See the full press release here.

Full article here.

Checkster made the list as the way to confirm strengths and weaknesses.

“Checkster’s Talent Checkup is an online system to request constructive, confidential feedback on your work performance from the peers and colleagues who know you and your talents best. Unlike CVCertify, Talent Checkup isn’t used only when you have a job description in front of you. Rather, it helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses at any time through your connections. With this information in hand, you can better craft your resume’s Professional Profile section.”

You can read the full article here.

….Yves Lermusi, CEO of Checkster, a San Francisco based talent management firm that offers 360 degree new hire tools, says “there is no reason” the tool couldn’t be used to determine fit for all levels of hiring.

Read the full story here.

In short: team performance depends on the social sensitivity of the group; teams containing more women had a higher social sensitivity.

These findings can change the way you put a team together, how you select interview panels or who should be in the executive team.  As the performance variation was not small, according to the researchers the group’s collective intelligence accounted for about 30 to 40 percent of the variation in performance.  These conclusions are based on two studies in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five and worked on a number of tasks.

So what can you do in order to improve the performance of your team?
1. Make sure that when teamwork is needed you value social sensitivity as much as pure expertise when selecting team members.
2. Respect the basic principle of collective intelligence when collecting data, like we do at Checkster for our 360 and Reference Check 2.0, namely: diversity, authenticity and discernment.
See more on the collective intelligence research here.

To answer this issue, you have several options, including:

1a) Asking them to describe what they’ve done–the so-called “behavioral interviewing” technique. Research shows that these types of questions generally contribute a significant amount of validity to the process. But they’re not perfect by any means, particularly with people with bad memories about themselves. And keep in mind at that point you’re taking their word for it.

1b) Asking them for examples of what they’ve done. Best used as a follow-up to a claim, but tricky in any situation where there’s even a remote possibility that someone else did it or did most of it (so practically everything outside of the person being videotaped).

1c) Asking others (e.g., co-workers, supervisors) what the candidate’s done. Probably the most promising but most difficult data to accurately capture. Hypothetically if the person has any job history at all they’ve left a trail of accomplishments and failures, as well as a reliable pattern of responding to situations. This is the promise of reference checks that so often is either squandered (”I don’t have time”) or stymied (”They just gave me name, title, and employment dates”). Don’t use these excuses, investigate.

Full posting here.

The full posting here.

The section that we like:

Over the past month at a couple of networking and educational sessions I’ve
had the opportunity to spend time with 50 other Fortune 500 Recruiting
Executives and Leaders. The time, the networking, and the conversation were
all invaluable. So, what’s on the top of everyone’s mind?
[...]
Reference Checks: There was a lot of discussion in using services for
background checks. The one company that everyone was talking about was
Checkster, and the value they’ve seen from their investment in addition to
the capacity it’s given recruiters to do their day job… Recruit.

The staff at Checkster was pleased to see the below article, as it reinforces what we have been saying about reference checks.  If done poorly, reference checks are a waste of time. When done well, they are THE most important assessment method.

See the article from Charles Van Heerden:

“The poor cousin of the recruitment process is the obligatory reference check. Too often it is nothing more than a perfunctory procedure to conclude an exhausting number of interviews.

Most reference checks are the outcome of a telephone conversation, as most recruiters will attach little weight to any written references. Many companies have policies prohibiting managers from providing written references, in light of potential litigation. Often the risks of providing references are overstated, resulting in limited information being provided, due to concerns about negligent referral or defamation. Privacy laws govern the contacting of referees and keeping of information. Though recruiters adopt a code of professional practice, the risk of hiring managers using their informal network to get anecdotal half-truths remains problematic.

A reference check is not a fishing expedition or idle gossip, but a structured and important part of the hiring process. Research has indicated that reference checks have about half the validity of structured interviews.

The declining value of reference checking is because it is badly done, rather than being of little value. The big challenge for recruiters is to develop a new and better way of conducting reference checks with a higher validity so that they can be more useful.

A Strategic Approach to Reference Checking
There are three very deliberate and strategic actions that recruiters can adopt to achieve significantly better results from reference checking. Having successfully implemented this approach in a number of companies, have also resulted in better retention of top talent.

(a) 360 Reference Checking
Extrapolating the benefits from 360 feedback systems, recruiters need to adopt a wider and more comprehensive approach by including:
Executives (one over one); Direct Manager; Peers; Direct reports; Clients and customers.
It is not sufficient to conduct only a minimum of two reference checks, which seems to be the general practice in many companies.”

continue reading here.