PI, where have you been all my life?

My career started in the Silicon Valley tech boom. I’ve applied to dozens of jobs at tech startups offering free snacks, coffee, and meals. I’ve worked at places with massages and manicures onsite. My recent role was at a fintech unicorn where I had the opportunity to grow with the company just as the company was starting to rocket in revenue. I got the job because I was referred there by a previous colleague, and as the company grew, I had the opportunity to build a foundational program where I hired a team to support our partners. 

I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. 

But seriously, what are the chances that you can get referred to a job where you happen to love all your coworkers and be right in a sweet spot of the company’s stage where they can fully utilize your skills and passions to build your career?

It’s extremely rare, hence the unicorn.

So how do you know if the job is going to be the right fit - for both the candidate and for the hiring manager?

When I was building out my team, I combed through hundreds of resumes to pick the top ten candidates. Then, I conducted all the multiple phone screens to pick the final few to go through the interview panels. At the end of all that, everyone picks the one candidate that looked good on paper, had the right answers to the interview questions, and impressed everyone enough that they could do the job well. Then, hopefully the candidate will really be a great fit for the role and they’re satisfied with the job, and it all works out.

Now as the newly appointed head of client success here at Lever Talent, I have entered into the world of the Predictive Index. In my first few days on the job, I heard words like dominance, patience, high Es, captains, mavericks thrown around like a foreign language. 

So as part of my onboarding, I attended the Drive Results with Talent virtual workshop. It was 4 hours a day for three days and led by Dottie LaMark, a PI expert who was super engaging.

The workshop easily explained everything I needed to know about reading PI assessments that would’ve taken me weeks and/or months to figure out and learn myself. The workshop defined what the factors stood for, how they showed up in a person’s assessment and manifested in someone’s personality. The factors became more than just letters on a page, instead they represented a person’s drives and motivations for how they showed up in the workplace, and it all depended on the positioning and nuances of where the letters stood relative to each other. 

The eureka moment for me was the part where we did a case study and we had to choose 2 out of 4 candidates that we would interview for a position based on the job description and their resumes. Similar to my previous hiring experiences, with only the resumes to go on, our team picked the two candidates that seemed to be the best fit because they were in or currently held similar positions in similar industries.

Then we saw their behavioral and cognitive assessments and how it lined up with the job target set by PI. Based on these results, it turned out that the OTHER two candidates would actually be better fits for the position. One of the final candidates was a customer service team manager that our team didn’t initially choose for this sales leader role because we assumed she wouldn’t be a good fit since she didn’t have previous sales experience. However, she had great leadership experience, and by looking at her behavioral and cognitive assessments, we could predict her suitability for the job with a much higher accuracy for fit and satisfaction.

Mind. Blown.

PI, Where have you been all my life, both as a candidate and as a hiring manager?

As I continue to grow in my new role and build out a team here at Lever Talent, I’m excited to use PI to help add more color and dimensions when finding the perfect people.