We offer a range of services to businesses for their staff on an individual and organizational basis. Psychometric assessments are intended to give employers or individuals a snapshot or gauge or how they might score on certain traits, abilities or other scaled ratings. We also offer organizational assessments so companies can know where they stand with their employees and what deficits or strengths their employees may have they can leverage or work on.
Assessments we offer
The things we look at in assessment, these are the tools that we believe are best to hire and assess individuals.
» Offerings
Specific detail on assessment types
More about the tools that we use, and why one size does not fit all when it comes to assessments and tests.
» Assessments detail
See our techniques in action
See some scenarios encountered by our clients that our assessments have helped with.
» Case Studies
Frequently asked questions
Answers to some of the questions most often asked about our assessments and processes.
» FAQs
What We Do
Assessments
Fresh Eyes is dedicated to helping individuals and employers find the right people for the right positions and help individuals develop themselves by understanding who they are and how their personalities and abilities are interacting with their workplace. We believe that a small suite of assessments can help with talent assessment and development and we do not offer every test and service that we possibly could. In addition, supplemental training and coaching after such assessments on existing employees can turn weaknesses into strengths and leverage strengths to greater heights.
As a summary, we believe that the following are the traits and abilities that are well worth considering for assessment and development;
- Critical Thinking: The ability to think critically and to make reasonable and accurate decisions is well matched to job performance.
- Numerical Reasoning: When numbers and numerical reasoning are critical to performance, ensuring that the individual is well prepared or able to handle such reasoning is key.
- Workplace Personality Measures: Knowing how an individual might perform relative to other coworkers in areas like conscientiousness, social influence or achievement.
- Emotional Intelligence: EI is one of the most researched and well proven assessments that look at the emotional competencies of individuals (and companies). It is one of the strongest predictors of performance out there and should be considered a key in employee or personal development.
- Stress: It is no secret that too much stress is harmful to productivity and fulfillment in the workplace. Having or knowing how much stress someone is under and knowing if they have the tools to deal with it is another matter. We specifically target stress assessment as a key measure for helping existing employees at least know where they stand and if they are able to roll with the punches that work (and life) is throwing at them.
What we don't do
We don't offer seminars or training related to unscientific or outdated assessments. We only add new techniques and tests as we feel they are mature and proven to increase value to our clientele with metrics like increased ROI, productivity or other measures.
Should you specifically request an assessment for a purpose that Fresh Eyes Consulting is not competent and trained in, or request assessments that are not based on research and evidence; we will respectfully decline the request. We only work with adults of working age and do not do assessments of any sort for individuals under the age of 18. We do not offer polygraphs (lie-detector), graphology (handwriting analysis) or any other assessment not based in science.
We can refer or inquire on your behalf for any particular assessments or workshops you may be looking for that we are aware of and can highly recommend certain companies for self-discovery and self-reflective courses or workshops.
It is also important to note that these services offered are not the same as any kind of clinical diagnosis for mental illness. From an ethical standpoint, we will stop any assessment, coaching or other interaction where evidence of mental volatility is seen. We cannot offer diagnosis of depression or any other illness and are not qualified to offer such services. If individuals feel they may require such services, they should reach out to qualified mental health practitioners.
Pearson Critical Thinking University
(PDF format, 920 Kb download)
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Critical thinking is rated the #1 workplace skill by SHRM
Current Workforce: Organizational Development
The development of the whole organization (or parts of it) are always on an executive's "to do" list, but why? Policy, advancement, keeping employees happy are all legitimate reasons to want the organization to morph into one of those perfect companies where everyone is happy, highly productive and has no turnover. One approach is to turn to seminars and workshops designed to give people time and space to reflect on who they are, what kind of person they are and how that interacts with the workplace and their coworkers.
The trouble with workshops and personality assessments
Workshops on various personality and trait assessments are fairly well known and accepted in the business community. They are often great opportunities for individuals to take stock and reflect on what these assessments and their accompanying workshops tell them about themselves. This kind of personal development is often accompanied by recommendations; homework and a promise to check back later from the assessing company and the client.
Most people have the same experience from that point of completion: they are excited and enthusiastic about the process and wear their "type" sometimes on cardboard stock tape to their forehead (true story). The desire to use and improve themselves is initially strong but the typical worker ends up losing enthusiasm as the work that they were supposed to be doing during the assessment, suddenly welcomes them back and needs doubling up of effort to catch up. Often, that's the last time the individual will think about or act on their recent discoveries and that can often feel wasteful to management based on what they thought was a great chance to change culture or communication styles.
If the company or individual you use for enrichment or self-discovery seminars do the follow up, do have the programs that last and provide long term measurable benefit, that's great, but the story is usually the same: Seminar, no follow up, and no benefit.
An alternative
Another perspective is to help employees (including leadership and management) be their best is to provide them with a baseline of their general skills and abilities and challenge them to improve themselves where weak or leverage their strengths.
Knowing their workplace style, their emotional intelligence, or their critical thinking skills can be a way to challenge individuals to reach their highest potential. Just as important, having individuals know that they have resources to try to improve their skills and be retested can be appealing for any employee who wants to be their best.
360 assessments
Some employees may benefit for the 360 assessment process; at Fresh Eyes, we use the EQi 360 process where individuals, their peers, direct reports, managers and even friends and family assess the same individual and then give the individual a perspective on how people really see them versus how they see themselves.
Benchmark assessments
Often individuals are star performers based on intangibles plus whatever technical duties they do so well. By assessing such individuals and finding out what these individuals might excel in or have a deficit in, managers might be able to understand their organization better and why some traits will be better integrated than others.
Whole organizational assessments
Organizations and teams do function as interactive entities and occasionally knowing or understanding how they feel and interact with each other can give upper management a scorecard to understand what strengths they can leverage and what weaknesses they don't know about. Consider larger organizational assessments as opportunities to be self-reflective on a large scale and fix problems that may be hurting the organization as a whole.
Emotional Intelligence and Selection
(PDF format, 210 Kb download)
CIBC conducted a star performer study where high and low performing sales associates were given EQ-I assessments.. an individual's test scores accounted for 32 percent of his or her booked sales and 71 percent of pipeline sales
Case Studies
So show me what I can do to help my company and myself by starting with assessments.
Hiring scenario #1
Hiring often comes down to selecting the best of a very small group of individuals. In a case when there is an obvious candidate, it is difficult to think that this might be the wrong candidate based on their resume and their interview but your existing team is very compatible and get along very well.
You select that individual and;
You hope: They fit in well socially and are a success.
Worst case: They have poor work skills and are creating friction with the original team.
What about: the other candidates, did they have some intangible skills or traits that might have made them better fits than the obvious candidate? Or perhaps the obvious candidate did have all the skills required, or maybe your company culture is not a good fit for the person you chose.
What could have been done? An assessment may have picked out particular traits of the individual that you might feel weren't good for your group, maybe the person was too outspoken, wasn't conscientious was too willing to listen and sympathize with anyone who talked to them and so on.
These are things that are not on a resume and are very difficult to pick out of a resume/interview process. Your bad or mediocre hiring selection might have changed if you had some kind of objective data on the individual.
Hiring scenario #2
A small group of individuals have reached the final selection process. They are all relatively comparable to each other in skills, experience and personality displayed in the interview. The hiring is a critical one for the company and is needed quickly to drive business processes that have been ignored and are causing problems throughout the company.
You select an individual based on "gut" and;
The individual becomes a star performer and leader, you are a star yourself for selecting such an obvious talent... or the individual is not as advertised and you are blamed. A small investment in a workplace skills assessment might give insight on which individual was the right choice at the right time.
Talent assessment Scenario #1
A management position opens up and a number of internal applicants wish to apply. Previous experiences have told you that promoting a non-manager to a managerial role with no training or mentoring can sometimes work but is sometimes a very rocky road. Some kind of way to tell if the individuals has the skillset within them at this point to take on a role would be perfect...
Leadership scenario #1
A member of the executive leadership is looking to retire and a committee is formed to search for a replacement. A number of suitable candidates are presented but the stakes for hiring are high, perhaps the survival of the company is at stake. Communication skills are desperately needed in the new leader as this is a common complaint across the workforce. If candidates seem equally suitable and they all interview well enough, other than flipping coins or drawing straws, is there any way that more could be known of all the individuals to help with the decision making process.
Leadership scenario #2
An executive is ready to leave and has indicated that they want their mentored report to take on their old role. The selection committee is lukewarm to the idea but are concerned that they know nothing or very little about the "heir apparent' and her ability to communicate and lead. A potential promotion to such a position would be the best case scenario but a failure would result in a huge loss of business intelligence if the original executive and the direct report were to leave in close proximity. Some way to at least understand the potential of the proposed replacement would help the selection process.
Pearson's Watson-Glaser II Critical Thinking Appraisal and CPP's CPI 260 assessment
(PDF format, 260 Kb download)
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Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking and CPI 260 assessment... organizations can quickly and fully assess their people to understand their capacity for job requirements...and leadership
Return On Investment
At Fresh Eyes Consulting, we think that we can provide very effective returns on investment. This can run the gamut from hard dollar savings such as by helping selection decisions that avoid bad hires, up to avoiding executive derailment. We also think that some of our employee assessments can give significant soft returns by increasing employee skill sets to be better critical thinkers or to improve deficit areas or helping them leverage any existing strengths.
Cost of a bad hire
The cost of a bad hire is a lot, and not just a bit of lost salary or missed opportunity. Google "cost of a bad hire' and you should get well over 100 million hit results. Not all useful or what they say but some of the conservative sites place the cost of a bad hire to be up to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Go ahead and do the math on what you might be willing to spend to have just a small bit of information when hiring that might avoid that bad hire, then imagine if you had a lot of objective, scientific data to help. Pre-employment assessment is a relatively small price and great return on investment.
Cost of executive derailment
The cost of having a high level manager or executive fail is not just one individual, it can threaten to destabilize whole divisions or whole companies if the person is unable to lead or manage. Understanding that the individual is not in the right job, needs to understand their stress coping capabilities or just making them understand that the people around them are not seeing what the individual is seeing can avoid full meltdowns and perhaps repair situations.
Cost of hiring individuals with the right mix of skills
Consider that not all positions need individuals with the perfect mix of skills. Those individuals may be very highly sought or unwilling to consider any new position. Promoting the wrong individual or missing a chance on the right individual for a new position may be painfully obvious months after a transition, but reversing the situation is often impossible and companies and workers end up living and working with bad situations that never had to come around.
Losing opportunities for improvement in individuals and organizations
There are seemingly infinite numbers of process change and business change strategies out there but giving opportunities to individuals to improve themselves or understanding the true state of the organization by asking the workforce is a people rather than process improvement. Both are important but concentrating on process rather than both process and people can hinder attempts to make a happier and more productive company.
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
(PDF format, 219 Kb download)
...Telecom New Zealand categorized 70 senior leaders into high, mi and low performance groups and found that EQ-I scores accounted for 48 percent of what differentiated the high and low performing managers. In other words, one-half of the skill set required... is comprised of emotional and social skills
Emotional Intelligence and Return On Investment
(PDF format, 1800 Kb download)
...Center for Creative Leadership... ROI Impact: the findings from this study were highly predictive, i.e. eight emotional subscales predicted high performance 80% of the time... these include: self-awareness, stress tolerance and empathy...
What We Offer
Based on sound, evidence based thinking; we believe that a fairly small number of assessments can fulfill most requirements for business or for personal development relative to their professional careers. More importantly, we can provide guidelines, training and coaching for improvement on most of these skills. These assessments are all available on-line and can be done and scored quickly. Debriefings are required for most assessments between the client and Fresh Eyes, but this can be done in any way suited to the client- by phone, in person or via webex. Whatever works for you and your busy schedule.
Please note that signed permission forms are required for all assessments for applicant or employees. As per the Ethics tab in this site, there are ethical requirements of both the assessor, Client Company and the test taker and we do take these obligations seriously.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking has many definitions but many people believe that the term is centered around defining individuals who are not blindly following habit and honestly evaluating all the data they have when thinking and making choices when solving problems- if people rely on what they know or can reasonably infer from the evidence they have, they tend to make better decisions that individuals who don't. You might think that it is better to hire someone who is a dedicated expert in their specific field rather than someone with more generalized skills and in a lot of positions that's absolutely true. However, most workplaces rarely give individuals completely fixed duties that rarely change and require no agility in their thinking and flexibility. It is this ability to think critically that allows one employee to be able to think and make decisions that don't make employers cringe and allows them to gain new skills faster than those who do. If you think your workplace is going to move more slowly and be mostly static, you should have no worries about critical thinking assessments, if you don't, it should be worth thinking about.
We use and recommend the Watson Glaser II Critical Thinking Appraisal as one of the most widely accepted and well designed and updated of these styles of appraisals. The Watson-Glaser has been around in some form since 1925 and has been used all over the world. Research has shown that one of the strongest predictors of job success is critical thinking and when under work stress or pressure, being able to use these skills is key. As always, these kinds of scores should be complimentary to the hiring process, not the basis of it.
See http://www.thinkwatson.com/assessments/watson-glaser for more information on the Watson-Glaser II assessment.
Another important note is that critical thinking can change and can be taught to individuals who wish to improve. In this case, Critical Thinking University provides a long term way for employees to practice critical thinking skills that can help with jobs and job success. This courseroom is online and always available for those who want to use and practice those skills.
Workplace personality
Workplace personality refers to measuring certain personality traits so that one traits critical to the job can be matched against the traits of the assessment. While most individuals and companies would say that having an applicant score high in any measure is a measure of their ideal candidate, the world simply does not work that way. Individuals have certain traits that are well suited to one job but irrelevant to another. As an example, one would want to see a high level stress tolerance for a CEO but such a trait would be less useful for a lighthouse keeper. Another perspective is that employers could find individuals with certain traits that they valued such or concern for others or cooperation. Finding the right person for a given job is now as much finding the right fit for culture or needs of the organization rather than someone who fulfills all the check marked requirements.
Rather than giving generic scores to a few categories like the Watson Glaser II, the Workplace Personality Inventory II (WPI-II) is based on the US Department of Labor occupational data and is considered highly reliable, valid and has been normalized for a great number of occupations; that is, it is known how scores trend in certain occupations.
The WPI-II reports also offer developmental advice on the skills measured.
Numerical reasoning
Certain occupations like engineering, accounting and certain sciences require good competence with numbers and have an need to use critical thinking with numerical concepts. Simply being able to do complex math is a skill but being able to apply it to practical problems is one that can be critical to why the employer is hiring. One nearly impossible task is to tell if your candidate really is good at applied numerical concepts and the failure of the individual to perform up to snuff can be, ahem, negative, in occupations like accounting or engineering.
We use the ANRA (Advanced Numerical Reasoning Appraisal) as our tool of choice when working with clientele who need or want measures on critical thinking, but with numbers. While not every position needs numerical reasoning, it is important to the knowledge worker and our ability to digest and appraise data, including numbers is becoming more and more critical.
As with our other offerings, the ANRA is considered highly reliable, valid and has high test-retest stability. The ANRA is often paired with the Watson Glaser II as a way to assess numerical and non-numerical critical thinking and the two tests show good correlations between certain categories and subcategories.
The makers of the ANRA assessment note that is was designed for employee selection for jobs with numerical reasoning such as project management, finance and accounting, business analysts, procurement and purchasing positions and any other position with financial emphasis.
As always, no test can be 100% predictive of job success and the ANRA, like other tests, is only considered to be an aid in the hiring decision making process.
Stress
We understand that stress is a constant in business and that it may be affecting performance both on assessments and in practical work situations. We offer the ARSENEL stress assessment to give a quick overview of a test takers stress levels and how they appear to be prepared to deal with them. While not appropriate for new hires, this kind of stress assessment can be critical to high productivity, managerial and executive positions as sometimes just stopping to understand stress levels and support can help with productivity and prevent burnout.
The ARSENOL assessment is based on the work of Dick Thompson, PhD, his work and writings on stress and derailment are well published and proven with respect to how much abilities and traits can be dragged down when stress levels are above optimum levels.
One topic with a good deal of academic and popular literature support is the notion of Emotional Intelligence. As always, there are varying views on what this is and how to define it, but it is considered to be a suite of abilities and attitudes that relate to emotions. People with the right levels of emotional intelligence for their jobs have high levels of job satisfaction and often have significantly higher levels of productivity than those with the right tools or abilities.
See the EI Consortium website for more articles, reviews and psychometric data on the various assessments that are available.
What is EI?
(PDF format, 94 Kb download)
Emotional Intelligence... reflects one's overall well-being and ability to succeed in life... The development potentials the EQ-I 2.0 identifies, along with the targeted strategies it provides make it a highly effective employee development tool
EI and Return on Investment
(PDF format, 1800 Kb download)
...Center for Creative Leadership... ROI Impact: the findings from this study were highly predictive, i.e. eight emotional subscales predicted high performance 80% of the time... these include: self-awareness, stress tolerance and empathy...
Improve Your Thinking... Improve your Sales
(PDF format, 640 Kb download)
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Think WATSON RED critical thinking model helps the sales process.... Recognize Assumptions >> Evaluate Arguments/Information.... Evaluate Arguments/Information >> Draw Conclusion
Critical Thinking Means Business
(PDF format, 260 Kb download)
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...too few employees possess the essential skills of focusing on the most relevant information, asking the right questions and separating reliable facts from false assumptions... 70% of high school educated employees were deficient in critical thinking, while employees with 4 year college education showed only 63% had adequate skills and only 28% were rated excellent critical thinkers