Uses of the Apollo Profile
There are a number of ways The Apollo Profile Psychometric Personality Test can be used to aid people and organisations to achieve excellence. Some of the more common ones follow.
- Self-Development
- Career Development, Mentoring, Outplacements, and Training Needs
- Recruitment and Selection
- Performance Management
- Team Building
- Sales Development
- Executive Profiling
- Organisation Development
- Human Resources Bench Marking
- Culture Building
- Custom Programs for Organisations
- Summary of Benefits for Organisations and Consultants
Self-Development
Taking responsibility for one's own career requires an objective assessment of how you shape up at this point of time. By comparing personal scores against those of other successful people, guidance can be obtained as to how to modify behaviour to improve career prospects. You are able to benchmark yourself against executives, or middle managers / supervisors, or salespeople, or customer service/support staff.
The Apollo Profile provides career guidance in a generally objective and supportive way and points to possible training and development needs. The report is written in easy to understand language appropriate to the level of report requested.
Career Development, Mentoring, Outplacements, and Training Needs
The Apollo Profile can help executives, middle management, supervisors, and sales personnel to identify personal strengths and possible weaknesses relating to career success.
Because The Apollo Profile compares the individual against the benchmarks of highly successful operatives in their field, guidance can be given as to new and more effective ways and behaviours to enhance performance.
Training and development needs are identified, and candidates can be trained, counselled and mentored to improve their effectiveness.
As a diagnostic tool, The Apollo Profile can detect a "bottle neck" in a person's style or make-up that is a barrier to better performance. The Apollo Profile can help reveal to a candidate how others may see him or her, and favourably influence their commitment to subsequent training and development because they agree with the outcomes.
Also, because The Apollo Profile is seen as more objective than some one else's personal opinion, feedback of a sensitive or personal nature is usually received with a more open mind.
Customer Service, and Support level staff frequently have little corporate investment given to their self knowledge and development, which is a pity.
Because the Apollo Profile has a totally different and highly relevant set of criteria for these roles, many candidates find the Apollo Profile affirming. When their reports are shared with their superiors, it enables a much greater understanding and appreciation of the differences between the roles of management and non-management.
The Apollo Profile is an ideal base for mentoring, especially if both mentor and mentee can compare their profiles.
When used for guidance as part of the process of outplacement the Apollo Profile can reveal possible strengths and weaknesses which can be addressed in career planning for the future.
Recruitment and Selection
Research consistently demonstrates that interview techniques alone, even when well structured and performed, only have 50-60% or lower chance of selecting the best person for a job, or choosing a person who subsequently executes all aspects of a job to the standards sought.
The cost of a poor appointment not only includes job under-performance, but also the unsettling influence this can have on other staff, and the difficulty in perhaps ultimately terminating that person's services. Time and money spent training and managing a poor choice is wasteful, especially if it could have been avoided for low cost!
On the other hand, a good choice contributes to productivity and profitability, helps the organisation to grow, and frequently has a positive effect on morale. A good choice also strengthens an organisation's "strategic capability" by providing a pool of well skilled and committed people from which future managers can be chosen.
The use of appropriate preferences and values assessments lets the selectors see dimensions of a person's style and drive, which are easily overlooked or even disguised at interview. Such assessments can provide data and guides and standards for criteria regarding personal attributes, which can be very difficult to assess using other means.
For example, when looking at graduate recruitment, a candidate could well have exceptional academic qualifications, but may not necessarily possess the drives for career success in your organisation. The Apollo Profile can emphasise such aspects, and suggest areas to explore further in interviews.
Certainly, there are circumstances where The Apollo Profile can reveal factors that strongly indicate that candidates may not be suitable for a certain position, and it would be in their best interest as well as that of the organisation not to proceed.
Use of The Apollo Profile will diagnose areas of direct relevance to the duties required, and provide data for discussion with the candidate, as well as possible pointers for follow through with reference checks.
Trained users of The Apollo Profile can also help dimension the personal attributes desired when drawing up the specifications for the position. Candidates can be assessed against the qualities sought and standards desired, although of course compromises are sometimes necessary in real life. Subsequently, training programs can skill staff members as necessary to deal with these.
Procedural use of objective techniques such as job analysis, structured interviews, and impartial assessment with the Apollo Profile also helps establish legal defensibility supporting non-discrimination.
Performance Management
If people are under-performing, The Apollo Profile is a valuable and objective aid for a counsellor or manager trying to help. The Profile provides 34 factors that relate to job performance, including inter-personal style and certain values. Because these are key factors, it is most likely that a diagnosis can be made of sources of a "just average" performance, if the sources are intrinsic to the person rather than associated with external factors.
The Apollo Profile can also play a useful role in a performance appraisal system.
Because everybody is different, and responds to different motives, the diagnosis provided by The Apollo Profile enables managers to identify the best ways to motivate, reward and manager their own individual staff. The Apollo Profile also provides an objective platform to discuss personal style with the candidate, especially where managers have also completed their profiles and are willing to share the data.
Team Building
In this age of multi-disciplinary teams, and the increasing emphasis being placed on cohesive and autonomous team performance, it is valuable to understand the motives, preferences and values of others we work with.
Because The Apollo Profile gives insight into 34 "slices" of what makes people tick, debate can occur and informed decision can be made as to which roles and tasks are best suited to team members to complement their known skills.
The narrative and graphic reports provided by The Apollo Profile enable quick and easily read comparisons and assessments to be made between members of the team to encourage disclosure and understanding.
Sales Development
Research has shown that there are special characteristics for success in the world of sales. A top salesperson does not automatically become a good sales manager, and vice versa.
That is why totally separate sets of reports and benchmarks have been developed specifically for sales people.
The reports are written in language relevant to the career of sales, and are particularly valuable in ensuring recruits have a high likelihood of success, and for enhancing development of salespeople. Especially useful also for diagnosing "roadblocks" where previously successful sales people are struggling.
Executive Profiling
Every organisation has a different executive culture. This indicates that for an executive to do well in that organisation, he or she ideally needs to "fit" the existing culture, or be consciously selected for the difference he or she can make to that organisation.
What does the executive culture look like in your organisation?
The Apollo Profile Log report can provide "norming" data which can be plotted using a scattergram to map your executive culture. This can provide the data that you need to make conscious decisions for recruitment and enhancement of the existing executive group.
Organisation Development
The Apollo Profile programs can aid in designing systems to be used for Organisation Development, such as succession planning, surveys and survey substitutes, team building methodologies, and organisation climate studies. Use of the Apollo Profile Log reports can provide low-cost input data for change programs and for planning future needs. In particular, Apollo Benchmarking studies can diagnose organisation strengths and weaknesses.
Human Resources Bench Marking
In situations where there may be a number of generic positions, for example bank officers, fitters and turners, customer service officers, clerks, etc., how do you know when you recruit, which ones will turn out to be best?
Using norms established by the Apollo Profile, you can differentiate between best, average, and poorest performing staff, and create models to recruit against so that you will be confident that you are getting people most likely to match your high performing staff.
Culture Building
The Apollo Profile can be used to map the degree to which the 34 factors for career success apply to your organisation.
The report can be set-up for different levels in the organisation, such as executive, middle management, supervisors, foremen, workers, etc. The report can also provide a profile by operating divisions, i.e. Manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, finance, or different regional locations.
It is to be expected (and is usually desirable) that the cultures will be somewhat different, but the question is "is this the most appropriate culture we want". Once the separate sub-cultures have been identified, The Apollo Profile provides a very strong and easily understood foundation for change programs of reform, creation of better teamwork, understanding, and appropriate behaviours.
Custom Programs for Organisations
Because the Apollo Profile system is based on new technology, the parameters of the system can be customised to produce programs especially appropriate to a desired organisation culture, and occupational classifications employed, for example Accountants, Branch Managers, Telemarketers, Supervisors, Insurance Clerks, Customer Service Officers, etc.
To customise programs requires studies to be conducted of the group(s) under consideration, and an organisation would have a number of options in the comprehensiveness of this study, including involvement of their own personnel or consultants in consort with us if desired.
The Apollo Profile system is a leading edge development, and is significantly different from other popular low cost instruments.
Ownership of a customised system places an organisation in an advantageous position to positively influence the calibre and appropriateness of future employees, as well as providing an aid to enhancing the development and productivity of existing employees.
(For more information on this option please E-mail jimb@apollonean.com)
Summary of Benefits for Organisations and Consultants
- Low cost based on volume.
- Contemporary data and benchmarks applied
- Validation and reliability studies conducted
- Models world wide best practice
- Ideal for centralised or decentralised HR functions
- Consistency between internal users
- Easy to use (and difficult to misuse)
- Easy to understand
- Minimal training required
- Well documented manual
- No formal qualification prerequisites required
- Low labour overhead in producing reports
- Four separate levels of reporting
- Can be easily and economically customised
- Multi-purpose for recruitment, development, performance management.
- Support from the Apollonean Institute and Distributors for Accreditation and interpretation.
Essentially, the Apollo Profile system is a fresh instrument compiled from contemporary studies conducted in 1996 to 2007 and therefore reflective of the most recent attitudes and work related preferences pertaining to the modern workplace.
The Apollo Profile has been designed by Dr. Richard Hicks and Mr. James Bowden, and provides information on thirty-four factors related to career success. The instrument has undergone validation and reliability studies, and provides bench marked data on a candidate that enhances ability to provide career guidance and development and make recruitment and selection decisions. Separate reports levels are selectable for Executives, Frontline Management, Sales or Customer Service /Support Staff.
The Apollo Profile models excellence of performance rather than "norms", and when used for selection or career advisory purposes the data can alert users to the possibility of a person with a current career block.
The Apollo Profile system offers special advantages as an accurate, low cost, fast to produce, colourful and convenient "mini-battery" that provides quick insight into many of the factors measured by other commonly used instruments. No time consuming writing of reports is necessary unless you wish to provide a supplementary report that puts the Apollo Profile report in context with a candidate's situation.
Confidence can be had that a candidate's score reasonably accurately records that person in relation to other respondents, and that therefore high, median and low scores are likely to be strongly indicative of that person's standing on that factor. For example, if a candidate scores high on Achievement on the Apollo Profile, it is highly likely that he or she would have scored similarly on other tests.
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