Identifying the Best Candidate

By Valerie G. Cardenas

Choosing one candidate for a position out of five can be overwhelming, let alone fifty. Where does an employer begin to differentiate? I’ve heard an array of different responses including: referrals, instincts, a better resume, or great interviewing skills. True that each of these provides useful information about a candidate, however none use objectivity. Selecting the right individual for a position entails understanding more than a first encounter allows, and personality testing alone does not give the cognitive abilities of a candidate.

The solution to hiring the right person is knowing both personality traits and mental aptitudes. The combination of these two provides a great insight to how well they will perform in a given position. Enter The Achiever: a proven assessment used to separate “A” performers from “C” performers (a difference of at least 50% productivity).

It is not an understatement to say that hiring or promoting the wrong person can cost a company thousands of dollars; in time, training, and lost opportunities.

Placing an individual in the most productive environment for their potential is in the best interest of the company. Let’s say that you have a candidate that is very personable and punctual, but is not self motivated or has a slower learning speed. This may suggest that an outside sales position is not in the best interest for the candidate or company.  Finding this out prior to hiring or promoting the individual is ideal, no?

The Achiever measures an individual’s potential and identifies their true talents and best placement for their skills. It measures six mental aptitudes, ten personality traits, and two validity scales, and then delivers specific conclusions. Achiever benefits:

• Determines the fit of candidates for a particular position
• Provides insight for the employer with how to engage employees
• Provides objective analysis
• Identifies improvement areas
• Describes their personality traits and mental aptitudes
• Enhances team building

The results are formed from Benchmarking, which provides a range of scores required for successful performance of a particular job. The reliability of this assessment is unrivaled, and the reason I have depended on it for myself and businesses that I consult. It identifies the best candidate for administrative, sales and management positions, and others. I cannot emphasize enough how crucial to a business’ success it is to understand the potential and the improvement areas of its employees.

If you are interested in learning more, please give us a call at 775.826.8282, we would love to answer your questions.

Your Business Success is in the Hands of Your Employees

By Valerie G. Cardenas

Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.

Companies frequently call on my business consulting services to help with employee and hiring issues, and I’m never surprised when I hear that request. One thing I’ve learned in my years in business and as a business consultant is that hiring and managing employees is right up there with productivity systems, sales and marketing as driving factors for profits.

There’s really no mystery to choosing the right person for the job, but there are some methods of going about it that, while well understood by some, are inconsistently applied at best. I’ve had people tell me that they hire based on “gut-reactions” to people; others go for the consensus, hiring-by-committee approach. And, while I know that almost any approach, these included, can work some of the time, in business, I encourage clients to seek out approaches that can better “their hand” with new positions and further enhance results over time.

I always tell my clients that a successful hiring process includes

1. Hiring process
2. Policy and procedures
3. Orientation
4. Training and development
5. Management/leadership that will retain the employee.

Strategic Hiring for Success

Strategic Essentials uses a predictive index that gives us a very good idea of how someone will perform in specific work situations. And once we have this analysis, we go several steps further. We look at the personality and expectations of the potential manager and teammates to make sure we’re setting up new hires to be successful – for themselves and for the company.  This information can be used to coach all parties on development needs, playing to the individual’s strengths and how to offset what may be perceived as challenges.

The right hiring, development and management practices can have a tremendous impact on your overall organization. But the best way to explain this would be with real-world examples, so here are a few examples from Strategic Essentials files.

Case Brief: Good Employees Mean Vacation Time

A family-run distribution company came to Strategic Essentials with what they saw as an insurmountable problem. They could not take a vacation or more than one day away from their 70-hour workweeks without jeopardizing their production.

In addition to business consulting, they specifically needed to find someone – that perfect someone – who could be comfortable in a warehouse setting, work with out-dated computer systems (at least at first), learn thousands of products, be ready to shoulder increasing responsibility, and be highly detailed.

This one hire was the lynchpin for further expansion and development. We found this individual by screening through numerous people, many of whom seemed competent. We needed exactly the right person, and we found that person. The difference for the company was profound. The leadership is now taking vacations, and the staff is capable of keeping the company running successfully in their absence.

Case Brief: Too Much Business

A business came to me with what seems at first glance to be an enviable problem: too much business. They had basic needs such as manageable systems and structure. But even more, they had few staff guidelines, no job descriptions, along with poor attitudes and job performance from staff.

Their hiring challenge went past bringing people into the door. It encompassed bringing the RIGHT people in, and then motivating them and giving them performance guidelines. Job satisfaction and productivity amongst their staff was critically low.

Through a mix of consulting and organizational development, this client developed standards, hiring practices, management techniques, and accountability. This focus and combination was what this firm needed to shift their organizational culture and their results!

Case Brief: Disruptive Staff in a Non-Profit Corporation

Non-profit corporations attract employees with a passion for their cause. This is a good thing, but for one non-profit that came to us, that same passion was holding them back and burning out some of their key staff.  One employee was also particularly disruptive.

Our first task with this group was to work with the leadership on management skills and handling disruptive situations in the workplace. Our goal was to improve workplace satisfaction. Because their non-profit guidelines made it almost impossible to let the disruptive staff member go, we worked on effective leadership.

And we worked on understanding what to look for while hiring for new positions to lessen the potential of similar challenges in the future. It takes more than a passion for a cause to be effective for the cause.

Hiring coupled with managing well affects every aspect of a company, from productivity, to workplace satisfaction, to worry-free vacations for top management. It is just one piece – but a very important one – for business success.

Business Consultant Wanted!

But what is a Business Consultant and Do You Really Need One?

By Valerie G. Cardenas

As most of you know, I’m a Reno business consultant. That is, I’m based in Reno, Nevada, and do most of my business consulting right here, in Reno, with a few clients across the country. I have defined my consulting services in this way:

As a business consultant, I help you make your business successful!

But no matter where my clients are, whether it’s Nevada or New York, one of the most frequent questions I get from business owners is:

What exactly is a business consultant?

Here’s my brief definition: A business consultant is an experienced, trained professional who guides you to achieve your goals and streamline your processes. Goals are usually centered around business or career, but can often be of a personal nature too.

The next questions are often along these lines:

• How do I know if I need a business consultant?
• How do I hire someone to consult with me on my business?
• What criteria do I use to make my selection?
• How do I determine how capable a consultant is, and also how compatible with me?

These are all excellent questions to ask before you plunk down your hard-earned dollars to hire someone to help you grow your business. Below you will find my answers and general guidelines to help these concerns.

How Do I Choose a Business Consultant?

Here are a few of my thoughts on choosing the best consultant for your needs:

• Choose someone who is interested in your business and your goals, who listens to you first, without offering pat or canned solutions. A business consultant must be a good, active listener who can fully understand your situation and needs.
• Find a professional who understands business and has business experience of their own. This is one thing that means a lot to my clients. They know I’ve managed a multi-million-dollar business, supervised executive staff, set budgets, managed cash and productivity. I’ve walked the walk, and that gives me insight into what clients are going through on a daily basis.
• Focus on the consultant’s business experience, not the specific business he or she has run. Business concepts and best practices are by and large universal. And once mastered are then applicable to any business.
• Look for practical application of the concepts you discuss. Your business consultant should work with you in applying knowledge, training and solutions to meet your business challenges. Consulting that doesn’t deliver actionable plans and subsequent results is not true business consulting!
• Ensure that the consultant has real-life business experience and knowledge to partner with your industry experience. Is the consultant ready to  partner with you and leverage your expertise in developing your business? Choose a consultant who brings a depth of business knowledge to partner with your industry insights.

Hiring a business consultant takes more than finding someone you ‘click’ with. Take a logical approach; use these strategic bullet points to look at the consultant’s qualifications and how they answer your specific needs.

And of course if you have any questions, I would welcome a call to discuss your challenges and situational needs.

To your success!

Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals

By Valerie G. Cardenas

“You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer

Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success.

Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.)

If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when?  Now you’re ready to measure.

Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI

Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI):

General Business Measurements

• Dollars per contracts signed
• Number of call-backs per 100 jobs
• Increased your profit  by [insert your goal percentage here]

Sales Measurements

• New accounts as a percentage of total accounts
• Number of new accounts per day
• Percentage of referral business to your total business

Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you?

Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.

Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement

Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements!

Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet, and it might be the old-fashioned thermometer graphic that you fill in as you reach your checkpoints.

Celebrating the checkpoints reached along the way to ultimate success builds confidence and keeps us motivated. And that, finally, leads to the grand celebration when we’ve reached all the checkpoints along the way and we stand at the goal itself. Success.

Realizing the Personal Aspect of All Productivity

Recently in one of my business coaching workshops, a client hit the nail right on the head when it comes to company productivity.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.”

You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.”  All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company?

It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity.

Leadership Matters in Productivity

Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge.

Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst,  orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for.

In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown.

Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not and/or profitability or not.  Right down to whether the business owner can pull a paycheck or not.

So, when my client said, “It’s all about us,” you can see, he was right. Productivity begins with you, the leader, personally, and it is also fundamental to your net profit.

– Success begins with a blueprint.
Valerie