6 Crucial Mindset Behavioral Analysis Traits for New Hires

BY C. Lee Smith
Featured image for “6 Crucial Mindset Behavioral Analysis Traits for New Hires”

Are you ready to make an offer to a top-​notch candidate who’s applied for your open position? Given the current state of the employment market, we don’t blame you being in a hurry. But before you extend the offer, you must consider 6 crucial mindset behavioral analysis traits for new hires.

If you lack data on these important behavioral traits, you might end up with an employee who doesn’t work out. And a bad hire will set you back.

Crucial Mindset Behavioral Analysis Traits for New Hires

Let’s take look at the following crucial mindset traits as they apply to a new employee in your organization:

  • Work Traits
  • Motivation
  • Behavioral Traits
  • Selling Traits
  • Critical Thinking
  • Leadership Traits

Work Traits

Your candidate touts their ability to be resilient and curious. They claim to have references who will speak to these important work traits. When you’re trying to hire a new business specialist, you need a resilient individual, one who takes rejection in stride, learns from the experience and adjusts their approach to the next prospect they target. Resilient employees are less likely to suffer from burnout. Individuals who also possesses curiosity “tend to be critical thinkers.”

Should you take a candidate’s word that they possess these work traits? Not in today’s work environment. Using psychometric assessments, you can determine whether the applicant who wants to be your next rainmaker has the work traits that will set them on the path to success.

Motivation

After you made your most recent new hires, were you surprised to see that a specific team member wasn’t as aggressive as you’d hoped in terms of chasing down new business? You might be able to adjust their behavior by appealing to the right aspect of their motivation.

If you have assigned the new employee to a selling team, but they have a high motivation to work autonomously, you’ve got a mismatch. Or you may have set up a challenge bonus program that you expect will appeal to most of your sales reps. Salespeople are always motivated by money, right?

Not exactly. Some employees have a different primary motivation. A review of their psychometric assessment may reveal that their motivation stems from the ability to have more authority. If you find yourself in this situation, give your new hire more control – allow them to decide how many sales touches to make and which type of outreach to use. You may soon see a huge bump in new leads being generated.

Behavioral Traits

How often have you wondered about the way people behave when they are alone versus the behavioral traits they show when they’re around others, such as being at work? Psychologists have wondered about that too, including William Moulton Marston, Ph.D., the psychologist whose work formed the basis of DISC, a behavioral traits model that classifies behavioral traits based on four quadrants.

When you’re deciding who to hire for a key position, you’ll want to consider more than work traits and motivation. You need to understand the candidates’ behavioral traits. Individuals who are typically more forceful may have the leadership traits that will help them succeed in a supervisory position. If you place them in a department with a headstrong supervisor, those individuals may argue about how to proceed, instead of getting work done. As you review your best candidates, keep in mind that in a sales role, desirable behavioral traits include being inspirational and charming rather than despondent and distant.

Selling Traits

When it comes to selling traits, some sales managers always look for a rep who excels at closing. Other managers will insist that discovery matters more. Regardless of your preference, selling traits matter. And you can measure a candidate’s selling traits by giving them a psychometric assessment specifically designed for sales positions. If discovery matters to you, pay attention to the assessment results regarding whether the applicant can find out and understand why a prospect wants to make a purchase.

Critical Thinking Skills 

It’s not exactly a news flash that employers want workers who possess critical thinking skills. Despite the efforts of educators to help students learn how to identify, analyze and solve problems, too many members of today’s workforce struggle with this core skill. Will your candidate come up with a practical solution to a prospect’s problem, or will they end up far afield, proposing a product you don’t sell? If you hire the candidate with the outstanding selling traits, will they work efficiently, moving from one client to the next? Or will they get jammed up in the details and fail to come up with a proposal that works for the client and your company? Ask yourself these questions as you consider their critical thinking skills in the context of what you also know about their motivation and work traits.

Leadership Traits

How many times have you made the following mistake? When your sales manager leaves, you promote the rep who’s been with you the longest or who excels at sales into the role. This well-​established practice in the sales profession often leads to disaster. Why? Because nobody thought to review the leadership traits of the newly promoted person.

Outstanding sales skills deliver great results to a company. Similarly, great leadership traits improve the motivation and output of the workforce. Rarely does one individual possess both sets of skills. Of course, we worry that putting a mediocre sales rep in charge of the department will result in disaster.

But that’s not what will happen if you promote and hire based on leadership traits. Promoting a rep into a management role buys that individual some respect. After all, they’ll understand exactly what reps put up with on a daily basis – the rejection, the threats to cancel a contract, and the need to document every moment of their work life into the CRM.

Beyond that, a manager with the right leadership traits can inspire others because they’ll adapt their communication style when necessary. They won’t speak down to their team members. At the same time, they’ll insist on accountability.

Succeed in Today's Employment Market

Hiring in today’s employment market can be intimidating even for the most experienced individuals. And if you listen to too many news reports, you may feel pressured to make an offer before your candidate ghosts you. Before you panic and make an expensive decision that could take years to undo, tap into the unbiased data you can get from a psychometric behavioral assessment and use that information to make an informed, instead of an emotional, hiring decision.  When you pay attention to the crucial mindset behavioral mindset traits, you improve your chances of onboarding the kind of employee who will take your organization to the next level.

Photo by Thirdman from Pexels


Share: