“Begin With The End In Mind” is Habit #2 of Steven Covey’s bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I was listening to someone speak this weekend who referenced this Habit.  He was discussing a different set of circumstances, outside of Business, but it made me reflect.  I think all of us when we are hiring (or selecting) someone for a new position are always hoping to select an individual who is a great fit for our company culture and a Top Performer.
Yet, we generally go at the selection process in the same manner that everyone else does — an interview and a background/reference check.  The statistics offer a sobering reality that when these two tools alone are used, only 25% of the time do we end up with that model employee.  How do we increase the odds?

Let’s apply Habit #2 to hiring a Top Performing Employee.  We begin with imagination–the ability to envision in your mind the Top Performing Employee we cannot at present see with our eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint. If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize the type and quality of employee you are looking to hire, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape your decision. Begin with the End in Mind means to begin a hiring program or an interview with a clear vision of your Top Performing Employee, and then make it happen.

We have imagined ourselves hiring the “perfect” employee and we are ready to start our interview process.  However, for a moment, let’s take a look at the reality of your applicant pool:

• 56% of working people admit they have lied to their supervisors
• 41% say they have falsified records
• 64% admit using the Internet for personal reasons during working hours
• 35% have stolen from their employers, by their own admission
• 31% abuse drugs or alcohol

Let’s go back to that imagination step.  Let’s now add two tools to tell us more about the candidate: one tool to assess the integrity, substance abuse, reliability, and work ethic of the applicant and the other tool to compare the applicant to other Top Performing folks in your company. Now the selection statistics change from a 25% chance of hiring that Top Performer to 75%.

Here are those two tools:

1. The Step One Survey II (SOS II) is a scientifically designed assessment tool that evaluates job applicants attitudes for integrity, substance abuse, reliability, and work ethic. The SOS II empowers you with a structured system to objectively obtain better information, identify the best candidates, and conduct better interviews.
2. The ProfileXT (PXT) assessment first compares an individual against the statistical database of over 500,000 people.  It can then measure how well an individual fits specific jobs, or specific talent pools, or specific leadership positions, all in your organization.  The “job matching” feature of the PXT is unique, and it enables you to evaluate an individual relative to the qualities required to be a Top Performer in a specific job or a specific pool of jobs, unique to your company.  

Both these tools are extremely cost-effective, and are available through the most sophisticated Internet delivery system in the industry. The predictive reliability and validity scores of our assessments are the highest in the assessment industry. 

To Hire that Top Performing Employee, we Begin With the End in Mind.  We start with imagining the Top Performing employee, we add the SOS II and the PXT assessments, then we execute our interview and selection strategy with help from the assessments.