Attention to Detail -- Can You Measure It, and is It Important?

Murrel Karsh, a member of Chief Executive Boards International, offered a great idea to his fellow board members at a recent meeting. Murrel is President of Windy City Fieldhouse, Chicago's Premier Team Building & Entertainment Company.

It's hard to find good help. We do what we can to screen resumes, interview people, perhaps even use various profiling instruments to determine whether a person is a "fit" to our organization. Murrell swears by a single instrument -- one that measures attention to detail from http://www.brainbench.com/.

Murrel has profiled his current organization, a good practice that gives you a benchmark against which to compare new candidates. In the course of that, he's determined a minimum score that he's willing to hire, and I got him to share that with me. Murrel won't hire anyone with a score of less than 3.25 on this assessment, and he prefers 3.5 and above.

He says "This was working well for us, and then I saw a candidate I absolutely loved, in spite of her score below the cutoff point. I convinced myself we'd try her, and the outcome would be the final litmus test of this instrument as a screening tool. Sure enough, she came to work and within two days I knew I'd made a mistake. She found ways to make mistakes that we hadn't even imagined."

So, Murrel swears by this profile and won't hire anyone for any job who scores below his threshold. Should you give this instrument a try?