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Understanding Predictive Index Test Scores

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Baffled by your Predictive Index Test score results? 

In this article, we will shed light on the test result of the two common Predictive Index Tests: the Predictive Index Cognitive Assessment and the Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment. 

What Is The PI Cognitive Assessment?

The Predictive Index (PI) Cognitive Assessment is a 12-minute timed cognitive test that is made up of 50 questions, which are comprised of three categories: abstract reasoning, verbal and numeric. It is a measure of general cognitive ability, or the capacity to learn quickly and assimilate new information.  

According to research, general cognitive ability is a reliable predictor of how an individual will perform in a workplace setting. Thus, many organizations use this Predictive Index Test when making hiring and promotion decisions. 

Understanding PI Cognitive Assessment Test Scores 

The PI Cognitive Assessment scaled score, is calculated according to the number of correct answer responses of the test-taker. The scaled score is the only PI Cognitive Assessment score intended to be used by employers when making employee talent-related decisions. 

What is the Average PI Cognitive Assessment Raw Test Score?

A raw score is the number of correct answers you got on your test. The average raw score in this Predictive Index Test ranges from 17-23. However, you can pretty safely say that the population’s average raw score is 20 right answers. 

What is the Norm Group?

When making hiring decisions, most employers use scoring tables of certain norm groups that relate to the job position they are hiring for. 

A norm group (or a quartile group) is a sample of pre-tested candidates who share a specific characteristic and whose scores were aggregated to develop a benchmark. When an employer seeks to hire a candidate for a new job position, the test administrator provides them with this benchmark so they can establish a cutoff score for their recruitment process. 

What is a Scale Score?

The PI Cognitive Assessment score is a scaled score that is calculated based on the number of questions you answer correctly on the test. There are no penalties for incorrect answers. In short, the more questions you answered correctly, the higher your score.

The only score on this Cognitive Predictive Index Test report that is meant to be used in relation to talent decision making is the scaled score, which is found at the top of the score report. The scale is 100-450 and the average score is 250, which is equivalent to a raw score of approximately 20/50. Every score falls into a percentile which demonstrates how your score compares to the scores of other test-takers in terms of percentages.

What are the PI Cognitive Assessment Cutoff Scores?

A cutoff score, or target score, is influenced by the employer’s decision, the profile of the job, and the recommendations of the assessment company (in this case Predictive Index). In essence, each employer determines its own cutoff PI Cognitive Assessment score. 

What Is The PI Behavioral Assessment?

The PI Behavioral Assessment is a free-choice, untimed, stimulus-response tool that is designed to measure the motivating drives of individuals. It measures four central personality traits: Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality. 

The PI Behavioral Assessment Reference Profile

After you complete this Behavioral Predictive Index Test you will receive a Reference Profile—a snapshot overview of the way you think and the way you are likely to work. 

The Predictive Index Test science team identified 17 “Reference Profile” after analyzing millions of Behavioral Assessments. These Reference Profiles provided groupings of attributes of individuals who have similar drives. 

The Reference Profiles  

Analytical Profiles:

  • Analyzer – Analyzers tend to demand a lot of details and will collect all relevant facts before forming a decision. 
  • Controller – Controllers are fast-paced and self-disciplined. They are always pushing themselves to get things done correctly.
  • Venturer – Venturers are always pushing past and exploring boundaries. They look for ways to drive the business forward.  
  • Specialists – Specialists are introspective, err on the side of caution, and are very loyal to authority. 
  • Strategist – The strategist looks at the big picture, they look towards the future and think about how decisions can benefit the whole business. 

Social profiles:

  • Altruist – Altruists are accurate, supportive, humble, and helpful workplace colleagues.  
  • Captain –  These individuals have a strong will and very independent and open to any change. 
  • Collaborator – Characterized as generally empathetic, cooperative, and patient. 
  • Maverick – These individuals tend to adopt leadership positions, they are visionaries and have high aspirations. 
  • Promoter – Promoters are extraverted and charismatic, they are popular and widely liked. 
  • Persuader – Persauders don’t easily take no for an answer. They are well-spoken and likable. They know how to motivate others. 

Stabilizing Profiles

  • Adapter – Adapters can take on different types of roles, they are typical generalists.
  • Craftsman – These individuals listen more than they talk, and are reliable workers.
  • Guardian – Guardians tend to bring precision and structure to their place of work. 
  • Operator – They are informal, relaxed, and reliable individuals.  They tend to be patient and cooperative.  

Persistent Profiles

  • Individualist – Individualists are strong-minded and tackle challenges with confidence. They are analytical and persistent.  
  • Scholar – Scholars are knowledgeable yet reserved individuals.  

Summary 

In this article, we have seen how the most important score of the PI Cognitive Assessment is the scaled score, which is based on the number of questions the test-taker answered correctly. We have also noted, that after you complete the PI Behavior Assessment you will receive a Reference Profile—an overview of the way you work and think.  

Budgeting and Business Planning in 5 Simple Steps

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All great plans commence with a very sound budget. For any business to succeed, budgeting and planning are processes come with much importance. 

While planning outlines the company’s financial direction and expectations over a specified period, budgeting specifies how the overall plan will be executed throughout the period, with more detailed expenditures. The company’s financial department usually undertakes the process under close monitoring by the chief financial officer.

Some companies, depending on their size, find it easier to use tools like Excel for budgeting, planning, and inventory balance calculations among others. There is however better software for fast-growing companies which consolidates and centralizes financial information, make it easier for finance managers to produce more accurate budgets. 

Budgeting and planning software can be purchased on its own or as part of integrated corporate performance management (CPM) system. Regardless of your budgeting and business planning tools, the process lends itself into simple steps outlined below.

NB: You need to understand that these business terms are different from forecasting, though related. Forecasting is a process which uses accumulated historical data to predict the future financial outcomes.

1. Calculate expensesThe first business order is knowing how much it is that you spend every month. You can do this via consulting financial files, receipts, and bank statements.

This is because some of the expenses are intermittent, like insurance payments, you will get very accurate financial picture should you calculate the average for six to twelve months. Add everything up for the past six to twelve months then get the average to help you know the average monthly expenses.

Do not forget that getting through when adding up expenses is crucial in coming up with a budget that is realistic. A bill which is forgotten would throw a wrench really in the savings plan.  

When you are having your expenses calculated you need to interpolate unexpected bills like car repairs. A good thumb rule is adding extra 10-15%.

2. Determine your average incomeAfter figuring out the amount that you will need to remain financially afloat every month, you will need to have the actual income determined. 

In addition to your normal salary, acquire a correct picture via interpolating in any additional funds which might come the entire year like garage sales, cash gifts as well as online item sales.

 Plus remember every other source of income such as rental income, dividends, interest, child support as well as alimony.

3. Set goals of debt payoffs and savings.
To have your realistic savings determined as well as your goals of debt payoff achieved you need to find out whether you possess a budget overage or shortfall. 

This is done by subtracting your income and monthly expenses. Should you find out that you’re making money more than you are spending well cups of coffee. That amount may be earmarked to your savings as well to pay off creditors. 

However, should you find out that you are spending more than you are making it might be high time to cut on other things in order to get a thing to save so that you don’t fall further in debts? 

A great way to have that figured out is where you are able to cut from those expenses and track every spending via recording all expenses for every month — insignificant items like cups of coffee that interpolate up over time. For example a five dollar snack a week might add up to about $260 annually which is a huge lot.

This will help you for one because you will get a blue, black frame of where every dime goes, be ruthless in cutting out expenses till your budget is in black. Cut sufficiently so that you get 10-20%of your monthly income to add it up to savings account. Should that be impossible, you might need to consider ways which might help you increase income.

4. Prediction of One-Time Spends

The importance of having a budget created has the ability to interpolate one-time purchase accurately. Although some items might unexpectedly come up such as replacing damaged laptops, others might be budgeted in advance for months such as enhancing office chairs to satiate staff need or staff thanksgiving party.

ONE-TIME SPENDS are like
•         Gifts
• Office supplies
• Furniture
• Software
• Computer

5. Put it all together
After you have all the financial, you have listed your financial situation you’ll have a much clearer understanding of your position and be able to plan for the future. 

Your next agenda should be on how to harness your spending to assist you in gaining your set financial goals. The aforementioned five steps above can help you outline a feasible budget that can help you achieve and reach your goals.

Conclusion
It may seem unachievable to create a business plan, but it is all for the good. It is something you can’t do without if you are a serious business mogul and would love to have a successful business tenure. 

Do not hesitate to take the step. It is an essential practice which builds for you the conscientious financial structure that keeps any business on track while seeking to outgrow beyond its potential.


4 Ways Small Businesses Can Entice Entry-Level Employees

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Recruiting is a challenge for small businesses, particularly those that compete with enterprise for talent.  

According to Inc., competing with bigger companies is one of the top four recruiting challenges a small business faces.

That challenge becomes even more daunting when seeking candidates for entry-level positions. 

Due to the nature of these lower-level positions, plus the stigma of working for a small company, it can be difficult to attract the top candidates.

There are three main strategies your small business can use to attract entry-level talent:

  • Build your brand online
  • Tout the benefits of working for a smaller company
  • Align your company’s strengths with the candidates’ interests
  • Seek outside resources

Using these strategies to earn an advantage against larger competition and increase interest for your company’s entry-level positions.

1. Polish Your Digital Reputation

Job seekers mainly turn to online sources to learn about a company and its culture. To adapt to this behavior, you small business’s digital presence needs to be both updated and appealing.

The first place to start is your website. Your website is your calling card – candidates will associate their impressions of your website with the overall impression of your brand. 

A website that is outdated, aesthetically flat, or nonresponsive produces a negative impression of your company and turns off job seekers. 

Invest in professional assistance, such as a web design firm, if you don’t have the in-house resources to build your website.

You also need to ensure that your company maintains a strong social media presence. While LinkedIn is typically the main business social recruitment platform, candidates will also review Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles to learn more about your company’s culture. 

Post regularly about daily life company. Short, succinct videos are effective and provide insight about how a job seeker fits in with your team.

Finally, set up a company profile on job search sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor and encourage current and former employees to rate your company and share information about the employment experience. 

Source

The more content you have on these platforms, the more clarity you provide candidates about the employment experience at your company. Be sure to monitor the reviews to perform any reputation management if someone shares a negative experience.

2. Promote the Benefits of Working at a Small Business

There are a lot of misconceptions about working for a small business. 

The comparison they face against large businesses and enterprises are tough to compete with. For example, large businesses simply have more resources for salary, mobility, and benefits. 

Small businesses, though, generally measure higher for employee happiness.

Your small business should actively promote the benefits of working for a small company. While every workplace is different, some of the common small company benefits are:

  • Collegial atmosphere: A tighter-knit team works in close proximity, which can foster a closer bond between employees. 
  • Collaboration: Smaller companies provide the ability to call a huddle with the entire team at any given time, making brainstorming and feedback easier.
  • Diverse experience: Employees may have multiple different responsibilities in a small company, as opposed to being siloed into one role.

3. Play to Candidates’ Interests

Every generation has different preferences and expectations for their ideal workplaces. Millennials, for example, value freedom and relationships with colleagues. These preferences don’t directly translate to their immediate successors may not resonate with their immediate successors, Gen Y, who value opportunity for advancement.

Source

There is, though, areas of common preference between the age groups that can help you mold your company culture to attract and retain new talent for entry-level positions.

A few areas of appeal in today’s workplace include:

  • Flexibility/work-life balance
  • Opportunity for advancement or recognition
  • Mentoring/coaching (professional and personal)

Try to identify small perks and advantages of your company that make it unique for the particular group you are targeting for your entry-level roles. These can be small perks, but may make your company more attractive over larger firms.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Consult an Expert

Small businesses may also struggle to hire entry-level employees simply because they don’t have as many HR or recruiting resources as larger firms.

Larger companies often have presences on college campuses, which helps them attract young candidates before they even hit the market. They also often have software and other resources at their disposal that help them streamline their hiring processes.

If your small business is struggling to keep up with hiring in general, it may benefit from an outside expert. Recruiting agencies are helpful resources that have expertise targeting your ideal candidates. 

Staffing firms, on the other hand, can help provide you with short-term or contractual employees for product pushes or to fill resources gaps. 

Small Steps Pay Big Dividends

Competing with large companies for entry-level employees can seem daunting, but many large companies are rigid when it comes to attracting talent. 

Your small business can take advantage of this by positioning yourself as an appealing alternative to enterprise culture. 

Take risks and be creative building your digital brand, tout the benefits of a smaller workplace, research and play to candidate preferences, and review expert resources if needed. 

Your efforts don’t have to be elaborate or expensive, but they can still have exemplary return on investment when it comes to recruiting and keeping entry-level talent.

Riley Panko is a Senior Content Writer at Clutch, a B2B research and reviews platform in Washington, D.C. She leads the team’s HR services research. 

5 Landing Page Mistakes That Affect Your Conversion Rate

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High-converting landing pages are essential to fuel your inbound marketing strategy. They are not only a significant lead generation tool, but also help in strengthening your brand image. Designing captivating landing pages is also vital to beat the cut-throat competition that your business faces today. 

You can’t afford to ignore the challenges of the continually growing digital landscape as doing that will kill your conversions. You have to go an extra mile to stand out from the crowd. In other words, when every firm is accessible to customers online, you have to put additional efforts to convert your organic traffic into leads. You have to design incredibly attractive landing pages to grab the attention of the visitors. 

You get only a couple of seconds to persuade a visitor to take action or to convert them when they enter your landing page. And if you fail to make the best use of those few seconds, you will lose a lead. 

An inbound marketer does a lot of hard work to divert traffic to their website, but they don’t always succeed in generating enough leads from that traffic. One of the most important reasons behind that is poor landing pages. 

If you are also unable to generate leads due to awful landing pages, you must work towards improving them. 

Here are some common landing page mistakes that you must avoid to increase the conversion rate. 

Poor Headlines 

When a visitor arrives on your landing page, you have only 4-to-5 seconds to convince them to take action. Poor headlines can reduce that time further by failing to capture the attention of the visitors. The first thing that a visitor observes in your landing page is the headline, and if it doesn’t impress them, you most probably end up losing a lead. 

So it’s essential to spend sufficient time in creating meaningful yet captivating headlines that can encourage visitors to go through the rest of the information on the landing page and then take the required action. 

Your headline should give the most valuable information to visitors in a clear and concise manner. 

Poor Design And Visual Clutter 

The design and visual appeal of your landing page are highly crucial to draw the attention of the visitors. Awful design and unattractive visuals can irritate the users, thereby encouraging them to leave your landing page. 

Create a design that talks volumes about your brand and reflects its personality. You should also avoid visual clutter because it distracts the visitors from focusing on the main point. So choose the right colours, fonts, and graphics while designing landing pages. 

Unattractive Images & Videos 

Images and videos play a crucial role in encouraging your visitors to stay on your landing page. But if they are unattractive and fail to convey the information to visitors, they will lose their relevance. So, pick attention drawing images and videos for your landing pages to make them more functional. 

Complicated Forms 

Whether you are looking forward to gathering readers for your eBook or you want to increase subscribers to your blog, you should always try to simplify the process of accessing your product for the users. If you ask them to fill an extremely complicated form, not everyone will indulge in that process, which will affect your conversion rate. 

In short, if you want your landing page visitors to fill a form to access your product, make sure you keep it simple. 

Bad Call-to-Action 

A good call-to-action helps in generating great expectations in visitors. The kind of words you use can raise their interest in your products, so pick your call-to-action phrases carefully. 

For example, if you are offering an eBook, using a CTA like “grab your eBook” or “read your eBook,” can increase your conversion rate multiple times when compared to a generic CTA like “download the eBook.” In this particular example, you are trying to connect your visitors with your product by using the word “your.” It makes them feel that it’s a product meant for them. 

So, if you want to experience increased conversion, improve credibility, enhance brand awareness, and generate information from your landing pages, make sure that you avoid above mistakes. 

Why Your Small Business is Failing

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Starting a small business is difficult–so difficult that 66% to over 90% depending on your sources–don’t make it past the first 10 years of business. How can you prevent this from happening to your business?

The first step to anything is to be informed. Here are some of the pitfalls that small businesses run into and what you can do to avoid them. This way, you can ensure the success of your own small business:

You Don’t Offer Your Customers a Unique Product or Service

First, making your business survive starts before you even open your doors. In fact, you need to make sure your business is unique before anything else. You won’t draw in customers otherwise.

For example, there are plenty of places out there that sell coffee so you would need something to set your cafe apart from the rest. Even better, be innovative and start a business that isn’t a flooding the market–something new and exciting.

If you can’t come up with an amazing idea and want to stick to what you know–that’s fine too. Just make sure your work is being done as efficiently as possible, and you’re keeping your customers happy.

You Don’t Know Who You Are or What You’re Up Against

This is a crucial question; who are you as a business? Are you here to provide a good, a service, or both? Who is your target demographic? What’s your business’s story?

All of these questions need to be answered before you can run like a company should. These questions will give your company character and help you to strategize. Having a story, especially, will give your company character that customers can add to what they are buying, personifying your company.

To grow and succeed as a business, you need to know what you’re up against–this means knowing the technology that your competitor is working with. For example, if your competitors have automated its invoicing process, or invested in data recovery software–look into it, and see if it meets your needs for your business. Most likely, it does.

Whether this means an in-depth look for a tech company or just keeping up with the social media marketing, you need to pay attention to your competitors and keep your edge against them so they keep coming back for business.

You Don’t Have Name Recognition

It is important to have name recognition for your business. After all, if your customers can’t name your business, they can’t spread their love for you by word of mouth and they may not even remember you themselves.

A good way to get name recognition is to work with your community. This tip is especially important if you are cultivating a business in a small town.

You can also work with other small businesses in the community. Think about it, you don’t have to just compete with these other businesses, you can build each other up as well. You can also pair up with other organizations in the community to build up your name recognition.

You Don’t Stay Up-To-Date On Marketing

You might not be a full on corporation but you still need to market your services. One of the best ways to stay on top of marketing is to use social media–especially for smaller companies.

Using a platform like Facebook is a good way to keep your audience informed of sales and updates. In addition, many companies use platforms such as Instagram to post pictures of new products they are selling.

Your Expenses are Rising

This is one of the most common problems with small businesses. There are a lot of expenses that go into starting a business and even more fees and costs in maintaining one.

This can be overwhelming, especially if you aren’t properly prepared. Of course, if you can be proactive you should. Balance your budget carefully and have money saved up when you open up your business.

However, sometimes we do get ahead of ourselves and get into debt. Getting yourself out of this as quickly as you can is important–especially so you can avoid filing for bankruptcy. There are ways to survive this, though.

There are agencies that can help you with debt but make sure you’re staying on top of everything. If you have late-paying clients, this is when you want to call them up and cash in. You might even want to try rebalance your budget yourself, or turn to automation for additional help.

You Aren’t Consistent

If there is anything you have to be when you are establishing your business, it’s consistent. You need to establish exactly what your business is and what it offers. This means that you need to keep your marketing on an identical or at least similar track no matter what outlet you are advertising through.

Being consistent means that you aren’t going to confuse your potential customers about why they would come to you. This also means that you should carefully consider your advertisements and make sure they capture exactly what your business is about.

It Takes Some Time

If you’re opening a business with no background or experience in the industry –you’re going to need a lot of help. Don’t be discouraged if it seems like it’s not as good as it should be, it’ll get there if you keep making improvements.

When you open up your business–it’s likely it won’t have as much volume as you originally anticipated. Keep persisting and you will get to a place where your business is succeeding and less likely to fail after a few years.