The reviews are stellar. The advance ticket sales have approached Star Warsian levels. The nachos cost $13 (what!).
The summer blockbuster season has arrived, and Captain America: Civil War is about to set an opening-weekend box-office bar that few films this summer can hope to reach (where’s Mortdecai 2 when you need it?). Come on, it’s got Cap, Iron Man, Black Widow, the Winter Soldier, Falcon, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, and (shhhh) Spider-man.
By my count, that’s two World War II–era super-soldiers, three guys in high-tech flying suits, two arachnids, and one… Scarlet Witch, because I’m not sure how else to describe her. Which raises one important question: Why does Captain America wear a mask?
It doesn’t offer eye protection; it’s not thick enough to protect his head during a fall; and we already know who he is, so he doesn’t have to hide his identity. Maybe `cuz it looks cool?
But Captain America isn’t a great superhero because his costume looks cool or even because of his tremendous physical strength. It’s his character, and we don’t mean “Steve Rogers.” We mean his innate qualities: Leadership Maturity, Conflict Management, and Decisiveness, which are balanced by a strong Service Focus and Accountability.
Okay, those are actually Caliper competencies from our Competency Library, not items from an official Marvel Comics biographical fact sheet. Caliper uses behavioral competencies to assess the performance potential of job applicants. Certain jobs, like “Superhero” for example, might see Collaboration and Teamwork as a critical success driver (and it sounds like a shortage of that might be the main problem in a movie called Civil War).
Caliper doesn’t have a Superhero job model (our R&D department was decidedly unreceptive to my suggestion each of the 15 times I submitted it, but the restraining order does not prevent me from writing about it in our company blog). We only have boring real job models like Sales Manager, Customer Service Representative, Technician, and 27 others.
If you were looking to hire someone for one of those roles at your company, you would have your best applicants fill out the Caliper Profile, and then we’d measure the results against the appropriate job model, which would tell us if your applicant shows the competencies indicative of top performance in the position. Just as unmasking a superhero reveals his (or her) true identify, the Profile helps you look past the façade of “best behavior” in a job interview and see if your candidate has the behavioral competencies and motivations to do the work consistently well.
In other words, the Profile helps you hire the right person the first time, thus saving your company potentially thousands of dollars in wasted time, resources, pay, and benefits on the wrong choice. With the money you saved, you could take your whole department out to see Captain America: Civil War. Or crowdfund Mortdecai 2 if, you know, that’s your jam.