Twenty years ago, Mark Purbrick was a professional CEO and senior executive in the wine industry. He is a winemaker by trade. He has worked in logistics, marketing and sales related to the industry. He worked for Foster's wine club division. During this time, he realised how important people were to the business. He started using 360-degree appraisals to improve his leadership capability for his management and himself. He also used psychometric assessments to fit people to a role better.
At this time, some psychometric assessments were of poor quality in their outcomes. Sometimes they were good at assessing the fit to the current role but not the roles they were targeted for in the near term.
Mark became the CEO of the Wine Society and turned it around from a loss-making business to a profitable concern. The most significant change in this transformation was to get the people right. He spent 40% of his time on people, 30% on Strategy and 30% on the customer.
At that time, he used job fit assessments. He created high-performance benchmarks for each role to compare the incumbents or planned appointments.
The assessment organisation approached him to take on the distribution rights, which is how his company Peoplogica was started.
Mark's philosophy is: that if you have the people with the right skills, you can rebuild an organisation or change direction. The value of People capital is not measured. It is not on the Balance Sheet. More capital value is placed on the expensive board room table than the loss of the best salesperson. The relative importance of each person in the organisation is not measured.
Everyone agrees and uses the correct language, but not enough change has occurred to increase the value of staff.
During the pandemic, employees found out they had more power. It has become an issue for companies because employers and senior management are using the Great Resignation as an excuse. People are not leaving the workforce; they are leaving leaders and managers.
For many companies, the definition of leadership development is at the senior management level. However, the vast number of managers and leaders are at the mid-management and supervisor levels.
Top-quality candidates have lots of options. A prolonged recruitment process means the company will lose the best candidates. Why have five interviews? Most interviews should be two or even 1.
Understand what the critical success attributes of the role are. What are the high-performance benchmarks? Identify and quality the characteristics. The hard wiring of the individual. Their passions, behaviour and cognitive capability. These attributes are then put into the job advertisement.
Traditional job advertisements are about the company and how good it is and what the successful candidate will do for the company.
Millennials want to know what is in it for them. Ideally, a little bit about the company: next should come some attributes about the candidate. What they love doing and what they don't like doing. The advertisement makes it more personal and speaks to the applicant.
A 3 to 6 times increase in quality applicants is the result.
The critical attributes consider the values so that there is a match to the company's culture.
The assessments give an understanding of the hard wiring of the individual but also the coaching and management requirements for the individual. The objective is to set individuals up for success and achieve the best they can. It is essential to manage and lead people with their strengths and weaknesses in mind. Your success is based on your people's success.
Unconscious bias is an issue in the screening process. It's a human characteristic. In an effort to address this, some profile assessments have non-gendered outcomes.
By screening applicants on fit means, the bias is removed. The best candidate will be given priority and not just by using what is usually used.