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| Profiles International: Help Wanted |
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| Written by Eric Slack |
| Friday, 01 January 2010 00:00 |
 One challenge shared by every company on the planet, irrespective of industry, is making sure that the right people are in the right seats. It is a daunting task that many companies don’t get right, limiting their success. Founded in 1991, Profiles International is one company helping other businesses in the US and abroad make better decisions when it comes to personnel.Founded by Jim Sirbasku, CEO, and Bud Haney, president and CFO, in Waco, Texas, Profiles International started small. At first, Sirbasku, Haney, and an assistant were its only employees, selling employee assessment products developed by other entities. By the end of the first year, the business had grown too big for its original office, and it wasn’t long before the company began developing its own suite of assessment products. In 1996, it went into the test publishing business, and since that time has developed its own assessment and evaluation tools. Industrial and I/O psychologists lead its R&D department, and consulting psychologists are on retainers. “We found out that most products we were selling were often created by psychologists and really needed psychologists to interpret the results,” Sirbasku said. “Many companies were using them ineffectively, so we hired a science staff and began to build our own products, and today our products are scientifically driven.”  The company is still headquartered in Waco, but now it has 200 people working in 50,000 square feet of office space in seven buildings and two office parks. It has sold products in 122 countries and been translated into 32 languages. About 700 people sell for the company around the US, with roughly the same number outside the country. Its European business is handled out of an office in Dublin. It has more than 40,000 clients worldwide and has conducted roughly 46 million assessments since 1991. Driven by the customer In addition to science, Profiles International is driven by the needs of its clients. Although it now offers products to help measure the effectiveness of an entire workforce, the company began by focusing on pre-employment. Its early clients wanted to better predict if an employment candidate would be successful in a job. “That isn’t entirely related to someone’s personality, so we needed to figure out how to measure that. We brought in a staff of experts and explored research done by the University of Minnesota, Iowa State, and USC, and we were able to create what we feel are the most user friendly, client friendly, and clearly explained assessments anywhere in the world,” said Sirbasku. “These are tools for managers to help them maximize the productivity of their people, written specifically for managers for that purpose.” These assessment tools are useful to managers in any industry and any size company. Profiles International has become a one-stop shop for organizations worldwide by offering solutions that help clients take the guesswork out of selection and to ease hiring, promotion, coaching, management, and succession planning. “We are more of a solution provider because we provide tools to help with prospective and existing employees, making it easier for managers, supervisors, and people in the executive suite to understand the people who are doing the work inside their company,” said Haney. “That helps them increase productivity and retain top performers.” Don’t go it alone There is one obvious looming question—why do companies need help with this in the first place? Sirbasku said almost no company gets all the right people in the right places, and it takes millions of dollars to develop internal assessment capabilities. One of the ways Profiles International has been able to help clients do that without breaking the bank is through its job matching system. The company studies the top performers at all of the individual companies it works with in every single job. By studying and assessing top performers, it can create a job match pattern, which is a high-performance profile. This provides clients with something to measure against when hiring or promoting people. Another way the company raised itself to the top of the employment assessment industry came in 1999, when it introduced its Profiles on the Web system. The company set up all of its clients in a virtual assessment center. Candidates and employees could enter that center and take an assessment, with results printing in a manager’s office or the human resources department less than a minute after completion. These assessments didn’t need to be proctored, allowing people to take them from home. Now the company is taking the next step with its system. Profiles International’s belief is that the Internet has in many ways oversaturated people with images and content, making using the Web an often overwhelming and uncomfortable process. The company is attempting to humanize the way assessments are given over the Internet. The system now uses avatars so when a client’s candidate goes online to take an assessment, it provides them with information on the company to which they are about to apply and helps them understand that an assessment is not a test. The idea is to make the individual comfortable with the process. The system is user-friendly, as Profiles International did a considerable amount of research and paid attention to minute details on everything from the typeset and colors that should be used to the instructions that should be given. When completed, the assessment lands in a client’s exclusive database and managers can begin the process of determining top candidates. Assessments measure the total person, including his or her thinking style, behavioral tendencies, and occupational interests. “All three are blended to get a picture of the total person,” Haney said. “We measure thinking because we want to know if the person can do the job; we measure behavior to see if they have the personality to do the job, stay on the job, and fit into the corporate culture; and we measure interests to make sure they really want to do the job.” To stay in front of the market, the company plans to introduce a new assessment focused on performance management next year. It is also working on a solution that will assess corporate culture. In January, it will release a new survey on employee engagement. It just finished a large summit with 48 of its biggest clients to learn more from them because some of its top clients are among the top-performing companies in the country. And it is also exploring solutions to help its clients understand better how to retain their own clients. “That tool will not only help our clients, but it will help us internally to retain our clients,” said Sirbasku. “We want to know how well we are performing and find ways to improve so our clients can rely on us even more.”
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