Client Highlight

Blue Wave Ultrasonics Eliminates Hiring Errors with ProfileXT^TM

A hiring snafu that occurred in the mid-’90s proved to be the turning point for a relationship between Profiles International of Waco, Texas, and Blue Wave Ultrasonics, Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. Blue Wave Ultrasonics’ manager Roger Stoneking was mentally kicking himself over the mistake when he saw a schedule for a nearby seminar about Profiles assessments. 

“I said, ‘I’ve got to go to that.’ I left my card and before the guy left town, I had him in my office. At the time we had 13 or 14 employees. All of us went through the assessment testing. We used that as a benchmark for all future hiring and it’s paid off very well.”

Stoneking and Jeff Hancock acquired the company in 1995. With Hancock as director of sales and marketing and Stoneking as general manager, the company operates in Iowa supporting customers around the world, designing and manufacturing part and tool cleaning systems for clients. They work in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, India, South Korea and Israel. “There are a number of market niches that we support, and most of those are global,” Stoneking says. “We design the equipment, in conjunction with customer needs, and build it, ship it and support it.”

Blue Wave’s equipment works via high-frequency sound waves to remove a variety of contaminants from parts immersed in aqueous media. The parts can be metal, ceramic or glass, for example. They are placed in a tank, and sound waves are driven through a solution of water and detergents, which creates cavitations, or an implosion of microscopic gas bubbles. The process produced by the imploding bubbles creates a high-velocity, high-pressure, high-temperature atmosphere, yet it’s gentle enough not to damage the parts being cleaned. The bubbles are small enough to get into the tiniest of places. At the end of the process, the contaminants are suspended in the detergents and easily rinsed from the cleaned object, and the water is recycled.

 “It’s an extremely environmentally friendly process,” Stoneking says. “The objects are eliminating the use of solvents [a health hazard], and reducing process time and labor.”

Many of the company’s 19 employees are engineers. Others have technical degrees in specialty areas like electronics or CAD design. Some are high school graduates with special training in assembly skills. Stoneking has found it beneficial to use Profiles’ Step One Survey II^TM for an initial assessment of potential employees. He uses ProfileXT^TM to narrow the candidate pool.

The insight that Blue Wave Ultrasonics obtains from the assessments prevents errors, Stoneking says. “In 11 years, I really can’t say we have made a real hiring mistake. We have made mistakes when we deviated from a plan in how we used the information gained.” And, because of the assessments, he knew beforehand that several of his key employees would attain the importance they have earned in the company.

His philosophy is that the customer, the product, and the employees are of most importance to the company, and are equal in value. “My partner and I provide the goals and the tools.”

HR Corner

What is Performance Management?
One well-known company that throws its office doors open to the public every day has found a very public way to recognize employees for good performance: It puts photographs of the employees in its lobby display case. Each photograph is accompanied by a biography of the employee. Less public but just as important, the employee also receives an extra paid day off, a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant, and a convenient reserved parking place for a month.

This reward system is only one of the building blocks of performance managing, and the last one on the list, but it is effective in its combination of recognition and reward and too often overlooked.

The other building blocks in this system of management individual performance are just as essential. If any of the blocks is omitted or neglected, it amounts to the same thing as leaving out a key step in the erection of a building: It will not be as sturdy.

While managers might believe that performance management is a mysterious practice that takes training to do well, some leaders do all four of these instinctively. The result of their efforts is high-performing workers who know what their employers expect and have the ability and resources to do it. Managing performance includes the four key strategies of planning, monitoring and feedback, development, and reward/recognition.

Let’s examine each of these building blocks in turn. First is planning. This means that you set clear goals for your organization and your employees. Everyone who works there, from the secretary to the CEO, knows what is expected of him or her. It can include a mission statement for the overall company, but it also must include each employee’s job duties and performance goals.

Next is the monitoring of the employee. Making plans and setting goals does no good unless a supervisor is monitoring the employee’s performance regularly and giving clear feedback when necessary.

 This feedback should take the form of both praise and constructive criticism. The key is to “catch” the employee in the act of doing well and praise him immediately, or to see what he is doing in error and correct the mistake right away and in the right way: constructively and in private.

Development means that leaders give workers the ability to do their job through skills training and other resources. Think of this as giving someone careful directions and a road map to arrive at her destination on time and without mishap. Development has a broad meaning, and managers should think of creative ways to develop employees to grow into their jobs and climb the ladder.

Finally, there’s the reward and recognition factor. Although reward does not have to come daily or even weekly, it’s important to the process and cannot be overlooked. It can be as simple as praise and as detailed as the recognition scenario presented above. It can include increased compensation or a promotion. Employers should be creative and match the reward to the performance.

The final reward will be your organization’s to reap. In a study of 100,000 employees of 2,500 organizations, the Gallup Organization recorded the attitudes of employees at work in highly productive groups. These attitudes are directly connected to the rate of employee turnover, customer satisfaction, and productivity. Employees in such work groups report high levels of agreement with the following statements:

Profiles Tip of the Month
 

Listen More, Talk Less

Good salespeople know what their clients need. This is not because they have the power to read minds. They know because when they ask a question, they pause for the answer and listen when the answer comes. If they can then figure out how to service the client’s needs, they have likely made a sale.

Record your next sales call. Focus on keeping your client talking while you practice the refined art of listening. If the client stops talking, give him or her several seconds to continue. If the pause continues, ask a follow-up question, such as “Can you elaborate on that?” to get the client talking again. Above all, don’t interrupt. Once the call ends, check out the recording to see how many minutes you talked versus how many minutes you listened. Your own presentation need not be lengthy. You should listen more than you talk.

Case Study

ProfileXT^TM in use by a
Healthcare Organization

Leaders of a healthcare organization faced with low employee productivity wanted to find a way to hire more employees that excelled in their positions. The current study was conducted to examine the relationship between employee productivity and Job Match to ProfileXT^TM.

Participants
The study was comprised of 60 enrollment specialists. Each employee who participated in the study had been administered the ProfileXT^TM and had their performance evaluated by a superior from their company on a five point rating scale. These company performance evaluations revealed 13 employees exceeding expectations (rated 4 or 5) and six employees failing to meet expectations (rated 1 or 2). The remainder of the sample, 41 individuals, met performance expectations (rated 3).

Job Match Pattern
In a concurrent study format, a Job Match Pattern was developed for the enrollment specialist position using the ProfileXT^TM. A sample of 13 current top performing enrollment specialists served as the basis to formulate the Job Match Pattern. This pattern now serves as a benchmark to which other employees can be matched.

Performance Grouping
With the enrollment specialist Job Match Pattern created, all 60 enrollment specialists were matched against the pattern. After a review of the sample’s ProfileXT^TM percent matches, an overall Job Match percent of 78 percent or better best identified top performing employees and was selected as a breakpoint to represent a good match to the Job Match Pattern.

This study has demonstrated that the pattern efficiently identifies top performers:  

Of the 60 employees included in the study, 34
met or exceeded the benchmark. Nine of the 13 (69 percent) top performers were included in this group while only two of the six (33 percent) Bottom Performers were able to display the same match for the pattern. Thus, the pattern is differentiating top and bottom performers as delineated by the company’s own performance evaluations.

Details
The company indicates its hiring practices have become more consistent after using the ProfileXT^TM. The organizational leaders of this company have become more confident in their hiring decisions knowing that the PXT^TM is based on the firm ground of employee attributes.

Summary
Using the ProfileXT^TM to benchmark employees, the organization has shown the ability to successfully screen enrollment specialist candidates. Of the 34 individuals that either met or exceeded the Job Match Pattern benchmark, only 5.8 percent (2 of 34) were bottom performers. Additionally, approximately 70 percent of the top performers (9 of 13) were included in this group. Clearly, selection practices can be improved by using Job Match Patterns created by the ProfileXT^TM.

Product Focus

Profiles Sales Indicator ^TM

If the new employee on the sales team is not doing as well as you expected, you should check the shape of the hole. You may have put the wrong peg in it. Put another way, your new sales employee might not be a match for the job.

Not everyone succeeds in sales. Sometimes even those who excel in other areas don’t fit well into this one. That’s because it takes key attributes to attain sales success. These include competitiveness, reliance on self, persistence, energy level and sales drive. Furthermore, seven important sales behaviors affect sales performance: prospecting, closing, call reluctance, self-starting ability, teamwork, building and maintaining relationships and compensation preference.

 Profiles Sales Indicator ^TM assesses all of these, and offers clear reports that show how closely the person assessed will match your open position. This assessment takes only minutes of the worker’s time and can be custom-tweaked by company, sales position, department, manager, geography, or any combination of these. It gives you the percentage of Job Match so you can determine just how well this potential employee will do. The assessment also works as a training guide.