From welfare to the workplace - helping welfare recipients find employment - includes related article

A partnership between industry and government can reform welfare and enrich society by uncovering talented individuals with the potential to perform effectively in a wide range of jobs - and perhaps do them better than they are currently being done.

People from every point of the political compass agree the welfare system needs reform and that work should be part of that reform. But there agreement ends. Few acknowledge that the millions of people on welfare or functioning at the edge of society provide an enormous source of untapped talent.

Many anti-poverty programs have failed because they relied on the misguided notion that simply providing training and a job will somehow break the poverty cycle. But before welfare recipients can break the poverty cycle there must be a determination as to whether they have what it really takes to succeed - the essential motivations, potential, and personality strengths needed to perform well in a particular position.

In my company's assessments of more than one million individuals for over 21,000 companies worldwide, we have found that regardless of experience or background, people must first be matched to jobs on the basis of their inherent personality attributes and motivations. Then, if given the appropriate training to do that job, they will succeed.

This "job-matching" process, which thousands of human resource executives have adapted to identify successful job candidates for virtually every corporate position, is the key to breaking the vicious welfare cycle.

"EXPERIENCED" DOESN'T MEAN "SUCCESSFUL"

When assessing the potential of individuals trying to make the transition from welfare to the workplace, reliance on experience is one of the first hiring myths that must be debunked.

Human resource professionals traditionally use experience - especially directly related experience - as one of the key criteria for measuring job candidates. For a sales job, the traditional approach is to seek applicants who have sales experience, preferably in selling the same product or service. Since most people trying to make the transition from welfare to the workplace do not have extensive experience, they find themselves trapped in a revolving door.

But consider for a moment: we have found that 55 percent of the current sales professionals have absolutely no ability to sell. Another 25 percent have sales ability but are selling the wrong product or service. The remaining 20 percent are doing precisely the right jobs for themselves and their companies, and, invariably, are making 80 percent of all sales.

Our studies indicate similar trends in management, customer service and a myriad of other positions. For too many people, 12 years of experience is just one bad year repeated a dozen times. So, why rely so heavily on experience in the hiring process? Does this emphasis ensure the best person is hired for a job, or simply encourage repetition of mediocre performance?

WHAT IT TAKES TO SUCCEED

Is there some better way to gauge future performance than relying on what someone has done before, or superficial impressions that come across in an interview? We have found that success can be predicted by assessing an individual's potential, then following up with an in-depth interview.

Sales. Successful sales people need three essential qualities: empathy, ego drive and ego strength. Salespeople need empathy to accurately sense the reactions of prospects and clients. They need ego drive, also known as the motivation to persuade people, to bring others around to their point of view. And they need ego strength, the ability to bounce back from rejection. People that possess these three qualities, regardless of their experience, will enjoy sales work, be motivated to sell, and perform very well in a sales position. Our studies have found that 25 percent of the general population, regardless of what they have done in the past, have excellent sales potential.

Management. People that want to succeed in management need a different set of fundamental personality characteristics. They must start out with the ability to focus and motivate others. Depending on the position, they may need the ability to see the big picture, take calculated risks, or make decisions. And generally they should be good communicators who command respect, are able to delegate, and who treat others fairly and with consideration.

Customer service. For customer service positions, a drive to please others is one of the most important personality characteristics. Just as a salesperson is driven to hear others say, "yes," a customer service representative needs to hear someone say, "thank you." The best customer service representatives are also conscientious, secure, flexible, outgoing, and adept at solving problems.

In essence, people succeed because of who they are - not because of what they have done. Finding successful job candidates requires looking at people in a whole new light, without regard to what they have done before. Potential is more important than experience, and testing for potential has enormous implications for people trying to make the transition from welfare to the workplace.

The underlying personality qualities needed for success in a particular job are not readily apparent on a resume and cannot be uncovered in a quick, initial interview. Keeping an open mind is essential when searching for talent among individuals who may not know all of the "right" things to say during hiring interviews. Be open to alternate ways to uncover talent and potential.

WHY TRAINING ALONE DOES NOT WORK

My company discovered the need to first evaluate applicants' true motivations and potential in the early 1960s, when we developed a program to find appropriate jobs for people on welfare. One of the first companies we approached turned us down flat, citing their experience the previous year.

As they described it, they offered 10 welding jobs in their factory. Candidates were provided by various welfare agencies, and 10 individuals were eventually hired to fill those positions. Within two months, six of the 10 had to be terminated, two quit, and another one was terminated three months later. This left only one out of the 10 who succeeded. As the employer put it, "They were all strong and healthy and should have succeeded. Yet nine out of the 10 of 'those people' failed." He then asked, "How can we afford that kind of attrition?"

While the company was adamant about not participating in our program, they did allow us to contact the 10 individuals. We administered a battery of personality and skills tests to all 10 and discovered that six of the 10 completely lacked the hand-eye coordination essential to welding. In addition, two of the individuals were impatient, restless, and clearly needed to work in a people-oriented position, as opposed to a purely physical one such as welding.

In all of these cases, it would have been easy to predict that these individuals would not be on the job very long. Only one possessed the hand-eye coordination, the temperament to do repetitive work, the stability and the conscientiousness that indicated that he could indeed succeed as a welder. And that individual, of course, was the one who was able to break the mold and make a significant contribution.

Nine out of 10 people failed in this situation because they were literally shoved into existing jobs for which they were fundamentally unsuited, positions for which they lacked the necessary talents, abilities and potential. Had they been matched to different positions that utilized their key strengths and motivations, they would have had a much better chance of succeeding and being happy with their work.

RUNNING A "WELFARE-TO-WORK" PROGRAM

In the late 1960s and early 1970s our company set up two projects - in New York and San Juan - to help people move from welfare to the workplace.

Anti-poverty agencies such as the Department of Welfare, the Office of Unemployment, and several civil rights organizations were asked to refer people to the program. Typically, groups of people would take a battery of personality and skills assessments, then be given an in-depth interview.

Those individuals who possessed the ability or potential to succeed in an available job would then be enrolled in a work preparation training program. Training ranged from one to two weeks, depending on the person's specific needs. During this training program, participants received counseling to help prepare them for the best possible job match.

Time was also devoted to preparing each person for a job interview. At the end of the training period, participants were referred to participating companies. Prior to the job interview, the participating company's human resource executives received the results of the personality and skills assessments, so that they had a clear understanding of why a particular person had been recommended.

Usually a participant who was hired underwent a transition of a week or two that included extensive coaching and mentoring. In addition, counseling was made available to assist the new employees with concerns that might arise, and regular follow-up was conducted to make sure everything was going well.

In this way, thousands of people made the transition from welfare to the workplace in several separate projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

DIAGRAM FOR THE FUTURE

The success of our efforts is based on the simple proposal that all human beings have fundamental weaknesses, but most also possess important strengths. More often than not, success depends on whether, through planning, opportunity or perhaps even luck, individuals are permitted to play to their strengths, rather than attempt to perform a job requiring qualities they lack.

Most welfare recipients, for a multitude of reasons, have not had the opportunity to play to their strengths. Our programs worked because they were designed to cut through superficial background factors to uncover the strengths in each individual buried under the debris of discrimination and the welfare cycle. Once those key strengths were uncovered, training could be specifically applied to maximize those strengths and relate them to the functional requirements of the job. We did not attempt to push people into jobs they were not suited for, in the hope that training could perform magical wonders. We preferred not to place an individual, rather than add still another defeat to an already losing psychology.

Breaking the welfare cycle and tapping the enormous hidden human resource reserves that exist in the current welfare population will require a partnership between industry and government. Industry must offer a wide range of jobs and be willing to replace their usual hiring criteria, including experience, with the one criterion that marks job success - the basic appropriateness of the individual to the job.

Funding should involve a partnership between companies offering jobs and government agencies that help subsidize the selection and pre-job training components of such a program. This blueprint will take a tremendous commitment, but it can work. If government and industry work together, view the welfare population as a rich source of talent, and accord this population the same opportunities that are provided to the middle class - looking at each person's basic ability and matching that ability to a specific job - the poverty cycle can indeed be broken.

We know from our experience that most people want to get off welfare. They want to work. They want the ego-satisfaction of knowing they can make it in the mainstream of society and the self-respect that comes from doing a job well.

By throwing away the "experienced only" model, assessing talents and applying training to match those talents to appropriate jobs, we have an opportunity to finally break the welfare cycle.

RELATED ARTICLE: An Early Success

In 1965, my company was given the opportunity to put this assessment approach to the acid test. We received a grant of $198,000 by the then-existing Office of Economic Opportunity to place "chronically unemployed individuals" in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in professional-level sales jobs.

Participants in the program could not earn more than $1,800 per year. They did not meet the stereotyped criteria companies normally used in making hiring decisions, nor were they experienced or adept at hiring interviews. Many were minorities, some were physically disabled and somewhat over half were women. The project was designed to assess the basic personality attributes and motivations of each participant and determine whether he or she was suited for a sales position.

Participants completed a comprehensive personality assessment instrument that was developed to assess an individual's primary motivations, strengths, and areas ripe for development. In effect, each applicant's potential, as assessed by the instrument and an intense follow-up interview, replaced the typical criteria that could not be brought to the interview table by applicants with an underprivileged background.

The success of the initial program lead to an additional $300,000 to fund the program for a second year. In total, out of 1,700 "chronically unemployed individuals" who were assessed, our company was able to place 350 people in professional sales jobs with oil companies, mutual fund houses, radio stations, newspapers, and other businesses. A chronically unemployed woman who baby-sat for my son became the first woman ever to be licensed to sell mutual funds on the island of Puerto Rico. Six months later, she returned and asked me to hire five people from a subsequent class to work for her.

The major frustration of the project was that it was limited to sales jobs. While we did place 350 people in sales, we tested another 1,350 who simply did not possess sales dynamics, but had other abilities. They would have been ideally suited to many other jobs, but we did not have those jobs available.

Herbert M. Greenberg, Ph.D., chairman and chief executive officer of Caliper, is a recognized authority on the relationship between personality and job performance. His writings on the subject include articles in The Harvard Business Review and a book, What It Takes To Succeed in Sales.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group