When looking to expand your workforce, having the right skills and abilities are certainly very important. Those skills and abilities can be taught, though; much harder to teach are the right attitude, mindset and approach to work to fit into your corporate culture.That is the thinking behind the JOBehaviors assessment, a pre-employment test designed to identify candidates who are best suited to specific positions. Along with assessments for a wide-variety of fields, the company has a pre-employment assessment for diesel technicians.
“We’ve become pretty darn good at imparting technical skill,” says Mark Tinney, president of JOBehaviors Inc. which is based in Gig Harbor, Wash. "What is a lot more difficult, is to transform somebody behaviorally. In a certain sense, they're coming to the table as who they are. Most folks can demonstrate technical competence at the point of hire, but it's pretty difficult in most cases to determine the behavioral aspect for that candidate."
“The power of a tool like this is that whenever you can introduce a very consistent, a very job specific, extremely predictive and valid tool, you’re going to significantly increase your odds for success.”— Mark Tinney, president, JOBehaviors
Job-specific behaviors rated
JOBehaviors develops its assessments through surveys of top performers in their given fields, who will generate, on average, close to 500 behaviors that make up a particular job. Those top performers will rate the behaviors on criteria that include job performance, success, and satisfaction, among others. JOBehaviors uses those ratings to analyze statistically the behaviors and rank them from highest to lowest performance value. The diesel technician assessment, for example, includes such job-specific behaviors as “systematically diagnoses electrical problems,” and “documents parts, time, and repairs” alongside more generally beneficial behaviors such as “uses creativity and initiative to solve problems,” and “plans and organizes day/job.”
“It’s an approach that respects the work and it respects the workers,” Tinney says. “If we look at any given job as a pie graph — even a fairly technical job like electrician or diesel technician — as it relates to performance, that pie is going to be made up of about 20 to 30 percent technical knowledge and 70 to 80 percent behaviors.”
Tinney notes that for highly technical positions, such as diesel technicians, much of the emphasis in the interview stage is on the individuals’ technical competence, but rarely does it go beyond that. In particular, at times when there is a perceived shortage of workers, technical competence becomes the primary goal. But it’s only after a person is hired that an employer might discover that the worker isn’t performing at the desired level.
“The power of a tool like this is that whenever you can introduce a very consistent, a very job specific, extremely predictive and valid tool, you’re going to significantly increase your odds for success,” Tinney says.
Online assessments
Administered online, the assessment takes 10 to 12 minutes to complete. The assessment can be emailed to a candidate or can be embedded directly into a website, including web-based recruiting platforms such as Monster or Craigslist. The results are then instantly emailed to the appropriate people in the company.
One of the key benefits of the assessment is to quantify performance — if a manager is asked how much more productive is one worker compared to another they might estimate a certain figure, but if you actually measure performance it could be significantly different.
“Say you have a mechanic who is very conscientious, who is making sure he’s getting it right the first time, who is working at a pace and keeps his work station orderly, and knows what he’s doing,” Tinney says. “He can absolutely run rings around someone who may be technically competent but is just not as conscientious about making sure that rework is not going to occur. That’s the main goal: to help our clients go out and identify individuals who are going to perform and produce at a very high level.”
Subtle deviations in behavior can account for huge differences in performance outcomes. Certain behaviors are consistent with any top performer in any industry — working respectfully with others, for example.
The company has a variety of assessments for driving-related jobs — a delivery driver, a motor coach driver, a school bus driver, and an over-the-road long haul driver. These positions are all fairly similar from a technical standpoint, but require hugely varying behaviors.
“Some people might think, ‘Well, a driver’s a driver’s a driver.’ But what’s separating a school bus driver or a delivery driver from an over-the-road long haul driver is quite a bit, actually, behaviorally,” Tinney says.
Cincinnati-based fleet maintenance company Clarke Power Services has utilized JOBehaviors since January. Director of Human Resources George Svaranowic was dissatisfied with his company’s high turnover rate, and tried JOBehaviors on a trial basis to see if the assessment could help identify better applicants for diesel technicians and customer service. He says he has been very happy with how JOBehaviors has helped to narrow down the applicants to those who will be the best fit with the company.
“Our shops around the country are small shops, so it’s a small family-type environment, and the customer support manager in each shop would interview the person for their technical abilities,” Svaranowic says. “That’s all well and good, but then you bring that person into a shop of five to 10 people, and if they don’t have the right behaviors and the right attitude, it doesn’t really matter what mechanical skills they bring to the table. It just doesn’t work. The small shop requires everyone to be more of a team, because one bad apple in a small shop and the whole morale is destroyed.”
Skeptic turns believer
Svaranowic says he was skeptical in the beginning but soon discovered a strong correlation between the assessment results and what the new hires actually did once they landed their jobs.
“This assessment takes 10 minutes, so that’s perfect,” says Svaranowic. “Every person we interview takes the assessment right there at the interview. We get the assessment result that tells us whether they have the right behavior and if they are going to be effective in our environment.”
Tinney says one of the biggest advantages of JOBehaviors is reducing turnover, which is a recurring theme in industries experiencing a technician shortage.
“If you want to get off the technician shortage merry-go-round, you can really solve that by addressing it at the point of hire,” says Tinney. “You can essentially solve the technician shortage problem for your organization by identifying and consistently hiring people that are going to perform at a high level and stay with the company.”
— Matt Jones
Matt Jones is a freelancer writer based in Fredericton, New Brunswick.