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.

PDF:  What is EI?

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

PDF:  EI and Return on Investment

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...

PDF: Improve Your Thinking... Improve your Sales

Improve Your Thinking... Improve your Sales
(PDF format, 640 Kb download) i

Think WATSON RED critical thinking model helps the sales process.... Recognize Assumptions >> Evaluate Arguments/Information.... Evaluate Arguments/Information >> Draw Conclusion

PDF: Critical Thinking Means Business

Critical Thinking Means Business
(PDF format, 260 Kb download) i

...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

  1. 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).