By Neal Glatt 

Here at GrowTheBench, we’re all about investing in employees and helping them develop to achieve their full potential.  But full potential isn’t created equally and each person brings with them various levels of unique talents.  Our ability to achieve results is based on two factors - talent and investment - but too few companies know how to measure talent at all.  Here are the two best options that exist…

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There are many assessments out there that claim to measure talent, but most of them fall far short.  For one, personality assessments do not measure talent.  The better ones can reveal unique insights into behavioral tendencies which can be valuable for developmental work, but stop short of actually predicting success (even when they claim to).  

The reason for this is that they benchmark the best performers but fail to validate predictivity against the bottom performers.  For instance, many of these assessments will say that salespeople must be highly decisive because they’ve seen 83% of the top sales performers in an organization score highly in the decisiveness trait they measure.  But they never look at the worst sales performers to ensure that less than 20% of them also score highly on decisiveness!  If they did, they would see that this behavioral tendency isn’t predictive of sales success at all.

Additionally, IQ tests, skills competencies, personality tests, culture fit, and behavioral tests will always fail to identify the level of talent for employee selection because they aren’t role specific.  That is the reason we use two very distinct tools when it comes to making hiring decisions around talent.

One is the Builder Profile 10 which measures the ability for people to build organizations.  It is specific to roles that require high autonomy and where success is required in changing market conditions where being comfortable with ambiguity is necessary.  This includes managerial and director-level roles as well as leadership roles.  Developed by Gallup, it can separate those who have entrepreneurial talents from those who would be better suited for individual contributor roles.

The other valuable assessment is for those in the sales function from Objective Management Group.  These assessments are specific to the sales environment where supporting beliefs and behaviors around money, rejection, and the will to sell are critical predictors of success.  We use them to find top-performing salespeople, sales managers, and sales support staff, knowing that 91% of the time a candidate is recommended and hired they become a top performer within 6 months and that 75% of the time a candidate is not recommended but hired anyway they are not retained or perform poorly.

GrowTheBench has used both of these assessments time and time again to find rockstar talent and build awesome teams.  If you want to make sure you’re investing your time in your employee development wisely, or looking to make a critical next hire, contact us to help deploy one of these talent assessments to ensure you’re not wasting your time and money investing in someone’s limited potential.