It’s a match made in heaven and it seemed so appropriate to tell everybody today of all days.
Wait, let’s back up a bit.
I’m already married. But now I’m engaged too.
For anybody who’s been unfortunate enough to read some of my more recent blogs, you’ll see that I’m big on retaining employees.
How do you retain your employees?
You engage them.
Get it?
Got it?
Good.
A few months ago Gateway committed to the Predictive Index suite of cognitive and behavioral assessment tools and a few weeks ago the full training was completed. Many thanks to their Canadian partners, Predictive Success.
So what has this done for me?
I took the tests, it turns out I’m a Maverick which I love because now I park my fighter jet on the roof. I also discovered I’m not that smart. Or at least not as smart as I thought I was but smart enough to be in sales.
Like any relationship, it’s not perfect. Can Predictive Index accurately predict a successful hire? Absolutely not. Then again, it’s better than most. An unstructured interview only predicts success on the job 9% of the time according to Schmidt’s landmark study. PI’s cognitive assessment is accurate 42% of the time. Layer in a behavioral survey and you can predict accurately another 8% of the time.
In the immortal words of the Sham Wow commercial “But wait, there’s more!!!” The beauty of the PI Behavioral survey is that if you use it on a team then you can manage communication, management, motivation, all of those goodies that lead to engagement.
And engaged employees are 20% more productive than disengaged employees.
So why am I engaged?
I’m a headhunter/recruiter/search consultant so I basically spend my days selling. Either selling the recruitment concept to a potential client (“yes, Mr/Ms Client, I don’t know anybody who can do the job but I can find somebody who can”) or selling a job and company to a candidate. And all the time reading between the non existent lines to get that elusive “fit”.
But what PI does for Gateway is it allows us to talk to a potential client and add certainty to the recruiting process.
Yes, we do all of the other stuff that the world has been doing forever but we layer in added testing and measurement.
By adding certainty to the recruiting process I can now support some of the wild claims that I’ve been making for years with science. Let’s hope no clients are reading this otherwise they’ll think I’ve been making it up for 20 years.
And what’s really great is when I talk to a potential customer they’re already drinking the same Kool-Aid as me so it’s not really a sales call, it’s more of a check in.
Don’t get me wrong, Predictive Index isn’t cheap (this is the bit where I hope somebody from Predictive Index is reading) but it’s a relationship well worth investing in from my perspective. And the reality is that an engaged employee is 20% more productive on average than a disengaged employee so if sales go up by 20% then PI’s licence fee has been well worth it.
If you’d like to find out more about what it is and what they do, take a look at their website or better still, help me to pay the bills by reaching out to me. Or if you’re worried that I’ll sell you something then just drop by our website (www.gateway-staffing.com ) and look at the 3 minute intro video.
There are a couple of other Gateway goodies in what we do but this post is all about Predictive Index, today I only have eyes for you.
But remember, I’m married.
