The Edelstein Group - Pre-employment Assessment

Ensuring that Candidate meet the Needs of the Company

An opportunity to increase executive and organization capacity exists when a company hires a new executive or promotes one from within. However, all too often companies hire or promote an executive with an eye on what they immediately wish to change, or to satisfy an immediate requirement rather than anticipated long term needs. Given how hard it is for executives to change, this is a big mistake. It is more desirable to select an executive who satisfies the most important criteria for success, than it is to initiate a management behavior change process after the executive is on board. Thus, companies should focus on hiring and promoting the right people. Then, as new challenges arise and the business environment changes, develop executives to increase capacity and effectiveness.

The Edelstein Group's Executive Assessment, Selection & Development process will improve the quality of a company's hiring decisions. The Edelstein Group generates data that, when combined with the company's own reference checks, interviews, analysis of work history and education, creates a comprehensive picture of each candidate.

We partner with the company in the implementation of a model that generates information useful in both the assessment and development of the executive:

Preparation - To set the proper target

A Position Description & Ideal Candidate Profile is generated by the company or The Edelstein Group.
Recruitment - To identify qualified, interested and available people

Utilizing various means the company generates a group of qualified and available candidates.
Assessment - To select the best candidate for the position and the company

The company conducts interviews comparing and contrasting the candidates to the Position Description and Ideal Candidate Profile.

The Edelstein Group takes the measure of each candidate along three dimensions:
Intellectual Ability
Management Ability
Management Judgement

Intellectual Ability includes the candidate's conceptual and practical thinking, analytic and problem solving skills. It is an indication of how quickly someone learns new tasks and the kinds of work he or she is best suited for. Management Behavior and Management Judgement is how the person deploys his or her intellectual abilities and comports oneself in the workplace. The former is mainly a function of personality; the latter is mainly a function of experience. The most desirable mix of the three depends upon the Position Description and Ideal Candidate Profile.
Development - To accelerate the assimilation & development of the new employee so as to be able to produce superior results.

For the successful candidate, The Edelstein Group will, based upon the results of the assessment, generate a Development Report which is first reviewed with the employee and then with the employee and supervisor.

The Development Report serves as the basis of a Development Plan. The Plan includes what the executive needs to do to get up to speed and how to best deploy his or her abilities. Elements of the Plan may be integrated into the company's performance management system.

Six months into the job, the new employee's supervisor assesses the employee's performance. The Edelstein Group uses this information to construct a profile of the most successful employees. This proves helpful in identifying attributes and skills needed for success and provides the basis for empirically derived Ideal Candidate Profiles.

Benefits of this approach include:

ensures that candidates are evaluated against previously delineated job relevant criteria.
ensures that successful candidates can meet both present and future needs of the company.
ensures that successful candidates will be a good fit with their supervisors, peers, subordinates and the company at-large.

The value of this approach lies in the fact that managers, left to their own devices, typically do not make good hiring decisions. They tend to:

select people like themselves.
consider technical qualifications to the exclusion of management behavior and organization fit.
fill a current need to the exclusion of the candidate's potential.