Beyond things like a healthy work/life balance and a supportive company culture, emotional intelligent employees will demonstrate a talent for managing work-related stress. High emotional intelligence is linked to a better ability to understand, perceive, and regulate emotions. The process of understanding, acknowledging, accepting, and acting upon stressors is what sets apart those employees who can manage stress and those who cannot.

How do #EQ and #SalesEffectiveness work together? @CaliperCorp demonstrates how emotional intelligence is necessary to sales success:
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The actions employees choose to take as a result of stressors is perhaps the most important part of stress management, particularly in a sales career. The choices a salesperson makes during stressful times has an impact on the greater objective. A salesperson with high emotional intelligence will be able to consider the best course of action and anticipate the outcome and its effects on everyone involved. Emotional intelligence is a critical necessity for sales effectiveness.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. More than just understanding oneself, an effective salesperson needs the empathy to understand how their prospects will react and the decision-making skills to respond accordingly. Relationship-building is key to sales effectiveness, and the ability to understand the emotions of others is the foundation to trust and loyalty between the salesperson and their client.

But emotional intelligence isn’t just one thing, it’s a marriage of many soft skills that can be trained amongst sales teams. These skills work together to build a stronger understanding of how one individual’s actions impact the actions of others.

Specific soft skills associated with an emotionally intelligent salesperson include:

• Mindfulness: Being present, focused, and ready to perform
• Self-awareness: Possessing a clear understanding of your emotions
• Self-Regulation: Evaluating your emotions in order to make a wiser decision
• Motivation: Using self-awareness to make choices that power fulfillment
• Empathy: Tapping into your understanding of your own emotions to understand those of others and their perspectives
• Social Skills: Using your understanding of others to relate and connect

Coaching for Emotional Intelligence

A good technique for coaching emotional intelligence is the acronym SBNRR, which walks an individual through critical steps for catching a hold of and managing one’s emotions. Coach your employees on how to Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect, and Respond carefully to stressful situations.

• Stop: Instruct employees on understanding when to stop or take a break from stressful activities.
• Breathe: Give your employees the opportunity take a few moments for themselves and take a few deep breaths when they’re feeling overwhelmed.
• Notice: Help your employees understand the stressors that trigger an emotional response and identify them accurately. Can you help them identify situations or conversations that are stressful for them?
• Reflect: Encourage employees to reflect on why their stressors get an emotional reaction out of them, and what those knee-jerk reactions are. Why do they think that happened? What outside insights can you provide to help them associate their reactions with their emotions?
• Respond: Coach your employees through the decision-making process that follows reflection. How do you act on your stressors, and what should be the outcome? How can you facilitate better responses when they feel stressed? How can you work together to create methods that recognize, process, and react to stress better?

Bonus Content: View the Essentials for Coaching Sample Competency Report

Want to unlock the secret to #sales success? @CaliperCorp says #EmotionalIntelligence is a key component to effective salespeople:
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Emotional Intelligence and Sales Effectiveness

When it comes to sales, soft skills are just as important as the hard skills necessary to sell. Emotional intelligence helps salespeople manage results rather than make excuses for what’s happening.

The confidence at the core of emotional intelligence is managed by grit and resilience, meaning that sales professionals are good at identifying and moving on from prospects that will never end in a win and recovering quickly from sales that have been lost.

A key skill that translates well into effective selling is the ability to separate the “what” from the “why.” When something fails, individuals with high emotional intelligence can learn lessons (Why did this result from what I did?) without taking the outcome personally. They see failure as an opportunity rather than a setback.

Sales effectiveness is attainable when the individual can separate what they do for a living from who they are as a person. The role is not their identity, and the more they can detach their self-worth from their role, the more effectively they can take on the myriad challenges in the sales professional. High emotional intelligence brings a self-awareness to the individual in which they can easily separate their personhood from the responses they receive from prospects.

Caliper can help you identify and coach emotional intelligence in your sales professionals so they reach their full potential and effectiveness. Reach out to our experts or start a Caliper subscription so you are always prepared for all of your talent management needs.

Defining Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions are a valuable tool to gauge a candidate’s future performance. Rather than hard skill sets — which can be trained — behavior is an innate quality that goes beyond ability and into potential. Questions that isolate past behavior, like how they handled a stressful situation, rebounded from a lost sale, or dealt with a difficult client, are a good insight into how your candidate can process and work through challenging scenarios. Behavioral questions that pinpoint situations similar to ones they can expect in the role for which they’re interviewing will give you a good idea of how they would handle conflict as it arises in this position. To do this, ask questions that gauge:

• How they would implement their knowledge to solve problems
• How their ability helps them navigate difficult situations
• How their skills allow them to be agile in uncommon scenarios
• How their temperament guides their decision-making

Why Behavioral Questions Are Important

The thing about asking candidates questions about their skills, experience, and education is that you already have their resume in front of you. Most of what you want to know has already been recorded for you. Behavioral questions help you target how your candidate might handle day-to-day workload and challenges, navigate relationships, and learn from mistakes. Rather than asking questions about projects that were successful or what their strengths are, dig deeper to understand how those things help them to determine what comes after success. What do they do once they’ve discovered a good workflow or process? Do they teach it to their colleagues? Perhaps they can tell you about their weaknesses or a project they struggled with and what they learned from it. How did it affect their work after that? Behavioral questions allow you to get a better understanding of their personalities to see how skill affects the way they perform their job and how they work with others.

Resumes can only tell you so much about a candidate. @CaliperCorp demonstrates why behavioral interview questions are crucial during #hiring:
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Most importantly, behavioral questions help you move beyond demeanor. It’s easy to be charmed by a candidate who is confident and can articulately speak to their strengths and the expectations of the role. Asking them questions about their past behaviors, however, allows you to get a better understanding of how they’ll behave in similar future scenarios. You can uncover patterns of friction or peacemaking with coworkers, frustration or temperance with clients, and see how they apply what they learn along the way. Behavioral questions help the interviewer see beyond an impressive demeanor and get to what really matters.

Get the Most Out of Your Interviews

Listen Well

The first thing your interviewers should be doing is listening. Steering the conversation is important, but talking too much means you aren’t getting the information you need to best evaluate your candidates. Listen intently—and take notes. You’ll likely be seeing many candidates in a day over a period of several days. In order to best remember answers from candidate to candidate, take note of what they say and your thoughts about the specifics of their responses. The more time that passes, the less accurately you can compare answers and what you thought of them. Revisit your notes and consider: Did they answer with specific examples? Did the answer relate well to the question? Were their answers thorough and thoughtful?

Compare to a Personality Assessment

Don’t rely solely on the interview to gauge your candidate’s behavior. Adding a scientifically-back personality assessment will paint a more detailed picture of your candidate’s potential. The Caliper Profile is validated against calibrated job models to match specific traits to necessary job functions. Using assessments such as this gives you reliable, qualitative data against which you can compare your interview notes to how they answer questions when no one else is in the room. Personality assessments are a great tool to dive more in-depth into your candidates’ behaviors and motivations.

Did you know? Only 1 in 5 hires turn out successfully. @CaliperCorp lays out why you should be asking behavioral questions during your #interviews:
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Speak With References

Don’t discount references. Take the opportunity to speak with former supervisors and coworkers to get a feel for what the candidate is like to work with. Instead of asking questions like, “Are they capable?” and “Would you hire them again?” inquire about what they were like to work with, how they managed their projects, and what their team dynamic was like. Pinpoint their working style and office interactions over whether or not they were competent. References are a unique opportunity to see inside the office and get a feel for what your candidate will actually be like as an employee.

Weigh All Aspects Equally

Understand that no one aspect of the interview process can give you a clear-cut answer as to whether or not to hire a candidate. There’s no magic solution. But, by using all the tools at your disposal, you can start to paint a clearer, more well-rounded picture of each candidate. Take your interview notes, personality assessment, and reference feedback and put them together for a holistic view of your candidate as a potential employee. You shouldn’t totally discount your gut feeling, but these three aspects of your interview process should back up that feeling. If they don’t align, you can look to the data you’ve compiled from multiple sources to see why things may be amiss.

For more information on The Caliper Profile and how Caliper can help you fine-tune your interview process and select the best possible candidates, reach out to our experts today to get started.

Why Personality Assessments are Critical

Cognitive ability tests can predict general ability to perform a job. However, they do not predict the personality dimensions, workstyles and motivators which determine if applicants will actually do the job successfully. Personality assessments help us understand how individuals perceive, interpret, respond to, and learn from work situations. It is critical in a wide range of contexts such as communication, decision making, problem solving, and time management.

Personality assessments do the following things:

1. Provide Data-Driven Results

Personality assessments provide insights regarding how candidates interact in the workplace and also predict job performance and fit with the company’s culture. This data also helps improve the team’s overall productivity and success.

Unlike face-to-face interviews, personality assessments enable a company to objectively assess an individual and can help reduce unconscious bias within the selection process.

2. Improve Selection Process

When evaluating a candidate’s fit, personality assessments can substantially improve the selection process and predict a person’s potential. This data helps drive a more informed decision. It also informs how the individual can be onboarded, managed, coached, and professionally developed throughout their career.

3. Increase Employee Retention

Over 70% of candidates expect to leave a company within two years of getting hired. So while finding the right candidates is crucial for any company, having the ability to keep them is just as important.

Herb Greenberg, PhD., founder of Caliper, would reinforce time and time again that if a person’s personality fit with the requirements of the job, the employee would enjoy their job more, which then would translate to better performance and longer retention in their role, and with the company.

Personality assessments allow companies to discover whether a candidate is likely to stay and thrive in the role they were hired for. In the current economic environment, acquiring and retaining top talent is a competitive advantage. Personality assessments help companies in the war for talent and often reduce the costs of turnover and hiring. The assessments will assist companies in hiring the right person, for the right role, the first time around.

Transform how your organization selects and develops talent with The Caliper Profile.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Alphabet announced revenues of $21.33 billion for Q4. And 99% of that revenue came from Google and the businesses under the Google umbrella (for example, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Chrome, and ads).

To break it down further, advertising represented 90% of Google’s total revenue, and ads on Google sites represented nearly 80% of that ad revenue.

In summary, simple advertising is Alphabet’s biggest money maker.

Google has become really good at targeting ads. We’ve probably all had this experience: we head to Google, where we search online for a product. The next time we log on, there it is, in a sidebar on a website. It follows you throughout the Internet.

Google has figured out how to direct the right advertisements to the right people, leading to increasing revenue numbers.

This revenue revelation highlights the importance of using data to match products with people. Or, when it comes to hiring, matching people to jobs.

Companies are most effective, efficient, and profitable when they have the right people in the right roles. Just like Google uses keywords, search history, and other data points to target ads, businesses need to gather data on job candidates and employees to target their hiring efforts.

A good starting point is to implement a pre-employment assessment into the hiring process. Doing so will enable you to gather critical personality data, get a more accurate picture of your candidate, and determine whether that individual truly has the skills and potential to succeed in that particular role within your company.

Using a reliable, scientifically valid pre-employment assessment will bring additional objectivity and  calibration into your current  selection process. The insights and information you will gain about your candidates can be used and interpreted based on your current needs, whether hiring a new individual or considering a current employee to fill a key position. When people are in roles that play to their strengths and potential, they are much more likely to succeed and to remain engaged.

If Google’s earnings report showed us anything, it’s that targeting business practices will lead to a bullseye.

Don’t feel bad; it happens to all of us. It’s the cycle of life in the business world. But whether you are taking on a new role or sailing into retirement, it’s important that the person following your footsteps is ready and able to tackle the challenge. Hopefully, that person is already on the payroll.

In a very practical sense, developing and retaining leadership talent is both a strategic and economic necessity. By filling positions internally, you can reduce the time needed to reach proficiency, limit hiring costs, and eliminate turnover resulting from a poor fit with your organizational culture.

Without a “ready-now” candidate on staff, organizations often compromise on the leadership qualities they want simply to fill vacancies. It’s worth noting that many current executives say that they weren’t prepared for their first leadership role.

Since your company, like most, may not have the time or resources to develop leadership skills in everyone, Caliper suggests that you devote your energy toward identifying and developing those with the highest potential to succeed. Here are some tips for focusing your succession effort:

1. Have a clear vision of where the business is going.

Depending on your growth goals and plans, you may need different kinds of leaders tomorrow than the ones you have today. Executives tend to look for people who remind them of themselves, so put aside your ego and think critically about future needs and who can best address them. The focus should be on developing leaders who can run the organization as it will be, not as it is now. Succession plans must be closely linked to business strategy.

2. Don’t waste time having leaders choose their replacements.

Stop completing those pesky replacement-planning forms! Instead, develop a high-potential pool of ready-now candidates to take on a variety of leadership responsibilities. Great leadership does not usually spring from specialized expertise, either. Acquiring a broad range of experiences allows leaders to develop a deeper, richer understanding of the organization as a whole.

3. Make your time investment in Succession Planning worthwhile.

Do you have the same discussions about the same people each year only to find that they are not getting any closer to being ready? Succession planning is a futile effort unless it acts on a working, evolving guide to employee development. Cast a wide net throughout the organization when identifying leadership potential, and you may be surprised by the talent that already exists in the company. Also, the criteria on which you assess potential must be objective and fair. Every team member should know what it takes to be considered a future leader.

4. Provide real development for real people.

People learn by doing. The worldwide primary methodology for simultaneously developing leaders, building teams, and improving organizational capabilities is Action Learning. Development by working on real, important, and urgent business problems is transformational.

In an article entitled “Dear Graduate, Here’s How to Get in the Game,” former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy, a best-selling author, offer advice to new graduates who are finding the job search daunting. As part of their plan, they state that graduates must “… understand that a job interview is not like a college test; it requires umpteen times more preparation.”

In short, they argue that with the right training and a rigorous regimen, the dragon can be slayed. So how exactly does one “get in the game”?

“Look, your job interview is not just about you… your job interview is about how much you know about the company you are hoping to join, its industry, and its industry’s dynamics. So prepare for your interview as if it’s the most important test of your life. Google your brains out.”

The Welches engage in some irony here. As much as they encourage people to stop being self-centered and to learn everything they can about a company, a prospective employee is doing so for purely selfish reasons and personal gain, not for his or her own edification.

So how can businesses see past the performance art and adopt a more scientific means of conducting hiring practices?

For starters, using a validated pre-employment assessment tool such as the Caliper Profile can help you cut through the noise and filter out individuals who treat the interview as the final exam after an all-night cram session.

The Caliper Profile zeros in on a person’s self-identified strengths and limitations, so a company can begin to get a handle on something more profound than platitudes spouted in the interview; it focuses on a person’s motivations.

But what happens after the new-employee orientation is complete and the individual’s first 6 months with the company are up?

What separates Caliper from its competitors is that Caliper is equipped to challenge and develop employees over the long term.

Using Caliper’s new Caliper Analytics™ platform, companies can run simulations that allow them to look at their entire workforce, pinpoint the metrics most critical to success in a particular role, and mine data in real time to rank high-potential employees for leadership positions.

Moreover, with Caliper Analytics™, businesses can take a visual perspective to comparing two individuals being considered for a stretch assignment, and they can even formulate potential work units that are cohesive and well-rounded.

In the world of employment, an assessment tool helps you get to the heart of a person’s workplace motivations, and an analytics tool that is dynamic enables businesses to constantly adapt and place employees in positions in which they will succeed.

A team interview typically involves assembling several interviewers to gain a broader perspective on the candidate’s experience, skills, and personality. The interview-panel format is especially helpful when the candidate will be reporting to more than one manager since interviewers all get to hear the same responses and can follow up on each other’s questions. Alternatively, team interviews can be conducted in a series of one-on-one meetings for ease of scheduling (and to reduce the intimidation level for candidates).

Two key elements of team interviewing are variety and consistency. Employ both and notice how much richer and accurate your selections become.

You can incorporate variety into the process by engaging interviewers with distinct personality differences. For example, you might enlist one interviewer who is process-oriented and another who is a task juggler, one who is gregarious alongside someone who is reserved, or pair a big-picture thinker with a tactical one. This shows candidates the diversity they’ll experience. With enough personality ‘flavor’ in the mix, your candidate will also find the interviewer who best puts her at ease and, by extension, encourages her to be more authentic.

Consider variety in perspectives as well.  Whether people are experienced interviewers or not, their perspectives are critical when putting together questions. Ask yourself:

• Are the manager’s concerns represented? What about peers? What behavioral questions should I ask of the applicant to address these views?
• Are internal customers represented?
• Have I incorporated a matrix manager’s needs?
• Will the candidate have direct reports? If so, how can I address their concerns in the interview?Then take the time to brainstorm questions that touch on the range of perspectives.

You can also vary the location where you conduct interviews. It may not be possible or practical for the candidate to visit each interviewer’s office, yet the parade of interviewers in and out of the conference room can be tiring for everyone involved in team interviews. Break things up by holding some interviews in a central location and others in offices.

Consistency is equally critical to maximizing hiring effectiveness. Try using a structured guide that sets parameters for team interviews and guidelines for asking questions. Instead of each person asking the same interview questions, discuss in advance who will be covering which questions and how.

Training can help interviewers who are inexperienced in asking behavioral interview questions. Making the effort to build those skills across your interview team will pay off big time.

Determine in advance the maximum number of interviews for candidates. Putting them “through the wringer” in a prolonged hiring process is grueling for them and defeating for you, and it makes the calibration of interview results time consuming and hard to achieve. But whatever that number is, be consistent in how you apply it.

Finally, spend a consistent amount of time debriefing your team. Don’t shortchange a candidate because one team member can’t meet at a particular time. Wait until everyone involved in the team interview is present to review your scores and notes. It’s also a good idea to have a facilitator conduct the calibration so that all voices are heard.

Reminders for variety:

• Expose your candidates to multiple personalities within the organization.
• Apply a range of perspectives when crafting interview questions.
• Use variety in meeting locations and times.

Reminders for consistency:

• Ask the same set of core questions to each candidate.
• Debrief with your interview team consistently.
• Use consistent selection tools beyond interviews.

By adding these simple items to your hiring toolbox, you can rebuild your staffing process so that it’s better than ever. To learn more about the ways Caliper can help transform your team interviews, reach out to our experts today.