pcl case study
Personality links to HMRC competency framework the issue
The team at HMRC had identified seven competencies that captured their definition of “talent” within the organisation – the characteristics that differentiate “the best” from “the rest” at HMRC – and needed a way of assessing these competencies. PCL was invited to contribute to the assessment aspects of its talent management project that needed to be widely available to, and inclusive of, the talent pool.
the solution
In mid-2005, we worked with the HMRC HR team to develop online assessments that would generate competency ratings within the HMRC framework – and the key to this task was to develop new ways of aligning personality measures to competencies. The new system reflected the complex relationships between personality and HMRC’s required competencies. We surveyed 3,000 volunteer participants, and captured their attributes, temperament and competencies using a series of mathematical algorithms. The reliability of these ratings at HMRC was high, due to the involvement of large numbers of contributing personality items (for example “I get annoyed with people when they make mistakes”) from multiple “personality scales” (such as self-esteem, composure and sensitivity).
the results
At the start of field trials we anticipated the need to progressively fine-tune the system in the light of experience – this is typical in the development of selection systems. After the first trials, although the psychometric properties of the competency measurement were excellent, the relationship between competency ratings and performance was not as significant as we would have liked. In the spirit of the “virtuous cycle” PCL and HMRC immediately revised the competency definitions and algorithms and recoded the data accordingly. Re-analysis showed that the correlation of competency ratings with performance had increased to show a highly significant and potentially predictive relationship between the two.
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