I don’t think so. And here’s why: Being CEO is Different from being a Middle Manager. As Jerome Ternynck says, “Top performance is nothing more than a human being who has found the right job.”

When Acton applied to Facebook, he was leaving Yahoo! as Vice President of Engineering. No small job. But while his Facebook interviewers may have asked him questions around strategy for the firm, they most likely didn’t pose the question: “If we gave you a few million dollars to create a consumer-centric product, what would it be?” They almost certainly didn’t pose that question with any real intent to give him the leash to achieve it.

The reality is that while Acton may have been able to create real value at Facebook, perhaps incrementally or significantly more than Facebook managed to create on its own in those 5 years, he would more likely have been staffed on a project to enhance Facebook as we understood it in 2009. A much more limited feature set. Big dreams, but narrower implementation in those days.

Those who argue that had Acton been hired, he would have created a tool worth $19 billion for Facebook for nothing more than a salary and a few stock options, speak with false certainty. The fact that Facebook turned him down gave Acton the freedom to experiment and create WhatsApp.

The real choices were (in retrospect): (1) work for Facebook and create something worth millions of dollars in exchange for a salary and some stock options, OR (2) found WhatsApp and later sell it to Facebook, recognizing that Facebook must think it will make even more money off of WhatsApp than it paid.

If Facebook makes a 10% return on WhatsApp, Acton will have created $1.9 billion for FB. Far more than he likely would have as an internal employee. When hiring, the right fit – at the right time – matters.

Steve Jobs was an incorrigibly difficult person to work with or (more often) work for. Yet, Dr. John Sullivan argues that not hiring Jobs was one of HP’s biggest mistakes. Was it? Who knows! But does anyone think Jobs’s tenure at HP would have been anything but rocky? To turn our attention back to Acton, what if he had joined Facebook and lobbied internally to move resources towards achieving his dream of a universal communication app like WhatsApp? Would that have distracted Facebook from its core mission of becoming the world’s largest social network, contextualizing online and offline events through the lens of our friends near and far?

Don’t forget: In February 2009, Facebook’s internal valuation was $3.7 billion, though it had previously raised money from Microsoft at $15 billion. Today, it’s market cap is $171 billion. FB added $150 billion in value since they turned down Acton.

Which brings us back to the idea of process. A Silicon Valley VC once asked me: “Would you rather be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?”

Suspicious that this was a trick question, I chose the non-obvious answer. “Bill Gates,” I replied.

“Correct,” he said, “Steve Jobs, for all his success, has gone into bankruptcy proceedings at least twice while at the helm. Microsoft has 12 business lines that bring in over a billion in revenue each year.”

And that’s the reality. I see it with clients at ConnectCubed all the time. If you’re successful, at a certain point, you need to institutionalize business practices, like hiring. Those decisions should be based on data, which is what we help SmartRecruiters clients with every day. Those guidelines should enable employees to deploy their expertise everywhere it adds value, not constrain people with bureaucratic hangover.

But that also means creating a process that picks the best person for your organization at this time, and avoids problem hires 100% of the time. Mavericks are more often colossal failures than runaway successes.

We’ll never know the answer to the “what if Acton had joined FB in 2009?” question. But the lesson for all of us inside and outside recruiting should be to reexamine and question our recruitment process constantly, to demand answers to hard questions around what drives employee performance, and to work towards selecting employees who will thrive. We should all be careful not to turn away Actons in our own candidate pipeline, if we can benefit from their contributions to our organization. That said, if another tech company had hired Acton other than FB and he had gone on to a successful but not blockbuster career elsewhere, this would be a non-story.

Have you ever had an “Acton moment”- not hiring a quality candidate, only to have him or her return years later  in a bigger role? Or has an organization overlooked your Acton-potential in the past?

Michael Tanenbaum is CEO of ConnectCubed. Using the power of big data, ConnectCubed utilizes epistemic gaming technology and psychometric testing to create next-generation pre-employment screening tests. Photo Credit Chrisitian Science Monitor, Ferdinand Magazine.

Use ConnectCubed to assess your candidates within the SmartRecruiters hiring platform. 

But when we’re investigating the tools on the market that provide behavioral reports on candidates, what should we be looking for? What determines a “best in class” tool? How do we know whether the tool we’re reviewing is a measuring the competencies we care about?

How Personality Works

The most widely-accepted psychological model of personality is called the Big Five. The Big Five describes the five major traits that come together to make up who we are. Within each major personality factor that makes up the Big Five, there are smaller personality facets, which measure one element of a personality factor.

For example, within the Agreeableness factor, there are several facets, such as, trust, morality, sympathy, and cooperation. Each of those (and more) come together to give a broad overview of a candidate’s “Agreeableness.” All of the other major factors that comprise the Big Five also have facets that come together to make the broad trait described in the factor.

The Same Personality Element Can Have Wildly Different Results

Here’s a question for you: If you are hiring a manager or senior business leader in charge of a team, would you prefer to select a candidate with great openness and creativity, able to see new opportunities and adopt a highly adaptive approach? Or would you prefer a candidate with little ability to think “outside the box”?

If you’re like most of our clients, you responded in favor of the candidate with great openness.

You would be wrong.

As it turns out, managers that are extremely open have a schizophrenic leadership style – they too often seek to switch gears and lack the ability to stay the course once a decision has been made for the team to attack.

Extreme openness works very well for front line creatives and others whose job requires great inspiration and a desire to tread new ground.

Bringing Personality Back to the Job in Question

The key decision criterion for a behavioral assessment tool is whether that tool takes the candidate’s behavioral information and relates it back to the job in question. Without that contextualization, you risk using your intuition to select candidates, rather than hard data from wide research about what actually works in the market.

If you’re using a tool like ConnectCubed, each assessment is directly relevant to the role. Rather than learning about a candidate’s Agreeableness, you’ll receive information on how that candidate will work with customers or with others in a team.

If the candidate is being considered for a managerial role, you’ll know whether that individual has the ability to make hard decisions and prioritize getting the job done over minor the immediate preferences of her direct reports.

Have you seen similar personality elements fail in two different roles? What has your process been for selecting new assessment technology at your company? What are the key decision factors that lead you to pick one tool over another?

Leverage thousands of tests from leading assessment vendors (such as ConnectCubed) through the SmartRecruiters Assessment Center.

Assessment geeks like to talk about having an “assessment strategy,” a plan your company follows to make sure that every candidate gets a consistent assessment experience based on the specific needs of your company. Coming up with a strategy is always a good idea, but it can seem daunting at first.

It needn’t be.

After all, a strategy is just a high-end word for a plan, and the great thing about plans is that they’re moldable. What works today may need an update tomorrow, but having a plan certainly beats never taking that first step.

The even better news when it comes to assessments is that there are basically only 3 ways to deploy assessments in your hiring process. If you’re using SmartRecruiters (great choice!), you’ve already got all the tools you’ll need to start using ConnectCubed to make better hires, every time.

At ConnectCubed, we’ve seen companies adopt one of 3 strategies we like to call the “Weed Out,” “Weed In,” and the “Double Check.”

Weeding Out: Or How to Go from 50 candidates to 10 without missing hidden gems.

You already know that hiring based only on resumes and interviews is one of the least sound ways to pick great talent. Your next star hire might get left out, even though they are a perfect fit for the role. Assessments work best when they’re given to the most number of candidates. It may seem counterintuitive, but your ROI on assessments goes UP the more assessments you deliver.

Adopting a weeding out strategy means assessing all the qualified candidates who apply to your role. With your ConnectCubed data, you’ll be able to prioritize who to interview and other follow up with based on a clear picture of who has the personality and smarts to be an all-star in the role.

Weeding In: Or how to go from 10 candidates to a short list by picking top performers.

The second most effective assessment strategy is one that uses ConnectCubed not to knock out candidates but to qualify them. If you’ve made an initial screening decision on the candidates in your pool, you can invite your remaining candidates to take a ConnectCubed assessment to help guide your decision on whom to bring in for follow up interviews and more involved engagement with your hiring team.

The goal of weeding in is more to back up your initial selection criteria and to highlight any red flags. If your initial screen missed some area of candidate personality or aptitude that’s likely to lead to failure in the role, you’ll want to know that NOW, rather than wait for a train-wreck later on.

The Double Check: Red flag/Green flag.

Even the most skilled recruiter can be duped by a candidate putting on a show over the course of a few interviews. ConnectCubed cuts through that “best behavior” face with psychological analysis that gets to the core of the candidates work style, workplace behavior, and work quality.

Like any responsible teammate, you want to double check your work before moving to the offer phase. Before you make a final job offer, you need to make sure that this candidate is primed for success and doesn’t exhibit any counterproductive qualities.

Have you started implementing an assessment strategy? What’s worked at your company? What successes have you found since starting your assessment program? Let us know in the comments!

Michael Tanenbaum is CEO of ConnectCubed. Using the power of big data, ConnectCubed utilizes epistemic gaming technology and psychometric testing to create next-generation pre-employment screening tests.

Use ConnectCubed to assess your candidates within the SmartRecruiters platform. More on the launch of our new employee background check services.

“Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.” –wiki

Forget all your recruiting challenges for a moment, and think about the future. How would recruitment ideally function?

First, you’d have a seamless process. Every candidate, active or passive, who saw your company had an open position would make their full work history, personality, aptitude, and other relevant skills/information available to you for selection purposes.

Second, the process for gathering that critical information – resume, assessment, interview – would be as easy as posting a photo online or swiping the unlock screen of an iPhone.

Third, you would have access to an unlimited, broad, and deep talent pool that touched nearly everyone qualified for the position you’re looking to fill.

Back to reality

Unfortunately, the talent search and selection process is far from this Utopian ideal. At the present, most candidates (not all) are still asked to do a huge amount of work just to get their “application” (whatever that means) available to your recruitment team.

Successful recruitment organizations – those who consistently receive far more qualified applications than they can possibly use – recognize the reality of the application process from the candidate perspective. They adopt the same tactics used by online advertisers. These best in class organizations realize that the company is paying a high advertising cost to get in front of candidates. In your case, that may be on-campus recruitment, fees for posting to job boards, or recruiter time to directly reach out to candidates.

Don’t believe me? Well, if you’re like most (non-SmartRecruiters) companies, you only get 100 applications for every thousand people who see your ad. If you were an online marketer, you would work tirelessly to improve that conversion ratio.

And what are the things preventing you from getting all 1000 people who saw your ad into your candidate pipeline? How many candidates start an application and never finish? Chances are you’re losing applicants because your process is just too damn annoying and time consuming to complete.

How games get you closer to the future of hiring

The power of games in recruitment becomes apparent in their ability to help you convert more of the people who see your job opportunity into active applicants in your pipeline. Treating candidates like customers is widely regarded by the top thinkers in recruitment as essential to ensuring that top-quality talent develops an interest in your company as an employment destination. Just like optimizing the conversion flow for a customer, you want to optimize the conversion flow for a candidate.

That’s the genius of games! If you can disguise your application and assessment process as a game, you’re much more likely to not only convert the top talent who saw your ad, but also engage candidates who would normally never consider your company. That’s the power of creating a viral loop.

At ConnectCubed, we find that candidates enjoy our games so much that they spend over 3x the required time. That’s right – they finish the assessment and come back for more! And remember, every minute they spend on your application is an opportunity to get your brand and your message front and center.

It’s amazing to see the process spread from person to person. Back in 2011, I joined our user experience team on a trip to conduct live user testing of a new game at a US college campus. In between focus groups, I wandered in to the library to see a group of students we hadn’t met with playing the new game.

Thinking I was being witty, I leaned over the shoulder of one of the students and said, “Hey, cool game you’re playing there.”

He turned his head and said, “Have you heard about this? It’s so cool, right?”

Two hours later and the game was already clear across the other side of campus. More students came pouring in throughout the day.

Additional benefits throughout the candidate pipeline

If you are using a tool like ConnectCubed, not only are your games adding to the attractiveness of your application process, but also delivering actionable insights into candidate fit for the role. This type of data not only helps you improve performance and reduce turnover, but also allows you, as a recruiter, to focus on only the most promising candidates in your pipeline.

If you use games in your application and assessment process, there will be a statistically significant boost in employer brand. It’s a fast and easy way to differentiate your company from the competition. If you’re fighting for talent, you want to put your company’s best face forward. Candidates who are given a game as part of their application process come into interviews with a noticeably higher opinion of the interviewing firm as an innovative and forward thinking place to work.

Isn’t that something we all want?

Doing the right thing

Recruiting is hard. It’s hard to manage overflows of applicants, and it’s hard to seek out top talent in tight labor markets. Sometimes, that means we cut corners. We let our technology take over the human element of building strong relationships with candidates who ultimately become our colleagues.

If the candidate is willing to share part of his or her day with our organizations, we owe it to him or her to make the process as easy and efficient and fun as possible. Through games, we can do that. We can get closer to the ideal of a seamless application process that provides a deep and broad talent pool, with meaningful data on each applicant.

It’s good business sense. And it’s the right thing to do.

Michael Tanenbaum is CEO of ConnectCubed. Using the power of big data, ConnectCubed utilizes epistemic gaming technology and psychometric testing to create next-generation pre-employment screening tests.

Meet Mike June 26 in SF at Smartup: Art & Science of Talent Assessment. More on information on the new SmartRecruiters Assessment Center.

One of the best ways to improve the quality of your new hires is to get scientific when it comes to selecting from among your candidates. The science of candidate selection centers on a branch of industrial psychology known as psychometrics.

Developed and enhanced over the last 100+ years, psychometric testing consistently delivers high return on investment by ensuring that every new hire has the correct personality and aptitudes to be successful in the job in question.

Understanding Personality Fit

Getting a handle on using personality testing to determine job fit is easy: think of a ring announcer and a librarian.

Ring announcers can all read and organize books; librarians can speak into a microphone. Yet, neither is likely to want to switch jobs!

Ring announcers are highly extraverted – they are outgoing and gregarious. Librarians are introverted – they thrive only with substantial alone time and don’t require external stimulation.

If you’re hiring a ring announcer, it can be challenging to determine if your candidate has the requisite personality for success (extraverted). Candidates may put on a brave face in an interview, and interviews are very expensive in terms of recruiter and hiring manager time.

But with a short, simple survey – benchmarked against hundreds of thousands of people – you can sort your ring announcers from your librarians, without any additional work as a recruiter.

Now, instead of conducting 15-20 interviews to fill a role, you can hold 5-6, confident you’re meeting only with candidates primed for success.

Aptitude – What are You Good At?

If personality tests measure “what you’re like,” then aptitude tests measure “what your talents are.”

For example, attention is an aptitude that is critical for both accountants and air traffic controllers. However, accountants don’t often work under extreme time pressure. Air traffic controllers, in contrast, do often make split decisions, and therefore reaction time is a key attribute to look for among candidates.

Each job has specific aptitudes that lead an individual to either succeed or struggle in that role. Because struggling employees are often the first to quit – causing high employee turnover cost – it’s hugely important to hire only those candidates who have the right aptitudes for a particular role.

Michael Tanenbaum is CEO of ConnectCubed. Using the power of big data, ConnectCubed utilizes epistemic gaming technology and psychometric testing to create next-generation pre-employment screening tests.

Use ConnectCubed to assess your candidates within the SmartRecruiters platform. More on the launch of our new Assessment Center.