I just returned from a trip to Europe where during our mealtimes we ate with people from a variety of countries. Of course, as always occurs, people ask “what do you do?”. When I told them that our business was providing psychological testing to help companies hire, manage and develop high performers , the discussion turned to how the selection process differs from one country to the next.
Our French Canadians were quick to point out that the process has to be completed in French and that documentation needed to be placed in the personnel files in French. Apparently psychological assessment has been used for quite some time in Canada and is not viewed as particularly earth shattering. Both of the individuals were government employees who resided in Quebec.
Apparently, and this is certainly not documented from my own research, the problem in Canada is that while there is some rigor/regulation required during the hiring process, more significant issues are related to dismissal procedures, mostly related to the fact that a very liberal definition has been attached to stress leave. Once an employee goes out on stress leave, the company is quite limited in its ability to dismiss the employee or to replace the position.
Our Spanish dinner partners discussed the issues around gathering personal information and avoiding the use of any tools that would disclose personal information about someone. They were appalled that someone would suggest inserting a psychological profile within the selection process, since this seemed to violate personal space.
And our German dinner partners didn’t seem to be too concerned about hiring processes. This could either have been because they didn’t know much about hiring people or because the system in Germany again is different from other locations. They seemed to think that being able to gather personality traits and personal styles information would greatly enhance the ability to place the right person in the right job. They were not, however, familiar with the use of testing in the selection process and wondered if we provided our tool in German. We don’t as yet.
As the world gets smaller and we find ourselves in business interactions with companies in countries around the world, all of us will need to upgrade our knowledge in this area, particularly if we expect to remain competitive. It never gets more simple, does it?
Filed under: Current Discussions | Tagged: ECI Behavioral Insight, Objective Hiring, psychological testing in the hiring process, selectio process, assessment tools
Very interesting read!
Thanks, Liz!