.
Completing a DISC Assessment at this point starts to provide essential information about how that person behaves and what they might be like in the workplace if employed. You may have more insight into what to expect from the candidate before you hire them. So ensuring that their natural and adapted behaviours fit the role and the company culture and complement the existing team members in some way. When I mean complement, I don’t mean that they have to be the same DISC profile. I often assess the need for the new team member to be the opposite behaviour of the existing team. However, if this the DISC profile I need to recruit that complements the current team, I’m prepared for what support I need to give them. At this stage, if you’re assessing the shortlisted candidates, this is where this research module can be beneficial, so before I start to take us through any of the new assessments, I wanted to remind you or for some of you to introduce you to something called the research module.
Extended DISC® Research Module
I find this particularly useful for the screening in shortlisting stages as you can get some additional information about the candidate. The information might include asking about skills and in-depth descriptions of experience or their situations. This information can help you identify who you might like to take further into the interview stage. The research module does not cost any extra, as it is supplementary to doing an Extended DISC® Assessment. The wonderful thing about it is that the FinxS online system allows you to create your own questions that applicants answer when completing the DISC questionnaire. Their answers will be in the back of the DISC assessment. So, when it comes to the Research Module, you can create questions. The candidate will answer those questions either before or after answering the DISC questionnaire. The answers will come out integrated into the back of the DISC assessment. Looking at the example here on the screen (15:00). You can see here that this person was asked about education and language and how they use their strengths in their current position. The Research Module does not have to be behavioural. It can be entirely about skills, background, or experience, so you can ask them some appropriate questions to help with screening.
DISC Recruitment Assessment
We have some really great new assessments available, and a lot of these ones I’m going to talk to you about is specifically for recruitment. Several of them are new, so if you don’t have access to them in your FinxS account, please contact the HR profiling or your FinxS supplier. You can use standard assessments, but the new Recruit and Select assessment is short and precise and gives you the critical information that you can consider for individual candidates. The Recruitment Assessment includes their profile graphs which are important to interpret their natural style and how they perceive their need to adjust in the current environment. That in itself can be helpful because you can discuss why or why not they are adjusting their style. The assessment also includes the Extended DISC® Diamond maps, such as the flexibility zones and arrow maps. These maps are also very telling to see the candidates natural flexibility. As I mentioned before, you can use it to plot the candidate’s job fit. You can see on the screen here (16:52) that I’ve got a candidate with flexibility areas in the ID area. So, I can look at their natural behaviours and how they fit with the flexibility of the tasks required in the role.
The report also includes motivators, situations that reduce motivations, strengths, attributes, and attitude to teamwork and what they can bring to the team.
This assessment has competencies divided into several important recruitment areas that are commonly required across most roles. This report includes competencies under the following headings decision-making, prioritising, self-development, independence, empathy and initiative. On-screen (17:57), you’ll see an example of a decision-making Job Template. The competencies in this job template relate to decision-making. In this situation, the blue square down the right side indicates how important that particular competency is to the role (you can change the weightings if they are not so important for your role). In this specific assessment, they are all set to five, so they are highly important to the job, and you can see how the person scores on each of the competencies. Anything left of the zero mark in the middle is not as natural and will require more energy and concentration. Anything to the right is natural.
You can see how they measure up against each of the competencies. For example, in the decision-making, we can see that this particular candidate may not have scored as naturally with ‘making considered decisions based on detailed analysis.’ So this competency may not be natural to them. It might be that they can do that because they’ve experienced it or practised it or put in some processes to help them do it. All that this is picking up is it may not be as natural to them. If the role involved a lot of decision-making requiring detailed analysis, you can consider their natural behaviours against what you need in the position. Maybe this person will need to make lots of detailed decisions and could find the role quite stressful, so may not be the right behavioural fit.
Another practical pre employment screening assessment is the Reasoning Analysis. The Reasoning Analysis is a Cognitive Ability Assessment, and it’s very different to the behavioural assessment. If you are completing all nine tests, it can take over two hours to complete. We always recommend only choosing 2-3 of the most relevant tests for the role. The Reasoning Analysis is most often used in situations that require measurement of a person’s developmental potential as a factor that influences their future. Reasoning is often thought of as the process of actively and skillfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating gathered information. They’re big words, but when you break it down, it’s very logical. The analysis includes nine different areas, and on the slide (20:30), you can see five of the areas. The components they will answer include abstract logical reasoning, understanding logical processes, visual reasoning, understanding social context and numerical reasoning. Typical application situations are recruitment, internal transfers and candidate screening. This is a great tool to use in the screening process as well as the interviewing stage.
Recruitment Process Step Four: The Interview Stage
Once you’ve decided on the shortlist and evaluated who you might take further into the interview stage, there is so much information in the DISC and Reasoning Assessments that can help you assess the candidate. Remember that the purpose of the assessment is to highlight areas as a source of discussion in the interview process and not to make your sole criteria in choosing the candidate. Being armed with critical additional information to discuss in the interview can definitely give you a smoother and more effective outcome through the whole interview process. Obviously, any of the Extended DISC® assessments are full of great information to inform or help you discuss certain aspects as well.
For example, their natural and adaptive style. The assessment will also bring up things like special cases for those of you who are trained, and that might be prevalent that you can talk to them about. Other questions it can help with are what motivates them, how they use their strengths, workplace stress and how they fit into team roles. The list goes on. I’ve got some on-screen (22:13), but there’s so many more that you can look at and utilise in the interview process. A lot of people don’t realise that at the back of most of your assessments and certainly at the back of the recruit and select assessment are sets of questions that you might like to use. Let’s have a little look at them.
Recruitment Interview Questions
The first four behavioural questions that you can use as recruitment interview questions in the interview process relate to the person’s what we call expressed emotions. For example, these mention how the person might feel and can bring up feelings related to any of the special cases in their profile, including frustration or insecurity. I also use them outside of recruitment, so they aren’t necessarily for the recruitment process, but they are certainly very relevant to use in the recruitment process.
The four questions are actually in order of D, I, S and C. The first question relates to their D style, whether they have it in their natural style or not. Sometimes taking a little bit of time to look at them is beneficial as there are some great questions to ask, and there are some very good statements that the report picks up on that you can easily miss or not debrief or assess in the profiles and diamonds.
The next set of questions that are often found at the backs of the reports and especially the new recruit and select report is the second set of five questions. These are about the person’s role and implemented as statements with a relating question. These are great questions to use in the recruitment interview if you want some guidance based on styles. They are not written according to D, I, S, and C in order. They are a group of questions that are based on their profile II. You can use these to uncover further information about them in the interview and how they handle certain situations.
Recruitment Process Step Five: The Final Selection
Step five in the recruitment process is the final selection stage. Understandably, the process can be very long and very complex, but using Extended DISC® as a recruitment tool to get you to this point, can be very helpful to eliminate some doubt around fit in the role. I also understand when it comes to the point of selection, it still can be very hard. This is where I can really go back and evaluate the information in front of me. At this point, I’d like to talk about firstly job templates and then also have a look at Work pair and Team assessments.
To reiterate where we are at this stage, you can use Extended DISC® to set the criteria or help you by using team fit or assessing tasks and activities. There are all sorts of recruitment tools to help, such as the research module and job template. You can collate all the information to uncover discussion points to use in the interviewing stage. So, that brings us into the final selection stage.
Job templates are fabulous, and they’re an easy tool to use in recruitment, and they’re also very commonly used for things like leadership, sales, employee development, and team performance. They are not strictly for recruitment. However, they are very useful in that area.
What are Job Templates?
The Extended DISC® Assessments often have competencies in them that are chosen for their overall general common use in the corresponding industry. For example, I previously talked about the Recruit and Select assessment that I showed you and that already has competencies that have been chosen in the following topics decision making, prioritising, self-development, independence, empathy and initiative. As you can see on the slide (27:00). What happens if you have specific competencies that you want to align to the company’s goals or culture or even more specific competencies that you are looking for in the role. Well, you can do that with a separate job template. You don’t have to adjust the report. You can simply use any report you want and complement it by making a job template. This is where you can pick specific competencies yourself. It is so easy and simple to do.
Some short style reports have been developed, and they complement the full assessments. Then we’ve got the job templates, and they are one or two pages, depending on how many competencies you pick. These targets exactly the competencies you need for the role or the culture of the company. Again the reason I wanted to point that out is that you don’t have to go into Report Designer to create them. You can navigate to the Job Template area in the FinxS online platform and select the required competencies to measure against the candidate. You can generate the one-page job template separate from the report using Open Preview. You’ll find video tutorials and manuals in our VIP area to assist you with this. There are over 1500 competencies to choose from and many different areas, for example, healthcare, entrepreneur, and even working in restaurants. You name it. It’s there. When creating a Job Template, there is a search mechanism so you can type in keywords, and it will bring up matching competencies for you to consider. You click on the required competencies, and they are automatically added to the job template you’re creating. Again, a job template does not consume additional points, and they can be implemented before or after the candidate completes the questionnaire. They just use the same data.
On-screen (29:47) is an example of a job template used in recruitment for a new business executive. The company had very specific ideas of what they wanted in the role, and they linked those specific competencies to the company goals. They matched competencies around things like initiative, ideas, problem-solving, follow-up, and negotiating. Those things were important to them, so they picked the appropriate competencies and made a simple but role-specific job template using the search bar. They then used this as well as the assessment to delve a bit deeper into specific areas. So, this particular company did this before the interview stage, which I would suggest too. It can really help in screening and in the interview stage, clarifying each competency with them. Clarification can be particularly good on important key competencies like the job template where the candidate might not have a great natural fit but they have done a lot of development to improve it. Remember, the whole assessment, including job templates, are created with their profile II, their natural behaviour. It does not pick up skills or processes that they have put in place to improve specific areas. This is the reason I suggest that job templates are good to do before the interview so you can clarify learned behaviours with the candidate.
Open Preview
Open Preview is another tool that is very applicable to use right throughout the whole stage. Open Preview, also called FinxS Playground, allows you to ‘play’ with the data from the candidate’s assessment results. As I said, I find myself using it through the whole stage but often in the final selection stage. Many clients forget that you don’t need to create new or even modify assessments to get what you want. You don’t even have to do the job template if you don’t want to create one.
You can log into your FinxS account and simply view particular information on your computer in front of you. Navigate to Open Preview, select a person’s results, and click on different competencies, job templates or graphics to view on screen. When I’m wanting more information about a candidate’s fit, or I need to compare candidates in different key areas, this is where I go. Obviously, it can be used for all areas outside of recruitment like leadership, sales and development, but it’s certainly good to have in your knowledge bank. You can see on screen (32:34) a simplified look to not show confidential information, but it’s as easy as going into FinxS, selecting who you want to see. I’ve got Betty Boo selected. I then go over to the left-hand side, and I open up behavioural competencies, and I literally click the ones I want to view on screen, which is ‘being a catalyst for thoughtful and appropriate change.’ So, I can click one at a time to see how the candidate might be measured against those particular competencies.
There is also a bit more in-depth information about looking at two people at once in Open Preview. You can also have a look at different graphics. You may not have a particular graphic in an assessment, or you need something a bit different. You can bring up the graphics and start comparing on-screen. It’s a really great live tool.
Team Assessments
The Team assessments have great information for recruitment situations. Firstly, yes, all the team members would have needed to complete the Extended DISC® Questionnaire, so their data would need to be in your FinxS account. You might only include the shortlisted candidates once you get down to two people on the shortlist. They’ve been interviewed, but you’re undecided about who might be the better candidate, so you look at them in a team situation. On-screen (34:37), I’ve got all sorts of different information relating to the team. Just by using the shotgun or the name map, you can see where everyone sits relative to the potential candidate or one candidate if you’ve narrowed it down.
So you can see here on my screen (34:5) I’ve circled candidate one and two and the team leaders in the green circle down the bottom. From here, you can evaluate where the team gaps are in your team. I’ve got quite a few gaps, but I have to assess whether I actually need those gaps to be filled by the new candidate or am I looking for something quite different from the existing team that all sit around that SI area. Will the candidate be similar to the team, so communication fits easily, or will they be quite different and might have a few issues or a few challenges when communicating? Is that what I actually need in hiring a new person to fill the gaps? I guess this also points out that if you are one of the people assessed already in the team, or the team leader, you can start to understand if you’re hiring a person similar to yourself because you got on well in the interview. This is where you can see if the candidate was very similar to the team leader. You really have to pull back and think are you recruiting a like-minded person you got on well with, but again, is that really what you need.
You can also see how the new candidate might fit concerning doing tasks compared to others as this can be a cause of potential conflict. Like how fast they get into doing activities, how they cope with change, how the processes work, and their attitude towards getting on and doing it. You can also see if a candidate might be a lone wolf where they might be out on their own and very different to the team. This might mean that they might problem-solve differently, and they might make decisions differently. They could have different motivators and communication needs. You can evaluate what potential conflict this might cause or discomfort for the new person. Using the team assessment, you can see all the potential challenges and the pros and cons of bringing each of the candidates into the team. You would have to know a little bit of information about behaviours, but it doesn’t take long to pick it up and see the differences and really understand the dynamics or the makeup of what you’re trying to achieve.
Most importantly, you can see how they might fit with the manager they would be reporting to. You can assess if this managers style is the preferred style of the candidate. If it’s not, what support would you need to give them? For example, the manager might have a natural people leadership very participative style, but the new recruit might prefer a very structured, planned and formal management. At times, this manager’s style might be too flighty, too friendly, and not organised enough for them. This could be an area of potential conflict or miscommunication, but at least you can plan for it early and work out what might need to be done.
Workpair Assessment
I also want to address the Workpair Analysis. This report has been around for a long time, so it’s not new, but sometimes we forget to analyse it. Like we have been talking about, it’s really great for leadership. It’s a similar style report to the team, but it’s intended to compare two people rather than an entire team profile. The Workpair is great for gaining an overall picture of the similarities and differences between two people. You can gain clarity in areas where the pair’s behavioural style will work effectively and in the areas where the pair’s behavioural style can lead to gaps in expected outcomes. The report also functions as a platform for which coaches, consultants or supervisors can facilitate discussion.
Suppose you wanted an actual one-on-one situation where you could profile the leader or the person that the new candidate is going to report to, or even for succession planning where you are trying to achieve similar behaviours to a successful person in the role. In that case, this is where the Workpair analysis can be helpful. It eliminates the team information and compares only the two people.
On-Boarding Assessment
Often we forget that Extended DISC® can be used through all of the recruitment processes, including the onboarding process. The new assessment will give you information about the candidate’s needs during this stage. It provides:
- Information into how the candidate likes to be managed.
- Their listening and communication styles.
- Strengths.
- A diamond overview of their natural role in a Team.
The report also includes things like their preferred job content, working environment and factors that cause them stress. All these elements are helpful to evaluate when inducting someone during the onboarding process. It is a shorter styled report, so it doesn’t include the profiles as you would have received those in the Recruit & Select Assessment. Although brief, it gives relevant and very much to the point information. So, you can use it in conjunction with your Recruit & Select Assessment report.
There are so many different recruitment tools that you can utilise, including Extended DISC® reports and the FinxS Online system. You might want to use them all to make a well-informed decision or just some of the tools.
