The New Workforce System^TM

Employers in today’s business environment will need a whole new palette of personal attributes in their employees.   They will need employees who are oriented toward customers, who are innovative, who work well in teams, as well as the old "standbys" of conscientiousness and reliability, to name just a few.

There are no tools currently on the market that fully meet the requirements of selecting for today’s workforce. The Kingwood Group has addressed this gap with a new set of tools. Called the New Workforce System Ó, its chief components are:

• The New Workforce Inventory Ó – This is the centerpiece of the system. The NWI is a personality inventory that is designed to measure the things that really matter in today’s changing workplace. It contains 6 major scales and 18 more finely-detailed "facets."

  • It was designed from the ground up as an employee selection/assessment instrument; it is not a "retreaded" clinical instrument, as are many personality inventories.

  • It "speaks the language of business." We have purged it of psychological jargon to make it intelligible and useful to the HR or line management professionals who are the primary end users.

  • It contains no embarrassing or invasive content. We took the lessons learned from Soroka v. Dayton Hudson to heart, and designed the NWI to be unobtrusive.

  • It contains no ADA-sensitive content.

• The NWI Personal Report Ó – After the NWI has been taken by a candidate, it is sent to our processing center for scoring. The NWI Personal Report includes an introduction explaining how to interpret the contents of the report, dimension and facet summaries that contain percentile scores and interpretive comments, and definitions of each of the dimension facets. Click here for a sample copy of the NWI Personal Report in PDF format.

• The NWI Job Requirements Questionnaire Ó – This is a job analysis questionnaire that can be easily completed on the target job or family of jobs. When scored, the NWI Job Requirements Questionnaire yields a profile of which of the NWI scales are important for the job(s) being analyzed. This addresses a major shortcoming of most personality tools used in industry by providing the user with unambiguous information on which NWI scales to attend to, and which to give lesser or no weight.
• The NWI Patterned Interview Ó – No matter how good it feels intuitively, the traditional unstructured, free-form pre-employment interview is not very effective in helping predict which candidate will perform best on the job.  Structured or patterned interviews do much better.   The NWI Patterned Interview is a collection of structured interview questions designed around the NWI constructs. The NWI Job Requirements Questionnaire tells you which NWI scales are most important for your jobs, and the NWI Patterned Interview gives you structured interview questions that will measure those scales. The NWI Patterned Interview can be used with or without the NWI.
• Future plans – The NWI System has been under development for over three years, and we will continue to refine, develop, and expand it. Among developments currently on the drawing board are:
  • Computerization of the NWI, the NWI Personal Report, the NWI Job Requirements Questionnaire, and the NWI Patterned Interview, and computerized links among the components in the NWI System.   
  • Development of the NWI Teambuilding System – This will be a suite of materials, built around the NWI, that can be used for assembling and building teams.
  • Development of the NWI Management and Professional Development System – This will be a suite of materials that will show how the NWI can be used as part of a management and professional development program.