Using JoBehaviors' behavioral assessment in the Trucking Industry.

In this episode, Mark Tinney from JOBehaviors and Dave from Next Gen Trucking and Patterson High School, explore the role of JOBehaviors in enhancing job success through pre-employment behavioral assessments. The discussion focuses on tailored assessments for various transportation roles, highlighting the key behavioral traits crucial for truck drivers. They also examine how JOBehaviors contributes to diversity, safety, and vocational training programs. A live demo of the assessment on the Next Gen website showcases its ability to identify students with high potential for success, matching individuals to roles that align with their intrinsic behaviors and passions.

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The Next Generation in Trucking Association is a non-profit trade association who is engaging and training the next generation of trucking industry professionals by partnering with high schools, community/technical colleges and private schools to connect to and launch training programs around North America.

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Transcript

Hey, welcome to NextGen talks. I am excited to have my guests on the show today. We have Mark from job Behaviors and Dave from NextGen Trucking and from Patterson High School. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. And as always, I just want to say a quick thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to our sponsors, Walmart, XPO, Averitt Express, and Forward air. We appreciate your support. We appreciate the support of C. H. Robinson as well, and I just wanted to send a shout out to those partners and thank them for their support. So let's talk about job behaviors. Mark, tell us about job behaviors. What is this? 
 
Well, thank you. Thanks for having me, first of all, and it's nice to see Dave again. We've worked with Dave in the past and enjoyed working with him greatly at Patterson. So, basically, job Behaviors is a pre employment platform. We develop very job specific behavioral, pre employment assessments that enable our clients to really consistently identify individuals who are going to be a strong match for a given job. We're a little bit different than the traditional personality driven tool that is, our tools are all based on a job analysis with proven top performers in specific job categories. We do a job analysis that tends to generate close to 500 behaviors, which is quite a lot more detailed than maybe a lot of people would think about various jobs. 

And that seems to hold true whether we might be talking about a school custodian, or an NFL football player or an over the road truck driver. And the other thing you're struck by is that top performers tend to love what they do. So there's a lot of energy when you're in a room with those top performers. And interestingly enough, they don't necessarily share the same personality type. Even if you think of people in your own work life that are outstanding in a given job, they don't tend to all be sort of monolithic in their personalities, but they do tend to hold the behaviors, the same behaviors important in performing that job. So with this approach, there's a couple of things that can be really advantageous for young people that might be looking to get into a specific job or look to get into training. 

And one is just the act of completing the assessment is a really powerful communication tool because every word in that assessment comes out of a job analysis. And then secondly, we really kind of coined the phrase enroll for behavior, train for skilled. So if you think of a job, any given job, and even some fairly technical ones, if we think of them as a pie graph, we're going to say about 25% of that pie is technical in nature. And about 80% of that pie, 75% to 80% of that pie, is behavioral in nature. And so what we tend to do in this country, and most companies do a pretty darn good job of imparting technical skill to individuals. 

At the end of the day, you still find that people may be technically competent or can demonstrate that they have a minimum technical competency, but may not be a good behavioral match. And so we're really trying to turn that model upside, right, to say, let's identify those with those core behaviors that are going to be a strong match, that are going to align with the things that top performers have identified as being important to long term success in that job. And then let's get those folks the technical training. And that's when you can really see just a massive benefit in making sure that those training dollars are a going to the right individuals. And secondly, if you've got a finite amount of dollars for training, we can help direct those scarce resources to those folks who have the highest potential for success. 

So we don't really look at this as a negative screen that is screening people out. It's really about giving young people or anyone really, the ability to identify, self identify, and to really, at the end of the day, have a greater amount of confidence going forward or pursuing training in a given field. So I guess the Reader's Digest version is that these are tools that are based on a job analysis that help individuals and companies align with the behaviors that are really going to account for long term success. And in transportation, it's not just a one assessment fits all. We have a tool specifically for over the road class ac deal drivers. Also a separate assessment for delivery driver diesel technicians, customer service operations. So it's not just a one assessment. Each one is unique. They are delivered online. 

So these are tools that someone can complete online or on a tablet or on their phone. It takes about ten minutes on average to complete. Results are typically instantly available to the end user. And those results essentially we report in a one through five star rating, which is basically taking hundreds of thousands of individuals and putting them into a normal curve. So it's a percentile equivalent that allows you to identify, let's say, individuals who are in the top 50th percentile, the top 20th percentile, or those that are in, let's say, the bottom 20th percentile. One and two stars would be the bottom 50th percentile. Three fours and fives would be those in the top 50th percentile. And essentially, as you go higher on our score rating, the more aligned that individual is with proven top performers. 

So, again, the interesting aspect of this, too, is that someone does not need, like, if you were to give someone a skills assessment and they haven't had the technical training, it'd be very difficult, obviously, for them to pass that with the behavioral assessment. Experience is not necessarily a huge factor. If they're a strong behavioral match, we can identify them up front. And then again, we would say, enroll for behavior and then get them into the technical training and graduate or put out a fully rounded individual who's ready to take on a career. 

Yeah. So this isn't skills. It's not your personality. It's your behaviors. So how does that compute to a good employee when they have the behavioral match up to the top performers? 

Okay, that's a great question. So, and a lot of times people say, well, what do you mean by behavior? I have a printout here, just some of, again, as I mentioned before, there's a job analysis that we go through. There's a proprietary rating process that we go through with those top performers to essentially, from their standpoint, not ours, individually, rate each of those behaviors, and then we're able to do a statistical analysis and rank them from the highest for performance value down to the lowest from their collected best judgment, not ours. So a few of the behaviors that came out as being really critical for success as an over the road driver, and I'll just rattle off a few of these. And the interesting thing to think about here is that this is what individuals in this job have told us is important. 

And so if you think of a professional driver, these are the things that they hold dear. These are things that they think about. Acts as an effective representative for the employer. Maintain self control in difficult or stressful situations. Stays patient at all times. Comes to work well rested. Maintains focus and attention, even in good driving conditions. Stays self motivated at all times. Effectively communicates with customer. Stays available to dispatcher at all times. Makes every effort to do the best job possible. Maintains a clean, neat appearance. Makes every effort to improve the image of the truck driver. So even the individual driver, he doesn't, you know, they tend to be self motivated, and they don't need to beat over the head. They see themselves as a representative, not just of the company, but of the industry. And so that can be very powerful. 

The other thing I find, and maybe Dave can back me up on this, is that when someone, I think one of the biggest things lacking for young people is actionable information. So we don't necessarily, these days, not everybody has a, you know, a guy like Dave, a good dutch uncle that you can go to and kind of get some life information, maybe. Or would you ask about careers? And so when someone does well on an assessment like this, or maybe they've given some thought about it and think, well, maybe I'd be in. My uncle does that. Maybe I'd be interested in that. And they do well on this assessment. 

It can be a real motivator for them to know that they're pursuing something with a high degree of confidence and that they have a high probability of not only completing training, but being a good match for the job. And that tends to sort of be a motivation or all the way through the process. And maybe Dave can speak to that a little bit. 

Yeah, I was going to say that's a really interesting point, and I think that probably Dave does have some examples of how he was able to identify a young person that scored high on that. So, Dave, tell us about your experience. 

Well, first, Mark, I want to thank you for being here today, and thank you for the wonderful, the time and effort you put into creating this. I remember the first time I took the assessment myself, I was a little bit nervous. Cause, like, oh, what if I don't score high? But actually I scored a five, so everything's fine. I totally agree with what you say about being a motivator, and I've seen that a lot with young people. When we first launched the Patterson program, we didn't have a recruitment plan. We were just kind of like, well, I don't know. Hopefully people sign up for the class. In fact, we actually leaned on our counselors the very first year, and we said, hey, can you pick some really good people for this program? 

The problem about leaning on the counselors is that they tend to pick people that were having, like, discipline issues, and they needed a place to put these kids because they're having this. And it turned out great because I think they all needed that class that year. But I don't know if were really getting the right people. And so I remember when we heard about your program, it just made a lot of sense. And one of the things I noticed right off the bat was that the type of students that decided to take the truck driving class started to change. One year, we had about 30% of the students enrolled in the class were actually the top students in the entire school. They all had 4.0 gpas. And it was kind of like I was a little bit awestruck. It's like everything's different. 

And the great thing about that is that they all completed the program, and they all came to me individually throughout the year, and they all came to me and they said, hey, mister Dine. Hey, I'm still on the path to college, but since I've been enrolled in this class, I now have a passion for trucking. I still want to go to college and get my degree in whatever, accounting, marketing. But they all said when I finished my degree, I want to come back into this industry. I'm like, bingo, that's it. Right? We just don't need the best people behind the wheel. We need the best people, period, in this industry. And what a great way to just get young people excited and interesting about just to explore the class. And so I think it definitely works. It's an excellent motivator as well. 

Yeah. And I think it's a great way to increase diversity in a class because what if you give this assessment to 30 students? 30 students take it, and 15% of the, or 50%, half of them are female, and they score high on this assessment. They've never considered this as a career choice, as a class that they should take, but they score high on it, and they think, oh, I didn't realize that maybe I would be a good driver. And wait, I know my path. Like, they start to put the pieces together, right? Like, this could really be a job that might fit me. So I think it's a great way to increase diversity. 

Yeah. 

And I've definitely seen an increase in female enrollment once we started implementing the job behaviors assessment. 

I really love that, by the way, simply because, again, it comes down to information. Right. It's probably not unusual that young women typically maybe are not exposed to this kind of information or the ability to get some insight as to whether this might be a good match for them. But given the opportunity and then seeing that they are, in fact, a good match, I think can, again, be kind of a motivator. And I was sharing with Lindsey earlier, you know, with safety being such an issue in the industry, I know a lot. For many years, there's been sort of a pushback on younger people in the industry, and that's all perfectly understandable. 

But I will tell you, I have clients that are actively using this assessment to identify individuals that they're either paying to go into training or they're reserving the right to assess them as they come out of training and they're actively hiring new drivers to the industry. And we're talking about a company that has, over 20 years, been around for over 20 years. They are experiencing their best safety record in the history of the company, in spite of ramping up the hiring of with, let's say, less experienced or non experienced new drivers to the industry. So there is really an opportunity to demonstrate to the insurance companies, etcetera, that, you know, there may be 35 year olds that you don't want near a truck and there may be 18 or 20 year olds that, you know, are going to be just fantastic. 

So at least there's an opportunity to have some backup information to help make those kind of decisions. 

Yeah, and I think that's a great point. Safety always needs to be on the forefront of all of our minds. I was having a meeting with somebody last week and he mentioned that his, he's a part of a dual enrollment program at a community college where high school students go for two years to the community college while they're in high school to do a diesel tech program. It is so popular that they have to turn down students every year. Everybody wants to take this course. And I thought to myself, and I told them, I said this job behaviors assessment is a great way to try to pick those right students that will fit in the program and be successful and hopefully retained as a diesel mechanic for their entire career. So how does this assessment. And we have this assessment on our website. 

How does this assessment help with those diesel tech programs? 

So we do have a diesel tech assessment, and then we also have. That's also on your site. It's a. It's called an autotech training candidate assessment. It's something that we developed with one of the major schools that puts out autotechs. I think in some ways it probably doesn't matter a whole lot whether we're talking about diesel or automotive. It's just. So we do have this assessment on your site, and basically that assessment was developed with successful students. We sort of looked at that as a job in and of itself. What does it take to be successful going through a VOC tech training program in the automotive and technical world? And it's an extremely powerful tool. 

And also, again, the content of that assessment really gets at exactly what it means to be able to sort of not waste instructors time, make sure that you have your personal finances together, make sure you have the proper transportation. I mean, sort of basic things that are needed to be successful. So again, one other quick thing that we've found with this is there may be people, significant others or family members or parents who may not, may be on the bubble about their child going down a boat tech path or what have you. The assessment when a young person comes back with a four star, five star and can go to their parents or the significant other, say, hey, this is. I have a passion for this, but also, this is also an indication that I'm going to be successful. 

And it can really sort of grease the skids a little bit so that there is some resistance there. It at least can kind of help move things along. So we've gotten a lot of, had a lot of fun with that as well. 

That's fantastic. Well, let's go through a demo on our site and just show how can somebody get to it on our site. 

Okay. So if they're going to the next gen, let me see if I can pull this up for you. And hopefully it'll. Hopefully this will appear. There we go. Is that showing up? Yep. Okay. So on the nextgen site, it's under, I believe it's under students. Student tab, and we have these various assessments loaded. So if someone were to be directed here, they'd simply click on the assessment. In this case, I'll just sort of do a, let's say a demo as if I'm taking it. It kind of will fill that in for you. Register. Let's see. Oh, let's see if we can register. So the assessments, the way they're structured, just to kind of give a real quick background, if you recall, we've done the job analysis. We've done the ratings. We've isolated the high performance domain of the job. 

So those 500 behaviors are rated from highest for performance down to the lowest. And the assessment itself is a series of paired behaviors. There's consensus one of them that it's a high performance behavior. The other is a part of the job. But there's a huge variance in how these two behaviors were rated. And so in each of these, the candidate will simply kind of go through, and they're just asked to select the one that best describes them, the one that they think is the most important in those two. So we'll just kind of go through a few of these, adjust for fog. I'm just going to kind of go through how I would answer some of these. Takes responsibility, shows appreciation. So in each of these, they'll click one as you see it. Kind of. It'll go forward on its own. 

Okay. So you're just selecting which answer mostly aligns with who you are. 

Correct. And which, in a sense, which one of these do you think is the most important in doing this job? I guess you could say. And as you can see, it kind of, it'll automatically go forward and then someone, they can go back if they want to change their answer and go forward. And this has been formatted so that, you know, someone can take it on a phone or a tablet or what have you, stays available to dispatch. So again, you can see that these behaviors, just by going through the assessment, you're going to really have a much better idea of what the job entails than if you were even to do a two hour interview with somebody. They really come away with a sense of what this job is all about. 

So essentially, then at that point, they'll be able to see their own result. Should I go ahead and get out of this? 

Yeah, you're good. 

Okay. So it's very straightforward as to how someone can and the result at the end will. Will appear for the individual. And they can either just keep that private, there's an option for them to share it, and down the road they. They would be able to maybe should share it with a training school or something once they get out of high school. And then, you know, companies can actually come to us themselves and set up their own account as well if that's something that they're interested in. So the assessment's used both for going out and hiring drivers, period. But because of the behavioral nature of the tool, can also, you know, it's kind of uniquely suited to identify individuals that may not have a lot of experience or any experience. 

I think that this is a no brainer for any teacher or school counselor or anybody to use to be able to get young people in their course, but young people that are going to succeed. And I just think that this is a great tool for students to use. And how long does it take? What's the process? 

It's about eight minutes, eight to ten minutes on average to complete. So I always like to let people know they're not getting into something that's going to take an hour. So eight to ten minutes results are instant. And like I said, we're really excited to be working with you guys. I mean, we're sort of aligned. We want the best for the industry. We want to help get the best people motivated to enter the industry. And also those that have, they're ultimately going to be successful and have a career and a life that they're proud of and get enjoyment out of. 

Right? That's right. Because they're more likely to be retained in the industry because they like what they do. They're making good money, they're content. It aligns with who they are. That's what I always love to tell people it's not about skills. It's who you intrinsically are as a person and your behaviors that align with this career path. And so that's why this is good. Getting the right people in the right positions from the get go. We want to train the right people to get into the right positions for their future. So, Mark and Dave, thank you for this great, informative expose of job behaviors, and thank you for your generosity in letting students use this. And I know a lot of companies use this as well, and it's helped their retention and safety. So thank you. 

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks, Dave. Good to see you, Lindsay. And like I said, we're proud to be a part of NextGen.