Work Smarter: Understanding the Employment Life Cycle

By
Steve Williamson, VP Digital Marketing and Content, eRep, Inc.
Posted
Monday, October 7, 2024
Tags
#CoreValuesIndex
#Employment
#Hiring
#PayEquity
#Performance
#PsychometricAssessment
#TalentAcquisition
#TalentManagement
#eRepServices
Work Smarter: Understanding the Employment Life Cycle

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There is a particular life cycle to the employment ecosystem. From hiring to retirement and everything in between, there is a suite of tools from eRep that makes it work better — pun intended.

One of the fundamentals every employer strives to accomplish is hiring the right people for each role. This process often goes through a particular pattern:

Phase I

1. Write and post a job listing.

2. Screen applicants based on resumes.

3. Conduct interviews.

4. Make an offer.

Phase II

5. Keep employees productive while keeping them happy enough that they don't leave

The two main goals of the first phase of the employment life cycle is to reach as many likely candidates as possible, then narrow that list down to the individual most likely to excel in the role.

Both of these objectives require their own specific set of skills and tools to be effective. A hard truth is that few business leaders are truly good at either one, and even fewer actually enjoy the process.

For their various flaws, job boards like Indeed™ and ZipRecruiter™ are the lingua franca that both businesses and candidates know.

Job boards work because they are often your best way to reach the largest pool of possible candidates.

Writing an effective job listing is arguably as important to the hiring employer as writing an effective resume is to the job seeker. One is the hole, the other is the peg, and they must be the same size and shape for a match to occur.

Get the job listing wrong and you'll waste a shocking amount of time and money wondering why people with medical assistant experience keep applying to your warehouse supervisor position.

Assuming your listing correctly matches the actual requirements of the position, and your candidates fit the bill in terms of their qualifications, there's still a lot of work to be done ensuring they're actually right for the role.

Experience and education are one part of the picture, while psychometric alignment is the often overlooked yet equally important second part.

What is "psychometric alignment"?

Psychometric alignment is a fancy term for making sure the candidate's psychology matches the needs and activities of a job. To explain by way of a counter-example, hiring someone who's highly creative but isn't detail-oriented would be a psychometric misalignment for an accounting position.

The trick is to have your candidates complete an accurate and reliable psychometric assessment — the Core Values Index — as part of their application process.

Get a tool that integrates your job listings with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) so that their psychometric assessment results are at your fingertips. Sort and filter to efficiently narrow down the list to only those who have the psychological profile appropriate for the role (analytical candidates for an analytical role, creative candidates for a creative role, etc.)

RECOMMENDED TOOLS:

The CVI and Hiring

Does the Core Values Index psychometric assessment have uses outside of the hiring process?

Yes! The CVI is profoundly beneficial not only to employers who wish to better understand the personality DNA of their workers, but it's also useful to the individuals themselves.

The CVI describes your default preferences and ideal way of seeing the world and operating within it.

The CVI describes your ideal learning style, optimal way of communicating and how you take in information. It even describes how (and why) you respond to stress and conflict, and provides guidance for turning that conflict into a more constructive situation.

CVI Foundations Courses

Once your team has completed the CVI, from the factory floor all the way up to the executive suite, what's the next step?

A CVI Foundations Course by eRep ensures your team gets the most bang-for-the-buck out of the CVI, the world's most accurate and reliable psychometric assessment and personality test.

What's the next step? You have all your applicants take the CVI as part of the hiring process. Their results are automatically fed into your ATS and you can now sort and filter applicants based on their CVI scores.

How do you know what CVI profile is right for a given role?

That's where a Top Performer Profile™ (TPP) comes in.

Top Performer Profiles™

If a CVI is the psychometric profile of an individual, a Top Performer Profile is the ideal CVI profile of the role.

The CVI defines the size and shape of the peg, while a TPP defines the size and shape of the hole.

Smart companies conduct a TPP for an open role before they list the opening through eRep's Job Listings service. This determines the specific CVI scores that are optimal for that position. Any candidate with a CVI profile closely matched to that TPP score has a high likelihood of being successful in that role.

Your candidates' CVI scores are directly compared to the TPP in the ATS, giving you the ability to efficiently hone in on the top candidates for the role.

Review the resumes of top "highly recommended" candidates to ensure they have the necessary skills and educational requirements, then schedule interviews with the top two or three. You can rest assured they have the appropriate psychometric alignment for the needs of the role.

The benefits of using the CVI and TPP in hiring are profound and very cost-effective.

Workers placed with a "highly recommended" CVI+TPP match are often 200% more productive than their unmatched peers and they experience 50% or less turnover. They also often report greater satisfaction in their role (the worker benefits as much or more from this process as their employer).

What about after the hire? How do you keep those performance fires burning?

Performance Fuel

There are three fundamentals to help you fuel employee performance.

  • Clarity: Make sure each worker knows their objective without ambiguity.
  • Feedback: Team members need honest and helpful feedback at the time they need it.
  • Purpose: Ensure that every individual on your team knows that what they're doing matters and will be appreciated.

These three fundamentals make up what we call the Performance Fuel Formula. They are integral to the facilitated relationship you get in eRep's Performance Fuel application.

Performance Fuel by eRep is an insanely simple and efficient tool that empowers your team leaders to provide their team members the three components of the Performance Fuel Formula.

Performance Fuel is the key tool your team needs to be successful.

Happiness Index

If you don't measure something, how can you tell if it's working or not? One of the most powerful employee performance tools available at eRep is perhaps one of our most enjoyable to use: Happiness Index.

There are more employee happiness survey tools out there than you can shake a stick at, but none of them have a secret ingredient that sets Happiness Index above the rest.

Every Happiness Index survey is calibrated to the individual's Core Values Index profile. This determines their own unique level of engagement and satisfaction.
What makes one person happy may not matter at all to their peer. Happiness Index by eRep accounts for that.

Happiness Index is easy to use because it asks a set of questions specifically designed to get to the core of five different areas of measurement. The results are presented in a consistent and easy to understand scoring system between 100 (max happiness) and 0, broadly grouped into "Doing great", "Room for Improvement" and "Improvement Required" classifications across its five categories.

Results of employee Happiness Index surveys are collected and reported over time so progress can be measured.

Pay Equity and Legal Compliance with Apex

Finally we come to a matter of importance not only in terms of employee performance and satisfaction, but with legal compliance as well.

Many employers aren't aware of the numerous legal requirements pertaining to compensation equity and fairness. For example, did you know that if two employees are paid the same but one has been in their job longer than the other, that might be a violation of pay equity laws?

Although different states have different laws on the books regarding compensation equity and fairness, the principles still provide cost and performance benefits if done right. Get it wrong and you could face a surprisingly expensive set of punitive fees and other costs.

Conducting a pay equity audit is an unglamorous yet crucial task in every organization with two or more employees. eRep has made this process quicker, easier, and far more accurate than doing it by hand.

Inspired by Oregon's Pay Equity Act of 2017, eRep created Apex, the Advanced Pay Equity Compliance System. Apex helps organizations compensate their employees equitably and comply with the law.

Even if you don't operate in Oregon, if you have two or more employees in your organization — including yourself — Apex is for you.

Ensuring that employees are paid equitably can be a tedious process, and employers need all the help they can get to efficiently gather all relevant employee data and analyze it. That's why eRep create Apex.

Employment Life Cycle Tools

To learn more about these employer and employee success tools at eRep, check out these links:

Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.


Go to eRep.com/core-values-index/ to learn more about the CVI or to take the Core Values Index assessment.

Hiring with the Core Values Index and Top Performer Profile raises employee performance by 200%+ and reduces turnover by 50% or better. → Learn more


Steve Williamson

Steve Williamson

Innovator/Banker - VP Digital Marketing and Content, eRep, Inc.

Steve has a career in project management, software development and technical team leadership spanning three decades. He is the author of a series of fantasy novels called The Taesian Chronicles (ruckerworks.com), and when he isn't writing, he enjoys cycling, old-school table-top role-playing games, and buzzing around the virtual skies in his home-built flight simulator.

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