Recruiting Talent, Developing Staff and Solving Problems

The Extended DISC system identifies 160 behavioural styles, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, motivators and approaches. Whilst initially sounding bewildering, these styles are a mixture of 4 significant distinct styles (D, I, S and C), easily identified and simple to utilise in daily life. For example, if a company is recruiting for a sales position, long term relationship based selling is has very different requirements to one off inspirational selling.

The Extended DISC tools will help a company identify the behavioral traits customers expect and match your talent to them. Once the talent has come for interview, the tools allow the identification of possible areas of miss-alignment and provide the basis for a thorough behavioral based interview approach, allowing the HR department to begin creating a development plan for the talent you possess.

The value of the tools in the Job Design, Pre-Selection and Interview phases are obvious. Recruitment is an expensive process, not something to be repeated every couple of years, wasting money on media adverts, orientation and induction, not to mention the risk of people leaving the company and taking customers with them. The solution? Develop the talent you have to keep them happy, challenged and committed, and address their perceived weaknesses for the benefit of the individual and the company.

The Extended DISC suite of tools offers a company's HR department a wide choice of options and support to address these challenges. Based on the work of the renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, and developed throughout the 20th century by the likes of the US Military, it offers practical applications to assist in identifying the talent needed, assessing if they will fit and bring value to the company when found, foresee the areas in which they can most naturally develop in the future, and maximise the potential of the staff employed already.

Let's take a look at some ways the Extended DISC suite of tools can be employed in Recruitment and Development. The Extended DISC tools allow a company the means to analyse an existing position and produce a solid vision of what an ideal applicant looks like. The implementation of the Extended DISC Personal and job analyses breaks down what any role involves and more importantly what clients expect to see. 

This presents the opportunity to design a tailor made job advertisement for a specific position with exact requirements rather than general benchmarks. From the outset a company knows exactly what it needs.

The above mentioned 4 behavioral styles and their derivatives and blends have separate, disparate strengths. 

The D are direct and goal oriented, the I are positive and people oriented, the S are committed and team oriented and the C are thorough and process oriented.

To work together effectively they must learn to interact. Post interview Extended DISC can help get the talent into work faster through the induction phase and teach line managers to get the best out of the new recruit. In the long term Extended DISC identifies which roles they are naturally suited to and how best for them to avoid unnecessary stress. It also allows a company to better allocate roles and responsibilities within a team or department, to utilise the talents they contain to the maximum, keeping them happy and committed.

Through looking at candidates Extended DISC profiles, those who are obviously inappropriate are easily identified and discarded in recruitment. Existing staff can be better matched with positions, present and future, where they are most fulfilled and most productive to the organisation. Roles and responsibilities are clarified and matched, and teams understand each other and communicate more effectively. 

The net result? A reduction in problems which divert energy from attaining the success of the company and a solution leading to increased productivity and profitability.