Selecting the best

1. Selecting the best What you need to know about talent assessment for yourself and for your career as an HR professional Orla Leonard, MSc, C.Psych. Guy M Beaudin, MBA, Ph.D. CRF Spring Symposium

2. What we want to cover • Best practice in assessments – or how to minimize your risk of a bad hire • How to select an assessment partner • Role of HR in the assessment process • Classic pitfalls – mistakes to avoid • Biggest assessment challenges • Q&A (anytime!) • Case studies

3. 10 Best Practices in executive assessment Pre-assessment the Assessment itself Post-assessment • Be honest about the culture and what it takes to succeed within it. • Be clear about what success in the job means and how it will be measured. • Assess candidates against the context, culture and job requirements. • Assess character and potential as well as performance. • Use a range of assessment tools and techniques. Bring all the points of view together. • Assess how individuals can use their strengths to be successful in the role. • Make the selection process part of the integration into the culture. • Think of on-boarding as an integration process, not just a briefing activity. • Act quickly in providing feedback. • Ensure that the effort put into selection and on-boarding reflects its importance. 7 1 3 2 8 4 9 5 10 6

4. How to select an assessment partner The psychometrics aren’t everything, but they are something Pick one if you are a small company, two if you need one to specialize in your senior executives Don’t fire them if: they get one wrong, especially at the beginning How to select an assessment partner? Fire them if: they don’t do a thorough job spec at the front end Give them as much context as you can Have them meet the hiring manager

5. Role of hr in the assessment process • Know who the good assessors are in your market • Treat your assessors as partners, not vendors • Act as a link to the business, not a barrier • Ensure thoroughness of process and adherence to best practices • Bring all the relevant parties together to share impressions of the candidate – hub and spoke is not optimal • Manage the whole process, from assessment to integration

6. Classic pitfalls – mistakes to avoid • Overemphasis on psychometrics • Over-reliance on the search firm • Overconfidence - Business acumen ≠ “Human” acumen • Oversimplification - “We’re all experts in human behaviour” • Over-reliance on incomplete measures • References / track record assessment method alone • Overlooking warning signals due to time pressures • Understand your own filters and blind spots • Overlook data that is not part of the ‘assessment’        

7. Particular Assessment challenges Determining potential Identifying derailers Assessing motivation

8. Case study #1 • The CFO you are supporting need to hire a new controller for his team • The CFO is approximately 2 years away from retirement, but has been lax in hiring talent that could succeed him when he leaves • You think the controller role is an ideal successor role for the CFO and you get him to agree to include the potential to succeed him as one of the criteria for selection • His top candidate gets a full assessment, and is rated very highly on his ability to do the controller role, but very low on his ability to succeed to CFO • You feel very strongly that you should continue the search, whereas he thinks there is great urgency in getting someone in the role now • How do you convince him of the need to have a candidate who can succeed him?

9. Case study #2 • You have put together a talent development roundtable process to bring some rigor to your company’s succession planning process • Previously, executives would fill in the succession chart according to their own opinion and assessment • You have included external assessments and a 360 process to bring more data into succession planning • You manage to get the data together for each of the key roles in the organization • You facilitate the first roundtable and it is a disaster: executives spend most of the time trying to discredit the data and defending their own choices for succession, arguing that they are a much better judge of talent • How do you get this process back on track?

10. Case study #3 • The Board and the CEO have different views of who should succeed the CEO • The Board is impressed by an internal candidate's ability to run a business steady –state, which they feel is what is needed at the moment • The CEO believes there is growth opportunity in this business and feels they need a different candidate and will need to go externally to find it • You have been tasked with the role of managing the succession process with the Board and the CEO. How do you help them gain alignment?

11. RHR INTERNATIONAL THANK YOU