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Profiles Incorporated

A Strategic Business Partner of Profiles International

Posted by Craig Palmer on September 12, 2018.

I was having a conversation with one of our Client VP of Sales recently. He was in the process of hiring a new region manager. He had four candidates that were very good fits with their region manager Profiles Performance Model and asked for assistance to help determine which quality candidate would be the best fit for the role. I asked the VP of Sales to tell me a bit about the people this new person would lead. He talked about the fact that half the people in the region were very new and half were very experienced and tenured. He talked about the broad based cultural evolution the organization was going through from one of low expectations and low accountability to high expectations and high accountability. From his comments, it became clear that he had a high need for someone that would bring good leadership skills to the table and a high degree of emotional IQ. So how could he use the DATA that the PXT Select provides to understand which of these 4 qualified candidates would bring this level of self-awareness that is required to support this team?

Self-awareness has three key aspects to consider:

  1. 1. Does the candidate understand themselves?
  2. Is the candidate aware of their impact on others?
  3. Is the candidate able to self-manage and make small changes in personal approach to optimize effectiveness with audiences that have a different perspective?

I would like to focus on the Thinking Style section of the PXT Select to help us understand the level of a candidate’s self-awareness. The Thinking Style scales measure the cognitive aspect of understanding words or numbers as part of the reasoning process. They form the foundation for the problem solving, communication, interaction and learning used on the job. People have a tendency to share information the way that they learn it. For example, if a candidate has Profiles PXT Select Thinking Style scores in the 7-10 range this means they process and assimilate information more quickly than most people. Therefore their tendency would likely be to share information more quickly than most people can keep up with thus likely leaving their audience struggling to keep up.

As we bring our 4 candidates back in for interviews we can use the Thinking Style DATA to determine if the candidates understand themselves by asking questions about how they prefer to learn new material or previous training programs they have attended and what worked or did not work for them. We also can listen to their responses to our questions and see if the answers come across as humble and empathetic or egotistical and trying to be the smartest person in the room. We can ask the candidates what they do to best understand how their audiences pick up on the information we are sharing. Our audiences pick up information based on the way their cognitive abilities allow them to learn. The highly self-aware candidates with Thinking Style scores in the 7-10 range with an audience left of them will respond with their understanding on the need to slow down how they flow information to their audience to optimize their communication effectiveness. The PXT Select gives us, as the interviewer, the answer to the question of what the candidate is really like. As we listen to the candidate’s responses to our questions we gain tremendous insight about how well the candidate understands themselves, how well they are able to articulate how they learn and process and how they can make small changes in personal approach when their audience takes longer to process information.


Author: Craig Palmer

Profiles Incorporated provides personalized consulting to support the assessment results of your employees. We also provide in-depth training for managers to maximize the value of the assessment information and administrative training that allows you to take this information in house.


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