Senior Role Candidate Assessment

The purpose and value of profiling

OPDC offers psychological profiling to compliment the assessment of candidates for a role. Profiling provides answers to vital questions which are harder to ascertain from a standard job interview. These include:

Psychological profiling provides far more information on which to base selection decisions, but it does not give you ‘the answer’. It will give you a much clearer view of individuals’ relative strengths and weaknesses from which to make an informed choice. Our approach goes beyond putting people through assessments questionnaires and making a decision based on a chart. Our in-depth profiling involves an exploration of the results with the candidates to see how particular characteristics – and combinations of characteristics – play out in their working lives.

As well as the information which comes from our assessments, we can also provide you with tailored questions for you to ask each candidate in your interview based on potential risk areas highlighted in their profiles. Our assessment support for each client engagement is tailored to reflect the client’s context and role requirements. Assessments we commonly (but not exclusively) recommend and use are:

Cognitive ability and strategic thinking

One of the key contributors to success in a senior role is whether a person has sufficient intellectual capacity to handle the degree of complexity and ambiguity inherent in the role. In particular, it is important that a person can work without structure to guide their thinking. This is an important aspect of strategic thinking.

The Cognitive Process Profile is very different from traditional (‘what’s next in this sequence’) reasoning tests and looks at the way people tackle problems when faced with unfamiliar information which becomes increasingly ambiguous and conceptual as the test progresses.

It assesses the way people think, as well as how well they do it, for example distinguishing between equally able candidates where one is very analytical and the other more creative. It gives a very rich picture of people’s thinking style and is particularly good at assessing strategic potential.

Personality assessment

There are many personality measures available, but the ‘gold standard’ these days is recognised to be the NEO-PI. This is based on the ‘5 factors’ of personality:

Neuroticism (how emotionally stable or unstable someone is)
Extraversion (how outgoing, outwardly focused and energetic)
Openness (to imagination, new ideas, feelings and so on)
Agreeableness (how easy to get on with, how dominant)
Conscientiousness (how self-disciplined, well-organised, etc)

Combined, these give a very comprehensive picture of a person’s characteristics and the ways in which they present themselves to world in ‘normal’ circumstances, when they are in control of the way they behave. Crucially, the NEO will tell us a lot about people’s interpersonal style, such as how easy they are to get on with, how sensitive are they to others, whether they can assert themselves and also whether they co-operate. It also gives a lot of information about people’s resilience.

‘Shadow side’ assessment

The Hogan Development Survey (HDS)is a measure of the ‘shadow side’ of people’s personalities, which highlights behaviours which may come to the fore when they let down their guard. Often these are people’s strengths overplayed, for example, someone who is good with detail may become so perfectionist that they obsess over trivial matters; someone who is charismatic may crave attention and start to treat other people simply as an audience. These can be seen as risk factors, as they can ‘de-rail’ people’s careers. Most people have at least one risk factor and some have many. Risks which the HDS can identify include arrogance, over-cautiousness, mistrusting others, extreme risk-taking, emotional volatility and an over-eagerness to please.

We do not recommend the use of The HDS without use of a standard personality measure in order to compare the ‘bright side’ and the ‘shadow side’.

Running the process

The psychological profiling can be integrated into the company’s assessment process, taking place on the same day as, for example, panel interviews or presentations. Alternatively, this can be a stand-alone process.

The psychometric assessments highlighted above are completed on-line, though the CPP needs to be supervised. The NEO and HDS are completed in advance, taking the candidates around an hour in total to complete. The CPP is completed on the day of the assessment. Following this there is a two hour interview to explore the results of the psychometrics and find out how the candidates’ personalities played out in the workplace.

Whether the assessment is stand-alone or integrated into the company’s process, we attend the ‘wash-up’ discussion at the end. Rather than write long reports which are expensive to produce, we write bullet points and provide the rest of the information through discussion. (Should you require formal reports, these can be quoted for separately).

We believe strongly that anyone who puts themselves through this level of scrutiny deserves to know what came out of the process, so we offer telephone feedback to all candidates. GDPR requirements mean that we share all psychometric results and the bullet point notes with candidates if they request them.