As most real estate Principals would know, hiring the right people that can consistently perform at a high level is an extremely difficult challenge.

Caliper Australia has partnered with the real estate industry since its foundation in 2002, helping real estate businesses avoid the common errors that lead Principals and managers towards hiring the wrong candidate.

Renowned real estate coach and mentor, Christine Mikhael, speaks alongside Caliper’s Managing Director, Patrick Farrell about some of the systems and methods Principals can put in place to make sure their business and staff are realising their full potential.

If hiring the right staff is important to your business, make sure you watch this Webinar.

Caliper Accreditation Program

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Since Caliper opened its doors in Australia ten years ago, our consulting team has delivered assessment services to a wide range of companies throughout Australia, South East Asia and India, at every stage of the employee life cycle.

During that time, we have had many requests from internal Human Resources Personnel, Consultants, Coaches and Trainers for them to be able to utilize our assessment tools directly, with their own clients and companies.

In 2012, that opportunity will become available,  as we begin a new era for Caliper by offering the Caliper Accreditation Program, enabling consultants and HR personnel to administer and interpret the Caliper Profile in their own service offering or job role.

Those who will benefit from completing the Caliper Accreditation program include:

Business Coaches

Organisational Consultants

Recruitment Consultants

HR Consultants

Internal HR Personnel

Sales Trainers

The first two-day accreditation course will be held in Melbourne on Thursday April 26 & Friday April 27.

To find out more about this exciting new development, call our office on (03) 9510 5158 or email info@caliper.com.au.  We will outline the accreditation process and the benefits of partnering with one of the world’s leading psychometric assessment providers.

Hire Right in Real Estate Webinar

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Finding the right sales people that can consistently produce good results is one of the most difficult tasks for real estate companies throughout the world.

Real estate professionals are extremely busy people, and often do not have the time or patience to labour through the development of a thorough hiring process.

Responding to a high demand from our many real estate clients, Caliper has developed a hiring program to assist real estate principals and hiring managers by providing a ‘one-stop hiring shop’ for real estate sales consultants.

The Webinar will outline how you can put more rigour and ‘science’ into your hiring process to ensure you hire the ‘right’ candidate for your business.

Title: Hiring Right in Real Estate

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm AEDT

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/125793054

Succession Planning

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When CEO’s are asked who in their company could fill their position if they suddenly had to leave, many of them cannot come up with a single name.

Unfortunately succession planning for the CEO is only the tip of the iceberg. Organisations should have a succession plan in place for every position in their leadership team.

Think about the structure of your company.  How would it suffer if one of your top managers were to leave suddenly? What if you had to leave suddenly? How long would it take to find a suitable replacement while you were gone? What would be the result on productivity?

If you don’t have a succession plan in place, it’s time to create one. Here are some tips on how to do it.

Stay focussed on a succession plan’s purpose. Pinpoint future needs and prepare individuals in the organisation for current and future work. Will they need to be ready to deal with growth and expansion? Alternatively, will they need to be capable of making tough decisions around efficiency, productivity, and downsizing? Remember that the main purpose of a succession plan is to ensure leadership stability and continuity, so bear in mind that grooming someone for the role involves preparing them for what’s happened in the past, what’s happening now, and what they’re likely to face in the future.

Start by identifying the critical positions in your organisation and the core competencies required to successfully perform that position. What would an individual require in terms of training and development to enter that position successfully if it were to vacate suddenly?

Remember that your best bet for a great manager in the future is not always your top performing employee at the time. They must possess the traits and characteristics required to be successful in the new management role they will be filling.

Assess your current talent pool using a valid psychometric assessment instrument to measure your employee’s potential.  This will help make sure your development dollars are being spent on the right person.

From these results, think about who in the organisation might be ready now, 1 -2 years from now, and 3 – 5 years from now. From this point, you can put individual development plans in place for your high potential employees.

Most companies make the mistake of leaving succession planning too late. You should be constantly grooming people for all the critical roles in your company.

By having a comprehensive plan, a business can react to change with confidence and direction rather than uncertainty and desperation, and ensure the seamless transition of their leadership team when the time for change arises.

Identifying Future Leaders and High Potentials

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Many companies take the identification and development of future leaders very seriously.

Planning the future of a company is essential to its ongoing success, and having a program to identify and develop future leaders or managers is extremely important in making sure the organisation can move through times of succession seamlessly.

It is important to examine how these future leaders are identified in each company. Many businesses are guilty of promoting a successful person in one role to a position of incompetence in another role. Not only does the company gain a poor manager, they also lose one of their most effective and reliable staff in the process.

Promoting people is not always as simple as choosing your best performer and moving them up the food chain.

In fact, 40% of internal job moves made by people identified by companies as high potentials end in failure.

Often we find that the people identified as high potentials are analysts, technicians, salespeople or involved in a role that requires a great amount of skill to perform. The question is whether those skills that made them successful in the previous role translate to suitability for the new role. An employee that is highly skilled as a technician often possesses traits and characteristics that do not lend themselves to success in a management position.

Caliper has been involved with companies that have selected large numbers of ‘high potentials’, only to discover that a limited number are actually suited for the role they have been identified for.

This realisation only comes about once upper management seriously examine why the individual was selected, and whether those reasons are relevant to the new position. In other words, companies must ask if the high potential has the necessary traits and characteristics, or ‘hard-wiring’ for the job that they have been identified for.

Remember that it is often the marginal performers in a business that take up most of the time and resources of a company’s development budget. Promoting the wrong person is one of the key reasons for this problem. By making sure that ‘high potentials’ are actually suited for a new role, companies can ensure that their development dollars are being spent on the right people.

Patrick Farrell discusses the costs of making a poor promotion decision, and the importance of making sure that your company is choosing the right high potentials.

Evaluating the Talent in Your Office

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Caliper has previously written content regarding the importance of evaluating a candidate’s potential prior to bringing them onboard in an organisation. But what about those that we already have in the organisation? How can we make sure that their potential and characteristics lend themselves to the role they are actually in? Perhaps they are better deployed elsewhere, or not at all?

When an organisation’s staff are not performing at a high level, companies often ask Caliper to assess the talent pool and find out where and why performance might be falling down.

Interestingly, we quite often find that it is because people are placed in roles that do not suit their natural motivations and potential. Having Sales Managers who should not be managing people but bringing in business is a classic example that we discover all too often. Promoting a highly-skilled and thorough technician to a management position as a reward for their high quality work is another common move that often causes problems.

Remember that productivity and job satisfaction goes up when people are in jobs that ‘fit’. Having a good understanding of the talent in an organisation is essential to increasing productivity and facilitating the growth of employees within the business.

Caliper conducts Team Talent Audit’s to achieve the following objectives:

• Identify the potential of each new employee to ‘grow beyond’ their entry level or specialist role, and to assume higher levels of responsibility within the organisation

• Identify the potential of existing team members to grow and develop within the organisation, and to improve the productivity of the organisation by ensuring individuals are deployed in a way to maximise their talents

• Identify ‘gaps’ and development pathways that will respond to coaching, training and mentoring

• Create succession plans based on an ongoing assessment of both performance and potential

So make sure you have a system in place to identify and develop the talent in your office. If performance is lacking, perhaps you have people that don’t really ‘fit’ in the roles they are in. There could be ‘diamonds in the rough’ that may already be working in the organisation in a different role, or there could be gaps that need to be filled with well-informed, thorough recruitment.

Common Hiring Mistakes To Avoid

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In earlier newsletters, Caliper has written about four of the most common hiring errors that companies make in the recruitment process today.

Relying too much on the myth of experience, being impressed by ‘interview stars’, hiring in one’s own image and depending on training to fill the gaps are some of the most common errors we come across.

Unfortunately, many of those in charge of hiring new staff are unaware that they are making these simple yet costly errors.

Evaluate the staff you have on board and ask yourself what percentage of them are providing the organisation with high performance. If this number is low, perhaps the recruitment process is falling down at one stage or another. Ask yourself what the reason for hiring them in the first place was? Did they display the key characteristics to fulfill the requirements of the job, or did it just ‘feel right’ at the time?

Having a documented, structured recruitment process is essential in getting the right people on board. With structured processes, companies can avoid making emotion or ‘gut feeling’ based decisions around the most important investment in their business – their people.

In this video blog Patrick Farrell discusses some of these common errors and how to make sure you’re hiring the right person for the job.

If you’d like further information about how your business should approach the hiring process, email us at info@caliper.com.au

Teamwork In Business

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Most companies value the idea of having a unified team in the workplace. In fact they value this idea so much that they are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars from the HR budget in team building exercises.

We often hear stories of expensive retreats where the employees get to know each other better and have a lot of fun. And then of course there are the trust exercises in which we fall backwards off a desk and our colleagues catch us (hopefully).

At Caliper we ask many of our clients how effective these exercises actually are, and usually the answer is ‘Well they were great fun and everyone had a laugh.’ The next and most important question we ask is:

‘How did the investment in team building affect actual business performance in the long term?’

Nearly every time, the answer is either minimally or not at all. ‘Feel good’ exercises and becoming friends with your colleagues has little to do with developing an employee’s ability to perform better in the workplace with those around them.

Further, how relevant is the idea of a ‘team’ in a workplace? How often are all employees working together towards a single objective in a business?

We find that in most businesses, it is the culmination of high level individual performances that leads to successful ‘team’ performance. If all individuals are performing at a high level, with an understanding of how those around them function and perform, overall performance invariably rises.

Patrick Farrell discusses this idea and how to identify which ‘team’ model applies to your business in Caliper’s new video blog. Determining how your business works and what strategies will bring out the best in your employees could lift performance and save you wasting thousands of dollars in your HR budget.

If you’d like further information about how your business should approach team building, email us at info@caliper.com.au

Effective Interviewing

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A lot of companies that we speak to find gaining an insight in to a candidate’s suitability through the interview process is often a misleading and somewhat ineffective task. A lot of the time, managers end up just going with their ‘gut instincts’ and hiring the person that ‘feels right’.

Keep in mind however that many factors that you may not be aware of are having an impact on your impression of the candidate in front of you during the interview process.

Research shows that out of six candidate’s that sit down in front of you for an interview, two of them automatically have a better chance of getting the job before they have even opened their mouths to answer your questions.

These candidate’s are Number One, and Number Six. This concept is called ‘Primacy and Recency’, a subconscious reaction that causes you to primarily remember the final candidate (recency), and the first candidate (primacy). This leaves little hope for Candidates 3 and 4, which may well be the applicant best suited for the role!

On top of this, many of us are victims of what we call ‘Interview Stars’. Those outgoing, friendly people that come across well in an interview situation and naturally make a good impression. There’s also the ‘Halo Effect’, in which we are naturally inclined to associate success, proficiency and competency with attractive, well dressed people. For example, if an applicant is very attractive or has high status – we may inaccurately estimate that they are competent in other respects.

Often however, we find that their best performance is the one they give you in the interview room, and their competency for the job is in fact lacking.

So with these natural reactions working against us as interviewers, how can we make sure we are gaining an accurate picture of the suitability of the candidates in front of us? In this video blog Patrick Farrell discusses how to put structure around your interview process and ask the right questions.

We all know the substantial cost of making a poor hiring decision. Getting the interview process right is an essential part of making sure that you’re hiring the right person for your business.

Today’s Property Manager, Building Your Rent Roll

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As the housing market comes under strain, the importance of a good solid rent roll is paramount in ensuring the viability of many Real Estate companies.

Many companies are now hiring dedicated Business Development Managers to seek out opportunities to build the rent roll. As Patrick Farrell discusses in this video blog, the key to success is finding Property Managers that are capable of not only managing your current rent roll, but also building it.

Caliper Australia’s Property Manager Study

Caliper Australia is working with its real estate partners to develop an updated Australasian benchmark for successful Property Managers in the real estate industry.

We are offering a free profile for the best performing Property Manager of any real estate office to help identify the attributes and personality traits that signify a successful Property Manager.

Find out what traits your best Property Manager possesses and what to look for when hiring in the future. As a Principal, this is also a great way to trial the use of profiling at no cost to your business if you are undecided about its value.

We have previously completed a study into identifying the characteristics of successful Real Estate Sales Consultants in Australia, and we are now wanting to understand more about successful Property Managers. We would greatly appreciate your assistance in taking part in this study.

What happens to the results?

Personal Caliper Profile results will be sent to the participant, and one of our team will also discuss the results with them. Most people find that they gain some very valuable insights into themselves and how to play to their own strengths in their careers from this discussion. When the whole study is completed, we will analyse all the results and build a ‘success profile’ for Property Managers in Australia and New Zealand. We will share this information with the participant and the Principal.

If you would like to participate, email: Shaun@caliper.com.au