In this presentation, Negar Riazati explains a two‑step hiring and management framework that first assesses a candidate’s production potential with the Performia Executest (referred to as the Production Check) and then evaluates personality traits to anticipate how the individual will behave within the organization. The Production Check is likened to measuring a person’s "helium" – the amount of value they can generate. Once high production potential is confirmed, a personality evaluation is used to identify possible disruptive tendencies, predict tenure, creativity, reaction to pressure, punctuality, adaptability, and suitability for specific roles. The speaker emphasizes that personality tests should not be used to make hire/no‑hire decisions in isolation but to inform placement (e.g., isolated office for high‑value but disruptive staff) and management strategies, thereby reducing surprises for managers.
Chapters
So when it comes to evaluating personality, the first question is, why do you want to evaluate personality? Because I haven't seen a personality test yet that can tell you whether you should hire or not hire a person. Okay, so it's not a tool to be used to make a decision. What personality evaluation is, is a tool to go What more information can I get out of this person to make a final decision and know how I can manage them better? And so really the question is then, like, what is personality? And so there's 2 sides. We have the production potential of a person. This is measured with what we call our Production Check evaluation. This tells us How much value the person is likely to add to the organization over the— while they're working there. This we could actually represent like with helium in a balloon. That's what drives a person to succeed and Production Check measures it. Then we have personality. You could really say what we're looking for in a personality is like what things could really weigh a person down and slow them down from achieving those things, and we can say that's personality. And so when we check personality, what we're looking for firstly, the first thing we're looking for is like, what's the potential for the person to be disruptive? So you might have someone that's actually quite productive on one side, has lots of helium, they've added lots of value in organizations in the past, so you know they're gonna add lots of value in the future. But they could also be someone that actually slows down other people's productivity. And the good thing is you don't sit there and go, oh, now we won't hire the person. What you do is go, you know what, this person, what we should do is give them an office in a separate building and we let them just work and be as productive as all hell and have minimal contact with other staff. Or it could be that you can't hire them because you can't achieve that. But personality beyond that also tells us You know, how likely someone is, how fast they'll pick up the job, how long they might stay in the job. It can tell us, you know, how creative they can be with solutions. It can tell us how they'll react under pressure. It can tell us, you know, how they work with customer service, how they handle it when someone's abusing them, how, you know, well they'll present themselves, how likely they'll be on time or not on time, how easy it is for them to change their normal operating basis, you know, or how easy it is for them to actually handle routine work. You know, how they see— go into a situation, do they see agreements or do they see disagreements first? You know, do they really like people and if they're easily bluffed by the way people look, or are they someone that could never be tricked so they should be in a purchasing type position or, you know, a major decision role? So these are probably 30 or 40 things I've rattled off out of the 300 or 400 things that we can tell you from the Performia Executest. And it's the second step in your strategy for hiring because personality you're only interested in once you know that this person has a lot of helium, a lot of potential to create value. Because what's the use of finding out the personality of someone that can't add value to your organization? It's like I want to buy a racehorse, right? the horse has got broken legs and they'll never repair, I'm not so interested to find out how I feed it and, you know, how I train it because it's never gonna run a race. But it's unbelievably important to know who you bring in because you don't wanna bring this disruption into your organization or you wanna know how to manage it. And also there's a lot of variables that will— that you'll know how to manage, how the person operates, and it'll take a lot of the mystery out of what starts to occur when staff members do things because you're gonna go, I understand that because that's what the personality Evaluation told me. And better still, you may have even done our training on how to evaluate personality. So as a manager, it's like you're going to come across very few situations that are ever going to surprise you again.
