I like professional American football. I enjoy watching the games and learning a little about the players and coaches. I know a little about a lot. Each week, for fun, I compete in a pool with my family trying to predict the winner of each game. There are typically 16 games to predict.
I try to use what I know about each player's skills, injuries and personal challenges to predict their performance and how it will work with their team's performance. I take a little bit of time to listen to the rumors going around about what the weekend play might look like. I feel that I have an intuition as to how they will perform backed by listening to their pregame interviews.
The truth is, I suck at it. Last week I got 7 right, the week before 5. So much for intuition.
It got me thinking - if I am this bad at picking football teams, how can I expect my employee choices to be good? The standard hiring process of application, resume and first and second interviews gives me about the same glimpse of information that I have when I am making my football picks. And if the prediction success probability transfers then I am only going to be successful with 1/3 of my employee choices.
That's why I don't gamble and also why I started using Harrison Assessments to help me choose and develop my employees. The Harrison Suitability Profile is designed to measure likely job satisfaction for specific jobs incorporating retention into its suitability score and providing reports that empower managers to identify and hire top talent.
It's a bit like the story of Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis, and also made into a movie. This real life story is about the Oakland A’s baseball manager who decided to hire a new kind of scout. One who used data to determine who he would put on his team, and ended up with a team that cost 10% of what the New York Yankees paid, but still racked up 90% of the runs that the Yankees ended up with by season end. It is about using empirical evidence combined with a 50 years Baseball sports almanac and computer system to predict which player is more likely to succeed in which game and type of play.
We all can't afford our own Moneyball scout or his data programs. However, we can afford to use the Harrison Assessment to predict success of particular job candidates and potential promotion prospects. The Harrison Assessment uses an online smart questionnaire to provide a robust tool that can help in the sorting and selection of candidates, as well as provide an interview guide and a roadmap as to what types of compensation and other benefits your winning choice will be attracted to.
Using the Harrison Assessment is not cheating, it's just smart use of good resources available to save me from having to rely on my poor intuition and prediction skills.
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