Finding the right people for a job is hard, especially if you have a big company with many employees. Building your company’s culture should be one of your top priorities since it is one of the best ways to succeed.
Recruiting talent is an important job, and in today’s article, we will compare professional sports like the NBA and transfer some of their knowledge and experience into the business world.
You’ll be surprised at how many things you can learn from NBA when it comes to recruiting talent. So, while you catch up on the latest NBA rumors, pay attention to how the best talent arrives in the league.
In fact, many NBA teams used personality profiling as a part of the selection process in the NBA draft.
Personality profiling became standard practice in many companies, and it makes sense that NBA teams look to leverage such tools that will improve their final decision about hiring new talent.
Like most companies, all NBA teams get the potential players to take a personality test, just to see if they are a good fit for their team. In other words, even though talent and potential are crucial when scouting for new players, they still have to blend in with the organization well.
The same goes for companies. Even if you hire the best person for a certain job, they won’t be motivated or productive if they don’t fit in the entire organization.
There are three ways NBA teams use personality assessments to ensure they pick the right person.
- Assess the fit for the role
Since there are a small number of positions on the team, NBA teams usually create a profile for each position where they identify the ideal attributes for players. This can be done by looking back to history and checking other players that have been successful in that role.
Contrary to popular belief, height does not have such an enormous impact on the performance, as you can see by these short players who succeeded in the league: https://edge.twinspires.com/nba/the-shortest-players-in-nba-history/
It can also serve as a lesson for companies while hiring new people. Don’t judge a book immediately by the cover, as you might be surprised by someone who fails at the first impression or disappointed by someone who seems very charismatic initially.
To avoid missing talent or hiring someone that doesn’t fit the role, you should create a profile for that position and base your recruitment on that attributes.
- Fit the Team (Organization)
A team is a group of people with different, skills, attributes, and behaviors that have an understanding (chemistry) of each other. For example, a successful team would be combined with different characteristics such as leadership, calm-headedness, aggression, etc.
Besides their skills, personality profiling is a nice way to find out if the person belongs to the organization. The same thing goes for the NBA where teams wouldn’t hire someone that won’t fit the team.
You can combine the best 5 NBA players in the world, and that team won’t function well since all of them have identical or similar attributes.
- Individual Coaching Plans
You have to remember to look at the long-term goals when hiring people in your organization. In other words, every new talent (especially young people) can be trained and educated to your organization’s needs. It is your job to squeeze out every bit of potential and you can do that by proper training.
The same thing goes for drafting NBA players. Teams develop individual coaching plans to ensure that the talent develops the right way.
However, many organizations make the same mistake of putting new people through the same training and education, which is very wrong. You have to understand that there is no one size fits all approach when it comes to training people.
The HR manager should identify how much structure a person needs to feel confident and work with them all the time.
This is something that we see in the NBA constantly and it proves to be one of the best ways to get the most out of players. Tailoring a coaching approach is difficult, but it is definitely worth it since you’ll have a better chance that the person will come through on the job.
So, if your company is using personality assessments just like in the NBA, make sure to continue using them as they are beneficial for your organization climate.
