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

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.

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.

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

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.

I don’t wish to be overly downbeat however because one can really sense a shift in attitudes and a much greater degree of optimism from the financial services community than was apparent this time last year. Towards the tail end of last year I attended the Mortgage Business Expo and was surprised, like many no doubt, to speak to business colleagues and new contacts, and find a much more positive outlook than I had anticipated. Yes, times were still deemed to be particularly tough, however the majority felt the light at the end of the tunnel was growing stronger and it seemed that the entrepreneurial nature of many in this market was beginning to shine through.

One sensed that firms were slowly taking themselves off ‘survival mode’ and were looking for greater growth by taking advantage of the one truism of the Credit Crunch and liquidity crisis, namely that ‘all bets are off’. There have been no certainties over the last couple of years and while this can be quite frightening for those who wish for a return to the old days, it can also be liberating for those who have often come up against a glass ceiling or a proverbial brick wall when attempting to break into new sectors and/or forge new relationships.

This is no longer the case. While relationships have survived and continue to be built on, many firms I have spoken to no longer feel like ‘outsiders’ in their own industry. This is because if they have something to offer or can deliver business then they are in a position to achieve greatness. I fully anticipate 2010 to be the turning point for many businesses; as I say, survival has been achieved and firms are looking at ways which they can now develop and exploit the opportunities that exist.

This all means that a significant number of firms are on an expansion footing and in order to achieve these ambitions they are going to need people to make it happen. While many firms will have spent the last couple of years cutting costs and, unfortunately, jobs from their operations now it seems that there are roles available. Which leads us on to the unenviable task of recruitment and developing a team which is able to deliver exactly what the firm wants. For example, many firms will now be looking at their sales teams and wondering whether these can be expanded to enter new product areas and meet new targets. Alongside this sales expansion often comes with it the need for more back-office/administration staff; in essence, your firm could need a number of quality personnel to fulfil the vacancies.

Many individuals will have gone through the recruitment process themselves, and each will have their own take on how it has gone. For every hire which fulfilled expectations and made a significant contribution to the business, there will be another which did not go to plan and ended up at best causing tension in the workplace, at worst disrupting the entire flow of the business. Hand on heart many business owners and managers will probably be unable to put their finger on what made one hire so right and another so wrong.

In a former life I, and a couple of business partners, ran a successful packaging firm and from personal experience we often had a bumpy ride when it came to recruitment. Due to the ebb and flow of our own business levels we would often bring in staff at short notice through a temp agency. Whilst not ideal it would allow us to meet demand very quickly, however, the disruption some employees brought with them was simply not worth the bother.

The simple fact of the matter was that many of the individuals who passed through our doors (and left soon after) were just not suited to the financial services market, they did not have the attitudes or skills or ambitions necessary to be a success in the role. Of course, as an employer you only ever learn this through the experience of having taken on an individual; all candidates were interviewed however it is often difficult to get a real feel for the person and, while a CV might show the person to be perfect for the job on paper, this may never translate into reality particularly if they do not fit within the company culture.

This is a very important point with regards to recruiting the right person. Before you go ahead and begin the establishment of that expanded sales team it is often a good exercise to look at your own firm and truly understand what the company culture is and what you are actually looking for with any new hire. The added bonus of course will come with being able to understand a candidate without even having to look at a CV or interviewing them. Many firms have used an array of traditional, some would say archaic, psychometric testing in order to help them in this area. Let me be the first to say that this type of testing has had its place however the fact remains that is particularly limited in providing the true information about a person an employer actually wants and needs.

When many candidates are told they will be undertaking a psychometric test of any kind, the first thing they will do is to buy or borrow a book which will show them how to ‘pass it’. Psychometric tests are set up in such a way that they almost encourage individuals to try and cheat them, and this can be achieved. This is because the testing essentially delivers a self-report to the employer based on only what the individual is willing to say about themselves; they do not give a true insight because, let’s face it, how many people are truly willing to be completely open about themselves, especially when it comes to applying for a job? The mantra is often: ‘say what the interviewer wants to hear in order to get the job’ and it would take a very perceptive interviewer not to be taken in by this. Interviews are often based on the art of the first impression, and if the interviewer is only armed with a stock series of the same questions which they ask each person, then the likelihood is they are going to get stock answers and little understanding of the true motivations and skills of the prospective employee.

So if ‘all bets are off’ in respect of market norms post Credit Crunch, what are firms doing differently in terms of the recruitment process, does your firm, for example, even have one – just using a recruitment agency doesn’t mean you have the right process in place. How can a firm ensure they get the right person in the right role every time? Essentially, they need to firstly understand their own company culture and the type of person who would thrive within it. They also need to have a clear view about exactly what type of individual they are looking for; what are the qualities beyond, simply the right qualifications that are needed at the firm? What values and drivers should the person have in order to be highly productive and successful in the role?

In terms of the provision of advice and achieving sales, many CVs will look similar. As stated, if they don’t have the necessary qualifications they’re not even going to make it on to the short-list. There is therefore a much greater focus on soft skills which will not be marked up on a CV. This is where an employee profiling tool like the Axia profile could be worth its weight in gold; firstly, it is impossible to cheat and it gives an accurate profile of the candidate, warts and all.

Axiology is the science of value which means the profile can highlight the internal valuing systems that influence everything we do. It is different to other self assessments as it does not ask someone to describe themselves the taker simply has to perform a ranking task making it a totally objective measure. Firms who use the profile will be provided with a much more rounded picture of the candidate; they will also be armed with an interview guide in order to ask the right questions. This allows the employer to put the interviewee into situations where they can gauge exactly how they will work and react in a real-life employment scenario. Importantly, of course it saves time and money by clearly identifying those candidates who would not be right for the firm, even if their CV shows that they might be suitable.

The recruitment process can be fraught and it takes a considerable amount of resource and investment; often this is still not enough to get the right person in the job. At a time when time is money for most advisory firms, arming themselves with all the relevant information about a potential candidate before they begin the interviewing process, could mean the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong. In a sales-based environment you want the top performers but you also want those who can make a real difference and add a considerable amount to the firm. Using a profiling system like will certainly put you one step ahead of the competition and in this environment that crucial head start could deliver real rewards.

Martin Gilsenan is Partner at AxiaMetrics LLP

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.

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.