The other day, I was talking with the vice president of sales for a commercial flooring company about integrating online assessment tools into his hiring process. He was excited about the idea and told me that he was going to have his best salesperson take the assessment as a trial. When I reviewed the salesperson's results, I knew right away that there was a problem. The assessment described an account manager who was brought in after the sale, not a "hunter" responsible for bringing in new business.

I have learned after years of doing this kind of work that you have to trust the assessment results. So I e-mailed the results to the executive, called him to follow up, and gave him my interpretation. There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then he said to me, "Well, I will admit it. I was testing you. I didn't assess my top sales guy. I assessed the guy who should be my top sales guy. He is polished, professional, smart, and clients love him; but he can't generate new business. He is an enigma." It took me just five minutes to show this executive how the assessment report clearly revealed why this salesperson didn't generate much new business. How valuable would this information have proved before hiring this person?

The people we hire can puzzle us. The ones who appear to have great abilities can fall short, while others who are not at the top of our lists end up being superb performers. How can you tell which is which? Good assessment tools can help by shedding light on people's hidden gifts and flaws before you hire them. Specifically, these tools help you to:

By "personnel assessments," I'm referring to online tests that provide feedback on job candidates' skills and abilities. These tools measure talents that are difficult to teach, such as sales effectiveness, leadership ability, competitiveness, sense of urgency, analytical orientation, personal motivation, and practical thinking. They also provide insight into critical but intangible factors like a person's intuitiveness about others, self-confidence, "coachability," and drive to achieve.

If potential employees don't bring the right combination of skills and abilities with them to a position, their chances of failure increase dramatically. By using assessment tools to make sure that all your final candidates have these foundational aptitudes, you're able to focus on finding the A-players among the candidates that you interview. Good evaluation instruments provide you with insight into people that you can't get otherwise.

Assessment tools provide an additional benefit. They temper your natural tendency to be charmed by certain candidates and pursue them despite their weaknesses. I know seasoned sales executives who refuse to interview any potential salespeople until they have completed an online sales assessment. These executives have made too many hiring mistakes based solely on initial impressions and "gut instincts." They like the fact that assessment tools inject objectivity about candidates into the interview process.

Evaluation tools like these also give you a common language to use in your organization as you interview, assess, and discuss candidates. Executives in sales organizations, for instance, will buy into the importance of measuring competitiveness, energy, money motivation, and drive to achieve—all of which are specific categories measured by sales assessment instruments. This common language helps multiple interviewers to evaluate numerous candidates quickly.

Translating your A-Player Profile into an assessment benchmark and then evaluating candidates against these criteria help you to avoid hiring landmines.

For example, executives often learn an industry while working for a big company and then take a leadership role with a smaller company in the same industry. They try to reproduce their success by hiring exactly the same people they used to hire at the old place. The problem with this approach is that different companies have different A-Player Profiles and require distinct types of employees. If you came to a small company from a much bigger organization, the titles used may be identical, but the actual requirements of these roles are often very different. People in smaller organizations typically are expected to wear multiple hats and handle a broader range of responsibilities than they do in larger enterprises. Salespeople have more account management responsibilities; operational employees have more direct client contact; executives have to roll up their sleeves and get more involved in tactical issues. You must take these changes into account when you are hiring—or you greatly increase the chances of a hiring mistake. Assessing candidates based on the right A-Player Profile gives you consistent, impartial data with which to make good hiring decisions.

Good assessment tools allow you to see how well an individual's profile fits with a job's requirements. Someone who has an ideal sales profile typically won't last a month in a project management role. The best project managers, conversely, often fail miserably in sales roles. Strong personnel assessments highlight the gaps between the skills a job requires and the skills a candidate possesses. The bigger the gaps, the larger the likelihood that the candidate won't do the job well.

I know a woman who is a top salesperson for a company in the kitchen and bath industry. She is hard-charging and fast-paced. Yet she also has incredibly strong practical thinking and problem-solving skills. On a 10-point scale, she has an unusually high score of 9. This combination of two seemingly unrelated talents—what I call the sweet-and-sour effect—makes this woman a superb performer. She can quickly solve construction and remodeling problems and effectively sell the solutions that she creates.

We therefore always look for individuals who possess this combination of skills when we assess salespeople for this particular company. When we find someone who has them, we quickly schedule an interview. If all goes well, the company moves swiftly to hire the person because it knows how difficult it is to find salespeople with this combination of abilities.

Alternatively, in design-related fields, if you hire anyone who has low practical thinking scores, watch out. I have worked for years with architectural and design firms to build and lead A-player teams. I have learned that a lack of practical thinking skills severely limits architects' ability to move up the professional food chain. Rather than pouring a lot of time and money into coaching people who lack these skills, it's best to screen them out in the interview process and instead hire people who have better talents. Good assessment instruments are invaluable in uncovering these kinds of weaknesses early—before they cost you a lot of money.

Whether people have the skills to do a job or not, they will not be long-term successes if they lack the appropriate motivation for a role. In contrast, a great motivational profile can turn a borderline candidate into an A-player. I once assessed a salesperson named Brian whose profile was not ideal for an outside sales role. He was less assertive and more analytical than many top salespeople, a profile that could hinder him from effectively prospecting for new business. However, he was strongly motivated by money but still concerned with serving people. He was also motivated just enough by independence and autonomy to thrive in a position that required a lot of self-direction. Yet he was not so autonomous that he rebelled against the authority structure of this sales organization. He also had extremely high scores in understanding people, practical thinking, and personal drive.

When you looked at Brian's overall profile and took into account his solid sales experience (he had a record of accomplishment selling office equipment), you saw an A-player. Sure enough, he has become one of the company's top producers.

Compare this to Janet, a sales candidate I assessed for another wholesaler. This woman had a perfect sales profile in the sense that she was assertive, outgoing, fast-paced, and didn't get bogged down in details. She, like Brian, had very high personal effectiveness scores. However, her motivational profile was the exact opposite of the ideal for the position. She was not motivated by making money.

The wholesaler hired her and saw her excel as a sales rep, but only for a time. Ultimately, Janet was not driven enough by the financial rewards of the job to stay with the company. She ended up leaving to spend more time with her kids and to pursue other interests that paid less but that she found more rewarding.

The topic of cultural fit often comes up when I consult with companies. Every executive understands on a gut level that A-players typically possess more than just strong technical skills. A-players also build relationships, earn trust, and influence others in ways that make the entire organization more effective. Zeroing in on such skills is another area where the right assessment tools can help to avoid bad hires.

I once aided a consulting firm in improving its business development and client satisfaction results. As part of this project, we assessed every consultant from the managing partners to entry-level associates. One particular item jumped out at me upon reviewing the results: Not one person in this entire firm was deeply motivated by personal autonomy and having control. In fact, most of the consultants disliked people who wanted to be in the limelight. This firm's leaders supported a highly democratic environment in which no one felt left out or taken advantage of as decisions were made.

Anyone strongly motivated by autonomy and control would stick out in this firm. Their coworkers would dislike them and see them as power-hungry and constantly jockeying for position. Like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, this firm was likely to snub any individual who did not fit into its democratic culture.

Of course, there could be a situation where this firm actually needed to hire a much more autonomous, individualistic person for a particular role. But because of this cultural issue, the firm's leaders needed to pay special attention to the motivational profile of everyone hired. We used assessment tools to identify people with both the technical skills and the cultural fit to be effective in this environment.

The president of a payroll company contacted me recently with a request to evaluate one of his salespeople. The results came back almost picture perfect. You could have framed this profile and used it as an example of a strong outside sales rep. However, there was one major hole. This person was totally unmotivated to achieve. The assessments revealed that he was frustrated with his job, his goals for the future were unclear, and he had a negative attitude. His lack of motivation showed up in his sales activity. He focused too much on analysis and planning and neglected the need to prospect for new clients.

The president immediately took these results and challenged the salesperson with them. The jury is still out on whether the salesperson is going to make it. However, there's a lesson to be learned here before you hire a new salesperson or any other employee: Insight into people's motivation and drive is invaluable. Someone with terrific skills but no drive to achieve is not going to be an A-player. The ideal candidate for any position possesses both past accomplishments and the motivation to achieve in the future. The lack of either one of these key factors is a yellow flag that must be addressed in the interview process.

In my experience, the best job candidates often have good self-esteem, but they are always driven to achieve. Despite their seeming similarities, these are two very different qualities. A top salesperson with whom I work has poor self-esteem as measured by assessment tools. However, he likes his job, has strong sales skills, and has clear goals that he is motivated to achieve. His performance qualifies him as an A-player in every sense.

Conversely, I have assessed poor performers whose self-esteem levels were through the roof. Their problem was that they felt they had "arrived." They were not motivated to achieve because they were satisfied with their current circumstances. This perspective is often not accurate. (Many people who think they have arrived actually never departed.) But this lack of drive can be hard to detect in an interview. Good assessment tools can help to reveal this hidden problem and keep you from hiring someone you shouldn't.

Now that you understand the value that good assessment tools bring to hiring A-players, here are eight key steps of the interview process with information on where and how to integrate these tools.

Here are some additional tips for using assessment tools to avoid hiring mistakes as part of your interview and hiring process.

While most online assessments are accessed via an easily e-mailed password, have job candidates come into your office to complete these evaluations if possible. This is the only way you can verify that the person you are interviewing in New York—not her superstar sales rep cousin in California—actually answers the assessment questions.

Take the time to find assessment instruments that work. Make sure that your assessment provider explains the results to you in plain English, not psycho-babble. Confirm that executives and managers who oversee hiring for you understand the assessments and the insight they provide.

Then trust the assessments. If an assessment tool shows a candidate to have great strengths, act quickly to interview the person and hire him or her if you remain impressed. If the assessment results reveal danger signs, then take that seriously too. Follow up on those issues in the interview process. Dig in to see if and how these weaknesses show up in the candidate's professional track record.

One of my clients is a large advertising and promotional agency whose controller was interviewing accountants for his department. We included an online assessment benchmark and candidate appraisal in the interview process. One of the candidates had a terrific personality and interviewed very well. However, her assessment results indicated that she lacked the ability to diagnose problems and to focus on analytical issues—which were key abilities required by this role.

Based on this feedback, the controller and his team dug into her past accomplishments in diagnosing, analyzing, and fixing technical accounting problems. It turned out that this woman did not have nearly as much hands-on experience in these areas as they had thought. In fact, her former teammates had taken care of these issues. As a result, my client eliminated her from consideration. Had it not been for the assessment results, they likely would have missed these weaknesses and made a poor and costly hiring decision.

The focus of this chapter is on assessments that dig into a candidate's talents and skills. Another set of valuable tools checks the personal backgrounds of job candidates and screens for illegal drug use. You should consult your attorney on if and how these tools apply to your company and the positions for which you are hiring. It's generally a good idea to use these kinds of tests, for two reasons.

Many people have questions about the legal issues associated with using personnel assessment instruments. These tools must test job candidates against job-related factors and cannot be biased against particular groups. Your assessment provider should be able to give you documentation indicating that its assessments comply with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's requirements. The U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration provides an online report entitled Testing and Assessment: An Employer's Guide to Good Practices that provides good guidance on establishing an effective assessment process in your company. http://wdr.doleta.gov/opr/fulltext/document.cfm?docn=6032