In the current jobs climate candidates are more likely to lie?

With The UK struggling through recession there are 2.46m people searching for employment at the moment. With 7.8% of the UK work force out of a job there is stiff competition for each and every vacancy, today’s job seekers are more likely to become risk-takers, fuelled by the desperation to secure that all-important role at whatever cost.

Research shows almost a quarter of potential job seekers (24pc) are prepared to stretch the truth to secure a job in this tough economic climate. Many candidates feel they have no choice but to bend the facts to keep up with fellow candidates who they believe will be exaggerating skills and qualifications on their CVs and in interviews.

While this should come as a warning to recruiters, this revelation from candidates is not surprising. People cheat in all walks of life and as long as they think what’s on offer is worth it in comparison with the risks, it is likely they always will.

Cheating is a global issue and recruiters are facing new challenges for which most are simply not prepared. Many are being inundated by applications so the process of sifting through to find the best people is becoming far more difficult and as the research figures show, relying on CVs and interviews to hire the right people is no longer enough.

But what can recruiters do? One way to save time sifting through applications and decrease the chance of cheating is through the use of online assessments. All Psychometric assessments claim to create a level playing field for all candidates and ensure all job seekers have an equal and honest chance to shine, but with a proliferation of books available helping candidates to ‘make themselves more employable’ how do you know your test is not being cheated?

One great litmus test is to see if the questionnaire requires the respondent to answer questions about themselves or to describe their own actions in given situations, as noted recent research shows 24 % of people will stretch the truth or get assistance from books written specifically to manipulate these types of test. Even unknowingly are you ever totally objective when answering questions about yourself, or like most of us, a bit biased and subjective?

So is there an alternative? With the Axia Profile you are never asked to describe yourself, you are never asked to describe what you would or might do given a set of circumstances, and you are never asked what others might expect you to do – this double subjectivity used in psychometric tests is supposedly a way of getting you to describe what you are really like. In fact there are no questions at in the Axia Profile, there are two sets of 18 statements and you simply rank them from best to worst. The Axia profile is not subjective, you are not asked to describe yourself or how you would perform. You are actually performing a task, making a totally objective measurement, and with over 6 quadrillion ways that you can order each set of 18 statements it is incredibly detailed and accurate. For more information on how the Axia Profile will improve your hiring decisions

Developing the Right Environment for Success

In the post-Credit Crunch world, no sector is going to have to adjust more to the fiscal challenges to come than Defence. With Government procurement programmes facing their greatest challenges yet, he reality for many is that the status quo is no longer an option – at AxiaMetrics we are working with experienced firm s in the sector by using the Axia Profile as to identify the ‘people issues’ which hold organisations back. This is part of a suite of services jointly established to offer procurement teams a suite of proven tools, skills and resources to help organisations – large or small, Government or industry – to work at the peak of their effectiveness and efficiency.

In the current environment, firms may feel beleaguered, but they have to ask themselves the following question, “What stops success”?

Below are things that we hear day in, day out which stop firms achieving the desired results:-

“There is no real vision and no strong, clear leadership.”

“The customer isn’t clear about what he wants, or indeed what we need to know, in order to be able to help.”

“We’ve measured everything that you can measure, but we don’t have the right skills and resources to address the evidence.”

“Relationships are not good, there is little trust and as a result, behaviours are not constructive.”

“Dialogue! What dialogue? Communications are none existent.”

If any of these statements apply, progress is often slow, excessive staff turnover and cost overrun can be at epidemic proportions.

AxiaMetrics together with its key partners – Christopher Lewis Associates, Digital Meeting and Precision Leadership offer an end to end solution to provide procurement teams with a range of services that help build relationships, confidence and communication. This includes the development of bid and delivery teams, plus the provision of the best collaborative working environments for successful defence projects and programmes.

Through implementation of the right skills, tools and resources on the soft issues, the right environment for success is created – it’s about going beyond commercial agreements, process, governance and above all, measurement. Through delivering the right culture, attitudes, behaviours, leadership and communication, goals are understood and achieved. It’s about creating a sense of shared ownership aided through timely, transparent information; it’s about the individual and team and psychological contract providing the ability and agility to sustain the right environment through the life of the contract.

With proven success in delivering sustainable improvement throughout the supply chain, our specialist skills will help procurement teams identify where and what critical issues need to be addressed, when they need to be addressed and will deliver the appropriate solutions.

Did you know that in the 1950‘s—in an effort to determine whether soldiers were mentally fit to handle deadly weapons—psychometric testing was created by the U.S. Military? (Actually, a more accurate term would be ‘pathology’ tests).

In the years that followed, a few enterprising entrepreneurs decided these pathology tests (with minor adjustments) could provide them with valuable insights into how people work together to bring about common business goals. After fifty years of testing, we now know the level of accuracy of these tests. We know where they are helpful and where they fall short.

How can you know if the assessment you are using measures up? This Blog provides you with the first of 11 questions you should ask to determine what tool you should use in your recruitment process and to determine the true accuracy.

1: What ‘norm’ are your job candidates being compared to?

Most assessments measure personality and behaviour.

Here’s the simple version of how personality and behaviour based tests are created. As you will see, created is the key word here.

These profiles are created by psychologists who observe the behaviour of a particular group of people. They then create questions designed to show where a person scores in relation to the observed ‘norm’ of that group. In other words, their goal is to match the questions they’ve created to fit the ‘norm’ they are creating.

Every assessment tool in the market place is “culture” driven. When an assessment tool is to be taken in a different culture, they must, again, find the standard of measure, or ‘norm’, for that culture. While this process has some value, there is a massive element of subjective bias involved. Clearly, these tools are affected by many factors including the geography, culture, income, age or gender that group of individuals.

Just know this … subjective bias significantly lowers the accuracy of these tests. Perhaps this is why – after 70 years of trial and error in the hiring process, research clearly shows that typical assessment tools are just not accurate.

Business leaders find it difficult if not impossible to trust the typical hiring assessment. Have you found this to be true for you?

There is a better way…

In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War an amazingly accurate way to measure performance in people was discovered by Robert S. Hartman. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his research in 1973. His approach was NOT based on simply observing behaviour or personality.

Hartman’s theory was that we all think and make decisions in the same way—that there are three core decision making dimensions. He called this, “The Structure of Thought.” Hartman spent the next 40 years of his life proving his theory scientifically (not the few few days or hours some take to establish a new norm!).

He proved his theory with a totally objective mathematical formula. This formula measures how people think and how they make decisions.

This was a major discovery because unlike “subjective norms” that come as a result of observing behaviour and personality, Hartman discovered that the structure of thought has it’s own norm. This norm is the same for people all over the world – regardless of culture, geography, income, age, gender, or other factors. We all have the same structure of thought.

Hartman didn’t create subjective norms. His science validation confirms a norm—an objective norm that already exists in all of us. That’s extremely important because when the measurement is totally objective—you can trust it’s accuracy!

The Axia profile scientifically measures how you think and how you make a decision—what Hartman called your ‘structure of thought’. It directly measures skills, competencies, attitudes, talent, whether or not you are accessing your talent, and much more. The Axia profile will quickly identify precisely who will and will not perform in your company with greater accuracy than other human metrics systems.

A growing list of top business leaders are using our system to make more accurate selection decisions and significantly improve business results.

Not my words, but those of Bertrand Russell! He summed up in one sentence what many of us know to be very true, a phenomenon that causes endless problems when interviewing for new staff as the more able candidate is less likely to be as confident or push their abilities compared to the less able who may come across better and more confident at interview.

This has been scientifically proven and is now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”.

The less competent therefore suffer from ‘Illusory superiority’, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from ‘illusory inferiority’. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the mis-calibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the mis-calibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

So if you can not rely on past performance, interview testing or educational background to assess skills competencies what can you rely on. The smart money has completed framework assessment to define the required skills competencies required for each role in their organization. Despite much work to enable them to define competency the difficulty is that many of the required competencies are softer skills that are harder to define and measure.

The Axia Profile competency modeling process helps organisations develop a framework competency. For larger organisations and teams this can be created on a bespoke basis clearly identifying the competencies of elite performers that are missing in the less productive team members. For smaller teams and organisations our generic reports have been developed over many years and already specify the key competencies for general roles such as management competencies and sales competencies. Using the Axia profile not only identifies these competencies but provides a measure of your existing team and a benchmark for all new potential hires.

So to find the most cost effective route to developing your own framework competency and avoid being the victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect at interview contact AxiaMetrics today

The 27th of January is a special day in the world of AxiaMetrics and Axiology for two reasons.

On this day in 1910 Dr Robert Hartman the ‘Father of Modern Axiology’ was born in Berlin Germany as Robert Schirokaur. He was a brilliant scholar and held a lecturing post at Berlin University and was also an Assistant District Court Judge.

Hartman was forced to flee Germany in 1932 due to his vocal opposition of the Nazi Party. Having experienced Hitler’s rise to power and what he saw as the successful organisation of evil , Hartman dedicated his life’s work to trying to answer the fundamental question of ‘what is good’

Hartman is credited with the discovery that all value has scientific order based on trans-infinite mathematical sets and for developing the hierarchy of the dimensions of thought. By combining these two discoveries he developed the first values based profiling tool, The Hartman Value Profile.

Martin Gilsenan, a father of 3 was also born on the 27th of January (as he is still with us we wont embarrass him by naming the year!) Martin is a partner in AxiaMetrics a UK distributor of the Axia Profile, which is based on Hartmans original work and profile.

Whilst Martin is not yet credited with the significant discoveries of Hartman he believes one of the most significant points in his working life was the discovery of Axiology. Never before had he seen such a detailed and accurate assessment tool. Unlike many flawed psychometrics that rely on subjective questioning the Axia Profile identifies the takers values using an ordering task which provides over 6 quadrillion permutations possible from the Axiological Norm established by Hartman. Essentially it identifies how we think and process information, why we make the judgements we do and the likely behaviour that will follow.

Martin is proud to share his Birthday with Robert Hartman and hopes for the following two achievement in his future:

1. To see QPR win the Premiership

2. That his personal legacy will be having introduced the science of Axiology to both business and education in the UK for the betterment of individuals and companies alike.

There is not a lot of chance of number one but to help Martin achieve number 2 contact AxiaMetrics today to see how this powerful technology can help your organisation.

When calculating the above, most researchers accept that it isn’t simply the salary and benefits of a bad hire they need to measure, painful though this is. They reason, quite correctly, that the “real” cost also includes factors such as reduced team productivity and missed client opportunities. The truth however, is the cost is much, much greater than that.

A bad hire has a profoundly negative effect on co-workers’ productivity and morale and can change their perception of the company “How could they have employed this person?” the rest of the workforce will say to each other, “How could they have got it so wrong?” is what they actually mean.

The biggest cost of a bad hire – by far, is the psychological impact on the leadership of the company – I should know I went through it myself with my 2 co-directors and close friends when we ran our own financial services brokerage between 2003 and 2007. “How did we employ this person?” we quite rightly asked ourselves. Then we had the subsequent cost in management time, coming to the conclusion that we had to get this person out of the company, then finally starting the process to actually do it. This, in turn engenders stress both at work and at home – the conversations with your spouse about that person, about how they drive you absolutely crazy, and about how you can’t believe that you ever offered them a job in the first place? The frustration that “you knew deep down” that you were making a mistake, but made the offer anyway and are now living with the consequences.

What a waste of money! More recruitment and training costs are incurred again – but what are you doing differently? It’s all the more reason to be absolutely sure that you’re making the right choices when it comes to adding new staff. Ask yourself the following – are you using a consistent hiring process to ensure that every open role is afforded the same level of care and attention? Do you have a method of filtering CV’s or applications? Do your staff know the right approach during interviews? Are you conducting thorough reference checks?

You may feel you have learned some lessons about people, one being that clients, customers and colleagues can be upset not only by a bad hire’s incompetence but by their attitude – again though, the same question needs to be asked – what are you doing differently to find out whether a person shares your company’s values?

The answer is simple – use the Axia Profile to underpin your recruitment process. New to the UK and based on Nobel Prize nominated research, this quick, online solution is specifically designed to help employers recruit the right people.

David Cameron, PM in waiting, has elevated education and recruitment to the top of the political agenda . Following research on the education model in Finland (who sit at the top of European academic results) the Tory think tank has concluded that by employing only teachers with a first class honours degree we will dramatically improve our current system.

On first hearing this my immediate reaction was ‘ good on them for wanting to improve standards in education’ but is it as simple as just selecting based on the result of a degree qualification?

Firstly, a first class degree in History or Science does not seek to measure the abilities of a person for the teaching profession. In schools as in business there are many horror stories of teachers both new and experienced who have all the right qualifications but are just not ‘good’ at teaching. It is not as great a sound bite but surely Mr Cameron and his team should be pledging to improve the selection process for teachers so that only the best at teaching get in.

Where is his commitment to benchmarking teachers or creating an elite competency model. Like all jobs in all professions it is a combination of competencies, attitudes and motivations not educational success that identifies the elite from the rest.

Looking at the educational model in Finland there are vast differences from our system, education only starts at age 7, the average age of a university graduate is 28, they do not stream on ability but promote equity and quality. Class sizes are much smaller and the class stays together for all subjects.

Mr Cameron wants to make the ‘Teaching Profession’ more respected by raising standards, but he has overlooked the fact that despite teachers in the UK being paid more than their equivalents in Finland, until the recent economic down turn we were struggling to fill teaching vacancies in the UK. This just goes to confirm what most employers know, paying top dollar and hiring the best educated is not on its own the secret of success.

In the video below Gary May, President of the Association of Sales Professionals talks about how Axiology can be used to measure sale performance and increase the bottom line.

Saturday was an unusual day, instead of the usual taxi service for the kids and a trip to Loftus Road to see QPR play Middlesbrough, I found myself presenting to the Board of Governors at a leading London College, discussing the accuracy of axiological science as a tool of measurement when I should have been discussing our forwards lack of accuracy in front of goal.


Anyway, you’re probably asking yourself what I was doing there and why, so I will tell you. Nigel Griffiths, my Partner at AxiaMetrics picked up through the I.O.D. LinkedIn Group, a request from a member of the Board of Governors at Westminster Kingsway College (who also happens to have a highly influential day job) for help with a specific problem. He was looking for a tool that would enable him to assess the Board’s collective attitude to risk. Although inundated with offers of help from experts wanting to run a multitude of subjective testing and analysis (the “tell me what you think your would do in this situation, and I’ll use blind corroboration to analyse your risk profile”, brigade), the Board member concerned picked up on Nigel’s offer as we knew we had the perfect output to measure this and discussions began.


Over the next few days, 20 members of the Board of Governors took the Axia Profile online (quick, easy and only 15 minutes to do) and we generated our Risk Tolerance Assessment report which measures your internal influences in 10 key areas of risk based decision making. By doing this, we were able to pinpoint where the Board stood collectively in their approach to risk as well as providing each member with their own individual report. Running through this with them on Saturday gave me an insight into the really valuable work which they do for the College and their commitment and sense of responsibility was frankly, inspiring.


This does not mean to say that it was all plain sailing though, it is a big ask for a group to understand in one hit why Axiology enables us to identify our internal valuing system which influences our perceptions, decisions and actions – basically “why” we do what we do. I have to say however, that as a group they were both open minded and genuinely interested in Robert Hartman’s pioneering work and the fact that we were able to define where they were in terms of attitude to risk so accurately. Individual members have already been in contact with me since and I am meeting with them in the days and weeks ahead to discuss how they can use some of the 50 outputs from the Axia Profile in their places of work.


Post Script


Anyone who knows the score from the QPR V Boro game on Saturday will know that I used my time wisely by not being at Loftus Road. Is it really too much to ask for 2 good results in one day? If ever a team needed the insight of axiology…hey, there’s an idea, I must refer them to Nigel’s blog on Football vs Business.

Your beloved team is at the bottom of the league, recent performances have been poor and the prospect of relegation looms. Week after week you’ll hear the same comments from football supporters, TV pundits and read them in the Sunday news papers.

“…The Chairman needs to put his hand in his pocket to strengthen the team”
“…The Manager is tactically inept and has run out of ideas”
“…They just didn’t show any passion and didn’t show any fight”


So, what do you or the average supporter want or expect to happen in order to revive this ailing club?


“The club has decided to sell our key players to save costs”
“New contracts will not being issued to future stars”
“We have decided to not to invest in our youth academy”


No doubt if you are a football supporter then the mere uttering of the above would make your blood boil and you demanding the board resignation.


Now let’s take a step back and take a look at YOUR football club put in other way… YOUR Business!


Your ‘backroom’ team are your support staff and perform roles such as HR, Accounts, Order Takers and Customer Support. We then move on to the team staff. These include the scouts, the coaches and physio’s whose sole job is to develop talent, spot future stars, suggest position moves and make sure that every player is fit for the job they are tasked with, which then moves us on nicely to YOUR team of players… YOUR Sales Professionals!


The similarities of a team of footballers and a team of sales professionals in astounding.


Your sales professionals are the people at the sharp end, out on show with their performance being played out and in the view of everyone else. Their tactics fight and passion is brought into question by every other staff member even if not verbalised yet they are the custodians of the company’s success.


Then we come to the football manager or in business terms, someone who hold a position of Sales Director or heads up the Sales Team. The person who picks the team, runs them through training, teaches them their fabled tactics and above all their inspiration and motivator. The same criticism you’d expect to be directed at a football manager is regularly thrown at them…

“It’s your responsibility for the poor results?”
“Your team need motivating”
“If the results don’t change then…”


And finally, the football Chairman or in our case the MD. Yes Sir/Madam it is you who wields the sword of power and it is ultimately your leadership and direction all others follow and it is your job to make sure the club moves forward and pleases the fans [your customers] who show loyalty, buy your products and who are the reason your club exists.


A football lesson
So what can we take out of the football analogy and place within our businesses?


• Are you listening to what you supporters are telling you?
• Are you asking your supporters for their opinion?
• What are your backroom team saying about your current tactics, formation and team?
• Is your team getting the best training by their coaches?
• Do your scouts have the right abilities to spot up and coming stars?
• Does your manager have the right credentials to get the best out of your players?
• Do your player respect and play to your manager’s tactics and formation?
• Is your Chairman putting up the funds to develop the team and supporting staff?
• Are you playing for promotion, relegation or simply survival?


If any of these were true with the team YOU support, then you’d expect them to do something about it wouldn’t you?


If we look at the difference in approach over the last 13 years between famous North London rivals Arsenal and Tottenham. One has taken a long term approach, backing a strategic thinking manager, investing in all of the team for the long term using scientific methods, developing a set of values and a culture everyone believes in and only recruiting people with the potential skills attitudes and beliefs that will fit in to the team. The other team with its short term view and desire for instant success has gone through 13 managers and wasted millions of pounds, always recruiting based on current behaviours (or reputation), never looking at the true motivators, drivers, values and beliefs of the new recruits or ensuring these fit with those of the club.


If you want to take the long term strategic approach to ensuring your team has the right values, beliefs , drivers and motivation and get the right new players to fit your culture then start by contacting AxiaMetrics to see how the Axia profiling tool, based on Nobel Prize winning research and the true and proven science of value Axiology can help.