The Hire Is Not A Fixer Upper

Thursday brought the opportunity to provide a Values & Behaviors Assessment to a client that I have been working with for the best part of a decade to build an excellent customer service team.

The Values Assessment measures the six average Values of the average North American and these Values are;

Theoretical – knowledge
Utilitarian – money and time
Aesthetics – appreciation of art, architecture, design, fashion and feelings
Social – people
Individualist – inner strength
Traditional – following rules

Given that we are in the financial service industry, the highest value score that I look for is the Utilitarian. The next highest ranking value score is Theoretical because the financial services industry continually has new products and services to offer and an interest in knowledge is a must. The third highest ranking value score is Individualistic because we are looking for inner strength, personal power and self esteem. People are driven by their top three Values and their Values will influence their Behaviors.

The Behaviors Assessment measures Dominance (ability to deal with problems), Influence (ability to deal with people), Steadiness (ability to deal with pace – can they multi task) and Compliance (ability to deal with or follow procedures).

Over the years we have benchmarked the Values & Behaviors of an excellent financial advisor, associate financial advisor, marketing assistant and support person, and we use these benchmarks to make recommendations for our clients about their hiring decisions depending on the position that they are hiring for.

My client has gained an enormous amount of experience from working with me over the years, and when we had completed the telephone debriefing of the candidate’s assessment, and given the candidate came in with the exact Values and Behaviors that we were looking for, my client exclaimed “The hire is not a fixer upper!”

– photo courtesy of;
http://www.t-shirthumor.com/Merchant2/products/fixrMP.html?Category_Code=retr