Disc Leadership

Five Secrets to Successful Hiring – Part 4

Hiring is very challenging in this day and age. Finding and keeping good people seems to be harder than ever. But if you follow a few easy steps and use emotional intelligence, your next hire might be the best one you ever had.

You can find previous steps in narrowing down the number of candidates for a position HERE, and then move to step No. 4:

Asking the right questions.

To manage to hire the right person for the role, your interview questions need to match the personality style you are talking to. I suggest using the DISC method for this purpose, as I have been using it in my own company for two decades and have had amazing results with it.

But to put things in perspective, it is good to know what percentage of the population what style is taking. The results are in, and they say:

D style = 10% of the population

I style = 25 – 30 % of the population

S style = 30 – 35% of the population

C style = 20 – 25% of the population

With simple math, we can see that Ss and Cs combined makeup up around 60 % of the population. That means:

60 % of the population of the planet Earth is the reserved kind.

That means most people on the planet don’t want to be the first to speak and they don’t like to talk about themselves a lot.
What do most HR people lead with as a first question in an interview? “Tell me about yourself”.
That is an EPIC fail. It’s a bad idea.

“Tell me about yourself” is a question that works well only with about 40 percent of the population. So, we need to have tools in place that allow us to ask the appropriate questions.

Dividing the interview into two segments

Naturally, a lot of questions will be specific to your industry and the role you need to find. However, before you dive into role-specific questions, you should spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of an interview getting to know the person sitting across from you.

To help you with that, I have prepared example questions for you to use for different personality styles. It’s completely free and you are free to use these questions in your recruitment process and as a base for forming questions that will be more specific for your line of work and the core values of your company. The link for your “Best rapport-building questions for different styles” is HERE.

Remember, you want to follow job benchmarking so that you can match the people to the role, and that has to be applied to questions as well.
If you follow my question guidelines and steps that I have laid out in previous posts, you can create around 45 minutes worth of conversation with solid questions that will show you what kind of person is sitting across from you and how well will they fit in the company and the role that you see them in.

The more specific question you can get, the better.

Think of this when you are thinking of the questions to ask.
The rule of thumb is to have the first 10 or 15 minutes of the interview orientated towards hitting their personality style that you got in one of the first steps, and then you will go to the question that will be directly connected to the role. This will be the time to check their past experiences and see can they show you where they showed their core values that are aligned to your companies core values.

How all this looks in practice can be seen in the video below. I’m sharing my tools and the step-by-step process I’m using in my own company. Glad to help!

By Alex Swire-Clark

How To Follow a Legend?

Having to give any kind of speech in front of other people can be a very stressful task. It can be any speech from a big presentation that has to end up in getting a sale, through talking to your boss about your raise, all the way to giving a presentation of your idea or work in front of a team. But what happens when a person or persons coming before you are either really famous or just knock it out of the park? How can you handle that in terms of your stress and your preparation?

This is a situation that can happen to anyone and it can cause nervousness to any of us. It just recently happened to me even though I have been giving speeches for more than twenty years.
I have been invited to speak in an organization and everyone in the organization received an e-mail that said: “Our meeting this month is in person and our focus is going to be on the Rapport Advantage: Dynamically transforming the way you communicate with Alex Swire-Clark. We had an outstanding speaker in general Colin Powell, chairman retired last month, and our presenter this month will deliver!“

Colin Powell? What?!
Thinking that I will be speaking to a group who just heard general Powell speak while having all the respect in the world for him, is really a hard act to follow.
How to do this?

I see this as an opportunity to build upon what’s happened rather than go into panic mode. I see this as an opportunity to have fun with it and embrace it and live up to that challenge. Of course, I will be nervous, I am nervous every time I go in front of an audience but it is because I want to deliver good content to them and make sure that the audience is getting value from my time with them.
What can you do before you get on the stage, what do you do in those moments before?

Breathe.
Nice, big deep breaths before you get on that stage.
Roleplay all the possible situations.
Do you know your numbers inside and out? Do you know your speech inside and out? Can you ad-lib if necessary? Are you prepared for questions in the middle of your presentation, can you handle that? Roleplay those situations, spend a lot of time in the pre-work and that makes the actual on-stage time much simpler for you.
Just go with it and BE YOU.
From a DISC world, I am a High I so I have strong improvisational skills, I am not rigid so not a lot bothers me. I could roll with the flow since that’s the way I am wired. For someone else that might not be the case and maybe you will have to adapt a bit more. However, do not try to be like anybody else.
Be you, use your voice. Do what you do in the way that you do it and that’s going to give you authenticity and you will not have so much pressure. If I tried to act like someone else does on the stage, I will not be genuine and on top of that I will have to remember content, mannerisms, techniques and I will enhance the chances of freezing up.

Remember, if you are delivering content, you have to be you through it. If you are delivering something that is data-driven, that doesn’t mean you can not liven it up, add your personality to it and appropriate humor.
Make sure you hit these three goals:

This will give you a sense of confidence and satisfaction that you know you’ll do a great job (of course, if you put in the time and the work before speaking).

Don’t worry, trust in your pre-work, be authentic to who you are and do your thing. Who speaks before you, in that case, shouldn’t matter. You got this!

By Alex Swire-Clark

Do You Know What Is Your Passion?

What are your passions and purpose in life? What is it that drives you? Whatever that is, you need to find that in your life.

For me, my passion is my family and friends. This should not come as a surprise as I am a combination of High I and S personality styles, and S in me is all about relationships in life. I want to support people and others to feel good about themselves. From that perspective, I have always had a special place in my life for the camp experience.

As a child, I went to camp many times and had an excellent time there, so naturally, when I became an educator and had to do my summer practice, I chose camp! After switching between a few, I found my forever camp in 1997. That camp is Broyhill Leadership Conference.

Teach them about leadership!

Broyhill Leadership Conference is unlike anything that has existed or will ever exist. First off, what kids are learning in this camp is leadership. We teach uniquely; we go from go-setting activities where we teach our students how to set the right goals that matter; we teach them about better communication skills, cooperation, and teamwork, and how to integrate themselves within the clubs they serve. That means we talk about Emotional Intelligence issues and the heart of leadership: being there for people when they need you.

The fact is that when any of us comes to an organization, we come with a heavy heart and some issues that we are carrying from previous experiences. And every other person comes with their own experiences. And we must meet people where they are. In Broyhill Leadership Camp, we prepare teenagers for that: in a way, we peel the onion layers so they can get to know each other better and form lifetime friendships.

Young people are inspirational

What always happens in this camp is we, as educators, go to the camp to try to inspire these young people, and they end up inspiring us. The stories they tell, the goals they set, and the dreams they have for one another are fantastic! And they are young people, still at the beginning of their lives and with not much wisdom that we older think we have. But you’d be surprised.

So what’s stopping us from following our passions? Maybe the fact that we don’t know what our passion is?

Ask yourself: what is my passion? Whatever that is: GO GET IT! Today is not too late to start with whatever your passion is. Just go out there and do it.

Don’t make excuses. Maybe you are in debt or in a toxic relationship, and perhaps you think you are too old… But all those things don’t matter. If you see something you really want, go get it and do it. We only get one time on this planet so let’s make the most of it.

How to find your passion

If you need some help with finding your passion, feel free to take a personality assessment. Then I can give you information about career opportunities and things you might want to get involved with based on your personality style that you may not even know existed. These assessments are even made for children and teenagers who need so much guidance and it’s the perfect time for them to take one. I’d be more than happy to help!

By Alex Swire-Clark

What is a DISC Personality Test?

The DISC personality ASSESSMENT is the only test where there are no right or wrong answers. It is actually an assessment of your observable, predictable, fully measurable behavior.

You see, some of us move fast, and some of us move a little bit slower, some of us like to organize things and some of us love having fun with others. Regardless, it’s all about being self-aware. The key point is to remember is: EVERYONE IS A UNIQUE BLEND OF ALL 4 OF QUALITIES THAT DISC ASSESSMENT SHOWS.

If we want to look at where it all started, we can go way back to 400 BC and Hippocrates. But to keep things more modern, let’s jump ahead to 1921. Carl Jung wrote the book, Psychological Types. He suggested a human behavior model that has four types of personalities in terms of who we are and how we do what we do.

Move ahead then to 1928 and William Moulton Marston. He published a book, Emotions of Normal People. He described the 4 personality style theory, he sharpened the concept that these 4 personality styles define who we are, and that they are measurable, predictable patterns in terms of how people do what they do on a normal daily basis. This is the model we use today.

DISC personality assessments became even more popular during WW2. The US Army used this as a tool to hire and to put the highest performing people in officer positions and others where they would be the best fit in the organization. From there, the Government leaked that information in the business world and businesses have used that info in HR since that time.

How does this transform our everyday life? Let me share an example from my personal life that gave me decades of happy marriage and blessed my life with five crazy kids:

Back in 1997, I was a teacher, working at a summer camp. One day I came home and found my wife crying at the edge of the bed. The reason? She said: “Alex, I just don’t understand you.” It struck me as odd, but I asked her to give me an example. She said, “Why I can’t get all the groceries from the grocery list that she gives me. There are only 10 items.” It was a fair point. I then was curious why she couldn’t be a bit more flexible and spontaneous? We had this exchange back and forth asking more and more questions over the next few minutes. We got to the point where we were only two years into our marriage and realized we didn’t know each other as well as we thought we did.

In the midst of it all, that summer in the camp I met Dr. Robert Rohm. He handed me a personality assessment and said it would change my life. I didn’t really think it would, but I still filled it out. I found out that I am a people-oriented person who likes to have fun with tons of different people. I care about others’ wants and needs more than my own, and I really enjoy life. But that wasn’t the point. What really struck home with me was: that’s me but that’s not my wife! So I took the assessment home and gave it to my wife. We found out she is a task-oriented, very driven individual. A polar opposite of me and my personality style!

Having that knowledge allowed us to adapt our behavior and meet in the middle; not to have a conflict there but to mesh, get along better and understand our roles better. In short: it made us tremendous marriage partners. We are perfect complements of one another!

Would you like to stay married for 25 years with your spouse? Understand your children better? Do you want to help your aging parents in difficult times even if they think of money and security differently than you do?

If those things sound good to you, you need to take a DISC assessment.

It’s an assessment that is above 90 percent accurate in terms of predicting behavior. To get that above 90 percent accuracy you need to get a quality assessment. A link to my assessment store page is HERE.

If you would like to research a bit more, find all the information on my Podcast or YouTube channel.

By Alex Swire-Clark

Questions, Questions, Questions, Ep. 55

In today’s episode we discuss the future of the podcast and how we can help you, our audience, improve the way you communicate.

For reference, our introductory episodes to the DISC Model of Human behavior can be found here:

High D “Dominant” Style

https://www.alexswire-clark.com/03-the-dominant-high-d-personality-style/

High I “Influencing” Style

https://www.alexswire-clark.com/episode-4-the-inspiring-high-i-personality-style/

High S “Supportive” Style

https://www.alexswire-clark.com/the-supportive-high-s-type-they-are-loving-and-loyal/

High C “Cautious” Style

https://www.alexswire-clark.com/the-cautious-high-c-personality-style/

ASSESSMENTS can be found at:

http://www.personalityservice.com/portal/GPPM/store

We want your input!! Head over to our website at therapportadvantage.com. Leave us a message on our contact page or Speakpipe App. You can also follow the show on twitter @RapportPodcast. Or find us on Facebook at The Rapport Advantage Podcast.

Let us know what topics you’d be interested in when it comes to improving communication, building better teams, and reducing conflict at work or in your personal life.

Thanks for listening!! We would love for you to subscribe!!

Disc Leadership

Asking the right questions.

Dividing the interview into two segments

The more specific question you can get, the better.

Teach them about leadership!

Young people are inspirational

How to find your passion

Concise Adult Version