Articles on talent selection and development
Jamesson Solutions offers insights and ideas.
Jamesson Solutions acquires Polygon Puzzle™, Trust Building™, Team Buildings™ and TPQ™
Jamesson Solutions has purchased three well-known business simulations and one personality assessment instrument. The acquisition includes simulations Polygon Puzzle™, Trust Building™, and Team Buildings™, along with the assessment instrument Team Performance...
Talent Tips: Leadership development helps employee retention
Jamesson Solutions' Donna Warrick sees leadership development as both vital to maintaining a succession pipeline and extremely helpful in employee retention – the talent you already have. And retention is much less expensive than replacing. So it's smart to offer...
Talent Tips: Use assessments to see a prospect’s “driving forces” for a more successful hire
Mike Warrick says a prospect's "driving forces" need to be in synch with their job...and vice versa. When you do individual assessments for top candidates and you find a candidate who's almost ideal, you can tweak the job requirements to be sure you capture their...
Talent Tips: Motivation is the most important factor in choosing any job candidate
Many times people ask us about motivation. What is motivation? Generally, motivation is what drives a person to do things. There's very basic motivation, a very simple level of motivation, which is driven by a need to survive in terms of basics like having shelter,...
How to give women employees upward mobility in your organization
We hear this from clients of all sizes. That is, that women employees are demanding more from work, and they’re leaving all companies in unprecedented numbers to get it. Too often, women hit a “glass ceiling” on advancement. They get discouraged and go somewhere else....
A leadership sandbox – How a peer-to-peer program builds leaders on the job
Peer-to-peer coaching lets each team member try out leadership. Photo: Adobe Stock.Learning to lead can be a matter of jumping in and trying it out. But there needs to be a safe environment for trial-and-error and experimentation – a space where first time leaders...
Take your teams back to school with simulations
We never lose the feeling of back-to-school time, do we? Even if you don’t have kids or your kids have already graduated, we seem programmed to feel that urge to focus more on achievement in late August. Of course, in the Jewish calendar, the new year starts in the...
How Larissa Cerqueira keeps Fluence competitive
We're amazed and inspired. Larissa Cerqueira is CHRO at Fluence, a leader in renewable energy with a significant focus on electric vehicle power storage. Larissa is constantly recruiting, selecting, and onboarding new talent around the world. This is in a rapidly...
A blend of best practices and women-focused initiatives can improve equity in the workplace
Women are still left behind when it comes to advancement in Donna Warrick's Viewpoint column in The Business Journal: “From glass ceiling to glass cliff, leadership succession for women is too often a mirage.”Half of Donna's solution is best practices – assessments...
Before you hire, benchmark the job to find the best matched talent
Time-pressed managers always tell us they’re glad they invested the time when we’re finished. Because two things happen: First, assessments work better, and second, management has a far better shared understanding of the team it’s assembling.
Are we seeing the most agile generation enter the workplace?
Agile intern, Susan Miller is a student at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.When a student can visualize and pitch their own internship, we like to hear about it. After all, we’re in the business of helping companies select the best matched talent based on...
Match extroverts to the right positions to ensure a better long-term hire
Let's look at extroverts. There’s a lot more to personality profiles than whether someone is an “I” or an “E,” as Myers-Briggs might suggest to the casual user. Talent professionals get this and know it’s vital to drill down with MBTI and other assessments. Still,...
How leaders can achieve a positive workplace culture
Recently, we were asked how companies measure if their workplace cultures are successful? Good question. We're so often asked about how to find the problems! Point number one: start by looking for transparency, openness and honesty. Let's clarify. Uunvarnished...
Last time we talked about unconscious bias, they threw paper wads at us
We asked for it. This was the closing exercise in our new Unconscious Bias workshop that serves as feedback about what was learned. Most recently we did this for an automotive supplier in a group of hourly and salaried employees. We wanted to know how well we as...
Why don’t women speak up? Psychological safety.
Psychological safety is necessary for any organization. It helps facilitate open communications, improves individual performance and assures you get the best collaborative ideas. Too often, though, it's lacking and usually this affects women and women of color most of...
Heading off immature leadership with assessments and development
No wonder we have so many people leading who simply aren’t prepared. In the past there were many more layers of management. Those days are long gone. As organizations flattened for efficiency, they lost critical training grounds for leaders.
Measure training and development ROI one person at a time
What’s your ROI on learning initiatives and your overall training and development budget? Don’t feel bad if you don’t have that figure handy. It’s been a topic of debate for decades. Maybe it’s similar to advertising… “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;...
Time to fill the empty vessel
Eleanor Brownn, the inspirational writer, gave us the now popular expression “you cannot serve from an empty vessel” to champion me-time for replenishment. The more jaded among us might prefer, “Put your oxygen mask on first, “given the last 12 months. Choose your...
The PressTime business simulation works well with remote learning
Simulations are powerful learning tools, unfortunately many of them rely on teams working closely together. How can you get around this during the pandemic? Consider the PressTime simulation. It’s ideal as a leader-level sim, because it’s always been computer based....
Using hiring assessments to measure motivation for development and career pathing
Mike Warrick's motivation was to sit down with Alison Nolan, formerly an HR partner at Volvo Group and now with the human development NGO (non-governmental organization), fhi360 to get insights from the field on the topic of motivational assessments. “Hiring...
I’m just a middle-aged white woman
After all, what can a middle-aged white woman possibly offer as a perspective that will make any difference at all? I love my job! It fills my cup and feeds my soul! As a facilitator I get to interact with different people and help them develop skills for being better...
How to avoid the true cost of making the wrong hire
Ever made a wrong hire in your business? Whether you are a large or small organization, have low or high turnover, you probably think you understand the cost of hiring someone new into your company. There’s the cost of advertising, interviewing, drug testing,...
Get The Most Out Of Your Staff By Increasing Employee Engagement
Are you getting the most out of your people? It’s complicated. Increasing employee engagement is a critical component of a healthy workplace. If you’re looking for ways to improve this important metric, keep reading to learn how you can get more from your talented...
How to assess motivation when hiring
What is motivation and why does it matter? To learn more, we had insightful conversations with a psychologist who develops assessments and an HR expert who uses them. Dr. Brett Wells and Alison Nolan, respectively. When you use assessments to dive deeper than...
Communication skills a top priority in Training survey
It’s where hard skills meet soft skills in training and development. Communications skills training can cover the most basic skills—like articulation and posture—and it also dovetails with headier skills like emotional intelligence and giving feedback, where self-awareness and empathy come into play.
It’s not every day you can share a cover story with your client
Iris Austin, HR Partner at Volvo Trucks, made front page news this week here in Greensboro. Six months ago, we heard the Triad Business Journal was researching for an upcoming feature on women in trucking. So we told them about the unique women in leadership program...
Trucking giant launches women’s leadership program
Women's leadership initiative? The first step is to get women to STAY with the company. That’s the approach at Volvo here in Greensboro. Needless to say, trucking isn’t the first place you look work women in leadership positions, but Volvo just wrapped up an...
Why you need assessments for talent selection
For talent acquisition, mere trust is never enough to assure a great match. Don’t start trusting until you can verify that the candidate really is who they say they are in every facet of their résumé. That's the gist of Donna Warrick's article in this week's edition...
Culture is key to attracting talent
Companies are taking innovative steps to attract talent in a competitive hiring environment. Traditional measures of compensation are not enough, as younger generations shop for employers who offer positive work environments, interesting products and a chance to make...
For moms in the workplace, gender inequity goes up
The National Science Foundation offers us a Mother's Day gift of research! But the story's not all roses. Mothers who work are perceived as less committed to their jobs than other women. Shockingly, employers are 100% less likely to proceed with the hiring process for...
Donna Warrick in TrainingMag.com on multi-generational workplace issues
From TrainingMag.com ... The goal in cross-generational communication training is not to study Millennials like aliens from another planet, but rather to improve interpersonal skills among diverse age groups to everyone’s benefit... ...When a seasoned, soon-to-retire...
Leadership & Training walk into a coffee bar…
Kudos to Starbucks for making a statement against racial bias. Closing all their stores for an afternoon of training will cost millions in lost revenue, but pay off in the end. Unfortunately, that payoff is more in the area of public relations than in actual changes...
Character counts, so remember the three Cs
Character counts. It's true for organizations as well as individuals. Recently this question was posed: what are the biggest HR turn-offs you want to avoid in your company's recruitment efforts? The biggest turn-offs for millennials and Generation Z often are often...
Bias against candidates with the highest GPAs…among women
Chalk up another example of gender bias in America. For women looking for jobs, having the highest GPAs may work against them. We're not suggesting that job candidates dumb down their résumés. Instead, we'd rather make a case for smarter hiring. But first: what the...
Can you train away the gender gap?
Women and women's issues continue to make headlines. From the grassroots of the #MeToo movement to the first all-female panel at the lofty World Economic Summit in Davos, media awareness is high. This covers workplace harassment, "glass ceiling" issues that prevent...
Hone your organization for success with greater soft skills through talent acquisition and continuing development
People skills, emotional intelligence and agility — development terms that fall under the umbrella of soft skills — are generally accepted as vital to advancement within an organization. They are important to a company by supporting succession and lowering turnover....
Not your father’s Human Resources. Training can get your organization up to speed.
Donna writes in Training Industry about Human Resources becoming a bigger user of corporate training to succeed in a newly competitive environment. Read the full article here. Talent acquisition is becoming more competitive as America is closer to full employment than...
Vive la différence! Workplace diversity contributes to innovation and how training can help
A new study from North Carolina State University suggests that organizations that make strides to achieve workplace diversity are also more innovative. This innovation manifests in more new products and, in some cases, even more patents and new uses of technology. “We...
HR may need some hand-holding to compete for younger “employee customers”
Employee customers? More and more, organizations are wooing new talent with techniques more akin to marketing than human resources to reach young people who brand themselves by their work. Competition for talent is getting tougher as the economy improves and...
Optimized hiring helps HR fine tune its talent acquisition: but do a little research first
Optimized hiring is getting a lot of coverage in business and news. Basically, this refers to the use of assessment in the hiring process. It’s a fundamental change from earlier HR practices wrought from the continuing refinement of assessments. We’re proponents of...
Generational baggage and how you can check it
Last week’s New York Times Magazine features a sobering and thought-provoking article about a reported increase in the number of adolescents suffering from anxiety. In “The Kids Who Can’t,” Benoit Denizet-Lewis documents a period in the life of a high school student...
The way you thought you needed to talk to Millennials is all wrong
Press Release: The way you thought you needed to talk to Millennials is all wrong— new communications skills course addresses generational differences in business and the workplace Greensboro, NC— In many industries, relations between manufacturers and their dealer...
Ever bomb an interview?
Fess up. Ever bomb an interview? Maybe it was for a job your really wanted. Or a talk with your boss about a salary increase. Or critical performance review. Or an important sales call. It's a little bit like a bad dream, because you probably know you're bombing,...
DISC helps talent acquisition tools do double duty for team development
Jamesson Solutions got into the talent acquisition arena earlier this year by establishing a value-added associate partnership with TTI Success Insights, maker of the TriMetrix assessment suite. We consider the suite to be very powerful, delivering scientifically...
Assessments and feedback for “back-to-workplace”
Chances are your office is pretty slow right now, as coworkers wrap up their summer vacations and your vendors and clients have automated "I will be out of the office until..." messages on their e-mail. If you do business with European companies, it's even harder to...
How to read body language
Current politics is a boon for network, cable and internet news because every event is so visual. And we're not even talking about spectacular footage of space launches or significant human achievements, either. These days it's downright compelling to just watch two...
Five ways to use your body to get what you want in the workplace
Selling an idea, leading a team, winning new business and getting a raise are just a few of the situations in which presentation skills can make a big difference in the outcome. In the three-minute video clip below you can learn about five body language techniques...
From the Beer Game to Paper Planes, business simulations continue to be popular
We're not sure what the first business simulation was, but when you research the topic, you'll find ample references to the Beer Distribution Game. Unfortunately for some players, the "Beer Game" isn't supposed to involve any drinking, just simulated distribution from...
You too can be Wonder Woman
Or, if you don't want to be Wonder Woman, you can be Superman. In her talk, "High Performance Presentation Skills: Body Language," Donna reveals some of the secrets behind her ability to influence and win over a room. There are postures and gestures that are easy to...
The power of good presentation: body language
From winning a job to winning new business for your job, presentation skills are both fundamental and an area for continual development. Body language is key. Body language impacts and sends messages to people all the time. We need to be aware of what our bodies are...
Assessing motivation: Does it match the mission?
A new employee started at a high-level corporate organization. Talented, well-versed in the field, and eager to succeed, all of her previous experience implied that she would excel in her new role. She participated in mentoring opportunities. She completed work on...
Recommended reading: Andrew Chamberlain on the importance of motivation
Writing in the January 2017 Harvard Business Review, Andrew Chamberlain provides fodder to make the case for motivation and motivational assessment in your organization, backed by studies, facts, figures and even Adam Smith. One of the most striking results we’ve...
30 years of marriage = talent acquisition, training and development
(Photo: Mike and Donna Warrick) With our new Talent Acquisition services officially launched, we went to see reporter Steve Huffman at The Business Journal. He wanted to know about running a family business. So we told him. Reading the article, it becomes clear that...
Jamesson Solutions partners with TTI Success Insights for TriMetrix assessments for talent acquisition
We're excited to add a new facet to the Jamesson Solutions products and services: talent acquisition using TriMetrix assessments. Industry thought leader John Sullivan says 2017 is "the year of the algorithm." Sullivan asserts that the recruiting function will finally...
Who Cries in a Business Presentation?
At a recent Advanced Presentation Skills workshop, we spent a day with the senior vice presidents of sales representing a global manufacturing organization. We asked these SVPs if they regularly used stories as part of their business communications, from informal...
“Son, I’m A Storyteller.” Why Business Needs Stories.
This article is the first of a series that will discuss storytelling’s unique power in business communications. We recently talked business and storytelling with Chris Laney, President and CEO of Greensboro, NC-based Zenergy Technologies, a software delivery solutions...
Part 1 – Presentation Basics
Almost all of us will have to speak in front of an audience at some point or another. Whether it’s an internal report to colleagues, an external presentation to current or prospective clients, or a fundraising ask to the local PTA, speaking in public can be nerve...
Part 2 – 6 Elements of Successful Presentations
We've all sat through presentations that are boring, poorly organized, or hampered by overuse or misuse of audio visual tools. And what happens? We tune out. And we might be missing information we really need to have. Sometimes we have to give presentations that are...
Part 3 – Talk Your Walk: Leverage Your Behavior Style for More Effective Presentations
Understanding your behavior style can help you play to your strengths and find ways to anticipate and even mitigate your challenges. At Jamesson Solutions, we have found the DiSC Profile to be a powerful and easy-to-understand resource to learn about your behavioral...
Training ROI: learning and leadership development is becoming more tangible
Training ROI? In our decades-long careers in learning and leadership development the question of return-on-investment has been answered with (highly) educated guesses often pointing to case studies that indicate employee development engagements do improve...