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Affiliation and Social Netowrks

For the last couple of years I've been using the Oxicon Written Interview - an online assessment resource - to help me help my clients vet business development candidates. I've tested enough principals, employees and candidates to see the patterns of success and failure. The Oxicon is an obscure little assessment that does only one thing - it measure a salesperson's motivational make-up. It does so across four areas: Power, Competitive Drive, Affiliation/Service and Autonomy. There are only two scores that will cause me to outright eliminate a candidate based solely on the assessment. One is too low a Competitive Drive score, and the other is too high an Affiliation/Service score.

You can scan the newsletter archives (do a search over there for 'personnel') for more info on the Oxicon and the four areas it measures. Here I'm only going to discuss the topic of Affiliation/Service and my new learning on this score and social networks.

A person's Affiliation/Service score measures their need for social satisfaction. People with high A/S scores are natural networkers. They collect people. They bond easily, try to build rapport quickly and easily blur the line that separates a professional relationship from a personal one. All this sounds great, but too much A/S impairs a person's ability to have sound, frank business conversations. High A/S scoring people tend to spend too much time on early-stage opportunities. They're often overly optimistic about oportunities based on more subjective information like chemistry. They try to sell to their friends and therefore try to befriend people into hiring them. They have a hard time letting go of the opportunity once it has closed, thinking that the client has really bought 'them' and not the firm.

I've never seen an A/S score so low that it was a problem, but 60% is an amber flag and 65% is a red flag. Much higher than that I can categorically say, 'this person cannot do this job.'

I tested two business development candidates for a firm earlier this week. Their Oxicon scores came in one after the other. I looked at the first one and saw the highest A/S score I had ever seen - 95%. It's not unusual to see other areas score this high but in about 300 tests I'd never seen a 95% Affiliation/Service score. The candidate was rejected outright. What really shocked me was the next candidate scored even higher - 96%. What's going on?

I asked my client where these applicants had come from, thinking maybe he met them at a Saturn owners picnic. Not quite. Both candidates replied to his job posting on LinkedIn, he informed.

"Ahhhhh...," said I, "of course."

Social networks are mainstream now and I'm sure their users span all types, but it's a good bet the early adopters and inveterate users are high Affiliation/Service people. Yes, my sample size is but 2, but I would bet big dollars this pattern prevails. 

There are lots of things high A/S people can do and excel at, but business development for an expert firm is not one of them.