How can you ensure your #leaders are ready for the future? @CaliperCorp shares 4 key #competencies to future-proof your leadership.
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So how do we take what we’ve learned and build future-ready leadership that is ready for anything and up to any challenge? We’re already coaching our leaders of the future — how do we coach them to be future-ready?

It starts by identifying 4 key competencies:

1. Learning Agility

The only constant is change — and that’s especially true for technology. The tools we use in our daily work are adapting and innovating at lightning speed, and workplaces are being disrupted at an exponentially faster pace than ever before. The best way to be future-ready? Keep up with the times. When the world came to a screeching halt, organizations who were already using video conferencing and had teleworking capabilities had a distinct advantage when it came to making the necessary pivot to social distancing.

Learning agility doesn’t mean every future-proof leader has to be on the cutting edge. However, understanding all available resources makes it possible for a quicker turnaround from “the old way” to the new. Learning agility means knowing what to do — and how to do it — when what you’ve always done no longer works. Future-ready leaders are ones who can facilitate the transition when something new makes something old obsolete.

2. Creativity and Innovation

Even the most agile learners can’t anticipate everything. Trends are important to watch, but 2020 has been the year to teach us that sometimes disruptions are entirely unpredictable. And when that happens, future-ready leaders need to be able to come up with creative solutions to unforeseen challenges.

COVID-19 has forced some businesses to completely change the way they operate. Distilleries started making hand sanitizer, textile manufacturers began making face masks — even if your organization didn’t have to change its business model, most businesses had to re-configure some aspect of the way they did things, whether it was conducting the entire hiring process virtually or managing teams remotely for the first time. Future-ready leaders are ones who can take a moment of uncertainty and re-organize and re-prioritize standard processes to create something new that is better suited for the time.

What does creativity and innovation have to do with #FutureReady leaders? @CaliperCorp shares how these 4 #competencies help your leaders prepare for an uncertain future.
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3. Composure and Resiliency

Change is stressful. A future-ready leader is not immune to moments of stress, but they have the composure to lead their teams through challenges in the face of uncertainty, and the resiliency to not succumb to the pressure. With a key trait of mental toughness, resilient leaders have the ability to handle setbacks and high pressure situations, with the energy and persistence to push through to the right solution.

Bonus Content: View our Comprehensive Guide to Mental Toughness

In times of stress, people look towards their leaders to know how to respond. A future-ready leader demonstrates composure and signals to their team that a solution is possible and feasible through creative problem solving, avoiding panic mode — these teams are better equipped to handle change as it comes, even when it seemingly comes out of nowhere.

4. Collaboration and Teamwork

An important part of being future-ready is ensuring that the team is ready to follow. Teams that feel as though they have contributed to the future are more likely to work together, develop creative solutions, innovate, and adapt more quickly. Leaders who can effectively facilitate collaboration between teammates will be that much more prepared for an unknown future.

When teammates can bring their individual perspectives together, thinking goes outside the box, and two key results occur — new ways of tackling old problems and a more tightly-knit team. As the future brings new challenges and new ways of thinking, collaborative teams can work together to develop solutions to new problems in a way that best suits the way they work.

While we can’t predict the future, future-ready leaders make it possible for teams and organizations to tackle new challenges head-on, and adapt effectively to new normals in real-time. To learn more about identifying key traits of future-ready leaders, reach out to our experts to explore the Caliper Profile, and to discover how coaching can guarantee your leaders are ready for whatever challenges may come their way, get started with Caliper today.

We recently released a whitepaper on mental toughness and how it differentiates top NCAA Division 1 and professional athletes.

To start, the chances of athletes making it to the “big leagues” is slim to none. In fact, a high school football player’s chances of playing Division 1 is only 2.7%, baseball is at 2.1%, men’s soccer is at 1.3%, and similarly 1.0% for basketball. Those numbers dip even lower when it comes to athletes being drafted to a professional team. With numbers being so low, athletic ability can’t be the only factor that scouts are looking for. So what are the skills, traits, and other factors they are seeking?

Scouts historically have analyzed prospects’ athletic potential in such physical areas as “explosiveness” and versatility in action. Now, these are important to the success of the team, but they aren’t the only factors that they consider. Scouts are also looking for non-physical aspects of a player’s game like instincts, court awareness, work ethic, coachability, leadership, and other psychological factors believed to contribute to success. Scouts refer to these as “intangibles.”

Recently, intangibles, like mental toughness, have received quite a lot of attention from the scientific community, although they have struggled with conceptualizing it. There have been many studies that have worked on testing, proving, and providing a guide or outline of how to measure these non-physical aspects.

In 2012, Kaiseler, Polman, and Nicholls found that athletes higher in neuroticism (one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology) reacted more intensely to on-the-field stress factors while showing signs of lower control over them. They were also able to find that higher neuroticism was associated with greater avoidance when it came to coping with the stress factors, instead of problem-focused coping. Similarly, in 2013, Yeatts and Lochbaum found that temperament or disposition predicts the preferred coping strategy.

Back in 2002, Jones, Hanton, and Connaughton brought together 10 world-class athletes in a series of focus groups and interviews to define the nature of mental toughness.

By working with these athletes, they looked to define mental toughness and to better understand what unique abilities mental toughness can bring athletes. They came up with the following:

“Mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) that sports places on a performer. And be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, confident, and in control under pressure.”

What we can take away from the study conducted by Jones, Hanton, and Connaughton is a better way of describing what mental toughness allows athletes to do rather than what the construct really is.

Now, we must look to test the theory that mental toughness is not a single trait, but instead a multidimensional construct that reflects a combination of the following personality traits:

• Level-headedness
• Stress tolerance
• Resiliency/ Ego-strength
• Energy/ Persistence
• Self-structure
• Thoroughness

These personality traits have been used extensively in assessing an individuals’ potential for success across a wide range of professional, academic, and athletic contexts. These traits have been proven to be related to performance measures such as shooting percentage, rebounds, turnovers, 3-point percentage, and more.

We start with a hypothesis stating that athletes with at least one year of professional experience will score higher than NCAA Division 1 athlete in mental toughness, as measured by a combination of level-headedness, stress-tolerance, resiliency/ego-strength, self-structure, and energy/persistence. We conducted our study with 2 samples, one being NCAA Division 1 athletes and the other professional athletes. We measured both groups of athletes against each other by analyzing their Caliper Profile personality assessment results.

6 Traits of Mental Toughness & Why It’s Good for Sales

Level-headedness

Our scientists define level-headedness as the ability to stay composed in challenging interpersonal situations. In the context of the sales profession, that means dealing with difficult sales, indecisive prospects, competition from other organizations, etc.

Sales professionals who exhibit mental toughness are able to take these agitators and deal with them in a calm, composed manner. They have a good handle on their emotions and have the ability to express them at the appropriate times in the appropriate ways. Such behavior facilitates more productive conversations, even-keeled relationships with prospects and clients, and proper responses with their teammates.

Where it’s critical

The sales profession is full of challenging moments, whether they be from transactions, contract agreements, competition, or relationship management. An important part of making the sale is to manage your emotions properly. Things can get heated, discouraging, or even exciting, but you can’t always prepare for what’s going to hit you next. Level-headedness is a significant driver of performance in competencies focused on decision making, conflict management, and composure and resiliency — all of which you’ll encounter frequently in the sales field.

Stress-tolerance

Our scientists define stress-tolerance as the ability to remain resolute under stress. Sales is a stressful field. There are targets, high rejection rates, persistent negativity, and, usually, money at stake. In a smaller company, a lot of the weight of the business rests on the shoulders of salespeople. Additionally, the work hours are often unstructured or erratic — things can stop or go on a dime. Those sales professionals who have mental toughness know how to manage the volatile nature of the job and keep the stress from overwhelming them.

How to Manage Stress

Stress can make or break a deal. It can cause tunnel vision, making obstacles seem catastrophic. It leads to frustration and causes employees to feel discouraged and disengaged. It can scramble their communication skills, turning small misunderstandings into irreconcilable differences. So how does someone with mental toughness manage their stress?

• When they feel overwhelmed, they take a moment to examine the core issue. They may ask themselves, ‘What are the goals I’m trying to accomplish, what are the roadblocks, and how can I address them in a productive way?’ These individuals are able to identify the negative and frame it as an opportunity to achieve something positive.
• They set the tone. Stress often begets stress. By managing their own stressors and remaining strong and composed, their prospects and team members are likely to mirror their emotions back to them. By staying calm, they encourage everyone else to remain calm, too. This keeps stress from spiraling out of control and keeps everyone communicating effectively so things don’t go off the rails.
• They look for new opportunities that recurring issues reveal. What did they learn from this stressful period, and how can they apply their problem-solving skills to future issues? Everything is a learning opportunity and a mechanism for productivity improvements.

Often stress management and level-headedness work together. Sales professionals with mental toughness are able to manage their stress levels because they are able to keep their emotions in check and  work through both with a cool, calm demeanor to maintain their vision of the bigger picture and the situation at hand.

Resiliency/Ego-strength

The Caliper scientists define Resiliency/Ego-strength as the ability to handle setbacks, criticism, and rejection. With sales in mind, those who score high in this trait bounce back quickly from rejection and do not let failures control their self-confidence. This is one of the must-have ingredients of mental toughness, and within a sales framework is a key component for success; rejection is a prevalent theme throughout a career in sales.

Sales professionals who exhibit resiliency and ego-strength can take a “no” and turn it into something meaningful. They can learn something new, find insight, or uncover an underlying issue that helps them move forward with better understanding. They don’t let the “no” hold them back, and can continue their work with confidence and drive to complete the task at hand. Sales professionals with this trait are emotionally proactive when faced with difficult situations, and as such, they’re able to establish action-oriented goals, be optimistic, and always follow through.

How to Develop Resiliency/Ego-strength

The overall process of sales is challenging — maintaining a large workload, consistent client communication, and constant rejection all haunt the job of a sales professional. These challenges can be discouraging and stressful, but the key to success is an ability to manage them in a calm manner. Resiliency means an individual can accept and power through hardships while remaining positive and motivated. Here are a few tips for developing and maintaining Resiliency/Ego-strength:

• Security is key. When employees feel more secure in their role, it improves resilience, and they recognize and respond to stress better. Make sure they have the resources they need, a manager to support them, and access to proper training and coaching.
• Offer skills training. This includes communication courses, technical skills development, and soft skills classes. Learning new tools and skills to help them carry out their daily role shows your employees you care and support their overall well-being while improving their abilities and confidence to tackle challenges head on.
• Use a coaching mindset. Form a relationship with individuals in which you serve as mentor and coach. This builds meaningful relationships where they can come to you during challenging times, knowing they’ll be heard and have someone to help them get work through tough problems.

Energy/Persistence

The Caliper scientists define Energy/Persistence as the ability to sustain a high level of activity over extended periods. Those who score high in this trait relate well to being active and persistent in overcoming obstacles. In sales, obstacles, objections, and hesitations occur frequently — and a lot of money is on the line. Sales professionals are at the mercy of their client schedules, have to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and need to anticipate all the hoops they’ll need to jump through before closing a deal. It’s a demanding job, and to be successful, a sustained energy level is needed.

What Makes Up Energy/Persistence?

Maintaining stamina and motivation in a fast-paced, highly demanding role is a unique skill — more so when it’s often coupled with a long roll of red tape. What does it look like to have energy and persistence? Here are four key indicators:

• You take ownership of your work. High levels of persistence fuel those who show a strong drive towards goals. They’ll persist in accomplishing tasks to their best abilities, regardless of outlook.
• You can adjust and adapt. Those who are highly persistent won’t keep hammering the same tactics at a task when they aren’t working. They seek to understand the issue, find a better way to do it, and adjust their action plan. Even in the face of obstacles, they will achieve their goals.
• Your skills and self-discipline are highly developed. High-energy salespeople know how difficult it is to stay motivated, especially when they think they’ve hit a dead end. Nevertheless, they rely on their self-discipline and the skills they’ve learned over the years to always drive towards their goal. While the work may not have an immediate impact, they know their hard work will pay off in the end.
• You never stop learning. Persistent sales professionals know their goals will take time. They constantly seek to learn, because they understand the dynamic nature of their job. Tools, technology, and processes advance with the market, and they need to keep up. To be the best they can be, they know they must welcome and embrace change, and know there’s no such thing as too much expertise.

Self-Structure

Someone who has self-structure is defined by our scientists as an individual who prefers to develop their methods of work — they’re motivated by their own workflow, organization, and pace to set their own structure rather than rely on someone else’s way of doing things, or doing things the way they were first told. They look for new efficiencies to improve upon, and they set their own goals to accomplish their objectives.

Self-structure is an important part of mental toughness. When things get stressful or busy, an individual who is unable to set their own structure can feel overwhelmed and lost. Their manager or teammates would have to stop their work to help them manage their workload, and it creates a ripple effect of people taking on work from others in order to accommodate. An individual who possesses self-structure, however, has the mental toughness to re-examine their priorities, adapt to the busier workload, and manage their work, with little oversight from a supervisor.

In a sales profession, this self-structure is critical. Most sales professionals have to manage many clients at the same time, all at different stages of the funnel, across time zones, with multiple stakeholders — there are a lot of moving parts. Additionally, many sales people work remotely, travel frequently, take meetings out of the office, and are generally away from their supervisor for a large portion of their time. To be successful in this role, self-structure is a must.

How Can The Tools You Have Help Develop Self-Structure?

Time management and prioritization are skills that can easily be bolstered by tools we already have at our disposal in the workplace. Platforms and apps made for efficiency, project management, file sharing, and time tracking are easy ways to build out self-structure skills. Calendars that sync across multiple devices and platforms, CRM integrations, and other automations are created with the express intention of making it easier for people to communicate, organize their days, and collaborate better — and they extend beyond just internal organization. They can help the salesperson stay in better touch with their prospects, too, sharing files easily, remaining easy to get in contact with, and connecting calendars to see when all stakeholders are available for important meetings.

Thoroughness

A person with thoroughness is described by our scientists as someone who has a tendency to be concerned with details and to take full ownership of tasks, jobs, and roles. This person is conscientious, takes pride in their work, and often a perfectionist. A mentally tough person is in constant pursuit of perfection — their work is a reflection of themselves — and to be perfect, it has to be thorough.

A detail-oriented individual doesn’t just focus on the big picture. They understand that the smaller details of an assignment are critical components of the larger piece. A machine cannot fire on all cylinders unless every cog is perfectly in place. And an individual with thoroughness will tinker with each cog until it’s performing its function correctly.

What Makes Up Thoroughness?

What key behaviors does a person with thoroughness exhibit? Here are four indicators that your employee is thorough:

• Organization. Understanding task hierarchies and ranking major and minor tasks helps individuals manage their work piece by piece. Knowing what minor tasks serve the major tasks can help the entire workload be completed more efficiently and effectively.
• Consistency. Thoroughness doesn’t just happen when it’s easy or convenient. An individual who is truly thorough, will always be thorough, regardless of whether it’s a big, important project, or a smaller, routine task. They think through every aspect of everything they work on, every time.
• Follow-Through. When thorough individuals make a promise, they keep it. They remember all of the things they said they would do, things the client asked to see, resources they promised to provide — and they follow through. A thorough person never leaves a person hanging. They set deadlines, and they meet them.
• Routine. Those who are thorough often find a technique that works for them — and do it the same way every time. Maybe they always clean their house front to back because they know the nooks and crannies better that way. Maybe they always send the same follow up emails at the same time. They take what works, and they implement it every time — because they know it works.

In the sales profession, any missed detail could mean a deal doesn’t go through. A mentally tough salesperson will meticulously record every detail, review their notes often, check up on every question, and address every comment. Someone who skins over the details during a shaky deal may miss something they think is small, but turns out to be the sticking point. Thoroughness ensures that everything is anticipated, researched, and ready for rebuttal. It could be the difference between a yes and a no.

Applying mental toughness to the workplace

Before approaching a strategy for mental toughness, you should consider what it means to value mental toughness in the workplace. Why should you prioritize building these skills in your team if they aren’t naturally inclined to do so on their own? If these are skills typically associated with athletics, how can they apply to the workplace?

As it turns out, there’s a lot of commonality between the traits that make a successful athlete and a successful employee. Just as successful athletes excel at balancing the demands of training, travel, and competition while still maintaining focus and confidence, mentally tough employees will be better at coping with a stressful work environment, i.e., deadlines, demanding clients, cross-departmental responsibilities, etc. The result is a teammate who is reliable and whose work remains consistent, regardless of circumstance.

Additionally, these employees are more likely to bounce back from rejection. How often have you heard an athlete speak about their failure as motivation for improvement? Michael Jordan famously cited his failure to make his high school basketball team as the impetus for becoming the greatest basketball player in the world. The more willing and able an employee is to accept his or her failures and learn from them, the more they will take ownership of improvement and maintain the confidence and energy required to improve and overcome.

How do you develop mental toughness?

It’s a misconception that these skills exist innately and that you either have it or you don’t. There’s a number of tactics you can employ that can develop these skills and help you coach resilience and confidence into your employees, even if they don’t believe they have it within themselves. So, how do you do that? There are a few easy places to start:

Reframe the context

The struggle doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. A good athlete knows that every obstacle helps them get stronger and better at what they do. The same goes in the workplace. Is someone on your team struggling in their role or up against a particularly difficult project? Make sure they know that these aren’t roadblocks, they’re opportunities. They can work through the problem, learn from the challenges, and apply it moving forward. There’s a lesson in everything.

Communicate Often

Make sure your team knows there is an open line of communication. When they come across obstacles, encourage them to talk it through. Maybe that involves getting advice from their manager or brainstorming with a colleague who can coach them. Conversely, if you spot a team member in the weeds, make it clear to them that you’re available to help. Communication is a two-way street.

Set Goals

Give your employees something to strive for. Often, when people are presented with a challenge, they can rise to the occasion. By encouraging them to reach just beyond their comfort zone and watching them achieve their goals one-by-one, you’re instilling a sense of confidence, ownership, and autonomy. You don’t always have to incentivize growth with a bonus or title, sometimes just demonstrating trust in their skills is incentive enough.

Build Trust

Creating a supportive relationship between management and employees is critical to building mental toughness. When your employees know that you have their back, they won’t get discouraged when the going gets rough. Having a support system helps maintain unfaltering confidence in their abilities that will carry them through to the finish line without negatively impacting their quality of work.

By fostering a supportive, communicative environment that rewards employees for putting in the hard work rather than punishing them when things get difficult, you’ll soon start to see the evidence of mental toughness growing from within your team, and you won’t need to hire the entire Duke basketball team to do so.

It’s Good for Small Business

Boost Their Confidence

Have you noticed your salespeople struggling in their role lately? They might be struggling to believe in their own potential. To change that, remind them that the obstacles they face are actually opportunities for them to learn and become better at what they do. There is a lesson in everything.

Force Them Out of Their Comfort Zone

Examine each salesperson’s weaknesses and hesitations and present them with challenges that address those things head-on. Encouraging them to step outside of their comfort zone allows them to practice what they lack. Once they achieve the end-goal, they’ll be filled with a feeling of autonomy.

Be Their Support System

Your employees should never fear you. You are there to help them grow and succeed in their position. Make it known by offering your salespeople constant support — put in the work to earn their trust. This positive energy will encourage them to reach the finish line.

Applying Mental Toughness to Small Business Sales Teams

Small business means smaller teams, fewer resources, and less cash flow than large corporations. It also means that if you’re hiring, you can’t afford to make a mistake. So it’s absolutely critical to get it right when it comes to hiring those who are charged with bringing revenue into your business.

More than any other business model, small businesses heavily rely on their sales — especially in their beginning stages — to fuel their business and keep it afloat. If your business loses a sale, the results could be catastrophic. Your sales team is small and each salesperson carries a heavy burden on their shoulders. They will face a plethora of stressful situations and must be able to think clearly and effectively under pressure. With that in mind, you should invest time into coaching your current employees and seeking out coachable new hires that demonstrate signs of mental toughness.

Coaching mental toughness gives salespeople new skills, a strong understanding of their role, and provides them with the support they need to leap towards challenges, cross the finish line, and win the gold medal — significantly reducing the major risks that small businesses face.

Mental Toughness in Team-Building

Mental toughness is an important factor in team-building, and one you should be looking for as you select your team members. A group of individuals who not only work well together, but who leverage each other’s strengths make for a highly engaged and productive team. Mentally tough teams are ones who are not only productive, but can overcome stress. But how do you build a team around mental toughness? Not all teammates are likely to have mental toughness individually, but when teams are built around key members who are mentally tough, the entire team stands stronger and more powerful.

The Caliper 4-Box and Mental Toughness

There are four key roles on a team that keep the engine running, and by filling them with individuals who exhibit mental toughness, you’ll ensure a high-functioning, high-performing team that’s strong from within. The four roles are:

The Champion

Champions promote ideas, energize teammates, and drive the team through challenges. They’re focused on big-picture goals, and steer the team in the direction of its vision through motivation.

A Champion with mental toughness has the resiliency and ego-strength necessary to keep the team in high spirits. They know when to rally the team during down times, and they have the energy to do it.

The Implementer

The Implementer is the team member focused on follow-through. These individuals are highly self-disciplined, and they are the ones to roll up their sleeves and do what’s needed to bring the vision to life. They have a close attention to detail, a great deal of patience, and they remain focused on the task at hand.

Mentally tough Implementers have the thoroughness and self-structure to accomplish even the mundane tasks necessary to reach the end goal. They are highly efficient, meticulously organized, and take pride in addressing even the smallest detail.

The Creator

Creators thrive on challenge. They are action-oriented problem-solvers, and think in big-picture terms. This person works closely with Champions; Creators come up with a plan, Champions push it forward.

The Creator is task-oriented and takes the lead. A Creator with mental toughness is persistent, and their energy to drive the work helps garner enthusiasm from their teammates to keep moving full steam ahead.

The Facilitator

Facilitators are the glue that holds the group together. They communicate well, manage relationships, and provide support amongst the team.

The Facilitator wants to create an environment where the team works harmoniously toward a common goal. A mentally tough Facilitator has level-headedness and stress tolerance to remain calm under pressure and keep the peace when tempers run high. They’re able to keep work moving forward — even in times of stress — by easing the tension between teammates.

Discover Mentally Tough Candidates with Caliper

Building your team is vital to the performance of your company. You need to be certain you’re hiring the right person. They need to have the skills to fill the role, fit within the company culture, have the motivation to perform in the role, and deliver results. With the Caliper Profile, we can make this as seamless as possible. Want to take a look at how these products can help your company? Contact us and we can get you on the right path to developing more successful employees.

Struggling to hire for sales? @CaliperCorp uses validated job models to match candidates to sales-specific roles and is the trusted choice for sales selection.
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Hiring for Sales

How do you determine if a candidate will be an effective salesperson? While sales effectiveness is not a generalized trait, there are qualities and habits that are greater indicators of success in a sales role. When hiring for sales, you should look for these six traits or the potential to cultivate these characteristics in candidates:

• Hyper-focus: Salespeople have many tasks and clients to focus on at once. In order to be successful, they need to be able to prioritize and focus on what is most important.
• Active listening: The best salespeople listen to their customers and ask the right questions.
• Networking Master: Building relationships is a key element for success in sales. Effective salespeople are able to build trust which improves customer loyalty.
• Work smarter, not harder: Successful salespeople follow a consistent process and balance their tasks. They don’t reinvent the wheel when there is already an efficient process in place.
• Adaptability: When faced with an unforeseen challenge or obstacle, effective salespeople are able to quickly adapt their approach.
• Be prepared: Exceptional salespeople know their product better than anyone. They do their research and are able to anticipate the questions their customers might have.

Did you know that sales productivity is the #1 challenge for 65% of B2B organizations? Learn how @CaliperCorp can improve your hiring and development plans and help you achieve #SalesEffectiveness.
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It’s also crucial to consider sales effectiveness as a function of the tasks themselves, although these tasks will differ across industry and organization. In order to hire the right candidates, start by defining the relevant tasks for your strategy, and reflect those tasks in hiring criteria and a disciplined hiring process. A combination of structured interviews, assessments, and background and reference checks allows hiring managers to observe and predict the candidate’s job behaviors which can yield the best results when hiring for sales.

Talent assessments have become more available and intuitive, which is great news for sales leaders. The Caliper Profile pre-employment assessment, for example, was built to help predict a job candidate’s potential success in the role. The assessment not only measures specific behaviors and competencies, but also uses the data and insights to match candidates to scientifically-validated job models for sales professions. The Caliper Profile also goes a step further to provide hiring managers with interview questions, coaching recommendations, and training for skills gaps, meaning that it can be used at both the hiring and developing stages of employment.

Set Them up for Success

Did you know that less than 45% of companies have a formal sales training process? Given the lack of training and development structure in sales, it’s easy to see why the turnover rate is so high. Companies tend to invest more heavily in recruiting and hiring activities than on the processes and programs that focus on developing employees and keeping them engaged. However, investing in training and development will likely improve retention and increase your company’s margin.

Professional Development and Productivity

Playbooks are a great tool for training employees and creating consistent sales processes across your organization. A playbook ideally contains all the content necessary for your sales reps to succeed, including buyer personas, call scripts, negotiation tactics, and proposal guidelines. Creating a playbook can be very time-consuming and should involve multiple stakeholders throughout your company. However, it is time-saving in the long-run as it allows new employees to be trained more quickly. Additionally, a playbook frees up time for selling. Research by the CMO Council shows that sales reps spend 40% of their time searching for or creating content, and a playbook can help centralize the resources they need.

Professional development is integral to individual success in sales and overall retention. When career advancement paths are unclear, sales reps will start to question their place in the company. This is where sales leaders can make an impact by investing in the professional development of their team with a coaching mindset. Effective coaching includes building a plan for your employees, establishing expectations, challenging your staff, and helping them find solutions. By implementing these practices, employees are more likely to become engaged with their careers and increase their overall performance.

Sales productivity is the #1 challenge for 65% of B2B organizations and directly impacts a company’s ability to grow and improve its bottom line. Hiring and developing for sales can be difficult, but the right investment in these processes will help you find the most qualified sales candidates and keep them invested in your organization.

Caliper can make implementing these processes as simple and seamless as possible. Want to see how our products can help you increase your success in sales? Contact us and we can get you on the right path to hiring and developing more sales effective employees.

With decades of research, Caliper has defined a common concept between top-level athletes and professional salespeople. This concept is known as mental toughness, the natural psychological edge that enables you to cope better than your opponents in high-demand situations. Mental toughness is made up of six distinct personality traits that give you an edge to perform under difficult conditions and with successful outcomes. In part one of this series, we discussed the first two traits: level-headedness and stress tolerance. Today we’re diving into resiliency/ego-strength and energy/persistence.

Resiliency/Ego-strength

Caliper’s scientists define Resiliency/Ego-strength as the ability to handle setbacks, criticism, and rejection. With sales in mind, those who score high in this trait bounce back quickly from rejection and do not let failures control their self-confidence. This is one of the must-have ingredients of mental toughness, and within a sales framework is a key component for success; rejection is a prevalent theme throughout a career in sales.

Want to know more about the specific traits that make up #MentalToughness? Take a look in part two of @CaliperCorp's 3-part series that takes a deep dive into resiliency and persistence:
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Sales professionals who exhibit resiliency and ego-strength can take a “no” and turn it into something meaningful. They can learn something new, find insight, or uncover an underlying issue that helps them move forward with better understanding. They don’t let the “no” hold them back, and can continue their work with confidence and drive to complete the task at hand. Sales professionals with this trait are emotionally proactive when faced with difficult situations, and as such, they’re able to establish action-oriented goals, be optimistic, and always follow through.

How to Develop Resiliency/Ego-strength

The overall process of sales is challenging — maintaining a large workload, consistent client communication, and constant rejection all haunt the job of a sales professional. These challenges can be discouraging and stressful, but the key to success is an ability to manage them in a calm manner. Resiliency means an individual can accept and power through hardships while remaining positive and motivated. Here are a few tips for developing and maintaining Resiliency/Ego-strength:

• Security is key. When employees feel more secure in their role, it improves resilience, and they recognize and respond to stress better. Make sure they have the resources they need, a manager to support them, and access to proper training and coaching.
• Offer skills training. This includes communication courses, technical skills development, and soft skills classes. Learning new tools and skills to help them carry out their daily role shows your employees you care and support their overall well-being while improving their abilities and confidence to tackle challenges head on.
• Use a coaching mindset. Form a relationship with individuals in which you serve as mentor and coach. This builds meaningful relationships where they can come to you during challenging times, knowing they’ll be heard and have someone to help them get work through tough problems.

What is it about resiliency and persistence that contributes to your #sales professionals having #MentalToughness? @CaliperCorp breaks it down in part 2 of their mental toughness deep-dive:
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Energy/Persistence

Caliper’s scientists define Energy/Persistence as the ability to sustain a high level of activity over extended periods. Those who score high in this trait relate well to being active and persistent in overcoming obstacles. In sales, obstacles, objections, and hesitations occur frequently — and a lot of money is on the line. Sales professionals are at the mercy of their client schedules, have to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and need to anticipate all the hoops they’ll need to jump through before closing a deal. It’s a demanding job, and to be successful, a sustained energy level is needed.

What Makes Up Energy/Persistence?

Maintaining stamina and motivation in a fast-paced, highly demanding role is a unique skill — more so when it’s often coupled with a long roll of red tape. What does it look like to have energy and persistence? Here are four key indicators:

1. You take ownership of your work. High levels of persistence fuel those who show a strong drive towards goals. They’ll persist in accomplishing tasks to their best abilities, regardless of outlook.
2. You can adjust and adapt. Those who are highly persistent won’t keep hammering the same tactics at a task when they aren’t working. They seek to understand the issue, find a better way to do it, and adjust their action plan. Even in the face of obstacles, they will achieve their goals.
3. Your skills and self-discipline are highly developed. High-energy salespeople know how difficult it is to stay motivated, especially when they think they’ve hit a dead end. Nevertheless, they rely on their self-discipline and the skills they’ve learned over the years to always drive towards their goal. While the work may not have an immediate impact, they know their hard work will pay off in the end.
4. You never stop learning. Persistent sales professionals know their goals will take time. They constantly seek to learn, because they understand the dynamic nature of their job. Tools, technology, and processes advance with the market, and they need to keep up. To be the best they can be, they know they must welcome and embrace change, and know there’s no such thing as too much expertise.

In part three, we’ll cover the remaining traits of mental toughness: How self-structure and thoroughness help sales professionals excel. To see how Caliper can help you build stronger teams by finding candidates with the right personality traits, reach out to our experts today, and get started.

Boost Motivation and Engagement

An individual’s Caliper Profile outlines the traits that define their preferred work style and specific aspects of a job model where they’re more inclined to excel. Unearthing their natural tendencies, strengths, and motivating factors provide managers with unique insights into key performance attributes that can be leveraged for performance management.

Are you using your #PersonalityAssessments for more than just #hiring? If not, @CaliperCorp tells you why you should be:
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Personality assessments allow managers to tap into the things that make employees tick is a great way to foster growth and engage employees through projects that challenge their skills, communicate in ways that connect with them, and capture their interest with work they relate to. Rather than managing everyone the same way, tailoring your management approach to the unique traits of each individual allows managers to find the most effective way to reach each of their employees and engage them with a style that clicks. The result is stronger employee engagement and higher performing teams.

Improve Manager to Employee Relationships

A key component of employee development is the sense of trust between managers and employees. The Caliper Profile is a valuable resource to manage relationships. Managers can evaluate the differences between their own trait scores and those of their employees to determine how best to interact. From personality assessments, managers can see how individuals prefer to communicate and adapt their own tendencies and preferences to meet the needs of their team members. Building rapport with team members strengthens the relationship between managers and employees, which means individuals will take more accountability for their work, bring concerns to their managers with confidence, and feel more engaged with their tasks and growth.

Quality #PersonalityAssessments aren't just for #hiring. @CaliperCorp demonstrates how they're a powerful performance management tool:
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Improve Peer-to-Peer Relationships

Managers can use personality assessments to understand how individuals prefer to interact with each other and how teams fit together. Pairing two contrasting work styles on a project may not be avoidable, but with a good grasp on each individual’s communication preferences, managers can facilitate better conversations and smoother interactions. The result is a better team dynamic, improved conflict resolution, a more tightly-knit team, and higher over performance.

The Caliper Profile and Essentials for Coaching

Paired with the Essentials Report for Coaching, the Caliper Profile is a powerful tool in driving growth and performance management. Managers get key insights from personality assessments based on individual personality traits, natural skill sets, and areas for improvement, as well as how best to communicate successes and opportunities in a way that creates a productive conversation. If used continuously and strategically, and in conjunction with other performance management best practices, the Caliper Profile facilitates the further development of skill sets, ability, and relationships.

To learn more about the ways you can use scientifically-backed personality assessments to develop employees, build high-performing teams, and strengthen company culture, reach out to our experts today to get started.

“Succeeding in business, in sports, in your life, is a matter of pulling together people you can trust, who are honest, who have their priorities in line, who have the talent, ambition, and desire to reach beyond themselves and make something really big happen – particularly when the pressure’s on.”

-Roger Staubach
Former NFL Al-Pro Quarterback and Executive Chairman at Jones Lang LaSalle

Defining Mental Toughness

Mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to generally cope better than your opponents with the many demands that sports place on a performer. Our research has shown that these same traits also contribute to successful, high-performing salespeople.

Get your free guide from @CaliperCorp to learn how you can build your all-star #sales team by developing #MentalToughness
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Download the Guide to Build Your All-Star Team

Why do some salespeople with the same observable attributes—education, experience, network, domain knowledge— flourish at the next level while others don’t seem to reach their sure-fire potential? With the help of Caliper Analytics, organizations are delving below the surface to find more quantifiable performance measures beyond “they have a lot of experience” or “they really know what they’re talking about.” Caliper’s assessment data can help you better understand your employees and job candidates, and what’s their potential to be successful in their job.

Mental Toughness in the Workplace

The Caliper Profile helps employers identify the intangibles that can determine whether an employee or candidate has the ability to reach their full potential and be successful in their role.

Analyzing candidate profiles can uncover attitude and personality traits that are indicators of potential. Whether you are looking for a salesperson that will remain composed under pressure or need a sales manager who can motivate and support their team, Caliper can help you find which candidates are innate leaders, or self-disciplined individual contributors.

For more information on how The Caliper Profile and our Analytics for Selection can help you better understand your employees, reach out to our experts today to get started.

As they do, an emphasis on soft skills has taken the front seat, and smart hiring professionals are starting to realize that measuring for personality fit is becoming more critical in predicting job success than just experience alone.

Hiring for Soft Skills

The statistics speak for themselves. According to a 2014 survey, 78% of professionals identified personality as the most desirable quality in a worker. Many executives cited skillset as the least important factor in hiring an employee. Below are some other reasons to focus on soft skills, especially during a talent shortage:

• 97% of employees and executives believe the lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project.
• Almost half of an employee’s success in the first 18 months on the job can be attributed to how the employee fits in with others in the organization, while the rest of their success depends on whether they can do the job.
• Employees who are more closely aligned with their company and/or team saw a number of improvements in their work:
  • Greater job satisfaction
  • More likely to remain with their organization
  • More committed to their work/role
  • Higher job performance

Did you know? 78% of professionals identified #PersonalityFit as the most desirable quality in #employees. @CaliperCorp knows how to find the right person for the job:
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• According to the Society of Human Resource Management, hiring someone who is a poor cultural fit can cost businesses anywhere from 50% to 60% of that person’s salary.
• 18% of employees reported that culture is a benefit that would increase engagement and loyalty.

Screening for Soft Skills

Soft skills make a big difference. But, assessing personality traits that will lead to success can be tricky, and avoiding bias is crucial for accurate predictions. Caliper’s six decades of experience and robust personality assessment is perfect for helping you discover the types of personalities that will be successful at your organization and determine how to coach and train your new employees.

Imagine your best employee. Think of the traits that make them such a valuable asset. Imagine if you could clone that employee’s best qualities and create a whole, more balanced team built from amazing employees.

By using assessments in your hiring process, you can get pretty close. Through cutting-edge personality science and decades of research, the Caliper assessment maps your best employees and helps you build success models around your top performers and competency requirements..

Bonus Content: Didn’t Get the Result You Wanted from a Personality Assessment? Here’s What to Do.

Our own Eric Baker explains it this way:

“Your top performers are tops for a reason: they have the right blend of motivators for sales success in your organization. By using assessments to collect personality data from the sales team (including all performance quartiles), you can begin to reveal the differentiators that set your best reps apart. 

These differentiators are the groundwork for a success model based on the behavioral competencies of top performers. Important: This process has to be done scientifically with statistical analysis; it’s not guesswork.”

These hiring guidelines can then assist you in screening, so the people who aren’t right for you from a fit perspective are funneled out, while you can evaluate who to move forward in the process.

Interviewing for Soft Skills

Having this information can be invaluable, especially when combined with an interviewer trained in uncovering soft skills like emotional intelligence, mental toughness or grit, resilience, and other soft skills typically reserved for later in the interview process.

Read More: Is This The Candidate I’m Looking For? 

Training your interviewers, whether HR or hiring managers, to seek out these qualities earlier can save you both time and money. More importantly, you can compare the objective results of the personality assessment against the more subjective views of an interviewer or perhaps a candidate who has all the right qualities to be a top performer at your company, but whose sweaty palms and nervousness made him a flop in the interview. Using The Caliper Profile, your hiring team can also gain insight into how to best interview this person.

According to @CaliperCorp's Eric Baker -- your top performers are tops for a reason: they have the right blend of motivators for #SalesSuccess in your organization. Find out how to get the #SalesTalent you're looking for:
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Researching for Soft Skills

As you get closer to the right person for the job, rounding out your view of their soft skills is crucial for fit and retention alike. Using a personality assessment to screen and guide is the first, and most important, step.

Training your hiring team to uncover soft skills in an interview setting helps you compare what you see on the resume and in the personality assessment to get a better idea of this person’s soft skills and if those particular soft skills are right for your company.

The third step is checking references to get a better idea of their work style and attitude. How do they put those skills into action on a day-to-day basis? Which of those soft skills were noticeable to their former boss or team? What was their attitude like in stressful situations?

This is the third piece of hiring for fit and retention. Another insight that can stem from digging into work style and demeanor is how you can develop and coach your potential employee. Combined with your scientific personality assessment, a trained interviewer and researching references completes the portrait of the candidate or new team member.

Read More: The Surprising Secret Behind Great Hires and How to Access It

Hiring the perfect fit for your company is possible. With assessments as a guideline for personality fit, interviewing to gauge skills and demeanor, and researching references to understand their work style and attitude, the right candidate will rise to the top.

Ensure an exceptional candidate experience every time! To learn how Caliper can help you increase candidate fit and employee retention, contact our experts today.

What to Score

Experience

It might not be the most important part, but the experience still matters. Gauge the kind of experience the candidate has and what they’ve learned to inform their work style. It’s not necessarily about how experienced they are, but what they’ve taken away from the experience they have.

Soft Skills

Just because the candidate is experienced, doesn’t mean they can meet a deadline or perform under pressure. Get a better understanding of their time-management skills, organizational habits, stress management style, and other skills that can’t be trained in the first few months.

Personality Fit

Personality assessments are a great indicator of potential. And while personalities can’t be “scored,” assessing where candidates’ strengths lie can help paint a picture of how likely they are to be successful in a particular setting. Where experience may fall short, a candidate may be able to make up for in tenacity, thirst for knowledge, and a desire to succeed. Personality doesn’t change with development plans, so identifying candidates who exhibit personality traits associated with high potential for success in a given role might be more closely aligned with a role than someone who is experienced but won’t enjoy what they’re doing.

Need a better way to evaluate your #interview candidates? @CaliperCorp shows you why you should be using scorecards, and has a free downloadable one, too. #HR
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Job Fit

Comparing personality traits to validated job models will give you a more holistic view of how a candidate would fit into a specific role. If they have the experience, and you have a good grasp on their personality, how will that line up for the specific job you’re hiring for? If they’re not a good match but they’re a good candidate and you don’t want to turn them away, this will help you find the right place for them that plays to their strengths.

Culture Fit

Consider your organizational culture and how what you’ve learned about them will fit in. Do they reflect your company’s goals? Do they embody your mission, vision, and values? Finding candidates who identify with your values is critical to employee engagement, loyalty, and growth.

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YOUR CANDIDATE SCORECARD

Why Score It

Scores should be broken down between three categories: Interview rating, assessment rating, and the gap between the two.

The Interview

Interviews are a great place to evaluate candidates in a personal way, but that process can be affected by numerous external factors that can make candidates look better or worse than they really are. While you shouldn’t treat the interview as the determining factor, you shouldn’t dismiss it entirely. It’s still a good way to gauge how the candidate thinks and articulates thoughts in real-time, thinks off the cuff, and, for some, how they handle a stressful situation. It’s also a great opportunity for you to ask behavioral interview questions based on the data you have collected from their personality assessment.

The Assessment

No single part of the interview process is a magic answer for who to hire; they all work together to create a better picture of who the candidate is and how they will fare in the role. Assessments are a great tool for getting honest, real responses that can’t always be accessed in an interview.

How are you scoring your #interview candidates? @CaliperCorp has the scorecard you need to choose the best candidate. #HR
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The Difference

Once you score the interview and receive the assessment scores, look at how each candidate stacks up against one another. Did they score as you expected? Are there any glaring differences? What observations or hypotheses do you have for any discrepancy? And is it something that indicates whether or not they’re the right candidate or can it be corrected through further conversations? Gaps between the two scores will help steer your decision-making and understand if this person is truly the candidate you’re looking for, or just interviews really well.

The Caliper Profile is a scientifically-validated personality assessment that can help give you a better picture of your candidates’ personalities and how they align with the job you’re looking to fill. Reach out to our experts today for more information about how Caliper can help you find the right talent, and don’t forget to download your scorecard!

“Often the best solution to a management problem is the right person.”

Edwin Booz

Bad hires have always been the bane of companies’ collective existence. It’s expensive, frustrating, and diverts resources of hiring managers, HR professionals, and the team being augmented. On average, a bad hire can cost over $15,000.

Today, with the future of the traditional in-office workforce under a layer of uncertainty, hiring right is even more important. Budgets are tight, employees are stretched thin, and company leadership expects every hire to contribute to the bottom line as quickly as possible.

Enter Pre-Employment assessments for remote and hybrid hiring.

Pre-employment assessments are tools to help companies select better hires, even when hiring exclusively remotely. In fact, pre-employment assessments are even more useful for remote hiring, as we’re all focused on ensuring success for our teams and departments.

For over 50 years, companies have been using screeners and questionnaires to weed out potential bad hires and discover top candidates by assessing certain personality traits and skill sets during the interview process.

Better Than Ever: Pre-Employment Assessments Big Shifts

Many organizations see the benefits of pre-employment assessments and are considering adding them to their hiring processes, but if you are starting from scratch or augmenting your process due to an increase in remote or hybrid hiring, where do you start? We’ve created this simple comprehensive guide to help introduce or extend pre-employment assessments to improve your hiring process, for remote employees and in-office workers.

Pre-employment Assessments Are Not Magic

Pre-employment assessments are not a definitive answer. They don’t separate “good applicants” from “bad applicants” or possess clairvoyance. The data generated by an assessment is, in fact, neutral. In reality, an assessment is one tool you can use when hiring a new employee to help you in the decision-making process. It provides clues, but it’s not a crystal ball.

Pre-employment Assessments Are Not A Test

People commonly refer to pre-employment assessments using the term “personality tests.” While personality tests sound jazzier from a marketing perspective, a pre-employment assessment is not a test. You can’t pass or fail one. A pre-employment assessment is, rather, a method for gathering data about personality traits. It provides an added data point for the kinds of roles in which a candidate might fit.

Dear Candidate Worrying About Passing Your Assessment…

Pre-employment Assessments Are Not A Replacement for Coaching and Development

Just because an applicant’s assessment results line up with the job you are looking to fill, it does not mean that they will be perfect on the job. People still need training, development, and an engaging environment in which to fulfill their potential. In fact, 51% of employees would quit their job if the training was not offered, even if they’re experienced in the job functions. An applicant who aligns with the job is more likely to succeed than an applicant who does not align with the job, but only when all other factors are equal. A good candidate still needs to feel engaged, motivated, and see opportunities for growth.

Pre-employment assessments are not magic nor @Buzzfeed quizzes. So what are they? @CaliperCorp has the answer. #assessments
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Pre-employment Assessments Are Not Rare

The American Management Association found that 70% of companies do some sort of job skill testing. 46% of them also use personality or psychological assessments. 41% rely on some form of basic literacy and math skill tests to support their decision.

Pre-employment assessments aren’t something your competitors don’t know about. In fact, if you aren’t using them, you might be playing catch up. The talent acquisition technology and services market is estimated to reach $113.9 billion in 2021, and assessment technology, in particular, is primed to be one of the biggest areas for innovation in this sector.

Pre-employment Assessments Are a Useful Tool

As an instrument for identifying applicants’ and employees’ intrinsic strengths and motivations, pre-employment assessments are hard to beat. Top-tier organizations are no longer leaving their decision solely to the impressions gained from a resume and an initial interview.

Assessments provide you with standardized and useful insights, regarding how candidates interact in the workplace and also predict job performance and fit with the company. This data will also help improve the team’s overall productivity and success.

The purpose of a pre-employment assessment is to uncover what you can’t see on a resume: a person’s motivators and inhibitors. The applicant whose motivators line up with the role and whose inhibitors are largely not required for the role, is more likely to be a top performer than someone with personality drivers that are negatively correlated to the role.

How to Get Better Hiring Results Using Pre-Employment Evaluations

Pre-employment Assessments Support Hiring and Development Decisions

According to Career Builder research, 74% of employers admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a position. But, a pre-employment assessment is not meant to replace human judgment in the selection process, rather it exists to augment it.

Let’s say that one applicant interviewed better, but the other has preferable qualifications. Assessment results can show you which applicant’s motivators align best with the job and, therefore, can serve as that added data point to consider when making a decision. The same goes for internal promotion decisions.

Even better, employee assessment results can help you customize your coaching and development plans for maximum effectiveness because you’ll know your new hire’s potential strengths and weaknesses ahead of time. No surprises!

A large percentage of employers already understand that assessments provide highly valuable information about specific aspects of a person’s potential. Not only does this make employee selection decisions more accurate and useful, but it also informs how the individual should be onboarded, managed, coached, and professionally developed throughout their career.

Pre-employment Assessments Are A Way to Limit Bias

Especially with roles with inherently high turnover (typically sales and customer-service positions), you can limit bias by applying the same evaluation criteria for each applicant. On a broader scale, you can use assessments to ensure your hiring managers are following the same process and not letting their personal quirks undermine the company’s talent acquisition strategy.

Pre-hire screenings provide recruiters and hiring managers with objective data, on record. By reducing human error, decisions can be made without bias and without the threat of legal involvement.

Learn More: Hire your perfect candidate. See how Caliper can help you identify top talent early.

Pre-employment Assessments to Identify Great Remote Workers

The Caliper Remote Worker job model details how an individual aligns with the core competencies required for success in a remote role. Comparing your pre-employment assessment to a remote worker job model can offer even more insights into the right employee for the right role.

• Composure — staying calm under pressure and performing to a high standard even in crises.
• Learning Agility — swiftly pivoting to new needs, ideas, and processes as priorities or workloads change.
• Information Seeking — learning new things to adapt to their role’s unique needs during a crisis with little to no outside influence.
• Accountability — consistently completing work, owning their role, and taking accountability for both mistakes and innovations when they occur.
• Adaptability —accommodating changes to their role, responsibilities, or department with flexibility and quickly adjusting to the new environment.
• Time Management — completing tasks promptly, hitting deadlines, maintaining quality, and exhibiting self-reliance.

What Pre-Employment Assessments Can Do:

• Uncover Truth. 85% of job applicants lie on resumes. Candidates can bend the truth about their skills during the application process for many reasons, mostly because they want to show the hiring manager they meet the qualifications. Pre-employment assessments can assess true skill levels and aptitudes directly in the hiring process.
• Reduce Turnover. Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group has found that companies who use pre-hire assessment tests report a 39% lower turnover rate. Why waste months training employees who never were a true fit for the job? Know before their first day whether or not the candidate is a fit for the role.
• Determine Culture Fit. One study found that 84% of recruiters surveyed agree that cultural fit — not the time and cost to hire for a role — is one of the most important recruitment factors, and nine out of 10 have reported passing on applicants who didn’t feel aligned with their company’s culture. Pre-employment assessments don’t just gauge skills and aptitudes. Values, communication styles, and attitudes can be gleaned from a series of selected questions.
• Save Time. Using assessments can cut back the time wasted on the wrong candidates. This phenomenon is compounded when handling high-volume hiring. Screening methods can differentiate top candidates early in the hiring process.
• Improve Candidate Experience. Nearly 4 in 5 candidates say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its people. The employee lifecycle starts before interviews. Show your talent pool you are investing in the right people by committing to bias-free assessments.

Choosing the Right Pre-Employment Assessment

Assessments have flooded the market in recent years, some cheap and easy, but be assured that you get what you pay for. Look for an assessment that is:

• Scientifically-Validated. Top-of-the-line assessments also achieve something called “criterion validity,” which means they are scientifically validated to measure job-performance potential.
• Proven. Go with an assessment that has a track record in the assessment industry not a fly-by-night provider with no history.
• Versatile. Authentic assessments are scientifically validated through extensive research and testing.
• Remote-Enabled. Your applicants should be able to access the assessment remotely to ensure its free from bias.
• Accessible. Your pre-employment assessment should be easy to access for all groups of potential candidates.
• Calibrated to Your Organization. Ensure there is some level of customization available to ensure alignment with your workplace.

Reduce turnover, increase cultural fit, and strengthen your team all with one thing….a pre-employment assessment. @CaliperCorp
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Great Pre-Employment Assessments Characteristics

Anyone can put together a questionnaire and call it a pre-employment assessment. But without proven validation, the results will be useless. Your pre-employment assessment must be versatile and validated. Authentic assessments are scientifically validated through extensive research and testing to make sure they measure what they claim to measure. This is called “construct validity.”

Top-of-the-line assessments also achieve something called “criterion validity,” which means they are scientifically validated to measure job-performance potential. The Caliper Profile is validated both for construct and criterion validity. Our assessment holds up even under remote hiring scrutiny.

What We Mean When We Say Caliper Assessments Are “Scientifically Validated”

A phone app that hit the market 36 hours ago is probably not your most reliable resource for evaluating applicants. Go with an assessment that has a track record in the assessment industry and is regarded as venerable. While your desired applicants and employees should be able to take the assessment from anywhere, most scientifically-validated assessments are NOT suited to being taken “on-the-go”.

For the consistent application of employment assessments throughout your organization, you should use an assessment tool that works both for selection and for staff development. Look for a versatile assessment that is also scalable to the size and needs of any organization, whether those needs are occasional hiring or an integrated, enterprise-wide hiring-and-development strategy. Such an assessment could serve as a platform for people analytics, as the basis for a 360-degree executive coaching program, or as a tool for identifying and developing high-potentials.

The Answer is Simple

Your chosen personality assessment must provide valuable insight that can create a brighter path for your organization. The Caliper Profile has been on the market for 60 years and is continually revised and refined as more and more performance data is collected and analyzed. It is also fully compliant with all relevant U.S. labor laws.

The Caliper Profile is part of a larger family of professional assessment tools including remote worker assessment tools, built on proven science and experience working with organizations around the world to hire and optimize remote workforces.

By measuring the competencies most tied to success in a remote work environment, our tools are able to predict performance and provide personalized guidance for hiring, coaching, and employee development throughout the entire talent life cycle, including:

• Hiring Remote Employees: Make strategic and more effective hiring decisions for remote and hybrid roles. Our Remote Worker Selection Reports provide insights related to each of the competencies for remote success, plus an overall fit recommendation.
• Remote Worker Selection Report & Personalized Interview Guide: Based upon an individual’s assessment scores, our reports suggest tailored interview questions for every remote-centric competency. Make your job interviews more informative for candidates and gain more robust insights into your hiring for remote roles.
• Developing Remote Teams & Individual Development Guide: Help employees build awareness of their strengths and development gaps when it comes to working in a remote or hybrid environment. Our participant reports and individual development guides are powerful tools for engaging employees and providing actionable recommendations for improvement as they transition to remote or hybrid models.
• Manager Coaching Guide: Show your employees that you’re invested in their professional development by providing personalized coaching as they transition to remote or hybrid models. Our coaching guides and reports for remote managers provide you with deep insights and action steps to engage your team in meaningful mentoring programs especially designed for remote roles.
• Managing Remote Workers & Remote Manager Development Report: Just as not all employees are naturally a good fit to work away from the office, some managers may need to focus on developing certain skills in order to lead effectively and maintain productivity as they transition to a remote or hybrid environment. Our Remote Manager Assessment Tools are designed to help guide your candidate selection decisions and development initiatives for line managers.
• Remote Team Analytics: How do you determine which groups can or should work remotely? Which teams may actually be more productive in a remote environment than an office setting? Our award-winning analytics platform provides powerful real-time insights to drive your most important talent management decisions.

To learn more about how Caliper can help you hire and develop successful remote employees, contact us today.

How do you know if the candidate has the right personality? The @CaliperCorp #PersonalityAssessment can find the right person for the job. #sales
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We’ve assembled some brief profiles so you can determine the type of candidate that would succeed in each role, and how personality and sales job models need to be aligned in order for successful candidate placement:

To learn more about identifying the unique competencies and personality traits for each sales job model, reach out to our experts today to get started with the Caliper Profile, or discover other ways we can help you develop your teams to reach their highest level of sales effectiveness.