I had the opportunity last Friday to learn a bit more about one relatively new HR technology vendor out there called PeopleAnswers.
It’s an interesting company with an intriguing product that dares to go where most talent management technology vendors don’t yet care to tread.
Specifically, they correlate scores from personality and cognitive ability tests with on-the-job performance of incumbents in a role to tease out which factors are most predictive of strong performance and establish weighted "performance profiles" (similar to job profiles) for a position.
Then, if you think of the standard fit/gap model applied by systems to aid recruiting, succession management, development planning, etc., the PeopleAnswers system puts a new candidate’s scores on the cognitive and personality assessments on one side,and places the performance profile on the other in order to help companies identify 1) strong job candidates for particular jobs; and 2) areas of development for people promoted/hired on.
It looks to be a good tool and I certainly commend PeopleAnswers for trying to bake some psychometric rigor into the use of enterprise technology for talent management.
There are a couple of areas where the product still falls short, however, which are worth pointing out:
1. The performance profiles are based on what predicts strong performance today and, really, yesterday, and is not future-oriented or designed to drive new behaviors in the role.
2. As one colleague of mine pointed out, correlation studies based on data from job incumbents (who tend to tell the truth) tend to collapse when applied to the recruiting process (because candidates often don’t). In other words, the performance profiles may be right but if the data coming from your candidates is bogus, the fit/gap analysis is worthless.
3. Where does information like experience, qualifications, and observed competence/behavior come into play?? A Workforce Management article this month does a nice job of highlighting this concept. Personality and cognitive tests can tell you lots of things about someone, but they’re not a perfect predictor of how someone will actually behave in very specific situations (i.e. when faced with an important looming deadline or antagonistic peer).
That said, it would be interesting to hear what their customers think about it. What kinds of results are they really seeing? If you are one, please let us know!
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