Passion Trumps Intellect

Gary Hamel is going to revolutionize talent sourcing as we know it. Initially, all companies were looking either for conscientiousness and discipline when looking for blue-collar labor or smarts when recruiting for top brass. Back in the 80s the big multinationals realized that the soft skills would also come handy when dealing with the rapidly diversifying business across the globe. So all kinds of "helicopter view" assessments sprang up. At Shell, for instance, the graduate selection criteria are about Capacity (thinking), Achievement (doing) and Relationships (people) - the CAR, as we used to refer to it.

So this Hamel guy comes up with the idea that Intellect accounts only for 15% of what an employer should look for in a potential candidate. Together with Obedience and Diligence, these three account only for 20% or one-fifth of a desired employee profile - they have become commodities, available at will anywhere in the world. What comes on the top of the list? You will find out from the following short video:

Prudential Momentum Program vs. American Idol

Have you heard of a successful graduate recruitment program?

I am deliberately not using words like "successfully-run" or "successfully-implemented" - a graduate program that would produce results positively impacting the bottom line of a company. I stopped by the Moscow Shell office a few weeks ago to have a cup of coffee with an old friend of mine. We tried to remember if any of the graduates who joined the company together with me under the auspices of the Shell Graduate Program were still working there. Fingers on one hand were sufficient.

I have successfully passed the Prudential Momentum Assessment on March 28th, 2011 (i.e. exactly seven months ago), and you can check my notes on that experience in my earlier posts:

It's a small but connected world - Prudential Momentum assessment (Part 1)

Tough Day: Prudential Momentum assessment (Part 2)

Dealing with assessment centers: personal lessons

To give them some credit, Prudential were quite quick to call and congratulate me and assure that a job was guaranteed. I nearly relaxed and started planning my summer vacation, putting my job search on hold. Fatal mistake. Once a month we would swap e-mails and one a month I would be reminded of how wonderful I am and that the job was going to be signed off for me sharp-sharp. The only timeline I was given was October 16th, the date for the global Prudential Momentum kick off. This date did come and pass and only today I received an e-mail:

******

Dear Sergey 

I hope this email finds you well? Today is the day when we formally close the role alignment process for Momentum 2011; it is a great shame that we have been unable to find you a placement within the business but unfortunately we are limited by the live vacancies in the business and this year the role alignment process as been the most competitive yet. I would very much like to stay in touch, you have been an excellent candidate and I would most definitely encourage you to apply again next year if Momentum is still a viable option for you. 

The very best of luck for the future, 

******

I understand that the decision has been taken not to take me in, but maybe a phone call after such a lengthy process and so many promises would have been more appropriate.

Moral: recruitment and dating are very much alike - don't believe anything they say until you see a ring on your finger.

Why did I start talking about American Idol? The principle hardly works: looking for talent just for the sake of talent, with no imminent business need for it does not yield worthy results. A high-potential program is only good when the business is ready and there is a need and (most importantly) available resources (positions, coaches, mentors) to take care of that incoming talent. When HR goes out on a crusade to find bright and beautiful, they do find it but then they are in a fix because the business has not asked for them or they have asked for something else… it's all about communication.

I am not bitter. After all, I am happily employed. Having Plans B, C and D does help a lot when you are back in the marketplace fresh out of school. What left a negative residue is the approach and the attitude… it's all about communication.

Making Recruitment Fun

Just like most children want to know if something is an animal, vegetable or mineral, most employers want to know what type of people come into their organizations. For those purposes they invent a wide variety of instruments ranging from online assessment tools to elaborate assessment center techniques. The recruiters and assessors will carefully observe everything you have said and done, classify it accordingly in immaculately looking recording forms and will pass their judgment according to the company's assessment methodology whether you are a suitable candidate for them or not. Nowadays that nearly everyone is following the same route of such evaluations and assessments, it has become somewhat trite and hackneyed.

So it was a gush of fresh air when a few weeks ago a friend of mine shared an informal (but none the less comprehensive) candidate assessment scale used by one of her senior managers. I cannot look at it without tears and at the same time admiration for the boundless creativity that is inane in the Russian culture.

According to that fine high-ranked specimen of a huge monopoly, all candidates fall into the following categories (I am trying to convey the manager's attitude as close as possible here):

• GHOUL. These have no place in the company and should be escorted (ideally with security) out of the interview venue. Serious self-esteem issues. Can be entertaining but only in retrospect and solely because of masochistically morbid curiosity.

• VEGETABLE. These fall into two subcategories: sad vegetables and happy vegetables. Sad vegetables make you yawn and ponder over Karen Walker's categories of why people choose to be poor or tax evasion being a victimless crime. Happy vegetables do become amusing with their eagerness or rosy idealistic categories of democracy and human rights. Both types are OK for hiring and will form the "solid citizen" pool of the company. Dispensable at will.

• STAR. Enough said. Should hire if the salary ambitions are adequate. Top score for females.

• ALPHA-MALE. Does not apply to women. The highest grade one can get. Issues like moral turpitude or harassment are foreign concepts for them, Machiavelli is a kin, and Joseph Stalin School of Management is the preferred academic institution. Hire by all means and costs: an invaluable asset but will eat you alive at the first opportunity. 

It makes me sad to think that this manager is up there at the senior level, that his approach and comments are tolerated and even made into urban myths, perpetuating the stereotypes of Russian management. Suppose I were to disclose the name of the company or even the name of the manager - nothing would change, as that is what others expect. It might only make that company more desirable for new entrants: to see how charismatic its leaders are, just like Boris Yeltsin's ratings went up after he got drunk and fell from the bridge.

At moments like this I can only quote a famous Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev:

You can't perceive the Russian land,

 You'll fail to measure it with measures,

From common way apart it stands,

You can but trust in Russian treasures. 

How to Trick the Applicant Tracking System?

Getting through the online assessment tools may be the only hurdle you'll face on the way to the job of your dreams. Unfortunately, the ruthless and unyielding to pleas or flattery ATSs (Applicant Tracking Systems), keep their watch at all times to make sure that only those who KNOW how to play the game get through.

The Ladders have unveiled the ultimate checklist of proper resume submission to gain personal attention of the recruiters.

Read it here: Resume Checklist

More posts on resume writing:

• Resume stuff
• Unique tips to help Executive Recruiters find your resume

Online Assessments Discriminate

I have already expressed my distrust and general feeling of uneasiness towards online assessment tools: http://bit.ly/rojWso.

Such tests can be discriminatory and have a strong bias towards gender, sex, race or disability. Employment seekers, however, rarely have choice.

Continue reading here:

Employers turn to tests to weed out job seekers

How Many Case Interviews Does One Need?

If your goal is to join one of the big consultancies, be it Bain, McKinsey, BCG, Roland Berger or any other, a case interview (well… many of them) is an inevitability. Blah, I know.

You only start liking them after you have had way too many. Case interviews are truly a pain: they require a lot of preparation, and yet - no matter how much you prepare, you will always be unprepared for the situation that the interviewers have prepared for you. Let's see: in my short but eventful job searching life I have

·         Relocated an office from Germany to Dubai;

·         Saved a sinking back-office banking company from bankruptcy;

·         Figured out how much tons of goods a city-locked shopping center should receive on a daily basis;

·         Counted all the football stadiums in Russia;

·         Moved a pharma production plant from the Czech Republic to Moscow;

·         Etc, etc, etc.

Maybe I have been lucky so far, but I have been successful with all the case interviews I have had so far. Even those where I had absolutely no idea what to do (normally in cases that deal with advanced Finance or Economics - "Dear Recruiter, please don't ask me to calculate weighted average cost of capital ever again, or I promise I'll slit my wrists right there in your flashy super modern office"). I can't really put my finger on what I am doing right every time I go through those business situations: is it being logical and structured, or is it coming up with truly creative solutions, or is it establishing rapport with the interviewer? If I had to give someone a three bullet point advice on what is essential in a case interview, it would be the following three:

·         Be natural. Do not pretend that you know business better than the interviewers. If you are being interviewed by a respectable consultancy, most likely your interviewers have real-life working experience on the projects that they offer you for analysis, so if you try to prove in the room that you are the prettiest baby in the sandbox, you will lose points automatically. For arrogance at least and for losing the supporting connection from the interviewer, which is critical.

·         Laugh at your mistakes. You will make mistakes. Everyone does. Since the situations you will be dealing with are ambiguous, you will make assumptions that do not always hold water or that do not bring you to the optimal solutions. Accepting your own fallacies and errors with humor and "can-do" attitude will only position you in a better light: it means that you are not afraid of making mistakes, but can learn from them and quickly redirect your efforts. Besides, a joke always brings the tension of the interview down.

·         Be as creative as possible. Throw out the frameworks you learnt at school and make up your own. I don't believe that you cannot come up with your own two-by-two matrix - you can juxtapose everyone and everything. Companies need implementers (B-players, if we follow Jack Welch's classification). But it is the A-players that get the company that competitive edge that bring the disproportionate amount of value to the shareholders. Demonstrate that you have this creative A-player potential and they will be willing to turn a blind eye to your other small mistakes and errors.

I have to confess that I have changed my attitude towards the consulting industry this year. Before doing my MBA I was extremely skeptical about the value of consultants, "selling" their product without really trying to understand your issues, as long as they can be crammed into one of the fancy frameworks. Yet, as everything in this world - IT DEPENDS. It depends on the situation, it depends on the firm, it depends on the consultant, it depends on the corporate culture, it depends on the managerial capacity to manage those consultants, it depends on whether the company itself knows what it wants, and … it depends!

Consulting is an exciting job to do, at least for a while. You travel a lot, you work on interesting projects, you have a lot of exposure to senior people, you acquire massive knowledge about industries, businesses, processes, people, and in order to be in that cohort of highly intelligent, a tad arrogant and truly international people, I am willing to go through another couple of case interviews!

I am attaching links to Case Books from the best business schools, which will definitely help you in preparation for this excruciating experience:

·         Harvard Business School

·         Kellogg

·         Wharton

·         IESE

·         London Business School

Dealing with assessment centers: personal lessons

I am not sure how to explain it, but for the me most difficult part in the job search process is getting to the interview stage. Maybe I just don´t have the winning CV, not matter how much it gets reviewed and re-rewiewed by Career Services and peers. However, once I get to talk to a live person on the other side of the fence, everything goes nice and smoothly. To prove that... all assessment centers I have gone through so far - passed all!

• Shell Recruitment Day 2005: got a job
• DHL Inhouse Consulting assessment 2010: got a job offer
• Prudential Momentum Assessment 2011: successfully passed, awaiting an offer.

Anyway... yesterday I had coffee with my friend Anton who is travelling to Bonn next week for his DHL Inhouse Consulting assessment, so he asked me for advice or any tips that would help him do better. The recommendations I gave him (in concurrence with my friend, who is an expert at SHL, a company specializing in assessment centers and global talent management) were only three, and that is exactly what I try to do every time I face a panel of assessors:

• Don't try to be someone who you are not. It is risky and won't get you far. Trying out new uncustomary behavioral models in the assessment itself will push you off guard and you will reveal even more negative information about yourself than you would if you behaved normally. You will only get more nervous and artificial, and such things are easily picked up by trained assessors.
• Manage your time. This one is critical. The exercises are composed in such a way, that you should only have enough to cast a cursory glance at the materials, identify the key issues and prepare your plan of attack. Nobody expects you to be precise and comprehensive, vice versa - your ability to prioritize and pinpoint the essential is more important.
• Boost your attitude. Don't give up if you feel that you have not done everything right. In a correctly composed assessment, there will be at least two different exercising designed to measure a specific competency. So even if you feel that you have bombed one exercise, there will be at least another opportunity to redeem yourself. Thus, keep your nose up at all times!

Besides, have at least five copies of your resume with you, be smartly dressed, try to establish personal connections with the assessors and the candidates, and remember that it is a learning and netwroking opportunity - make the most out of it.

Good luck!

Tough Day: Prudential Momentum assessment (Part 2)

As the Heathrow Express (nearly said Hogwarts Express…) is carrying me away from London, I would like to ponder on the key moments that I would like to take away from the last day, the day of my assessment for the Prudential Momentum Program. Yes, by the end of the day I was completely exhausted, but energized at the same time. It is a weird feeling of when physically your body is tired, but the level of excitement refuses to go – it happens when you work on exciting but challenging projects, undergo strenuous assessment or get married, I suppose.

The day of assessment brought me what was promised by Prudential and they worked hard on sticking to the time and ensuring that the schedule runs as planned. Two interviews (one business and one HR), a case preparation, individual and group exercises on that case and a peer feedback session at the end. As I mentioned yesterday, only 1% of the applications make it to the assessment center, so that was a motivational factor repeated several times as a kind of morale boost during the pep talks we had at the beginning of the day. The ratio candidatate:assessor of 1:1 also suggested that we were in for some serious stuff. Over coffee I had a chance to ask around about the backgrounds of the folks I would have to go through the day with – mostly British, mostly Finance and (a point in my favor) not MBAs.

The pace of the day does not leave you time for a leisurely comfort break and the lunch is tightly squeezed between assignments. This is also an exercise in managing your time properly, because the amount of information you have to process does not allow you make a thorough analysis of everything, so prioritization is important. Without disclosing the contents that much, here is an overview of the tasks that I went through:

• Business Interview: probably, the easiest part for me. We had a nice chat about my past work experiences with a guy who used to work for Shell, so it was easy to connect and draw on common experiences. In general, I find it very beneficial to find commonalities with the person who interviews you and try to establish a stronger personal bond. I know that it’s trying to skew the scales to my side using the similarity bias, and it does not work at all times, but hey – in love and war… 
• HR Interview: something new for me professionally – a semi-structured interview that is built to gather information about your personality through the experiences you had in the past. It’s narrative-based and there is a lot of latitude for the candidate to talk. I am always a bit wary of talking too much in such occasions. 
• Case Preparation: I was given a bunch of materials about a company and a specific business task. I am not sure if there is a variety of cases and one is selected to ensure that none of the candidates had explicit work experience in that particular industry, but at least that was the case with our group. One hour is enough to prepare for the individual and the group part of the exercise, but yet time is a scarce resource. One piece of advice – brush up your SWOT skills. Otherwise, it’s very similar to any case you would have at a business school, with financials and whole lot of other data cryptically scattered around. 
• Individual Presentation: you have to present back to a panel of assessors the results of the case preparation using any materials available. Even shorter time is allocated for their questions, but the questions are on the spot and some of those were quite unanticipated. 
• Group Exercise: the longest exercise of the day. The group (8 people in my instance) has to arrive at a unanimous decision around a business problem. Only three pieces of advice: collaboration, collaboration and collaboration. My personal challenge was, as usual, balancing not talking excessively but yet being heard and making a good impressing on the assessors. In the feedback session I got some positive comments on how I had done it. 
• Peer Feedback: to my utmost delight, this part was built in the official outline of the day – it is rather uncommon for events like that and it sends a strong message that the company is committed to personal growth of its employees, if it chooses to spend the assessors’ time on conducting those sessions during the assessment center. Mind that there will be official feedback provided at a later stage once the assessors’ opinions are aggregated and the hiring decision is made. This exercise is presented as a chance for the assessors to observe our abilities to give and receive feedback, but personally for me it was more important to hear from my partner how I came across throughout the day. 

It was also a great opportunity to meet the Prudential employees and ask them questions about the company, its culture, working there and their instant feedback on how they perceive you fitting in. Unfortunately, there was only one “momentee” but I did have a long chat with him about his experiences (at the expense of a larger chunk of my lunch though). Even though the time is limited, there are numerous occasions for networking and we all know that sometimes a rightly placed question can get you further than a full-hour interview.

I was promised the feedback and the decision within about 10 days. A bit long for my personal liking, but this is another indication that this whole process is taken seriously at Prudential. Indeed, this was a rewarding experience and irrespective of what the results will be, I am grateful I have gone through the process and already have learnt a lot.

It's a small but connected world - Prudential Momentum assessment (Part 1)

It's a small world we are living in - I think we have established that. Yet, every time I keep getting surprised when this proves itself over and over again.

Today was my big Prudential day: I went through the whole assessment center procedure as a part of the Prudential Momentum Program. We were congratulated early on that only 1% of all the applications make it to the assessment center, so everything I am going to be talking about below pertains to the 8 candidates and 8 assessors who took part in the event. I'll write about how it went a bit later and when I have more time, but just for now - how incredible is that:

• the Momentum manager is my ex-Shell colleague who used to be the HR offshoring project manager and was my contact in the Hague in the times when I was the HR Services Lead for Russia;
• one of the assessors held a short-term position in the Tax department in Shell Downstream;
• another assessor worked for Unilever - a company, which plant I am visiting later this week;
• I got a chance to talk in Afrikaans to another assessor because she comes from my beloved Pretoria;
• one of the 8 candidates graduated from the MBA program in IE just four months ago;
• another candidate is Russian and worked at Salym, a Shell JV I used to work with;
• yet another candidate comes from Romania and speaks fluent Russian.

The morale of the story is clear: the world is getting so interconnected that you need to take care of your reputation irrespective of where you are going and what you are doing, as you never know whom you are going to meet just around the corner in a place you least expect the encounter!

Online assessment tools

Have you recently had a chance to take an online assessment as a part of the recruitment process? I should tell you from my personal experience that those things can be quite tedious and long, but also you are constantly riddled by the question: how do I trick the system?

The system can be tricked - no doubt about that. I am making this bold statement purely because anything created by one human being can be reverse-engineered by another. In the past couple of months I have completed quite a number of various online questionnaires, forms, tests and other forms intended to find out who I am and what I do.

Undoubtedly, there are many advantages to using an online tool in the selection process: they save time, money, efforts and provide consistency alongside with objectivity. At the same time, inadvertently they will sort out potentially brilliant employees who get bored with online assessments / are having a bad day / press wrong buttons / or because the system has been configured improperly. Obviously, each company will be looking for different things in candidates and each assessment tool will be tailored made for them - there are no cookie-cut solutions when it comes to selecting future employees. Still, my success rate so far has been around 50% with those and I can never really predict if I am doing great or poorly on the test.

For instance, I applied for the Sony European Graduate Prorgamme. They offer you to rate the responses to typical management situations according to the degree of their appropriateness in that particular context. There are 20 of them and thinking of each one can get quite tedious. The system is fully automated and there is surely a cut off score that defines if you are progressing in the process of if you receive a "we are sorry" letter. Well, I did not get in.

A different example is The Momentum Programme at Prudential. Their online assessment tool is a combination of pre-selected response choices and free-text answers. While this approach is more time and effort consuming, you get much better results, primarily because they are qualitative.

Which one is better? As always - it depends. For the candidate, doing an automated "click-the-button" test is easier and faster: those normally get completed in about 20-40 minutes. Writing essays is more difficult and you need more time - it took me a couple of hours to complete the Prudential online assessment, but that effort paid off: I have received an invitation for the assessment center at the end of March in London. I am not sure what conclusions we can draw from this, but my observation is that when I get a chance to convey my personality and experience through a narrative, my results are much better. If I am dealing with a robot, I normally fail.

I am still undecided about online assessments. Yes, there are advantages as well as drawbacks and in some situations they can be real life savers. As long as one fully understands the risks associated with using those and uses the tools effectively, there are definitely large organizational benefits that can be reaped. In the meantime, I should be packing for London!

Finding strengths

Have you heard of StrengthsFinder 2.0? I am sure this title has sent a number of my group mates into shudders. Some don't like, others are fascinated by the outcomes, but one thing that nobody can negate is that it is one of those rare personality assessments that focus on the strengths rather than on weaknesses.

From early childhood on, we are being reproached for what we are bad at, but rarely are we praised on our strong points. Why? Because the society likes to hold firm stereotypes of what we should be and once we wander away from the "ideal" picture, there is always a hammer to bang us back down. When you are a genius in Literature and failing in Maths, you will be sent to Maths courses and will have to spend innumerable hours with private teachers and Maths problems, rather than reading more books and honing what you have a natural talent for. It's time to shift the perspective.

StrengthsFinder helps you identify 5 areas (talents) that are your natural strengths. It was fascinating for me to go through the discovery process. At first, I read the book and tried to guess what my 5 talents were. Then I asked a friend who knows me well to guess what those were for me. After that we compared the two lists. Finally, I took the test. The interesting part is that none of us were able to guess more than 3, and two strengths came out of nowhere, but now that I am looking at the definitions, I can surely see myself in those.

The big question is, as always, what am I going to do with the results? Well, the first thing that I did was incorporating some of the strengths and the wording from the book into my resume and it does look nicer. Secondly, I used this concept at the interview when I was going through the assessment center at DHL. I was asked why I believed I would make a good consultant and I compared the qualities I thought a good consultant would possess to the 5 talents identified through SrengthsFinder. I am not claiming it helped greatly, but I got the offer. Thirdly, this assessment provides some suggestions on how you can build up even further in your self-development. After all, we all grow from the positive and strong, not the negative and weak.

If you have not read the book yet, I would definitely recommend, but take it with a pinch of salt. As everything in this world, nothing is definitive, not even death and taxes.

Beauty At Your Finger Tips

Have you ever seen a spray painter at work? In a mere matter of 10-15 minutes you will see a masterpiece being born in front of your own eyes. A spray here, a spray there, smudge, touch, sprinkle, turn, adjust, more spraying... I was captivated and mesmerized  by the whole process when I saw it for the first time in my life. Is it art? Maybe. It is well looked upon art? Doubt so. It is easy to understand, it's right in front of your own set of eyes, but can you do it?

Same with HR. There is the Craft, the Science and the Art of the profession. Just like with anything else. Let's try to visualize the process of a painting creation. You may know the basics of mixing the paints, preparing the canvass, positioning the objects, and the like. You have the Science of the subject matter. Furthermore, you may be good in drawing, creating images, transforming your own ideas into a visual form for others to appreciate. You have the Craft of painting. But does it make you a Raphael or a Picasso? Hardly so - and that is the last element - the Art of the profession.

Obviously, you need all three and all three are there in the society, but they are distributed unevenly. How many HR professionals are out there? If we take the average ratio of 1 HR pro per 40 employees, that is a massive army of HRs out there! How many of them have the Art of the profession? Some. But not all.

Once again, we are coming back to the issue of finding what is it that you are really good at and how do you develop it and capitalize on your strengths. What is easiest/hardest to develop: Science, Craft or Art? How? Everything starts with understanding oneself. Once you have a grasp of who you are, you are much closer to understanding your fellow human beings. You don't need to understand Finance as much, for instance. It will get to to a certain point in your life, but to progress from there a deep insight into the nature of yourself and others is crucial.

I am going to write something about Strengths Finder quite soon. I need to make up my mind about that assessment... will let you know...

How I got to DHL Inhouse Consulting

I am not sure if my career is going to be dominated by yellow and red (remember my previous company was Shell), I just keep my fingers crossed it is not going to be McDonalds in the future.

As you remember, last week I went to Bonn in Germany for an assessment center with DHL Inhouse Consulting. Some of you even sent me messages to find out what that was all about and how to apply, so I figured out I'd rather make the details of the trip public; hope someone finds it interesting and useful.

Everything started on Monday in Bonn with my crude misconstruction of German behavior. Take these three things into consideration: Germany, Monday morning and Germany. Everyone in the office was smiling and greeting me!!! How weird is that? I mean... on a Monday morning it is generally a very BAD idea to talk to me before I had my first cup of coffee. In Bonn people on the streets were greeting me - huh? Well, I allow a possibility that was because I was wearing an awesome Calvin Klein linen suit with a tie and a fresh haircut - still, I was not prepared for that.

What I WAS prepared for is that everything will be measured to the dot and it was. The process ran smoothly according to the schedule, not a minute wasted. I have always admired German punctuality (not when you live with one of them, though), but in general you can check your clock by the German schedule.

The presentations and interviews are done by consultants and project managers, which instantly signals the level of commitment the company places on the recruitment process. As Jack Welch said, recruitment is the single most important activity in any organization. I think Goldman Sachs is another company taking it seriously with up to 60 interviews when you join them.

I have never done a case interview in my life and I should tell you, it's not something you want to go through every day. I used to run assessment centers at Shell, but that was somewhat a different experience... not so stressful I believe. With a case interview you need to think of your feet and lay out your reasoning and calculations there and then. The key (as I see it) is to reveal your thinking and show the ability to look at the problem holistically. Nobody expects you to demonstrate Financial Management knowledge - if that is your biggest asset, probably you should be doing this interview at Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers... no... hold on... scrap the latter one... Obviously, you need to pepper your answer with the typical MBA lingo, such as "sustainable development", "win-win solution", "leverage" and the like, but you can only do this much BS - you are expected to give a concrete recommendation at the end of your verbal torrent of business school profanities. The case studies turned out to be relevant real life problems, examples of which can be found on the DHL Inhouse Consulting website. I struggled a little with "getting my hands dirty" and digging deeper into the numbers, but I am aware of my preference to go for the bigger picture. If you demonstrate the ability to think on the fly, you are fine.

The feedback and decision was instant, so walking away from their office three hours later I was given the offer and the details. HR gets involved only at the final stage when it comes to figures and contracts, and it is all polished and smooth, which sort of can be expected from a worldwide logistics leader.

One concern that I still can't get my head around is: if they stress the importance of teamwork so much, why were all the candidates given only individual assignments? Or maybe it's merely because it is only an assessment for an internship, and the "real" assessment will be more grueling, longer and earth-shattering?

Now I have four months before the start and the personal question is what I need to do to get the most of that internship experience and weigh up all the other options. There are electives, there are long- and short-term exchanges, Venture Lab, and surely I can try getting into another company. They say that options are good, they give you the sense of freedom. But when there are too many of them, they give you a headache.

Tough career choices

Talent vs Skill. One you are born with, the other one takes time and lots of sweat. Still, no matter how hard you try, the most well-skilled person will lose to someone who is naturally talented. So why trying?

In Buckingham M & Clifton D (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths the same questions are echoed when it comes to making decisions about your career:

• What are your talents?
• What roles and careers would make maximal use of your talents?

Deciding on particular skills to develop, I can start the list with

• Public speaking.
• Interpersonal influence.
• Analytical reasoning.
• Ability to emphasize.
• Doing research.
• Acquiring knowledge.
• Thinking creativity.
• ...and it will take us a couple of days to complete it.

Marrying supply with demand, what are the skills required in the market nowadays? I am going to give you the most common MBA answer - it depends. If we talk about CEOs and their jobs, it's one set of skills (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4070/is_n84/ai_14362697/). When we look at, for instance, South Africa, its government is interested in a somewhat different agenda, provided shortage of skilled workers overall: http://www.labour.gov.za/legislation/acts/skills-development/skills-development-act-and-amendments.

The decision is yours and it is difficult to give recommendations. There may be areas you are passionate about but not being naturally talented in them, you will be always playing second roles, while your natural talents may not excite you as much and you may decide not to leverage those in a work environment. Good coaching combined with personality assessments will help, and a bit of judgement will be useful too. Plus I always trust my gut feel and as the saying goes, "He who does not risk, does not drink champagne."

Personality Assessments

There are so many and they are so different. I guess I won't be far off if I say that MBTI, DISC, 16PF, Social Styles, HBDI would be among the most often used ones. There are surely many more, addressing various personality aspects and often targeted for particular goals, e.g. in recruitment or selecting team members for an important task. You might wonder why so many, but let's think about e.g. HBDI and Social Styles, their frameworks being:

While HBDI focuses on the way our brain operates, Social Styles assessment targets the behavioral aspects. While there might be parallels and we can make assumptions (though those can be wrong) like "Analysts most certain have a Green brain", such assumptions will prove to be erroneous without corroborating data.

Why are those assessments important? We talked about the Johari Window before - expanding the open zone (your Arena) is the one way to make sure that you capitalize on your strengths and leverage your weaknesses. As Stephen Covey said, "First seek to understand than to be understood". This is in a very broad sense paraphrasing of Cicero's nosce te ipsum. It is incredibly powerful to realize what your powers and limitations are, even though sometimes we don't like our own reflections in the mirror, but it's unlikely being the mirror's fault.

The most recent assessment I have done myself was comparing my profile to executive benchmark position, which I did through Korn/Ferry International. I was slightly disappointed... An executive benchmark required much lower level of intellectual involvement with issues and less expert knowledge. At the same time, a flexible thinking style is a big no-no in the executive world, so I am not gaining points there. The last drop was the empathy scale. I know that some of my friends complained that my empathy is like that of a refrigerator, and still I scored above the benchmark. Question: what do I do with results like that? Does it mean that most likely an executive position is not such a great fit for me? Well, I scored high on other aspects... Do I need to exercise less flexibility? Do I need to be less intellectual in my approach to problems? Anyone knows how to do that? Suggestions on postcards please.

Final thoughts on assessments and job search. In other words, how can we increase our chances to hit that sweet spot at the intersection of our abilities, attitudes and employment reality? By doing assessments, and I am not limiting this to self-assessments only: by all means, an assessment center or a 360/720 can provide even more information about yourself than you are aware of (think of Johari window again). At the interview, I guarantee (100% assurance) that you will be asked about your strengths and maybe weaknesses. Well, those you get straight from the assessment results. Additionally, if you mention a couple of assessment instruments to the recruiters, you'll make their day and gain brownie points.

Have I convinced you to go and do your own personality inventory? :)