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Power Hour Optometry
Evidence-Based Hiring in Optometry: How to Fix Staffing at the Root | Kati Lechner & Eugene Shatsman
01:03:18
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Katie Lechner
Foreign.
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Eugene Shotsman
Optometry's biggest and longest running show. I'm your host, Eugene Shotsman. We've got a great one for you today because we're digging into something that I think matters to just about everybody in almost every position of the practice.
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Interviewer
Staffing.
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Eugene Shotsman
And the hypothesis of today's show asks us to think about what is the sustainable way to fix the staffing problem, whatever it is in your practice. And it's not another job post, it's better knowing who you're interviewing and hiring and how to work with them. So my guest today is Katie Lechner. She's the senior director of learning at Wonderlic and she lives in the world of selecting and developing great talents. She spent 20 years in that world and she also studies learning and organizational change with a focus on coaching and AI. And she brings a perspective to this conversation that's way more scientific and practical than most of the generic HR advice
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Interviewer
that you've probably heard.
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Eugene Shotsman
So here's where we go in the show, we unpack what evidence based hiring actually means. And it is way more than just a personality test, but it's definitely better than a structured, call it good vibes interview that many people have in their practice. And then we get into the methodology that Wonderlic has developed because it's not just about personality tests, but it's comparing personalities, comparing cognitive ability, it's comparing interests that people have occupationally and why that combination is actually what matters when you're trying to avoid the classic, I had a great interview, but it turned into
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Interviewer
a bad fit type of situation.
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Eugene Shotsman
And then we shift into the part that I think practice owners are really going to love is what happens after you text your existing team with a Wonderlic test so you understand their personality, you understand their natural tendencies and the cognitive ability and also their operational interests. And then how do you use those insights to coach people better? How do you reduce friction? How do you understand what your team might be missing and what to hire for next? So if you ever hired someone that you were super excited about, but then like 60 to 90 days later, you're thinking, man, how did we get this so wrong? This episode is definitely going to help change the way you think about this problem. And by the way, the way I got Katie on the show is that PowerPoint practice actually has a relationship with Wonderlic, so they've made Katie available for us. So as you're listening, if you're interested in testing out anything that you hear in this episode, some of the tests that she's talking about and some of the tools, even just running a few of the Wonderlic tests on your current candidates or on your current staff. Just reach out to the Power Practice and mention this episode and then you can learn more about the platform and then have someone give you a chance to test that out in your own practice. Okay, so quick reminder, if you want any resources from this episode or if you got a topic that you want us to cover, or if you've got a question or you just want to reach out, reach out to me on the Power Practice website or@eugene shotsman.com I promise I listen to the feedback. I definitely make sure that I take everything that you share with me and leverage that in future episodes. And I also appreciate anyone who reaches out and just has questions. I definitely respond to everything that comes in. So make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen, there's a great show. I know you're going to enjoy it. Here's the Power Hour with Katie.
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Interviewer
Katie Lechner, welcome to the Power Hour. Excited to have you on the show.
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Katie Lechner
Thanks, Eugene. I'm excited to be here.
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Interviewer
Okay, so this is such an interesting topic because every single time that I'm on stage and I do one of those polls of. So what are the biggest issues in your practice right now? I guarantee you for the last two or three years, the, the number one thing people say or the number one bar that gets the most votes is always related to staffing. And I'm excited to have you on the show because your, the, the company you work for has a really interesting solution to what we'll call part of the staffing problem. Although maybe it's a bigger part than people realize. So maybe without further ado, just like dig in and tell us a little bit about what Wonderlic does.
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Katie Lechner
Absolutely. So Wonderlic is a talent assessment company. Our mission is to ensure that everybody gets access to evidence based insights so they can make smarter talent decisions so that every person, every individual employee can have and be thriving in their best jobs. We help organizations leverage the best of what over a hundred years of research in selecting and developing employees shows in a way that's accessible for everybody, even if they don't happen to have an industrial organizational psychologist sitting next to them.
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Interviewer
Yeah. And you know, the, at the core of it, right. It's obviously a test that your employees take, that your prospective employees would take. And that test that there's a lot of methodologies out there, right. Like there's the Myers Briggs psych test, there's the Colby testing. There is, gosh, I can't think, but I'm sure there's like four other ones that I'm. Yeah, there are lots of like, this is not a, like a new, new industry, so to speak, in terms of getting people to take a test and then saying based off of their personality, these are the, or based off of the results, this, these are the insights you might have about their personality or their ability to do a specific job.
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Eugene Shotsman
Tell them.
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Interviewer
Talk to me about how Wonderlic is different.
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Katie Lechner
Yeah, thank you for that. Because you're right. There's so much in the space and I know wonder, like ourselves, we've been in the business almost 90 years and so we are not new to this, to this space. But as you say, as you started to get into, a lot of them are really only focused on personality. And we have a big focus on personality too, because that's really going to determine kind of how is somebody showing up? Who are you likely to meet? What do they likely be doing most naturally as an employee? But where Wonderlic is different is we bring in also cognitive ability and we bring in occupational interests, which is a way to think about how motivated somebody is to do their work or the work that's in front of them. And so that's one big differentiator is that we do, we assess more areas and importantly, they are areas that don't overlap with each other. They give us more information Additionally, interests in particular, it's really tough to get at in an interview. If I ask you, you know, hey, Eugene, how much do you care about patient care? You're going to tell me, you know, you absolutely get out of bed every day to do nothing but patient care if you want that job.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Katie Lechner
But the reality is that something else might actually be what gets you out of bed in the morning more. And so that's a thing that's really tough to get at in an interview that we measure as part of our assessments.
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Interviewer
You guys talk about evidence based. What does that mean? So before we dig into like the specifics of the test or the specifics of kind of how, how things work in general, talk to me about what it actually means to do evidence based employee testing.
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Katie Lechner
Yeah. And it, it feels strange to be, to be talking about because, because hiring people is so personalized. So when we talk about, about evidence based, we're really like with any other aspect of science, we are looking at what is the research showing. And there are some seminal studies in this space that, that have investigated this and, and then meta analyses or Studies of studies, which I'm sure your audience is familiar with that. Not, not necessarily these studies, but the concept of a meta analysis that looked at over 85 years of talent selection decisions and what things actually drove the difference between folks who were successful on the job and those who weren't. How can you actually predict that? Performance research has continued to happen. We have, like many industries have our annual conference where new research is discussed. And so those exact numbers have shifted a little bit over the years as we, we reanalyze the data. And by we, I mean the field of industrial organizational psychology, which is the study of people at work. And Wonderlic follows what that academic research shows. So we base our tools on the body of research that demonstrates what is going to actually predict performance for somebody in a job.
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Interviewer
So what's an example of one of those pieces of research and how does it line up with some of the things that you're doing in the test?
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Katie Lechner
Sure. So a couple of studies that we lean on. One is Schmidt and Hunter from 1998. It is a. The. I can get you the actual title of it, but it is slipping my mind right now. But it is a study of the studies across 85 years. There was an update to that in 2016 that is for some reason still a working paper. And then there has been some research from Dr. Sackett and his team that has kind of refined some of that information. And what in. In general terms, kind of what these studies all show is, is kind of the best way to predict whether somebody's going to be good at the job is to watch them do the job, which we see bear out in how referrals often have a better, better success rate in jobs. But the reality is that if, if you and I want to go hire somebody to do a job, their current employer is probably not going to let us come watch them do it. So when we get past that, there are a series of things that, that kind of have these decreasing values in how much they. How much information they add to that hiring decision. And that may. That includes all kinds of things like certainly what Wunderlich tests, but also interviews. And looking at the difference between a structured interview where every candidate is getting the same questions that are selected ahead of time and are related to the job, and an unstructured interview where I might come in and just ask you whatever is on my mind or what, wherever the conversation flows. And we, you know, they looked at those and, and you know, all kinds of things all the way down to even graphology, which is the study of handwriting, which it turns out not very predictive of success on the job. But there was a moment, there was a moment in some parts of the world where that was happening. So what Wonderlic did was kind of look at these studies and, and say, all right, if, if the goal here is to, to deliver this fair predictive science in a way that's accessible for every organization, which things are going to have the biggest payoff from a predictive perspective, but also be something that can actually be done in, in a pre hire setting in a way that's both time and cost effective.
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Interviewer
Got it. And what are some of the, so when, when you mentioned before, personality, cognitive ability, occupational interests, these are all obviously related probably to the, to the things that have been studied. But what, when you frame the reason I'm always skeptical about some of these, some of these tools is, is exactly what you said in the beginning is that, you know, if I'm applying for an, I don't know, a job that requires a heavy amount of analysis, I am going to look at all the questions that basically look like I enjoy looking at data. I enjoy, I enjoy, I am, I am always analyzing how things work, you know, like, or whatever that, whatever those questions are. And like, oh yeah, definitely me because that's the job I'm applying for. And um, and then there's the other side of the equation where, you know, if you have a job that's like all about customer service, for example, and it's like I really love talking to people. People are my favorite. Right. Like a new. And you, you kind of know what you're applying for. So you know, kind of, you know exactly how to game the system. How do you guys prevent that from happening?
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Katie Lechner
That's a great question. So part of that is that the questions are not related to any specific job. One of the things I think is super cool about the way that Wonderlic approaches assessment is that regardless of the job you're applying for, regardless of the job that you're in, everybody takes the same test. And so whether I am applying for a, an entry level front desk job or a, an a vision therapist job, these are going to have different, very different expectations for somebody in a practice. But they're, I'm going to take that same assessment. The questions are going to be the same types of questions all, all the way through. So that is one thing that, that helps with that is we're not, we're not, it's not quite so transparent as, you know, do you like helping customers? There may be Some questions like that. But if there are, everybody's going to get those same questions. Another thing that we do is when we think about occupational interests, which is how we operationalize motivation, our current assessment is actually a force rank. And so rather than just being able to say, yep, I love everything, it really is having to make decisions between things and say, of these three things, I like this one best and then this one and then this one, which helps us to kind of weed out some of that noise, some of that impression management. This type of test is actually really tough to fake because there isn't a clear right answer for most of the questions on the assessment. Another thing is that we have a staff of industrial organizational psychologists. Our psychometrics team is constantly looking at how do we improve the assessment, how do we make things better, how do we make it make the insights better? And that, that is not something that everybody in the space is doing. We spend millions every year on our science to help make sure that it is staying where it should be in order to deliver the best insights for our customers.
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Interviewer
Got it. Okay, so I think we talked a little bit about the test and maybe we'll come back to some specifics later in the show. But right now let's zoom in on how to use it. So what do you recommend in terms of, you know, you know, you, you know, eye care practices somewhat. You've worked with the power practice directly. Tell me what you recommend as far as eye care practice, usage of Wonderlic and what you're seeing that's effective.
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Katie Lechner
Yeah. So in a perfect world, if I were princess of the universe and I got to pick how everybody did their selection process. When a candidate applies to a job at a practice, they take Wonderlic select. That is, those results are then viewed through that job specific lens, which is another thing that really differentiates Wonderlic. Everything we're looking at is through a lens of what's important for this job. And we understand millions of jobs. So every applicant would take that assessment and that's going to give you a sense of how likely compared to the, to a typical applicant for a job like this, how likely is this person to be able to be successful? So that helps me to identify quickly which applicants are most likely to succeed and therefore who should I be paying attention to. This can be super helpful, especially as you have entry level roles where you may not be looking for any specific type of previous experience or where you might be able to look at somebody with transferable skills, because this is getting at kind of raw, innate natural tendencies and capabilities. So then I would focus on those folks who have a more likely than average likelihood to succeed in a job or potential to succeed in the job, review their resumes, do interviews, do any of the typical things you might do. And then when I have my short list of candidates, my last couple of folks that I'm considering, that's when I would come back to Wonderlic, select and really compare the more granular results. Because as, as my, my principal psychometrician likes to say, life is compensatory. None of us is great at everything, sadly. And so we may have one candidate who is more outgoing but maybe a little bit less diligent or dependable in their, their work style. We may have somebody who is more dependable, but might have, might react to stress and a little bit more reactively. And so you can really kind of get into the nuts and bolts of like how are these folks most likely to show up when they are on the job. So it can really help you identify what are my trade offs and really consider what is the environment this person's going into, what's the team and really be looking at what's most important for this job right now and, and help you make that decision between a couple of candidates.
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Interviewer
Okay, so let's, let's, let me just ask a couple of clarifying questions. By the way, never heard the word psychometrician in my.
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Katie Lechner
Okay. Yes.
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Interviewer
Yeah, so that is a, that's a new one for, for the vocabulary.
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Katie Lechner
It was for me too. I had to practice saying it.
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Interviewer
So it is somebody who studies psychometrics, is that right?
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Katie Lechner
Yes, absolutely. And some psychometrics, if we break, break down the etymology of that word, it is the measurement of the mind. So it's when we talk about, about tests and some of the ones that you mentioned at the top of the, of the show, those are psychometric tests. There are other tests that are, would not be considered psychometric tests. And then even within psychometrics, there are varying levels of evidence based.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I bet your chief psychometrician is a fun, fun person to invite to a party.
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Katie Lechner
I love talking to him. Yes.
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Interviewer
Well, okay, so back, back to this test. So you said every candidate should take a test. Yes.
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Eugene Shotsman
How long does this test take?
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Katie Lechner
So typically about 35 to 40 minutes. It kind of can depend a little bit. But, but generally speaking, the, the way it exists today, the first section is cognitive ability. It is 12 minutes. It's 12 minutes for everybody. And then the personality and motivation, which is that interests section, those are a little bit more flexible Folks can kind of take a break in the middle if they choose to, etc.
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Interviewer
So it's a half hour. But we're asking candidates to do this before they've even been considered for a job. Have you ever gotten, have you heard, have any of your clients gotten pushback on that?
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Katie Lechner
Absolutely, we've gotten pushback on it ourselves. But the good thing about having a science based organization is we looked into the data and we looked at where is this happening, what's actually happening, and there's actually a relationship between folks who don't take the test and those who are would score lower on the test. So a couple of things are at play here. One is that folks are more likely to just opt out of taking the assessment if they're not really that into the job, if they're just kind of looking for a job and they're not really excited about this job. So that's, that is already in itself a screening mechanism that's already saying the folks who are engaging in this are the people who actually want this job. The second thing is that there's a relationship between people who will take the assessment and those who score higher on the measurement of conscientiousness, which we show show up as dependability in Wonderlic Select. That's also related to showing up, showing up on time, finishing your work, doing what you say you're going to do. All of those things that are actually really good at predicting whether somebody's going to be successful in a job. And so again, that is another place where folks are kind of self selecting out that are probably people who you wouldn't want to move forward in the first place. Self. Something that I am pretty impressed by though is that if somebody starts the assessment, they tend to finish it somewhere in the like high 80s to 90s percentage. If they start it, they finish it nice.
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Eugene Shotsman
Okay.
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Katie Lechner
I can also tell you for myself, when I was a candidate applying to Waterlake, I will say it was a huge imposter syndrome buster for me that I kind of was able to go into the interviews going well, I got here and they know who I am. I'm not, I'm not snowing them. I haven't convinced them to interview me. And so it actually helped us to have, I think a more honest conversation in the, in the interview because we.
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Interviewer
How do you advise that practices or employers position it pre, pre interview, pre consideration of resume? You know, like I need you to spend 40 minutes in, in a world where it was probably a tougher job market. Also it's not as tight of a job market in 2026 as it was at the same time in 2025. So I bet it's a little bit easier to get people to do this, but still you have to position it. So how do you pitch it to the candidates?
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Katie Lechner
It's a great question. So we, this is another area where we are constantly kind of reviewing and looking at and seeing what's resonating and what's not with candidates. And we do it with our own use of our tools because some certainly we drink our own champagne and we also do it on behalf of our customers and we find language along the lines of, you know, we want you to have a chance to demonstrate your potential that tends to resonate. But we experiment. We've experimented with different language over the years. We also give our customers the ability to customize their own language and so that they can, you can experiment with what, what's working, what's not, what's getting folks to, to engage in the assessment, what's not, which can also give you a preview of that practice's culture, which I think is, is great as well.
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Interviewer
Yeah. Okay, so let's say they take the test. What am I going to learn about the candidate or what are they like what. When you were talking about it, I kind of, I gather that there must be, you know, objective categories that you're evaluating people and within that whole personality, cognitive and occupational interest components. So like, can you talk me through those and tell me what I get?
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Katie Lechner
Absolutely, yes. So when we look at cognitive ability, we are looking at essentially, can somebody do this job? Do they have the cognitive capacity to learn, to solve problems, to adapt to new situations, to transfer learning from one situation to another? In this we are looking for, there's kind of a threshold effect. We're looking for somebody who is going to be able to keep up with that job. And so that threshold effect will, will be at a different place for different jobs. If certainly, you know, I think about a nuclear physicist is going to have to have a different. That job is more cognitively complex than a carpenter's helper, for example. But in both cases we need somebody to have enough becoming with enough cognitive ability to be able to do the job. So one of the important things that we do is we contextualize that. So when we are picking that job specific profile to see through which we'll see the results of a candidate's assessment, we're comparing them to a typical applicant for that job. So we are looking at an optician compared to Typical opticians, an office manager compared to typical office managers. So we can kind of figure out where is this, where's this person landing? The second thing we see is personality. And we measure this on the five factor model of personality. And so if folks are familiar with that, that's, that is absolutely the science that we are based on. But this is going to give you information like dependability which is as I said, are they going to show up on time, are they going to finish their work? It's going to give you some insight into their stress tolerance. How are they, are they likely to react in a moment of stress or are they, are they going to stay cool, calm and collected which sometimes can get all the way to. And then not react in an emergency? It's going to give you things that you might expect like sociability, like cooperation and like open mindedness, kind of that openness to what other ideas might be out there. And then the third section is motivation. There's occupational interests, so, and there are six of them. We use John Holland's Rysic model of occupational interests to measure this. And so we're looking at things like how interested is somebody in supportive or social work, so helping people, how interested are they in enterprising work or that sales and balancing the bottom line and kind of getting, getting, getting to more and next administrative or conventional work, that's that making sure that everybody, everything is getting done in a repeatable, predictable way. Hands on work, which is the physical manifestations of things, creative work or artistic work, which is about innovation and creating new things. So we provide measures on each of these attributes. We then roll them up into a job specific aggregation that helps you at a quick hit see how likely is this person to have the potential to be successful in this job in a way that is specific to that job and allows for that compensation. Somebody who maybe has a little bit lower cognitive ability but a little bit higher dependability, they may be able to kind of push through and power through where somebody who is, you know, in a sales type role. I think about, I think about certainly retail sales associates I've seen in your practices. That's somebody who likely you're going to want to find somebody with a strong, strong enterprising interest. They're really driven by that sales and so that being high enough might, might help even if they're a little bit lower on something like sociability. So that aggregation is, is really valuable especially at the very beginning of the selection process.
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Interviewer
Okay, I have a question. This is going to sound ridiculous. The first thing you said was cognitive. Is somebody ever too smart for a job? So, like, I imagine cognitive is on a scale of, I don't know, whatever, 1 to 100, 1 to 10, whatever it is. So talk to me about how that works. And like, is this just a filter to say, like, hey, I don't want dummies in my practice? Or is this like. Or. Or is this like, hey, I really don't want somebody who scores a top score for a particular role because they're going to get bored?
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Katie Lechner
Yeah, that's a really great question that there has been lots of discussion about in this space and there have been court cases about it and all kinds of things. So one of the things that's important to remember is when we present that information in Wunderlich select, we're presenting it compared to a typical applicant for a job, for this job. So your technicians are being compared to other technicians. Is it possible to have somebody who is going to score so high that they are going to get bored? Theoretically, yes. But generally speaking, our recommendation is not to put a cutoff at too high. What we're really looking for is somebody going to be able to handle the cognitive complexity of this job and have that lesson as a. Less. As a slider or a. Well, you know, they can make up for some of this in, in these ways and more as a. We want to make sure we're. We're kind of passing that threshold and it's a checkbox as much as anything.
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Interviewer
And those cognitive abilities, what. What are the categories for cognitive abilities?
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Katie Lechner
Yeah, so this is an interesting spot, you know, with, with select, we report that out as a single score on cognitive ability. In Wonderlic develop, which we haven't started talking about yet because it's later in the employee lifecycle, we report out on four different cognitive abilities, or we refer to them as capabilities on that side of the tool. In that case, we are looking at fluid reasoning, pattern recognition, quantitative reasoning, and spatial reasoning.
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Interviewer
Okay. And you're basically at that point. So in the beginning, we'll come back to the develop after the break. But I think in the I, in the current model, you're basically giving me a score and I say pass. No, pass.
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Katie Lechner
Basically, right at the very beginning. Yes.
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Interviewer
Yeah. Okay. And then there's behaviors, essentially, and we're trying to say, are these behaviors in line with the, with the job that this person has to do? So, for example, I am fairly. I think when I took this a long time ago, I found myself fairly terrible at. I think it was like, I Don't know if this is a behavior or an interest, but I think it said that I was awful at administrative work. Like, I think my lowest score on everything was like, I got a 4 or something like that on administrative work, which I think out of 100 is pretty bad. So, you know, is like, clearly, don't put me in that role if I'm going to be the. You know, if I'm. If I'm going to be that bad at it. So is that a. Is that an. Is that a. I think you said interest, or is that a personality thing?
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Katie Lechner
That is an interest. And if you'll indulge me for a moment, there is. There's a couple of things at play here. One is, as you say, that's an interest that suggests to me that you are not energized by doing structured, repeatable administrative work. Does that sound right to you?
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Interviewer
That sounds exactly right to me.
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Katie Lechner
Okay. Okay. So what's important to know here is that it's not that you can't do it. It's that given a whole variety of tasks, and one might be selling, one might be innovating, one might be helping people, one might be those structured, repeatable administrative tasks. You are probably not going to be drawn to that administrative task. You're probably going to be drawn to be doing something else. So I talk sometimes with. With sales teams, and they sometimes are so high in enterprising interest, they would actually rather talk somebody else into doing their administrative work than they were doing it themselves. Right. So. So that's one. One thing is that it's just. It's about what drives you. What are. What do you actually doing? What are you most excited to do? However, we can re. We can always reframe our work. So if you're driven by sales, you might see your. You might reframe your administrative work as what allows you to make more sales. If you're driven by. By supportive work, you might reframe your administrative work as what helps you to help people. So that's something important. That's more for the develop conversation, for in the select conversation. What's another thing that's important to keep in mind is actually across the board, what's important to keep in mind is all of these are indications of what is somebody's natural tendency. And so, as I say, we can always reframe our work. We can build muscles, we can set up frameworks for ourselves to support behaviors that might not be as natural. When we're selecting somebody, we want to kind of assume that Most people will do what's most natural for them most of the time. When we're, when we are selecting talent, we don't have a whole lot of evidence to show to demonstrate that somebody has, has made change to be. To behave in a way or be driven in a way that is different than their natural tendencies. So when we're selecting talent, we want to kind of trust that most people are going to follow their natural instincts most of the time. So if I were looking for an office administrator, probably I would. I would be selecting somebody with higher interest in administrative work.
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Interviewer
Got it. Got it. And what about things like, I don't know, like the ability to. So I imagine that there's been a world where somebody who has a sales responsibility is high on the interest of enterprising work, but may not be so excited about something like emotional connection or something that you need to do that work or, I don't know, like, what other personality traits that may, that may be required in order to be able to connect with people like they may. So what, what does that tell you when you're selecting that candidate?
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Katie Lechner
Yeah, when you're selecting that candidate, you really are kind of looking for those, those kind of compensators, so. Or for, for evidence in through their interviews or through their previous experiences that will show you. Well, they seem to have figured this out for themselves. So one thing to keep in mind, if somebody's really driven by enterprising work, even if some of those other things that are going to support sales don't come as naturally, they're more likely to put in the effort to do those things anyway. They're more likely to have figured it out. So if I see somebody who, taking sales as an example, who may be driven by it, but the results are showing, well, they're not, you know, I'm seeing a little bit lower sociability, a little lower cooperation. But I see on, on their resume or I hear in their interviews that they were with multiple organizations for long stretches of time and got promoted repeatedly in sales roles and were hitting Presidents Club or whatever their company called it. This is evidence that they were able to overcome that maybe less natural tendency towards some of the behaviors that are going to help them in sales and likely that was driven by that higher interest in supportive work or, sorry, in enterprising work.
- [34:29]
Interviewer
Got it. Okay, So I think what we'll do is just to sum up this section is that if you are looking to hire someone and you want to make sure they fit a particular job, what you would do is you would say, here's the job and Wonderlic knows what that job requires, whether that's optician or office manager or doctor. And then you would say, okay, now let me ask my candidates to spend 30 minutes taking a test before we interview them. We'll pitch it to them as a, as a way to, to really shine and the, in the interview process or for us to be able to really, for them to be able to showcase their, all of their strengths during the interview process. And then they'll, they'll hopefully take the test. Then we, and then the system basically says you've matched a minimum level of cognitive intelligence. And then based off of the job, here are the personality and behaviors or here are the personality and interests that you have that and based off of the job requirements, this is a match or no match or maybe a match but like should you interview this person or not? Which presumably saves you a lot of time in interviewing the wrong person but also potentially saves you a giant mistake in hiring the wrong person who just interviews. Well.
- [35:55]
Katie Lechner
Absolutely, yes. So one, one quick adjustment there is that rather than saying, oh, this, this is a check and this is a yes and this is a yes, it is actually aggregating all three of those areas so that we can have that balancing effect across different, across the different aspects and that compensation. But it is going to help you identify who is more likely than average to be successful, who has more potential than average to be successful. And that's who you move forward in your process. That's, that's who you, you for move forward to, to resume review and interviewing. And so as you, you implied, it can cut your resume review time in half.
- [36:32]
Interviewer
Yeah. And hopefully also prevents you from making the wrong hires. People.
- [36:37]
Katie Lechner
Absolutely.
- [36:38]
Interviewer
Who, who again just kind of, they interview well. They, they show up well. They, they have a great personality and unfortunately they just don't that they're not a good fit for the job. So after the break, I'm actually going to go to the more interesting in my opinion part of this, which is that once you've run these tests on your team, what can you do with that information? So we'll be right back in the power hour. All right. Back on the Power Hour with Katie Lechner having a fascinating discussion about my, some of my favorite topics, which is organizational behavioral psychology. And really one of the ways that we can use the science in organizational behavioral psych and I guess industrial psych, how we use that science to help, to help our practices. So let's talk. We, so we talked about hiring and I think we talked about and I think there's a clear benefit to running a personality and cognitive and interest test on the people who you're trying to hire, um, at the possible cost of scaring some people away. But it seems to me like it's probably not that you're, you may be scaring away the right people. So we talked about hiring. Now I want to move into the topic of your team management stuff. So let's say I have a practice and let's say I have, I'm just going to make this up. 12 employees. So with those 12 employees, should I have them take the Wonderlic test and what will I learn?
- [38:09]
Katie Lechner
That is a great question and the answer is absolutely you should. So for what we've been talking about so far is Wunderlich select which is designed for pre hire assessment. What we're going to start talking about now more is Wonderlic Develop which is designed for your current employees. So this is this based on the same science. So we're still looking at cognitive abilities, personality and occupational interests. We reframe them as capabilities, behaviors and interests. But same, same underlying science, same research, same stuff in at the core the assessment is a different assessment. Folks who are applying for a job are different than folks who currently have a job. And so we want to make sure we're, we're assessing folks in the right way. What we report out for folks in Wonderlic Develop is we report out on 30 attributes. So we actually go a level deeper than we would than we do in select today. What we, when somebody logs in, the first thing that they're going to see is these are the five attributes that are most important for your job. So if I am an office manager or an optician or a doctor, these, the, there might be some overlap but the, those critical attributes are going to be different for each of those jobs. Everything and this is true actually in select and Develop everything is shown on a scale of 0 to 100. So we need everything easy to interpret. One, one thing that folks often get hung up on is it's not like a grade like in school where a 90 is, is an A and an 80 is a B. It's it's percentile ranking. And So A, an 80 means that this person scored higher or this, this, whatever we're measuring is more natural for this person than 79% of the population. So it's an important thing to keep in mind. So with develop, what we're trying to do is build self awareness for employees. Oftentimes we kind of have A vague idea or we might only get performance feedback that's really outcome driven. What develop allows us to do is get into kind of look under the hood and get at, okay, how, why maybe might I be struggling with my, my sales interactions? To take our previous example, is it because I'm, I'm not really driven by enterprising work? Okay, well, how do we reframe it? Is it because emotional connection doesn't come as naturally for me? Well, in that case, how do I build that muscle? How do I maybe make it not natural, but automatic that I engage in the behaviors that are going to build that emotional connection? How do I structure my work in a way that allows me the energy and the effort to put toward demonstrating that emotional connection when I'm working with my customers? So when I am, when I'm an employee, that's what that allows me to do as a manager, as a business owner. What it allows me to do is kind of look at my team and see again, under the hood, figure out what might be driving the outcomes that I'm seeing on the job. So if I am, if I have somebody who is, gosh, just consistently showing up late for work, well, then I might. There are a couple of things that could be driving that. It could be that they are lower diligence, lower orderliness, lower organization and planning. They're not planning their, their days. They're not, you know, really putting their head down and doing that work. It could also be that they're, they get really, really stressed out easily. And so then, and then that throws them off track. And so getting at kind of some mindfulness practices or some. How do we, how do we make sure you're protecting your energy so you can put it toward not, not losing it when, when something goes awry? Just as, you know, a doctor would never make a prescription without doing some diagnosis. We want to, you know, if I, if I go into, I'm going to totally torture the, the, the, the space. But when I go to my eye doctor this week and I say, hey, doc, I need glasses, if he just hands me glasses, that's not solving anything. He's going to run tests, he's going to figure out what exactly is going on with my eyes to make sure that we've got the right prescription. So same thing is happening here. We are looking at what is actually the underlying natural tendency that is driving somebody to, to show up in the way that they are or to perform in the way that they are.
- [42:46]
Interviewer
Got it? So when, when I think about it, it's the. So I'm getting the information about me and this is like, you know, it's essentially a report about me and assuming that I want to do well at work and I'm self motivated, then I would go in and I would read the report and I would try to say, okay, hey, I can be more mindful. Right. Of these particular, of these particular things. Right. Is there I, when, when you were talking about like actionables, is there a way for employers to make sure that employees like know what they're supposed to be, I guess do what they're supposed to be doing in terms of like acting on some of the things that, that could help them do their job better?
- [43:39]
Katie Lechner
Absolutely. So there with wonder Lake develop. We kind of recommend a development cycle where the first thing that an employee does and they can do this in conjunction with their manager, but the first thing you do is explore the results, see what's, what's there. What, what am I, what am I seeing? What are these tendencies? The next thing is identify one or two things that might be something to work on that might improve your performance. The third step is to calibrate and this is where I'm going to go to my boss, it's going to, where I'm going to go to my mentors, my, my peers, my direct reports. I might look at my performance reviews or feedback I get from customers, or I might look at a 360. All of these are going to be ways to get additional data of around if these are my tendencies, how am I actually showing up? Because we've all done work throughout our careers to get better at things that might not be natural for us. And once I've done that calibration, then we commit to some sort of behavior change. Again, whether that's putting in a structure or I love an if then type of goal. If this happens, then I will do this to kind of remove the thinking from a situation so that it again becomes automatic, even if not natural. Sometimes that is about reframing one's work. As we talked about with our sales example, we might reframe that through another lens that resonates more with that employee. It might be also, and in many cases it is about building that muscle. It's about practicing staying engaged. When something gets tough. It's about practicing finishing one task before moving on to the next one. And what we have within develop is for each of these attributes and as I say, there are 30 of them that we report out on today. Within each of these, for each person we have Recommendations based on their score for how might you develop this? How might you get better at it? So as an employee, I can, I can go in there, I can say, okay, well, I'm looking, I'm having trouble with change. Here are the attributes that, that are going to impact that I, I've identified one, I've worked with my manager. We're going to work, I'm going to work on this one. Here are five examples of how I might do that or I can create my own. That's kind of get. Once I've digested that information, then we have an action planner that helps me to keep track of the goals that I have set, the ones I'm thinking about, the ones I've already completed. And also a key part of any learning and also our development process is to reflect and repeat. Once you've achieved that goal, once you've done what you said you were going to do, go back, think about what did I learn here? It's critical for learning and I can capture that as well as my progress in my action planner, which helps me to have stories for if I'm interviewing for promotion for when I'm writing my self review at the end of the year so that I can really speak to the progress that I've made and the learning that I've done.
- [46:43]
Interviewer
So this is interesting. You said the word self review and I have to hang, I have to like get hung up on this for just a second. So how often should we be having. Based off of what you know and based off of what successful employers in your customer database do, how often should they be talking to employees about the, their kind of, I guess, development plans, development goals and you know, how, how often should it be a formal review? A. You know, you mentioned this concept of a self review. I bet not many companies do that. So just talk to me about the review cycle.
- [47:19]
Katie Lechner
Sure. So this is not so, not as much Wonderlic's wheelhouse, but I can tell you I, I've spent, you know, over 20 years in, in HR and so I can, I can say that the, the nuances might vary a little bit from organization to organization. In some cases you want to be doing it every week. In some cases less frequently is more appropriate. But I would say a good place to start is quarterly. That is a good chunk of time for an employee to be really sinking their teeth into a goal that's going to be, going to be meaningful but not so broad that they lose track of it or that it's easy to forget it. So I Would say quarterly is a great place to start. And different roles, different organizations may need to ramp that up or down. But that's my, that's kind of my, my baseline recommendation.
- [48:09]
Interviewer
Got it. Okay. So kind of going back to this whole concept of, okay, I know all of these things about me when. And that's me, the employee who took the test, and I can understand what I need to do differently and I can create some action items. That's really cool. What about my employer? I, the employer now know some things about my employees or maybe teams. What, what, what do I know that I didn't know before and how has it helped me?
- [48:36]
Katie Lechner
Yes. So one of the things that I think is, is really important to keep in mind is, is most folks end up in people leadership roles because they were really good at doing the thing.
- [48:48]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [48:48]
Katie Lechner
Not because they were, they demonstrated they were great mentors or because they, not even necessarily because they wanted to lead people. They often were great technicians of some sort and, or, or you know, doctors who said, you know, I want to go into business for myself, I want to, I want to do this. And, and part of that package is, congratulations, now you're a people leader. The other, the other piece of that is often people are not taught how to do it. And so I, it, I think it's important to kind of recognize that and to say, it's okay, this can help you do it. So one of the things that is our tendency when we're especially as we're a new people leader or if we're not particularly skilled at it yet is to kind of. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if I'm seeing a behavior that I know I struggled with myself, I'm likely to assume that the person I'm seeing struggling is, is doing so for the same reason I did. And so I'm likely to make the recommendations in, in all good faith, with all good intentions. But what's driving that for that person might be different than what was driving it for me. And so it helps us to, to really get at what is actually going on for this individual. So if I can share an example with an organization that I worked with, there was, there was one team member who, any time that a new, a new initiative was being introduced, they were really kind of like just asking tons and tons and tons of technical questions about it. And like, to the extent that the rest of the team would kind of turn off and they would, it was just kind of, it would derail the progress and just these New initiatives were not launching well. So the manager kind of looked at things and recognized that, you know, this person had really high curiosity, but they had low change adoption. And so what was happening was they really wanted to kind of get at what are all the things that can go wrong here? Before they said, okay, great, I'm ready to go. And so what we actually recommended then and what they did was they brought that person in earlier in change processes. They actually helped to craft the messaging around the change. They were able to ask all of those questions up front because oftentimes their questions were things that the person who had initiated the change hadn't even thought of. They were able to. Able to kind of get that faq, get that testing out, and it helped. And then they became a change agent in the organization. Additionally, it gave them more time to get on board with that change, which can be crucial for somebody who is lower in natural change adoption. So sometimes it really is about looking at, like, okay, what might be working together or working against each other here that's driving the behavior that I'm seeing. Because sometimes we just, you know, we see that person who's kind of punching holes in our. In our, in our wonderful new change and not taking the time to step back and say, okay, what's driving this? Why is this happening? Because I'm sure their intention isn't to derail my progress.
- [51:46]
Interviewer
Yeah. And it's interesting that you would take that person and you would. You would know that about them as a manager and you would say, okay, I need to approach this person a little bit differently than I would approach somebody else. But do I get that, Like, I get that direct feedback directly out of Wonder Lake, like, it analyzes and says, here's how you manage this person.
- [52:09]
Katie Lechner
So it. It doesn't give that directly. Today, this is where a coach can come in handy. This is also where some of our training can come in handy. I know we've talked about the Wonderlic foundation certification, which helps to build fluency. And especially in using these things together, the constellations between attributes is really, really valuable, like in this case, with our new change agent. So those are some things. We're also continuously improving the tools, including looking at fresh ways that we leverage AI to help make the results easier to approach, easier to interpret, so that we can engage in them a little bit more easily. There are for every attribute today, though, and this is going to help help managers, there are today lists of kind of coaching tips for each attribute based on each person's results. So we've Got some stuff there and there's some really exciting new stuff coming on the horizon.
- [53:12]
Eugene Shotsman
Yeah.
- [53:13]
Interviewer
And you know, the other thing that you sort of mentioned, but I just want to iterate this a little bit more is, is can I take a bunch of people that took the Wonderlic test, whether select or develop and make them into a team and then know how good that team would be?
- [53:31]
Katie Lechner
You absolutely can. In develop, we can take our current employees, we can create a team dynamics report. It's just built right in. And you can look at how a team communicates and interacts with each other, how they get work done together, what drives that team. And there's a lot of rich insight there for a manager to identify, like, what's the aggregate of this team, what's the distribution of this team? What are some of the risks, what are some of the benefits? And then we can really get to better understand what's going on with this team in aggregate. But also it helps you identify where there might be outliers. So if I've got a team that is largely, really direct that, you know, low courtesy, high, high assertiveness, but I've got one team member who is high courtesy and lower assertiveness, okay, well, what's going on? What's going on? What is that person's experience? Are they getting steamrolled? Are their ideas being brought, being brought up? What might we be missing by, by allowing their, their more direct teammates to, to dominate that conversation? So it can help us to have those conver, those conversations. It can help us to strategize as a team and as a leader. Another really powerful thing that we do that is we bring it to life with what we call a team dynamics workshop, where we will, we will take a team through the sections that are most relevant for the work that's ahead of them, the challenges they're experiencing, the goals they need to achieve, and talk about how their similarities and differences can help them to achieve those goals. And then we work with that team to kind of set, set standards, to establish some, some interim goals. And then each individual employee can kind of establish their own goals based on what the team has, has kind of chartered around.
- [55:21]
Interviewer
Can you see what's missing on that team as well?
- [55:25]
Katie Lechner
You can, because you can see you get everybody laid out so that we've got a couple of different ways that we, we visualize this data. One is that as I, as I kind of referred to, we, we will plot two attributes against each other, two attributes with each other. So you can see in quadrants kind of where do I have folks and where might I not have people and what might be the impact of that?
- [55:48]
Interviewer
What are some examples of those, of those quadrants?
- [55:51]
Katie Lechner
Sure. So to take the example I was, I have already started using with Communicates and Interacts, we're looking at the relationship between, between assertiveness and courtesy. So we might have a team that is, is direct. We might have a team that is, that comes off as more aloof, one that might come off as more engaging, and each individual is plotted within that matrix. So you can, you have kind of descriptions of what each of those quadrants looks like, what, what they might bring to a team, what, which can help you to understand what you might be missing if you don't have somebody there. But also what we, what we can see is, you know, if I've got a chunk of folks here, but I've got a balancer over here, what is that person likely bringing to the team and what do we need to be careful about? We also then look at individual attributes and we will plot everybody on a spectrum and say, you know, here's the team average, but here's where each individual person is. And then talk about what is the impact of how clustered or distributed those results are and how do we, how do we move forward from there with that information? What.
- [56:59]
Interviewer
So, for example, if somebody has, I don't know, if somebody has a particular behavior that you want to leverage that you may remind that team that, hey, make sure you ask this person's opinion first or, or make sure that they get a chance to provide the first batch of edits before you guys, you know, create a new policy or something. I'm just making this up.
- [57:25]
Katie Lechner
Yeah, totally. One team that I work with there is kind of one person who is lower assertiveness, higher courtesy, and tends to get. And she's in a role that is more administrative and is more kind of functional compared to the more strategic members of the team. One of the things that's nice about the team dynamics is I can make an ad hoc team. So if I've got a project I'm working on, I can do it there too. So in, in looking at this, these team dynamics for this team, what we identified was this. This one person, lower assertiveness, higher courtesy, but she was also higher diligence. She also was really interested in administrative work, which nobody else on the team was driven by. And so one of the things we uncovered was it had never occurred to her that everybody doesn't love making schedules. It had never occurred to her that um, everybody doesn't love coordinating other people and, and sending emails out and making sure that everybody's responding. And so what that team decided was she raised her hand, she said, please give me that work. I was just trying to not take it from you because I don't want to take the fun work from other people. And the rest of the team went, oh, please take it. We don't want it. And we, it's not natural for us. It's not what drives us. It doesn't come naturally. Um, and so sometimes they do have to kind of remind her. She actually just had to send out an email that required follow up. And, and you know, the, the team leader was saying, like, okay, please tell her to get it out by this day. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, let's back up. She's going to get it out. That's not a thing you have to worry about. What we want to remind her is that she's going to have to set a strong deadline and follow up with people because the people she's sending this to are not as interested in administrative work and they're not as diligent as she is. And so it would never occur to her to not immediately respond. But everybody she's sending this to, that's more their tendency. And so we're able to use those results, those Wonderlic develop insights in order to better help this team work together, both by distributing work where it's going to match somebody's natural tendencies best and really got her jazzed about the work she was doing and help her to understand, here's how you're going to actually get what you need out of the rest of the team.
- [59:40]
Interviewer
Got it, Katie. Super fascinating. And I probably think we could talk about this for hours, but we do
- [59:49]
Eugene Shotsman
have to wrap up.
- [59:49]
Interviewer
So I kind of want to leave you with a, or leave the audience with a question that may kind of sum all of this up. What organizations that have used this Wonderlic testing as part of their operating system, operating principles. What, what happens? What, what, what is the outcome that you have seen from your clients? And you know, obviously you've been in business for 90 years, so there's clearly got to be some sort of benefit that people are measuring, right?
- [60:21]
Katie Lechner
Yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple of things that we see. One is that, as I mentioned, we are reducing resume review time right off the top by as much as a half, as half. The second is we are more confident in making that grade higher. And so we see companies. We actually just did a case study for an organization where they saw a 50% reduction in their overall turnover. And a lot of that was actually driven by their voluntary turnover reducing as well. Because what we're seeing is not just that people are better fit for their job, but also when we invest in people's development, when they are cared, feel that their organization cares about them and their growth and their learning, people tend to stick around. I mean, it's an old adage, people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. And so often with a lot of the jobs that they're hiring for, somebody can get 50 cents an hour more down the street. And so what's that differentiator? What's going to keep somebody in your business? What's going to keep somebody there? And so often it is when we look at employee surveys kind of across the industry, people want to feel like they matter. They want to feel like they're being invested in. And so what? Wonderlic select helps us identify those folks who are the strongest fit for the job before they start. And Wonderlic develop helps us to enable self awareness so that those people can really thrive and grow.
- [61:47]
Interviewer
Got it. That's. That's great. And you're saying massive amount of reduction in turnover. And also obviously the risk of hiring is reduced significantly when you.
- [61:59]
Katie Lechner
Absolutely. And when we say higher engagement and higher retention for folks. Yeah, perfect.
- [62:05]
Interviewer
Well, Katie, it's been a pleasure having you on the Power Hour. I think it's been a fascinating conversation into the world of psychometrics and other things that we talked about today. But I think that some of the solutions that you talked about absolutely have a clear impact on business, which is why I wanted to feature it. Power Practice does offer a lot of these services as part of or as something like. Power Practice is a I care specific distribution arm for Wonderlic. So I think that it's great if people are more interested in. Interested in doing some of the stuff that they could potentially reach out to. The Power Practice is a good place to start. Or sponder, like directly if you'd like. And of course, the other piece of this is that I think there's going to be questions that come up from people. We'll make sure that we post some of the information for you, Katie, inside of the show notes in case people want to reach out. But it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me on the Power Hour.
- [63:06]
Katie Lechner
Pleasure. It's been all mine, Eugene. Thank you.