How to Hire and Develop A-Players

Frontline Real Estate Services was founded as a people focused business. As a broker, I wanted to work somewhere that provided a supportive and innovative platform that would engage me and allow me to provide the highest level of service to my clients. We envisioned doing this by building strong teams both at a product type level and between our front and back office. Working with our amazing team to create that atmosphere is what keeps me going to this day.

It turns out though, that running a people focused business is hard and takes a lot of intentionality to do it well. This is chiefly because people are all different. They have different needs and desires, passions and pet peeves, strengths and weaknesses. It is hard to create an atmosphere and company culture that engages, inspires, and builds trust with everyone. So, what do you do? At Frontline we decided to invest in a business coach to help us stay true to our original goal of building a people-focused company culture. We made the investment in working with Trevor Throness who, from the start, spelled it out for us: “a great culture insists on having star players in every key seat”.

Getting the right people in the right seats

Making sure we had the right people in the right seats became a focus at Frontline. We started using light personality testing to achieve this when hiring, promoting, and coaching. We have used a few different personality assessments but the one we’ve stuck with is called DISC. Today we use the DISC assessment for a variety of purposes:

• Learning how to communicate with each other better
• Understanding the motivations of others
• Hiring the right person for the right job
• Advancing and promoting people into the right jobs
• Coaching people to recognize their natural areas of strength and weakness
• Self-reflection and personal growth

DISC helps us understand people’s nature and determine if they would be the right fit for a particular role. Below is an overview of how we use DISC in our hiring process.

How WE use DISC WHEN hiring

1. Ask the candidate to fill out the DISC assessment
   We ask all candidates to fill out the assessment as part of the initial screening process. We don’t put too much emphasis on the assessment, we simply explain that it helps us understand some of their basic strengths and weaknesses.  It’s important to explain that you can’t pass or fail the assessment and that there are no wrong answers. Once the candidate has completed the assessment, we ask them to forward the scores to us so the hiring team can have a look at them.
2. Have the candidate estimate how much of each DISC personality they have
   In the next stage of the hiring process, sometimes a phone or video call interview, we quickly describe each category and ask them to estimate which is their strongest, which is their weakest, and which rank second and third – with some context and explanation. Asking for examples of how they see each personality type in themselves can help.This part is important during an interview as you can’t always believe the assessment results in this situation. The candidate may be nervous and answer differently than they normally would or gear their responses to what they think the company is looking for.
3. Pose questions that give clues to their DISC personality
   There are many traits of each DISC personality that you can look for when meeting and talking to someone. Here is a great resource that briefly outlines the 4 main DISC personalities and some of their key traits.
4. Put the right personality types in the right roles
   Using the DISC test in hiring has helped us hire the right people for the right seats. While DISC doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, it’s a great first step to finding a candidate who will be naturally good at the type of behaviour, habits, or tasks a particular role entails. It turns out people are happiest and most productive when they are doing things that fit their nature – the things that they are naturally good at.
5. Understand the limits of what the DISC test tells you
   Using the DISC test in hiring doesn’t tell you everything about the candidate.  Even though they have the right personality type, they still need the right skills and attitudes. You can read more about what DISC doesn’t tell you here.

Putting “the right people in the right seats” was the answer to building a great company culture and a team of A Players at Frontline Real Estate Services. We learned that we cannot assume that everyone is the same and that anyone can fit into any role. There are people who are naturally chatty and people who are quiet by nature. Others are very dominant and want to run their own schedule while others like to be given a list of tasks to finish. We also learned that universally the closer someone’s personality fits the job they do, the happier they’re going to be in that job. Which achieves our goal of building a people focused company.

BRINGING DISC TO MORE BUSINESSES & PEOPLE

As we experienced at Frontline, and Trevor has seen with many companies before, using personality assessments combined with the other tools Trevor introduced us to have been life (and business) changing. Since starting to work with Trevor, Frontline has achieved leaps in financial growth, attracted top talent, and dramatically improved team unity, focus and purpose.

It has been so impactful that I wanted to recommend Trevor to all of my friends and associates who owned or ran a business, but Trevor was way too expensive for most people to afford. This is what drove me to work with Trevor to start Getting People Right (GPR) , an online HR & Leadership education platform. GPR is making Trevor’s revolutionary process, including the DISC assessment, accessible and affordable for anyone in any business and any industry.

At GPR we have developed a free DISC personalities assessment and a free course to teach you how to implement what you learn from the results.

Check out the free DISC Assessment and then take the Free DISC course.