According to a new global study, the majority of U.S. executives received no formal workplace onboarding in their most recent roles. Furthermore, when it comes to grading onboarding experiences on a scale of 1 to 100, executives in the U.S. rate theirs as mediocre with an average score of 59.

After investing heavily in recruiting and hiring a new member of an executive team, many organizations fail to maximize that investment when ineffective onboarding leads to dissatisfaction, poor performance or turnover. In fact, almost 60% of executives report it took them six months – and close to 20% said it took more than nine months – to have a full impact in their new roles.

While you can’t control every aspect that factors into an executives’ performance and longevity in a role, implementing a robust, data-driven onboarding program can greatly improve your odds. Considering executive failures can cost up to 40 times the base salary of leaders, which can translate to a multi-million-dollar mistake, HR leaders can’t afford to ignore the critical necessity for effective onboarding.

More and more of the world’s leading organizations are utilizing talent assessments to better inform hiring decisions and drive more effective employee development. In fact, 82% of companies are using some form of skill assessment tests today. There is little doubt that the use of talent assessments in the hiring and development process will continue to grow, particularly given the recruitment challenges in today’s market and the import of finding best fit hires.

As HR leaders look to these vital tools to improve their HR process, there are two critical considerations when choosing and implementing a talent assessment solution.

As we enter a brand-new decade, what better time to evolve your hiring practices and strategy to meet the new requirements of the modern day? The fact is businesses have never done as much hiring as they do today or spent as much money doing it. Yet, most aren't doing as good of a job hiring the right candidates the first time.

Almost every successful professional has had a trusted mentor to help them chart a new course for their career, to guide and inspire them. For individuals, studies show that good mentoring can lead to greater career success, including promotions, raises and increased opportunities.

Famous author Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions,” but the value of feedback is only realized if the person on the receiving end truly acknowledges what is shared. Often, business and HR leaders focus heavily on the ways in which they can effectively provide feedback to others, which is certainly an important component of performance development. However, the second part of the equation – the ability to effectively receive that feedback – is very often overlooked.

Arguably, the ability to take feedback to heart is even more difficult than the art of delivering it. Why? Because inherent in receiving feedback are several “personal” triggers that can influence how each of us perceives feedback, particularly in the workplace. And, many of us are triggered to ignore, become defensive or even anger at the hint of criticism or constructive feedback due to the way in which the person communicates or behaves when providing the feedback. 

A recent study highlights a pervasive challenge facing the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, and that is a lack of talent. The study found that 51 percent of CEOs of life sciences and pharma companies admit to greater difficulties attracting and retaining the right people, more than any other industry in the study.

In fact, one of the greatest challenges on the horizon for pharmaceutical and life science companies is filling vacant positions and decreasing the time-to-fill for those positions. On average, pharma hiring decision-makers report they are currently 14 percent understaffed and have roughly 212 open positions at this time. Additionally, they report that it takes an average of 105 days, essentially 3 ½ months, to recruit and hire non-executive positions.

These lengthy vacancies are quickly eating away at corporate profits. In fact, companies lose $500 a day for every job that stays vacant. Given the average time-to-fill among pharma decision-makers is 105 days, and that amounts to $52,000 per vacancy.

Lack of Right Skills and Culture Fit Key Contributors

For many pharma decision-makers, sourcing good candidates is hard and finding qualified applicants can be even harder. Yet, finding the best-fit talent both in culture and skill-set can be downright excruciating. Consider that 76 percent of Pharma HR-decision makers agree, “when positions become available at my organization, we struggle to find people whose skills match the job requirements,” and 70 percent say, “we struggle to find people who are a good cultural fit.”

Pharmaceutical and life sciences leaders will need to increasingly leverage data and analytics to bring greater accuracy, efficiency and predictability to the hiring process. As pharma companies continue to struggle with turnover, open positions and costly vacancies, they simply can’t take a chance on anyone who doesn’t measure up.

The Challenge    

High turnover in a key scientist role was plaguing this Fortune 500 multinational pharmaceutical company, greatly hindering productivity and advancements in this critical function.

The Preparation

 In order to address this problem, XBInsight identified the need for a robust succession plan that included:

• Creating a benchmark for the next level position to measure the readiness of these scientists to be promoted to this role.
• Developing a customized assessment to not only reflect the skills, critical thinking and overall fit needed for the current position, but also identify a clear picture of what success looks like in the next level job.
• Designing a comprehensive leadership development program to prepare high potential employees for next level positions

Innovation is critical in a knowledge economy — driving growth, new products, and new methods of delivering value to customers. According to PwC’s 2015 study on Global Innovation, U.S. companies spend $145 billion dollars in-country on R&D each year. And yet, despite its importance, innovation is a difficult quality to cultivate both in leaders and in organizations. In Conference Board’s 2015 CEO Challenge study, 943 CEOs ranked “human capital” and “innovation” as their top two long-term challenges to driving business growth. This is a key talent challenge for most organizations, and a talent gap that needs to be closed, starting at the top – with the role of the CEO.

Imagine the consequences of not assessing someone seeking to join the police force, or someone aiming to join an airline as a pilot. Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? While the impact of hiring the wrong person in those roles can be dire, the consequences of not assessing job candidates and employees in less complex jobs are also significant. The outcomes for businesses hiring or promoting the wrong person can range from poor performance, high turnover, lackluster customer service, to even lost business.

Executive and leadership development has risen to the top of most companies’ priority list over the past decade, with the realization that in the fast-changing, innovation-led business landscape organizations must have exceptional leaders to navigate it. In fact, when upward of 500 executives were asked to rank their top three human capital priorities, leadership development was included as both a current and future priority, and almost two-thirds identified leadership development as their number one concern.¹ This explains why U.S. companies alone spend almost $14 billion annually on leadership development.²

However, for many organizations, the outcomes of their leadership development are lackluster and fail to meet the ideal return-on-investment for such programs. The failure to meet expectations of executive development programs can be attributed, in part, to four common mistakes that derail their efforts.

It’s easy to understand why most companies place greater value, consciously or unconsciously, on higher-level positions, executive management and the C-suite. However, the reality is a company’s success depends primarily on the quality of work of those who perform the majority of the work – those employees who hold lower-level positions, typically found in customer service, administration, IT, and operations. Yet, few employers structure their career development program to optimize the skills and competencies of employees at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

Research has shown that feedback is an effective way for individuals to gain insight into their need to change or develop. It permits participants to understand themselves more fully and to see the impact of their style and behavior on others and on goal attainment. The development process allows the manager or internal coach to help individuals take a more objective perspective. Using an assessment during this process results in a credible and more accurate self awareness. Raising self awareness is critical for employees to take ownership for changing behaviors (Riggio, 2008). For example, development assessments uncover blind spots: areas of weakness that were unknown to the participant. Participants are likely to learn about hidden strengths: skills or competencies that can be further leveraged or adapted for future roles.

High-maintenance high-performers: Working with a high-performer can be either exhilarating or exasperating. It all depends on how you react to the challenges that come with it. Most likely, this high-performer can be also high-maintenance – which has its benefits along with its drawbacks.

Usually high performers are inspiring, charismatic, focused, direct and driving. Yet with their high-maintenance flaws like being confrontational, demanding, and impatient, it’s often hard to align goals and strategies with such roadblocks between the lines of communication.

People-reading Skills For Salespeople – Subtle Cues That Can Help You Close More Sales

Salespeople constantly hear that they must know our prospects and sell to them in the way in which they want to be sold. However, within the short time span of an initial meeting or lunch, many salespeople don’t have much time to observe, much less make qualified decisions about the communication methods of those we meet. The DISC Behavioral Profile can offer some much needed assistance in making quick assessments. Using the cues below, you can easily gather some basic information to help you tailor your sales approach “on the fly” and potentially close more sales.

It's that time of year again, the time when everything seems new and we all begin to dream of ways to plan (and accomplish) what we’ve let “slide” during the old year. For managers, New Year’s resolutions can be extremely valuable. However, many simply make broad plans to close more sales, get more done during the day or have better working relationships without considering how to accomplish those goals. Here are some basic skills you and your team can improve upon in 2017 that will have a profound, positive effect on everything else you do.