Beginning a new year is always a good time to reflect on what you did during the last year and what you would like to do differently in the new year.  After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Many companies are starting to hire new employees.  I have talked about this in previous entries.  Hiring new employees is always a great opportunity to put people on your “team” that will drive your company forward to even more profitability.  But finding the right people may mean you need to add a new tool to your selection process.

A recent SmartMoney article was describing some completed studies showing the relationship between satisfied, happy employees and productive companies.  One of the employee attributes of a satisfied, happy employee was that of being a “dispositional optimist” rather than a pessimist with similar skills.

How do you find these candidates?

A recent SmartMoney article by Ryan Sagar described several recent studies that were proving that satisfied employees are more productive.  A National Bureau of Economic Research paper issued in September reported that “dispositional optimists” experience significantly better job outcomes than pessimists with similar skills.

The study tracked MBA students at a major mid-Atlantic university. The authors defined dispositional optimists as people who believed good things would happen to them. While optimism should theoretically have negative effects — overconfidence tends to backfire — the researchers found the opposite to be true. Optimists searched less intensively for jobs than did their peers yet received job offers sooner. They were also more likely to be promoted within two years of starting a job.

Were the optimists just more charming? Not likely. The researchers asked students to choose their five most charismatic classmates and the five most likely to become CEOs, and the picks didn’t overlap with the high-achieving optimists. So what explains their success? The researchers’ best guess is that optimists are better able to adapt to and internalize negative feedback. Since they expect good things to happen eventually, they’re less thrown by short-term bumps in the road.

So happiness may not be everything, but it does seem to help us produce more things and advance ourselves further. Wharton finance professor Alex Edmans has been tracking the performance of the companies on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. According to a working paper by Edmans, their stocks outperformed those of comparable firms by an average of more than two percentage points a year between 1984 and 2009.

How do you find these types of potential employees??  Use the ProfileXT^™ assessment.

This 45-minute, online assessment reveals consistent, in-depth, and objective insight into an individual’s thinking and reasoning style, relevant behavioral traits, occupational interests, and match to specific jobs in your organization.  It helps your managers and you interview and select people who have the highest probability of being successful in a role, and provides practical recommendations for coaching them to maximum performance.  It also gives your organization consistent language and metrics to support strategic workforce and succession planning, talent management, and reorganization efforts.

One of the specific behaviors measured by the ProfileXT is that of optimism vs. pessimism, the degree that a candidate has that trait, how that candidate compares to a large statistical base of individuals, and how that candidate compares to your best performers.

You can find those happy, productive, “dispositional optimists” to add to your team by using the ProfileXT.