Smarter Hiring, the DDI Way

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It sounds neat and tidy and affordable, but all this talk about selection can be unsettling. Are we creating an overly standardized Stepford work force? What about our grand tradition of rugged individualism? Byham responds to questions about the dark side of DDI with a story he used to tell at GE when he was running training programs there. "I gave them a description of a hunchback who didn't speak English well and who didn't graduate from college. I asked, 'Would you give him a job?' They said, 'No.' Of course, it was Steinmetz." He's talking of Charles Steinmetz, the brilliant engineer who made significant breakthroughs in the study of electricity. Byham insists that DDI's methodology would have let Steinmetz in, but how can he be certain that Steinmetz would have made it through the in-basket test? In true absent-minded-professor fashion, he might have taken a left turn and never come back.

Even if Byham is right, though, the best system is still that -- a system, one that lets some in and not others, one that slams the door on the gifted but unclassifiable. It's hard to disagree with Jim Collins, who argues, "Sometimes the most important piece of information is very hard to quantify." He relates the story of a POW who escaped from prison twice and was hired for that reason. (Collins wasn't being critical of DDI; he didn't want to comment specifically on its approach.) But Byham is adamant: DDI is fundamentally egalitarian, and in fact, it does seem to de-privilege the well-born bounder by stressing behaviors over contacts, country clubs, and education. During the interview process, candidates will even be asked if they went to the same Ivy League school their mother or father did. This built-in objectivity served DDI well when the Equal Opportunity Commission was established (DDI helped put in its own selection system, Byham notes). If a company is too loosey-goosey in its hiring practices, if it can't point to a process that eliminates the risk of discrimination, it sets itself up for an avalanche of litigation. Because DDI is driven by behavior and is person-neutral, it helps bulletproof companies against charges of discriminatory hiring.

What about competitors? There is the Gallup Organization. The senior consultant for its assessment and training business is an articulate and intense young man named Marcus Buckingham, who is also the author (with Donald O. Clifton) of Now, Discover Your Strengths and (with Curt Coffman) of First, Break All the Rules. He says, "DDI doesn't like me very much," and mentions that Byham had challenged him to a debate at an industry conference, after DDI had posted a negative review of his book on its website. Buckingham declined.

Unlike DDI, Gallup uses an automated questionnaire to evaluate candidates. It does conduct open-ended interviews for managerial positions, but there are no simulation or role-playing exercises. Buckingham insists that DDI's behavioral-based approach is neither scientific nor conclusive. "DDI says we looked at the job," he gripes, "and here are some good interviews and questions -- best of luck." Buckingham dismisses all the studies Byham is so proud of, claiming they are based on data that don't have inter-rater reliability, meaning that assessors aren't tracked to assure consistency of ratings from one evaluation to the other. Buckingham also says DDI doesn't give candidates a statistically reliable score. "They don't say, 'Jim scored X, and he will perform better than Marcus, who scored half X." And the "dimensions" that DDI claims to assess? Buckingham calls them "spurious bull -- ."

Byham believes that the Gallup system is too sketchy. He isn't completely opposed to personality tests. "I am for a holistic view, and Rule No. 1 is, The more the better," he insists. "But they need to be different instruments. Three kinds of personality tests won't help you." He also claims that Buckingham is dead wrong about DDI's methodology. "They don't understand it," he argues.

Another difference between DDI and Gallup deals with the not insignificant question of an individual's ability to change. It's fair -- and necessary -- to ask if selection systems penalize those who are still a work in progress. Marcus Buckingham doesn't believe we change that much: "We become more and more who we already are." Byham sees the world differently. "He [Buckingham] is more into predestination than I am." Even so, DDI believes that behaviors -- creativity, for example, or initiative, or integrity -- are not trainable, at least within the current business context: no time, no money. "Businesses fool themselves into thinking they can change people," Byham noted. "It's not like people can't change, but given the speed of business and supervisory attention, it's highly unlikely. The famous last words of the poor interviewer are, 'We will train him in that."

Boyatzis, who earlier had some complimentary things to say about DDI, is troubled by this. "People grow, and any of us who had difficulty at any point know that people can blossom. People who hold fast to the selection process don't look into themselves and admit they've changed." And what about those who question whether you can assess at all? Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has some doubts about any system that "presumes you can easily and unambiguously measure talents and abilities." He notes that "Steve Young played for the Canadian Football League, and Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. If it's hard to assess talent there, it's hard to identify it in interconnected systems." Yet even Pfeffer praises DDI, saying that it "does a very good job of assessing people's attitudes and values. I think cultural fit can be measured, and that is a very important source of team-based organization."

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