Interestingly, this chart shows that both groups achieved equally high scores on talent and equally poor scores on their attitude, but it was the high performers ability to access their talents that was the key  performance discriminator.

We can all have temporary losses of form or performance, or put another way, have things going on in our lives that will temporarily block us or stop us from being able to access our talent, but as an employer or recruiter you want to avoid employing people for a role that either do not have the talent, or are unable to access that talent, or you will be spending a lot of time and energy managing that employees problems. To read more about the Axia Talent benchmark solution click here

There are many different definitions to describe talent resulting in a huge amount of confusion in the workplace, especially in relation to recruiting for a new role.  Some companies define talent in terms of competencies, but competencies are often knowledge based.  Just because someone has knowledge it does not mean they have talent.

Just look at the debates and comments that follow every football match.  The majority of the male population often voices an ‘expert opinion’ but this knowledge or interpretation of an incident definitely does not make them a talented footballer or manager!

In the work place you can take 100 people who possess similar knowledge (experience or qualifications).  If you then provide them all with the same job specific training, will they all complete the job in the same way? The answer, as every employer, manager and HR professional knows, is definitely not.

So, if talent is not Knowledge then what is it? Is it attitude or personality based?

There are many psychometric profiles now that will accurately define someone’s personality group and the traits you are likely to see from this group type, but this does not infer any specific talent.

Robert Harman proved mathematically that human thought has a structure and that it can be measured.  Each individual’s thinking process is therefore what makes them unique.

At AxiaMetrics we define talent as a person’s recurring and habitual patterns of thought.

The way a person reacts to any given set of circumstances is dictated by how they process the information presented to them.  In the work place, no two people will react the same to a problem, as we all have different thinking patterns.  This means they will not come to the same solution and we will all be influenced in some way by the set expectation of acceptable behaviour.

To find out how the Axia Talent benchmark can dramatically improve your recruitment and succession planning click here

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

AxiaMetrics LLP, the people assessment experts, have launched the Axia Profile, an online service based on the science of Axiology, which measures a person’s values and therefore the way they think and make decisions.

Utilising proven scientific identification of employees’ values and talents, AxiaMetrics provides a vast range of ‘people solutions’ to businesses and organisations helping them recruit, develop and retain the right people.

The Profile’s launch has been hailed as the beginning of the end for psychometric testing which although widely used in the past, is increasingly being seen as irrelevant to the problems faced by businesses and large organisations in the early 21st century.

Nigel Griffiths, Partner at AxiaMetrics, said:

“Businesses have woken up to the elephant in the room and now realise that existing psychometric tests actually provide no value whatsoever when it comes to implementing much needed change. The problem is very simple; psychometric tests are fundamentally flawed as they are self reports based on what the individual says about themselves. The information is then used to categorise individuals into a limited number of predetermined standard groups – all of this through blind corroboration and anecdote. Unbelievably this then purports to indicate the individual’s ability to perform, based on these preset groups, a process that is neither scientific nor objective.

“The Axia Profile is based on Nobel-Prize nominated research and unlike psychometric testing it provides a quantitative standard for measuring people’s values and consistently records and predicts mathematically those value drivers which influence all of our thinking, judgements and behaviours. Crucially, it is the accuracy of the outputs provided by the Axia Profile that then enable organisations in both the private and public sectors to implement much needed change in critical areas like recruitment, training and development, succession planning and effective management. Axiological knowledge is therefore objective, independent from any observer and empirical. Although new to the UK, this profile has been valued, validated and successfully applied in the US for over 20 years, in partnership with leading organisations, including AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ford Motor Company, Goldman Sachs, Hospital Corporation of America, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, NASA, New York Yankees, Texaco The Federal Aviation Authority and Xerox.”