CCSS - Comprehensive Candidate Selection System (summary)

The state of affairs

The success of any team and any organisation depends overwhelmingly on a critical mass of high-quality people in key positions. Despite this fact of decisive importance, so-called “staffing decisions”, or decisions about selecting and placing colleagues, fall into the category of the weakest managerial decisions. Practice points to an anomaly in which only one third of these decisions has a satisfactory outcome. A well-known truth contributes to this too: first-rate managers choose first-class people as their colleagues, whereas weaker managers choose third-rate people, driven by egocentric impulses, fear of internal competition, abuse of authority and the manipulation of influence. Such practice creates devastating long-term consequences. Overcoming these mismatches can significantly improve the functioning and performance of almost every organisation.

Needs

Every organisation has a recurring need to recruit, place, develop, promote and dismiss its colleagues. Business owners and managers need information, adequate knowledge and arguments to attract candidates, choose the best of them and obtain recommendations for working with them in future. These needs become especially acute when it comes to choosing leaders, senior managers and successors who are to take on the greatest responsibilities. Career planning for employees likewise requires an assessment of people’s predispositions, abilities and character traits.

Problems

Many agree that human resources are the most important capital of any organisation, yet they do not devote enough attention, time, effort and financial resources to selecting and placing people. That is the first problem and, unfortunately, only one of many. In general, there is a wide gap between the achievements of modern science and common practice in the field of selecting and placing people. Typical problems in this area can be grouped into several categories:

• A general lack of knowledge in this field, primarily an unfamiliarity with modern methods, tools and software.
• Unclear job requirements and an unidentified organisational culture.
• The inability to compare job requirements and organisational culture with the characteristics of candidates.
• Superficial approaches to selection whose probability of a good choice is less than 40 per cent.
• A lack of specific recommendations for working with the selected candidates.

The solution - the latest scientific findings, a systemic approach and ICT support

A comprehensive system for selecting and placing candidates makes it possible to take staffing decisions with a probability of a good choice greater than 90 per cent. It draws on five general groups of human characteristics: multiple intelligences, character virtues, intellectual strength, and communication and team characteristics. All testing and interviews can be carried out online via computers or mobile devices (phones, tablets and laptops). The simulation of teamwork is conducted live.

Benefits for clients

Applying the CCSS system improves the most important resource, the human resource, reduces turnover and increases the intellectual capital of the organisation. The most important benefits of applying the CCSS system are:

1. Selecting the highest-quality people from the pool of available candidates in line with the job requirements.
2. An optimal placement of people that enables synergistic effects and greater job satisfaction.
3. Valuable information for working with new colleagues and better planning of their careers.
4. Savings in time and effort in selection work.
5. A reduction in the direct and hidden costs of selection and employee turnover.

What do clients receive?

Among some twenty results and reports from the range of our selection services, five modules take a central place from the standpoint of clients’ needs and expectations. Clients receive:

1. Precisely defined job requirements and identified profiles of the organisational culture.
2. Proposed advertisements aimed at attracting candidates from selected target groups.
3. Ranked lists of tested candidates, with those people singled out who fit best the requirements of specific roles and the organisational culture.
4. An optimal placement of candidates and employees in current roles.
5. Suggestions and recommendations for working with candidates who will be hired.

The theoretical and practical grounding of the CCSS approach

The methodology described in brief is based on the study of more than 1,000 works by eminent scientists, experts and consultants in this field, and it has been developed within the CCSS team over the past 30 years. The segments that represent original scientific contributions have been published in the proceedings of international conferences of Mensa and other organisations. The CCSS 9.0 system uses instruments and tools for profiling productive, logical, social, creative, emotional, moral and spiritual intelligence, as well as for obtaining a profile of a candidate’s general system of values. The CCSS 9.0 system, together with its earlier versions, has been used in 13 countries, from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Russia in the east to the United States and Brazil in the west. In companies where it was applied in full, average results of approximately 90 per cent in high-quality staffing solutions were achieved, which is among the highest standards in this field worldwide.

The CCSS methodology rests on the following fundamental premises:

1. Every person is a specific individual and has their own unique personality structure.
2. The model of human nature contains operative intelligences, character traits, physical attributes and one’s own history. Predefined personality types distort the validity of assessments.
3. Job requirements can be expressed in the terms of the model of human nature.
4. Multiple profiling of the candidate and the job enables precise multi-criteria ranking.
5. Multi-criteria optimisation of placing people in current roles ensures greater personal productivity, greater synergistic effects and greater job satisfaction.