When it comes to fulfilling the expectations of a job, the behavior and leadership style of the candidate determine how the role is actually carried out on a day-to-day basis. How that looks can make or break a candidate’s success in the company and position.
Mark Waschek, President, Ag1Source, recommends that companies utilize an assessment tool to discover a candidate’s behavioral and leadership style. Assessment results can then be used to find alignment between the candidate’s strengths and the expectations of the role.
“It only takes five or six minutes, and many are available on the market,” he says. “Beyond that, I encourage organizations to take their hiring process one step further and assess not just the candidate, but the role itself.”
This component is so critically important that Waschek ranks it above all the other factors when assessing a candidate for a position.
“A group of people can sit in a room and create the perfect job description, with 100% agreement on the expectations and responsibilities, but be 180 degrees different on how the person would actually do the job—because they’re so focused on the candidate’s needed experiences, skills and attributes,” he says. “The job description is the same, but the style is very different. How the candidate accomplishes that job matters.”
To illustrate this concept, take the example of hiring a salesperson. The job description may be standard. The sales territory is expanding into new territory with no customers and that candidate is going to have to do cold calls every day for years. Waschek explains that the company would want to hire someone with a very different style and motivations than a salesperson being hired for an established territory with market share.
There will always be gaps between a person’s behavioral and leadership style and the ideal candidate, so Waschek says that hiring teams should be willing to accept and manage those factors.
“The assessment results can guide the management team so there’s no surprises,” he says. “I often see hiring teams that insist they don’t need an assessment, when they really do.”
Waschek shares the example of a recent placement he was working on where an organization had recently merged with a company that wasn’t as profitable and needed a chief operations officer because the former COO had retired. The shareholders and board were putting a lot of pressure on this role to perform. The hiring team spent a day working on the job description and identifying measures of success for the role—swearing they did not need an assessment.
When Waschek talked with members of the hiring team, including the CEO and CFO (who had been best friends for 40 years), it became very obvious that the team members were looking for a vastly different type of person for the role. The CEO wanted to hire someone who was an extroverted, take-charge person who was also a good listener and could bring the different company cultures together on a tight timeline—someone who wouldn’t sit around and wait for things to happen. Meanwhile, the CFO wanted to hire someone who was the exact opposite—someone who was patient, methodical, and think things through before making changes and could handle a challenging financial situation.
If your organization is trying to determine the right behavioral and leadership style for a candidate to fill a role, Ag1Source can help. Contact us today. You can read more about our assessment tools HERE.
