Allenvision works with you to design differentiated people strategies. The employee experience starts with the candidate experience. We ensure your company stands out from the initial posting, through the selection process, onboarding, and staff development.
We help you understand what matters most to your ideal candidates.
With the right candidates in your pipeline, we provide an essential hiring assessment that pinpoints the candidate's greatest behavioural strengths (and challenges). We predict how likely they will meet or exceed expectations. Our best-fit staffing assessments provide hiring managers with insights about a candidate's potential for the given role. We predict the likelihood that the candidate will meet or exceed expectations with 85% reliability.
We enhance talent selection for Board members, management and staff by assessing the discriminating factors - behaviour traits and competencies. Along with skills and experience, these are the key differentiators in determining performance. Our career assessment compares each personal profile with "high performing" people in the same role to find the right talent for your organization.
Selecting the right Board members is critical for successful governance. We start with a customized Board Skills Matrix to help the assessment process and to make sure the Board has the range of skills, expertise, and experience to allow the Board to carry out its mandate and functions effectively.
Success requires great people, creative ideas, and effective management of your resources. Your employees will aspire to a high-performance culture, focus on results when you enable the combination of collaboration and clear direction with scope for autonomy. You need a work environment that challenges and empowers employees, promotes learning, teamwork, and innovation, and recognizes achievement.
We offer employee career development plans and programs to help your team achieve high performance.
Performance management requires committed people who can exercise leadership at all levels in the organization. We start by offering to work with you to document the attributes and competencies for success in your organization.
We have a partnership with BambooHR—the leading provider of tools that power the strategic evolution of HR in small-to-medium-sized businesses to manage your online recruitment and onboarding of new hires.
Our custom hiring benchmarks have proven to be extremely useful in the selection of high performers. Our analytics can be game-changing for your organization.
Top performers in a specific position share certain key characteristics. With Performance Predictor, our team of experts work closely with your company to develop the profile of your Top Performers for a specific job and help you recruit employees based on the most important traits for success in that specific role.
Performance Predictor not only helps you identify the best candidates, but also helps you simplify your hiring process by giving you a tool to evaluate and shortlist your candidates by comparing their scores against the benchmark of top performers.
A dashboard allows you to compare candidates and identify those with the highest propensity for success in that specific job. You will also get detailed information on why they fit.
Sales and financial services advisors play a critical role, and SuccessFinder has given us a tried and tested way to predict who the high performers will be in these fields. It’s having a material impact on our bottom line.
– Martin Robert, VP, Talent, Culture & Communications, SSQ
Hire the best candidate for any given role at any level using SuccessFinder’s Talent Predictor. Compare the behavioral profiles of your candidates against SuccessFinder’s expert-model benchmarks of top performers. Get a comprehensive profile on the most important competencies for a role and identify other relevant positions where individuals could potentially fit.
Using SuccessFinder’s Talent Predictor, you will hire more top performers in key positions, which will ultimately minimize exit rates and outplacement.
We tried it first with a search for a Director and I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to interpret the SuccessFinder report and the applicable, meaningful conclusions.
— Frank Monteleone, SVP Human Resources, Rexall Pharmacy
Our hiring assessment solutions have proven effective in helping companies identify and hire best-fit candidates with 85% predictability— higher than any assessment on the market today.
With our services, you have a statistically-validated tool that:
Today 86 percent of younger job seekers who are in the first ten years of their careers use social media in their job search. However, nearly 2 in 3 employees say their employer does not—or does not know how to—use social media to promote job openings. Moreover, 3 in 4 say their employer does not–or does not know how to–promote their employment brand on social media.
Using social media in your recruiting provides access to a broader range of candidates. Combining social media with our tools to screen candidates and conduct an in-depth analysis of the short list delivers the best candidates. It also promotes your employment brand to thousands. Let us show you how. We also offer BambooHR software with built-in online recruiting tools.
According to McKinsy&Company (images below) — most companies force fit employees into a Bell curve
An engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied worker, but an employee who feels inspired at work is nearly 125% more productive than a satisfied one. The companies that encourage more employees to perform better than the rest.
A high performer can deliver 4OO% MORE PRODUCTIVITY than the average performer. Talent selection is essential for business success.
Despite this, most hiring managers use hiring tools that are woefully biased and inaccurate for making crucial many hiring decisions. We are committed to helping your hiring managers identify and employ best-fit candidates for critical positions without the guesswork.
It’s not just the top of the pyramid leaders that make a difference. It’s first-line leaders who make decisions day in and day out that move your organization forward. Some organizations are not developing young leaders even though by 2025 millennials will account for 75% of the workforce.
Our programs:
Entrepreneurial Leadership is a primary force behind successful change. These wealth-building Entrepreneurial leaders are not merely "executing better" – they're radically changing the rules of the success game in the workplace. For the Entrepreneurial leader, creativity is a continuous activity. They are always seeing new ways of doing things with little concern for how difficult they might be or whether the resources are available. But the creativity in the entrepreneur is combined with the ability to innovate. They take the idea and make it work in practice.
This sees something through to the end and not be satisfied until all is accomplished. This is a central motivation for the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial Leaders need to encourage expansive out-of-the-box thinking to generate new ideas but also filter through these ideas to decide which to commercialize. Using a balanced "loose-tight" style of leadership alternates creating space for idea generation and freeing exploration with a deliberate tightening that selects and tests ideas for further investment and development. Looseness usually dominates the early stages of the Entrepreneurial Leaders process; in the later stages, tightening becomes more important to scrutinize the concepts and bring the selected ones to the market. A balanced approach is essential to Entrepreneurial Leaders. Those who remain loose too long generate plenty of ideas but have difficulty commercializing them.
In addition to the technical or professional skills, education and years of experience, research has shown that specific performance competencies are necessary to enable career success in a particular profession.
The SuccessFinder competency model (refer to the image below) is made up of 26 competencies that are organized into five broad categories of performance. As I spent my career in engineering and lead large engineering organizations for 15 years, I will use engineering as an example. The same approach applies to all professions. However, performance competencies are different. We work with associations to make this powerful analytics available to young people considering your trade as a career. Through our CareerSuccess program, we also make this analytics available to students and new graduates as they embark on their journey to career success and satisfaction. We encourage this journey to start before considering your college major. Most don't, and 80% of college students change their major!
When the SuccessFinder Researchers benchmarked the performance competencies of engineers against the full range of skills, the researchers found ten dominant competencies that high-performing engineers demonstrate in the workplace.
| Competency | Description |
|---|---|
| Reasons Critically | Demonstrates the ability to tackle difficult problems by using logical, quantitative reasoning to identify patterns relevant to problem-solving. |
| Builds Consensus | Enjoys working as part of a team. Emphasis is on appropriate compromise, demonstrating tact, maintaining emotional control and interpersonal tolerance rather than making demands. |
| Demonstrates Character | Honors interpersonal commitments, maintains the courage of high-minded convictions, values living rightly and plays by honourable rules. |
| Thinks Conceptually | Demonstrates the ability to comprehend theoretical concepts and be curious about the broader "why?" or holistic perspective on problems. |
| Strives for Excellence | Demonstrates a desire to produce the best quality products or service and conscientiously tracks and double checks the accuracy of work. |
| Overcomes Adversity | Demonstrates an ability to persevere when pursuing difficult challenges and responds positively to adversity in the face of failure. |
| Maintains Accountability | Demonstrates an attitude that is defined by taking responsibilities and loyalties very seriously, by assuming a sense of personal accountability of one’s results, as well as co-workers’ actions without seeking to blame or provide excuses for failures. |
| Establishes Alliances | Establishes friendly relationships, enjoys expressing one’s views and participating socially with others in a manner that reflects genuineness and interpersonal intimacy. |
| Initiates Independently | Demonstrates a preference for taking action, pursuing high risk and initiating projects independently of prior approval or requests. |
| Focuses on Results | Prepared to make the personal sacrifices or expend extraordinary dedication to one’s work when frequent overtime is required to complete assignments. |
A bad hire is bad for business. It wastes time, and stresses the organization and the person you hired and fired. Our approach to achieving strategy of business success focuses on achieving value for the shareholder and has two necessary conditions: satisfied customers and a satisfied workforce. We drive employee success and career satisfaction.
We use SuccessFinder in all our talent analytics used for selection, employee career development, succession planning, team development and leadership coaching.
Inspirational leadership is a leadership style where the leader engages with others in such a way that leaders and followers constructively raise one another to:
Inspirational leaders are team builders and place a great deal of faith in the value of teaching and coaching and will go the extra mile with their people while refusing to compromise on their vision or intent.
This leadership style challenges employees to be creative problem solvers, and develop followers’ leadership capacity via coaching, mentoring and provision of both challenge and support. Using the democratic leadership style or participative style, the leader encourages employees to be a part of decision-making.
We determine this style through the 85 performance traits measured in SuccessFinder.
The National Research Council of Canada has defined in detail the core competencies of inspirational leaders.
Using performance competencies, we can provide an additional view of a candidate versus a higher performer.
In addition to technical skills, academic background and professional experience acquired, an individual’s natural behavioural tendencies are crucial elements to achieving success at work. Our goal in creating this model is to provide better ways for organizations to capture these natural behavioural tendencies and leverage them to develop the strong, resilient leaders required to drive today’s business strategies. SuccessFinder measures 85 performance traits. The 26 performance competencies consist of three to six behavioural characteristics. The competencies are grouped into five categories. They are very useful for developing a performance plan as they reflect the interaction of the traits.
How the traits combine along with a career theme in different dynamic combinations to predict business and career success. These combinations constitute the complex behavioural trait dynamics that we see in the workplace and can be measured using competencies and a readiness to influence others directly.
Performance competency is the kind of skill set that an individual should have so that he or she can meet the goals of the organization. Measuring performance competency is a tough job for any human resource manager. SuccessFinder makes it easy. Due to the increasingly complex structure of the organization, it is imperative for individuals to have a good and healthy relationships with people across departments.
In some organizations, including behavioural competencies is part of their appraisal as well.
Understanding performance competencies play an essential role in succession planning, workforce planning, and training and development.
Agile Leadership is a leadership style where the leader values the need to adapt to constantly changing conditions, with the ability to embrace new effective behaviors based on new requirements and the challenges of a chaotic, even volatile marketplace driving a magnitude of change, with the potential to confound by it daunting complexity and uncertainty.
Agile leaders (“We need Learning Leaders who have the ability to stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and handle a magnitude and diverse range of challenges.”)
Competencies Demonstrated:
Practically speaking, assessing integrity is really about asking the right questions that will get to the core of a person's character (in addition to standard tests/assessments, "job auditions," and role-play exercises). But first, whoever is on the interviewer's seat must be skilled in the science of performance interviewing. Here are twelve questions you may wish to use:
Remember: No integrity = no trust. Your hiring team must ensure that, no matter how talented, experienced, and smart job candidates are, they will protect your company, your employees, and your customers by hiring people every person can trust.
A structured interview is almost twice as effective as the common unstructured interview. It calls for a systematic approach, trying to measure candidates’ competencies in an objective way. It still doesn’t predict future job performance like SuccessFinder but it will remain an integral part of hiring due to the benefit of face-to-face contact. It pays to make interviews as effective as possible, in other words, transform them from informal discussions into reliable, structured processes.
Without a pre-determined scoring system, your interpretation of the candidate’s answer may often be based on intuition. The loose flow can even pose litigation risks as spontaneous questions won’t have been assessed for legality in advance.
A structured interview works differently. Here, we provide a step by step guide to structured interviews:
During a structured interview, the same predetermined questions are asked to all candidates in the same order. They’re all correlated to important job competencies derived from a detailed job description and can be either behavioral or situational. They’re rated with a standardized scoring system with a range of acceptable answers. When there is more than one interviewer, consensus on the order of questions and the interpretation of answers is required.
This process has shown greater reliability and validity that the unstructured interview, reducing the likelihood of a bad hire. It also ensures that discrimination issues can be avoided completely as all candidates are treated fairly and are given the same opportunities to showcase their abilities. Yes, it takes a little more time and expense but its benefits far outweigh its costs.
For each position, you have to use job analysis to match skills to job tasks. Information from this process is essential to design a structured interview. It can help you develop a professional and informative job ad, structured interview questions as well as salary ranges. Apart from selection, it can also help towards your training and organizational needs.
Tip: Results of a job analysis may be already in place. If not, you can do it using a variety of methods like interviews, questionnaires and observation. Common job descriptions may help you identify duties and qualifications that fit your own requirements.
Now that you have a list of requirements needed for the position, you need to provide a full definition for each one. For example, what are communication skills? We all understand it in the abstract but you need to indicate what this means for a specific role. This will be a great help for later when you’ll have to develop a grading scale or behavioral examples.
Tip: Depending on the position, you can even divide competencies in core and secondary and place different weight on each one.
Interview questions should be developed with great care, preferably with the help of an expert. Assuming you’ll have to evaluate around six core attributes, you can develop a set of 12 structured interview questions. The number is largely up to you though, you can ask less or more if you have time.
Both situational and behavioral questions are job-related. You can choose great questions from existing lists and categorize them according to the requirements you want to assess. If you have situations that are expected to happen frequently to a position, you can include them in the process. Take care, though, to link them to specific attributes that have been indicated from the job analysis and have experts test them if possible.
Probing questions aim to clarify points or gain more information about the candidate’s answers and should also be predetermined. The following example comes from the US. Department of Personnel Management (OPM) and uses the STAR method (Situation/Task, Action and Result) to ask probing questions:
Competency: Interpersonal Skills — Shows understanding, friendliness, courtesy, tact, empathy, concern, and politeness to others; develops and maintains effective relationships [..].
Initial Question: A very angry client walks up to your desk. She says she was told your office had sent her an overdue check 5 days ago. She claims she has not received the check. She says she has bills to pay and no one will help her. How would you handle this situation?
Probing questions: Why do you believe this situation occurred? (Situation/Task), What factors would affect your course of action? (Action), How do you think your action would be received? (Result).
The presence of a scoring system is very important to ensure objective decisions. You can choose the common scale of five or seven points ranging from low to high. The key here is to accurately define the scoring levels.
According to the abovementioned example from the OPM for interpersonal skills, the grading scale can look like this:
Level 1- Low: Handles interpersonal situations involving little or no tension or discomfort and requires close guidance
Level 3- Average: Handles interpersonal situations involving a moderate degree of tension or discomfort and requires occasional guidance
Level 5- Outstanding: Handles interpersonal situations involving a high degree of tension or discomfort and advises others
It’s also helpful to develop examples of behaviors for each grading level specific to the position. The distinction between them will be more apparent this way.
Want more detail on how to anchor your rating scales? Download our free structured interviews guide.
Tip: Test the reliability and validity of the grading scale along with interview questions with the help of subject matter experts.
Structured interviews may be challenging for an interviewer. It’s best if there’s a guide that hiring managers can use as a reference to understand and follow the process. Some training may be necessary for those unfamiliar with the structured model.
Being friendly, respectful and avoiding mistakes that put off candidates are a matter of importance in all interview forms.
Tip: Take clear and concise notes to help you remember answers. Avoid writing down your assessment of the answer but do write the answer’s main points. Resist the temptation to evaluate attributes that aren’t job-related and not included in your planning.
The disadvantages of structured interviews reflect the benefits of the unstructured interview. The latter proceeds more like a conversation and allows for a personal connection between interviewer and interviewee. Conversely, the structured interview may appear cold and impersonal without allowing participants to digress from the established interview process. The interviewer can still be friendly and help the candidate to relax but the lack of spontaneity makes the environment stricter and doesn’t permit exploration of interesting tangents that may come up.
Moreover, the structured interview, for all its preparation and standardization, is still not immune to interviewer biases. The existence of a panel of interviewers may moderate their effect, but it doesn’t help to make the process any more comfortable for the candidate.
Nevertheless, for more senior roles or positions of responsibility, it’s a good idea to use a structured interview that can mitigate the risk of a bad hire. Keep in mind though, that selection should include different types of assessments. Leave the interview as a final stage and include work samples, tests and other methods to craft a complete, reliable hiring process.
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Kim Allen brings clients a big-picture view that balances innovative thinking with the practical mindset that can only be gained by leading organizations. He draws on his 25+ years of accomplishment as a chief executive in the public, private, regulatory, and association sectors and experience across all major business functional areas. As an agile leader, Kim works with business leaders around the world to build and strengthen governance, strategy, organizational alignment, and operational excellence. Also, he works with clients to find and develop exceptional leaders. Kim cares about the people and understands the bottom line.
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