Parkinson’s Law in the Age of the Pandemic
C. Northcote Parkinson (1909—1993) was a British naval historian, lecturer, and novelist; he formulated his famous law in an essay in The Economist in 1955. Parkinson’s law was intended to describe the behavior of managers in the British Navy and British government, but it is also a pretty good description of work in most organisations. The July […]
Survival Skills: Who Will Succeed in the Automated Labour Market?
Automation has long been altering labour markets and eliminating jobs. Recent research suggests that up to 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of becoming automated within the next 20 years.1 That percentage varies from country to country, but it consistently falls above the 40% mark. Although automation is largely thought to threaten low-skill jobs, advances […]
Leveraging Personality in Onboarding
We’ve all experienced that feeling of excitement and energy on the first day of a new job. The feeling that emerges after walking through those doors is almost entirely dependent on the organisation and its selection and onboarding processes. Many resources from Hogan discuss the importance of selecting the right candidates, including a variety of case […]
Derail Leaders’ Derailment
Despite the thousands of print and internet resources available on the subject of effective leadership, it remains elusive. The number of leaders who fail is consistently estimated to be greater than 50%. The impact that ineffective leaders have on their teams and entire organisations can be devastating from both a human and financial perspective. It’s […]
Personality and the Problem of Police Brutality
The cases of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor represent just two recent and horrific examples of police brutality resulting in unnecessary loss of human life. The awfulness of these cases is amplified by fact that African Americans—both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are black—are more than 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police than white Americans. Although statisticians, social scientists, […]
Clones, Diversity, Innovation, and Personality
People sometimes ask whether using personality assessment for selection will create an organisation full of clones, decrease diversity, and narrow the range of innovative thought available to solve company problems. Their concern is that if they hire people with similar personality characteristics, they will create a culture of groupthink. Some assessment providers have fostered this view by […]
8 Common Personality Types
When discussing personality, it’s common to hear people refer to themselves or others as “Type A” or “Type B.” Or, for those who have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, acronyms like ISTJ or ENTP or INFP are so commonplace they frequently show up in online dating profiles. At Hogan, we’ve historically steered away from labelling people […]
Q&A: Natural Language Processing
The amount of text data we send out in the world is staggering. On average, there are 500 million tweets sent per day, 23 billion text messages, and 306.4 billion emails. Everything we say, every email we send, and every word on our resumes can be used to understand the world around us, and it […]
Evolutionary Model, Modern Results: Introducing the New Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory (HBRI)
Our hominid ancestors constantly had to solve problems related to survival. They had to find food, water, shelter, and protection from predators. They also had to keep peace within the group and defend themselves and their groups against attacks by competing groups. If they did not solve these problems sufficiently, they died—whereas those who successfully […]
Is COVID-19 Changing How People Score on Personality Assessments?
COVID-19 continues to upend our daily lives. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people die daily, millions of jobs are lost weekly, and people continue to adjust to a new world. So much has changed within the past few months. It is fair to ask if people are changing too. We examined this question empirically using […]
