We are entering an era in healthcare where mistakes, especially errors in hiring, will become too costly to tolerate.
Executives and managers should be held accountable for their track record in hiring. While Human Resources may run the recruiting and employment process, putting all of the blame for miss-hires on HR seems grossly unfair. Yes, they may own the talent acquisition piece, but, in the end, they do not make the decision for who gets the job and who doesn’t.
To achieve this level of accountability, leaders need additional resources that add insight and value in the candidate selection process.
Moreover, misguided performance metrics for recruiters – time to hire, etc. – may produce the unintended consequence: pressure to hire the wrong person.
To mitigate the risks, corporations are increasingly relying on behavior and values related tools to help them find and employ the right/best suited candidate for a given job. The DiSC,© Myers-Briggs, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory are among the most popular in pre-employment guides. The principle legal requirement is that the tests be used in a way to select the best candidate, not to eliminate individuals for non-job related issues.
JohnGSelf Associates (JGSA) employs the DiSC for the candidates as well as the key direct reports.
The DiSC Profile is a multi-level learning instrument that helps individuals assess to what degree they utilize each Dimension of Behavior in a situation, explained Nancy Swain, President of Strategic Intelligence, a JGSA strategic partner. The instrument then provides feedback designed to help people:
- Discover behavioral strengths, areas for augmenting, blending, capitalizing
- Value and learn to respect the strengths of others
- Deal with conflict effectively by learning adaptive behaviors
- Enhance work group with teamwork and minimize team conflict
- Develop strategies to meet diverse needs of others
- Improve communication skills by determining communication styles
- Increase sales skills and understanding of the prospect, client, and customer with people reading.
- Improve customer relationships by identification and meeting needs
- Reduce conflict and stress, in both interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships
- Manage interpersonal communication better
JGSA, is not alone in seeking tools to enhance the quality of work. Ms. Swain, a specialist in the DiSC and a leading executive coach and transition specialist, explained that the DiSC, one of the first in the field, is used by many Fortune 500 Companies, HR professionals, consultants, coaches, trainers, medical providers, clergy, government agencies, sales firms, and educational institutions. Healthcare is only now beginning to incorporate insightful tools like DiSC into their hiring process.
DiSC Profiles help these clients:
- Build productive teams
- Develop effective managers, supervisors, leaders
- Train a powerful sales force
- Improve customer service
- Ease frustrations and interpersonal conflict
- Enhance communication
- Conflict management resolution
- Improves personal diversity awareness and recognition
- Improve the bottom line: productivity
- Assists in hiring, recruiting, placement, promotion, outsourcing
- Change management, quality enhancement
- Managing, counseling, coaching
In addition to using DiSC as a candidate screening/marching tool, it is the primary resource for the Firm’s 60-day post employment team building session that is incorporated in the price of our executive search engagements. Clients say this is an important value-added benefit in that it helps to enhance the team’s performance.
We see DiSC as an integral component of a best practice in executive search. The cost of this assessment is ridiculously cheap when you compare it to the expense associates with a miss-hire.