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Traditional Methods and their Limitations
Human resource professionals who want to assess
an individual have two choices; they can invest in a psychologist’s
appraisal, which is comprehensive, but is time-consuming and not
inexpensive; or they can use one of a myriad of quick and inexpensive
assessment tools available, which are significantly more limited
in their accuracy and efficacy.
Popular methods, such as DISC and Myers-Briggs, were developed more
than 50 years ago. These are simple four-factor, rationally-based
methods that essentially place people into sizeable categories or
profile “types”, which serve as helpful handles in understanding
people.
By placing people into categories, people tend to be stereotyped.
As such, a good degree of an individual's uniqueness is overlooked
because he or she may be true to type in some or many respects,
but not in others. For decades human resource professionals have
expressed ambivalence about such simple profiling, objecting to
the “labeling” of people and its potential misuse.
Compounding this, simple methods may be susceptible to being “fixed”
(particularly the most familiar ones that have been overexposed
in the marketplace). More generally, the point is that these simple
methods are only accurate to a certain degree, and so people can
be miscast or placed in the wrong category.
In spite of their limitations, we are much indebted to these methods
for facilitating a great leap in our understanding of people. Simple
profiling methods can still play a useful and valuable role today.
They can be used most appropriately for screening, for appraising
shortlisted candidates for junior staff or support roles, or as
part of a battery of measures for appraising shortlisted candidates
for more senior roles.
Lacking comprehensiveness, however, simple methods have limited
depth and capacity to go beyond a surface sketch of people. For
example, they may:
- indicate that a person can be good at selling,
yet a candidate may be generally good at promotion and business
development, but not good at direct selling, for example, of complex,
big-ticket items.
- describe a person as relatively competitive,
or relatively considerate, but cannot describe him or her as both
highly competitive and highly considerate, or both
uncompetitive and inconsiderate.
- describe a person as generally goal-oriented,
but he or she could be highly goal-oriented in the long-range
strategic sense, but not in the short-range pragmatic sense.
In the modern technological world, these methods
are the equivalent of simple spreadsheets having four basic quadrants.
In comparison, PLM ADVANCED ANALYSIS™ is a uniquely powerful
relational database capable of superior analysis, precision and coherence.
Can business capitalize on recent developments in the field? Is there
a new technology available today that enables us to go beyond the
simple profiling methods? Can this advance our understanding and appraisal
of people significantly? The answer is a resounding yes to all three
questions.
To find out more about how you can benefit
from PLM’s ADVANCED ANALYSIS™ click
here.
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