Talent Pool Evaluation in the Panel on Issues in Cognitive Assessment in Organizational Setting: Recruiting, Talent Pool Development, Individual Career Coaching

Speaker A Jerry Cranes described it last year. I described it last year. And Steve Clement, I know, uses this process, but there are some key parts to think about, and they play on the part that human people are better at making judgments between things than they are about making absolute judgments. How tall is that post that's holding the light down the end of the street versus how tall is it compared to that tree over there? We're a lot better at doing paired comparisons. So the process, and I'm going to explain it very quickly because it's documented in requisite work, is basically we form a hierarchy of roles, and we have a number of tools to do that. We can describe the nature of the work and position work by the difference in the nature of the work. We can use time span, and we can use the gut response of managers about how big roles are that they are familiar with. What my experience has been is that sometimes it's hard to get people to start with time span. And if we begin to plot roles and then we discover that, gee, isn't it interesting that the longest task associated seems to line up with this hierarchy? And what I tell the client is that if all three don't agree, we really don't understand the role to the depth that we should understand the role. So number one is you make a hierarchy of roles. Then what you do is you compare people to the roles. And we use the model that Herb has put up here. We say we're attempting to measure current potential capability, not current applied capability, where applied means everything that I'm bringing to the job right now and how I'm doing. We're basically saying, what could I bring to the job today if I could bring everything I could bring to the job? And we're saying that is really this issue of cognitive capability. And then we add to it, do I value the work and do I have the values for the job? So anyway, we create this hierarchy of roles and then we take an individual and we say, where could that person work? And the question that Elliot used and I have found to work very well is, could this person, if they had the opportunity to get the skills and knowledge, if they wanted to do the work, at what level could they function? And you begin to bracket that until the manager says, well, gee, I think they're not up to my job right now, but maybe this other job, which is higher than their current job, they could do. And after some struggling with that, managers begin to get a handle on that and can position people. Now, what I find is it takes a year or two for accuracy to develop, but they're reasonably accurate at the beginning. We also find that because no organization that we go into is very sound in its structure, that you have some judgment problems because you have people who are judging higher potentials. They're judging people below them who have more capacity, and they're lousy at doing that. So the first time you do this process, there is a correction cycle. So number one is you position the roles. Number two, you compare the people to the roles. And number three is you compare the people to the people. So you've got a bunch of people. We're talking about doing large scale judgment, not one on one. We're talking about large scale judgment of a talent pool. So you can look up and say, gee, we've positioned these ten people at a certain level. Does it make sense that their judgment making, that their way to balance information, that their way to problem solve is roughly in a group and they'll come back and say, no, I really think this one stands out or this one is not in that group. So with those three processes as anchors, you get a real sound judgment. Now, I'm going to leave that topic. That should be the primary way that we do internal judgment on a large scale. The second thing is the idea of judging the capability of my subordinate can be greatly enhanced. I'm not going to go into it now, but Herb has done some training on this issue of just what is it to make this judgment of depending upon somebody and judging what their capability is relative to the work that I'm assigning them to do. So that's the second thing that's needed and it deals with this judgment of capability. The third thing is the complexity of information processing, which is the book. Human Capability is really a documentation of that methodology. Now, we don't have 47,000 past ones. About two years ago, I did a survey of Earth. Windberg is here and Cappell is not here. And what we've done, we've done about 1000 of these things between the three of us. So we're kind of in that stage of development compared to 40 some thousand of the CPA. And what we do is look at the structure of argument development different than the content. Now, as far as we've done a very little comparison of CPA and CIP observation in the way that we're doing, and I think I've got a dozen less than 15 joint points where we've got joint comparison. And we find in the four to five range, we need to understand some things because if we're missing, we're missing in that four to five range. So we're looking at something a little bit differently. What we're finding, though, is that one of the caveats of doing CIP observation is that how do I say it is that if we cannot get the person to do real work in the interview, we can't grade it. And every once in a while we will stretch out and we'll run into trouble. So one of the problems is you have to have an interview technique which is looking at new work within the interview technique and then the judgment of what the structure of that new work is. Now, what that has driven us to is to say we really need to triangulate that. One of the things that we get is we get this information based on the structure of a person's argument and we make a judgment about capacity. But then we look at the resume, then we ask some questions about career path. Now, you didn't get a chance to explain the career path interview that CPA uses as one of the processes, but it basically follows a person through their career and you attempt to match the level of complexity of the work and their comfort, how they're progressing through their career. So anyway, let's see if there's anything else must have work. Herb, do you have anything you want?

Speaker B Just to clarify that when you talk about the structure of the argument, we're.

Speaker A Saying the crossback, we're talking about this structure which is really content independent. And that's one of the things that sets this process apart, that it is going right after structure rather than content. It follows a person through their career and you attempt to match the level of complexity of the work and their comfort while they're progressing through their career. So anyway, let's see if there's anything else must have worked. Herb, do you have anything you want to work closely?

Speaker B Just to clarify that when you talk about the structure of the argument, we're saying a toss pattern.

Speaker A We're talking about this structure which is really content independent. And that's one of the things that sets this process apart, that it is going right after structure rather than content.