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
Why Should You Care?
"The Emotional Intelligence assessment offered through Fresh Eyes Consulting was both comprehensive and personally very satisfying. The Assessment Report, while very detailed was easy to follow and the use of graphics made comprehension of the results a snap. The debrief session was also very helpful and professional, giving me a number of things to work on, as well as some significant food for thought in a number of areas. Fresh Eyes Consulting was even very helpful in sourcing appropriate professional development opportunities to address areas requiring further development. All in all an extremely interesting and telling process."
C. Charles Brimley
President & CEO
Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation Inc.
Fresh Eyes Consulting was born from our founder's many years working in the High Technology sector where high speed hiring was the rule rather than the exception. While they and other sectors hire more cautiously now, there is still an enormous temptation to hire on subjective interpretations of individuals when met for a brief time, or to see only certain things on a resume, rather than know what the person is truly like and how they might perform in any given setting. From all of this, the idea of using scientific, evidence based assessments for selection was born. We strive to be able to give tools for hiring, reviewing and development that meet our standards for good research foundations and are what we consider objective and evidence-based.
We also offer access to online training for skills like critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Assessing staff and offering opportunities for improvement, as in continuous improvement, is something we think should be a core value for many knowledge based companies. We also offer coaching at any level, from individual contributor, to manager, to executive.
"We wanted to know what some of the top people in our company are 'made of', and reconfirm our core values. Fresh Eyes helped identify which assessments would make sense to achieve our goals. The assessment process was new to us but Eric guided us through and facilitated a very informative debriefing at the end. We will use assessment data in our hiring process going forward and Fresh Eyes to guide our decision making."
Gordon Reynen
Senior developer and owner
In the early 1900s, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were early pioneers in industrial psychology and essentially created the field of time and motion studies on workers that showed management that efficient movements, proper tools and rest breaks led to better productivity and happier workers. After Frank passed away, Lillian continued her work in industrial research, ultimately accumulating 22 honorary degrees, being called the "mother of modern management" and having a postage stamp created in her honor. Oh, and their 12 children became the basis of the original 1950's movie "Cheaper by the dozen". The first supermom?
So what is an Industrial and Organizational psychologist and what organizations do they belong to?
What are SIOP and I-O Psychologists?
Ever had a personality type test and wondered how it might be used or useful in the workplace? While FreshEyes does not offer subjective personality tests like those listed below, this may be what you are looking for.
How Two Partners Use A Personality Test To Avoid Conflict
Assessments like the Rorschach ink blot test are only for clinical use and should not be used in organizational work.
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
The term emotional intelligence is only a relatively recent concept. Psychologists used to consider emotions to be superfluous to our health and happiness but now research indicates that individuals with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful and happier in their lives.
World War I was the first mass attempt to use assessments to classify individuals for different kinds of work in the armed forces. While not entirely successful at the time, by World War II, the army Alpha test was used to classify an estimated 12 million soldiers for military jobs and specialized stress tests further allow classification of soldiers into intelligence agencies.
One study on employee self-rating showed that 90% of employees believe they are in the top 10% of performers. Even more startling, 99% of workers think they are in the top 50% of performers and the remaining 1% think they are just slightly below the 50th percentile ranking of performers. Next time you think about self-deception not being a big deal, think about this.
Current Workforce: Job Analysis & KSAOs
How well do you know what your employee do versus what you think or advertise that they do? Job analysis looking at knowledge, skills, abilities and other traits is an often overlooked business efficiency; perhaps your company has the skills it needs internally but doesn't know it or perhaps you can shift duties to help fulfill requirements from the company perspective and help employee grow with new tasks and duties.
Job analysis and looking at Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other skills (KSAOs) can often be done with simple logging of duties or can be done with interviews with workers and coworkers and other methods. We can help with these kinds of tasks or you can do it on your own; either way, before spending money on new talent, consider ensuring that you know what KSAOs you have already and saving yourself and the company the cost of onboarding new talent.
Example: when considering hiring a new manager, look at your existing talent pool to see if there's a manager in waiting. Sure, lots of people make it known and obvious that they want to be considered for promotion or changes in scenery but often individuals don't know or are never given the opportunity. Giving individuals assessments based on things like emotional intelligence might reveal a leader in the making... you may never know what you have already.
In testing and assessment, there is a concept of Face and Construct validity? What this means is that if I say that you are a happy person based on a test and you agree, then there is face validity to saying that. If you then ask what being happy actually means or how can I measure it, then we talk about what the construct of happiness means. If there really is no applicable meaning to the word "happy" or "happiness", then we have low construct validity because the concept of happiness is only what someone feels it should (subjectively) mean.
Specialists in Industrial and Organizational psychology have the academic background to find deeper issues in organizations that someone with lesser training may not be able to provide.
So who uses employment tests? Quite a few people.
How Many U.S. Companies Use Employment Tests?
The NFL and the Wonderlic cognitive ability assessment
Aaron Hernandez: An Early Warning in 2010 NFL Draft Profile
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
An understanding of how psychology might be used in business, advertising and workers was proposed as far back as 1893 by E.W. Scripture and his book Thinking, Feeling, Doing.
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.
Do not assume that a given assessment is universally applicable to all individuals in all countries; normalization (or norms) for different populations are required for assessments to be valid, asking for an assessment to be given to someone in another country requires a specifically normalized version of the assessment and the language of the individual should match the required level needed to take the test.
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
Understand yourself! Even if your organization is unwilling to run assessment programs, self-reflective behavior is a trait of good management and leadership. You can independently pay for any assessment that you and the assessor agree are appropriate; if you have a deficit of a social skill and don't know it, knowing and working on it is the first step of becoming a better team player, better manager or better leader.
If asked to take an assessment, you must be given clear instructions on the purpose of the test, how the test will be given and who the results will be given to. Simply asking individuals to take a test without understanding why AND giving permission to do so is unethical.
Current Workforce: Personal/Individual Development
Individuals can often use assessments and coaching as a tool to see things how they really are or how the world sees them. It's often not a fun task to be asked to look at yourself and receive feedback from your peers, direct reports or management structure, even at the executive level, but is something that can spring individuals out of unproductive behaviors and let them be their best. Emotional intelligence assessment in the EQ-I 2.0 or EQ-I 360 assessment can be a way to quickly "check in" with yourself to see if things are not in balance. Stress assessment can help you understand if stress is getting the better of an individual and if they may be hitting the burnout phase of stress rather than productive stress.
What's coaching all about?
Coaching is a relatively new phenomenon where leadership or high performers are given individual attention to attempt to work out or sort through issues that may be keeping them from achieving their very best work. In years past, one might have a mentor or confidant to work through struggles but often, individuals are boosted to positions that give them power and responsibility that they are not well equipped to deal with. Even executives are often feeling overwhelmed or unable to focus on what they can or should be doing.
What's "executive derailment"?
This is a new business nomenclature only slightly related to the psychiatric term of derailment, which is a condition of disconnected thought processes. In the business world, executive derailment refers to the process of failing at executive level positions because of a variety of reasons mostly related to the stressors of the position and the perception of the individual on their ability to do what they've been hired to do.
At Fresh Eyes, we do understand the potential losses to the company; the employees and the individual in question when there is a need for coaching and assessing that may not be available or known of. The potential disruption, the loss of high level leadership and the loss of investment by the company in the individual may make evaluation and coaching of individual at-risk to be well worth the investment.
So what can you do?
We can assess individuals for traits and abilities emotional intelligence (to see if they have some imbalance in their emotional tool set) or for their ability to handle stress (to see if they have the tools to deal with the high level of stress typically encountered at such positions) can be a key to successfully begin a coaching relationship either with Fresh Eyes or with a preferred or familiar coach. Longer term commitments to online solution to increase EI or critical thinking skills may also be plausible commitments for the person under the stress.
Case Studies
How not to hire a murderer
Select International article
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
19 points showing how emotional intelligence relates to return on investment in organizations
The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence
Great sales people are all extroverts, right? Everyone knows that. Or not.
The mistake we make: extraversion as a money making trait
Do accredited associations like the American Psychological Association also focus on the workplace? Oh yes, and on all kinds of topics, from career development to retirement and all aspects of work between them.
CWS Areas of Research
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...
Psychometric testing is explicitly not to be used as a tool to layoff or fire individuals. It is unethical to use a test in this way and there can be legal repercussions to such actions. These tools are meant to differentiate talent and to help or leverage the strengths of existing workers, not be the magic 8 ball that tells you who to layoff or fire.
The Hawthorne effect describe the change in efficiency and productivity when individuals are aware of their being observed; it was found accidentally by Elton Mayo of the Harvard Business School when looking at the effect of changing the lighting levels in a factory setting. They noticed that productivity increased when increasing lighting levels, and kept increasing when lowering lighting levels.
If you are asked to take an assessment, it is your right to refuse and to expect no repercussions because of your refusal.
Many employment assessments can be purchased or used by non-professionals such as the Wonderlic cognitive ability test. When interpretation and training make professional credentials a requirement, there are then restrictions on who can purchase and interpret such instruments. Without professional interpretation, it can be easy for untrained assessors or those receiving results to misunderstand what the results of the more complex assessments actually mean.
Ethics Of Assessment
For all our clients, we follow the recommendations and guidelines of organizations like those provided by the American and Canadian Psychological Associations as well as gold standards such as The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999) and the Canadian Code of Ethics.
In brief, they prescribe certain things that include;
- Being competent in the principles and practical instances of test assessment. Simply put, one should not be using any particular assessment if one is not competent or trained in its use which should also include general experience and training in psychometric assessment and interpretation. There should be effort made to update and be aware of research on the assessments (current research) and these needs to be reconciled with the purpose of the assessment.
- Using the tool for the purpose for which it is intended. Some assessments are meant for clinical settings and should not be used for selection; similarly, some assessments are made for selection and should not be used in a clinical setting. We will not use tools beyond their stated purpose as creativity has a time and place but assessments are not one of them.
- The person assessing must know enough information about the person being assessment to know if the assessment is valid for that person. That means that the person being assessed needs to be a member of known groups that have been "normalized' against the assessment. This includes knowing the most comfortable language used, knowing of cultural or ethnic variables that can change scores, knowing where the assessments will be taken and so on.
- The person taking the assessment must have knowledge of why they are being asked to take such an assessment, consent in writing to doing so (and be free to withdraw from testing if they choose) and have the knowledge that their refusal to take the assessment will not be a factor in any decision making. Similarly, when using assessments for selection, assessments are a factor to help in the decision making process, NOT the only method used when making a hire.
- There will be clarity in who the client is for the assessment and who gets the results. These are confidential and the relationships between all parties will be crystal clear before any assessment begins. As an example, if a developmental assessment is done with a client and there is an agreement that the only ones seeing the report will be the client and the person assessing, then that client's manager or HR department cannot demand the report after there is an agreement in place.
- Debriefings after scoring is completed are required as the client should be given assistance in the interpretation and understanding of the scoring process.
- The client is free to ask questions: if you don't know or understand why something is happening or being done, ask and we will answer or provide you with links to the science behind the tests that help answer your questions.
This is not an exhaustive list of ethics but is intended to help answer question and provide clarity about what you can expect from us and what we expect from our clients.
Assessment consent
Fresh Eyes Consulting will provide, or will work with your company to create a consent form for participants in assessment that satisfy all requirements. Without signed/acknowledged consent in place for the participant (and knowledge of why this is being done and the freedom to withdraw without consequence), then no assessments will be done.
Fresh Eyes Consulting will validate that the person taking the assessment is part of a normed group under that assessment. Assessments are only truly valid when certain characteristics of the person taking them that could affect the results are accounted for.
More About Us
This accelerated pace of life has made hiring, promoting and development difficult for seasoned executives and HR staff; much less those under pressure to hire at all cost and assume that the resume and interview were the best tools available.
We hope that our experiences as workers and managers might make you consider us as been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, types who have a genuine appreciation for the decisions you need to make, the costs of being right and wrong, and the speed you need to make them.
What makes you think you're so good at this?
We have the experience but the assessment is the key; when objective data is present, people are more likely to make better talent decision. If you don't think you need any help and you're exceptional at talent assessment, consider this; we reinforce our successes and do our best to forget our failures. The accountant who couldn't add, the developer who couldn't code or the manager who hid in the corner are hires that are quickly forgotten.
Being willing to be reflective and search for better processes in talent acquisition is not regressive; it's a sign of company maturity and growth. Could Fresh Eyes do your hiring any better than your current system with assessments? Impossible to say, but that is part of the point, the assessments are objective and help remove some of the doubt when making final selections. And make no mistake; you as the client are making the final decision, if your gut tells you something contrary to the data, we are here to advise, not force you to make a decision.
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
There is no correlation or connection between cognitive intelligence, which is roughly what people think of when they think intelligence and emotional intelligence. The genius may have great people skill or not, but the person of average cognitive ability but high emotional intelligence may be far more successful in reaching their life goals.
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
Frequently Asked Questions
I think my Human Resource department/Recruiter is great; they don't need these kinds of services.
We don't know your HR people or your recruiter and their record; they are likely very, very good at what they do and are quite talented; that's why we're consultants, we are here to assist and provide a second look at a talent scenario before committing resources to a new hire or spending money on an existing one.
If your hiring process is 100% checkmark based with no other criteria allowed, then we can't help you. If there are interviews and subjective processes involved, then by definition, there may be places and people who fall through the cracks and don't get hired and those who should've fallen through the cracks and do get tired.
We are offering a way to get a more impartial, objective assessment of individuals since we are not invested in your hiring beyond providing the advice at that point. Of course, we want you to succeed and have great hires and hopefully this is the goal of everyone else involved too.
So I can now toss out my HR department or recruiter and just hire you to do hires?
No, you can't do that. They are awesome people so stop what you're doing and go buy them all something sweet and caffeinated from some upscale coffee place, maybe biscotti too. We'll wait while you do that.
Now then, assessments are only intended to provide a partial snapshot of what you're doing and help with the decision making process, not make it for you. There are no magic machines that make the best fit and assessments only provide probabilities that any given person might have the traits or abilities that you might want for any given position.
Well, I see a flaw here, someone taking one of these assessments will just give themselves checkmarks to make them look perfect so they'll cheat on the test.
Fakeability is something that concerns all assessments and it is something that research is able to account for- once organizational psychologists started to assess individuals, there were individuals trying to outwit the psychologist. In modern tests, there are techniques like looking at the number of questions answered one way or the other, checking to see if people are giving themselves impossibly good ratings that few people really can say they honestly would get (e.g. "Do you ever make mistakes?") and many other things. One of the things that assessor companies like ours is provide is the experience to check these things and let employers know that things are maybe not as honestly answered as they could be. Similarly we can look at the assessments and see something that doesn't add up. A debriefing session between the assessor and the client then can lead to answers on discrepancies and prevent misunderstandings that poorly trained assessors can miss.
I've taken an MBTI/DiSC or other personality assessment and know that I'm a certain type so I don't need anything else beyond comparing types and seeing what the net result is between two types. What do you offer over and above that?
The MBTI (Myers Briggs) is a wonderful tool for self-reflection, personal development and is a good snapshot of what one's subjective state of being is when the assessment is taken. It is not designed to be used for talent assessment purposes (and specifically says that in the documentation). We offer the opportunity to work with assessments made for selection and other workplace purposes and only that. If you or your company wants personal, introspective experiences, we can recommend other firms with the skills and experiences to deliver those products.
So if I want to use this, I have to herd my employees or potential hires into a room for a day, give them a pencil and your test and then send it in to you and wait 6-8 weeks? That doesn't sound fun or useful.
No disagreement there, that would be ugly. The assessments here are all available on-line and most are scored within hours or a day or two. The time required for an individual to take an assessment can range from under 30 minutes and up to an hour for some but individuals often finish much more quickly. Results can be forwarded to clients and discussed or debriefed in hours or a few days depending on the circumstances and context.
So is this whole emotional intelligence thing just another fad, I've been through a lot of business fads and am not convinced this won't go away in a couple of years.
Fair question, we at Fresh Eyes have been through our fair share of fads that never seemed to go anywhere. The scientific evidence for EI's strength as an assessment is very strong.
Consider that: Yale now has a full center for emotional intelligence (http://ei.yale.edu) . One of the pioneers of emotional intelligence, Peter Salovey, is now president of Yale as well.
Consider that: The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, noted recently that Emotional Intelligence was just as important as traditional intelligence quotients.
Consider that there is a full consortium dedicated to Emotional intelligence, exploring it and applying it to new and exciting opportunities constantly (http://www.eiconsortium.org).
The more your read about EI, the more convinced you may be that it is the measure that matters in leadership and the ability to work effectively in teams in the future.
Contact Fresh Eyes Consulting
If you have questions, feel free to send us a message using the following form, or contact us directly through the coordinates below.
Eric Hind, Principal
Email: ehind@fresheyesconsulting.ca
Phone: (613) 796-3413
Fresh Eyes Consulting
7001 Nickerson Way
Greely, Ontario, Canada K4P 1A3
Footnotes
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Promotional and Training Products associated with the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA). Copyright © 2012 NCS Pearson, Inc. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Promotional and Training Products associated with the Watson-Glaser II Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson-Glaser II). Copyright © 2012 NCS Pearson, Inc. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
"Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" and "Watson-Glaser" are trademarks, in the US and/or other countries, of Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliates(s).