Lumina Select interview with Dr Stewart Desson & Julie Ensor

We spoke to CEO Dr Stewart Desson and Product Development Lead Julie Ensor to get their thoughts on the new digital Lumina Select offering.

Q: Please can you summarise the digital Lumina Select offering.

A: Digital Lumina Select enables organisations to more quickly choose the right people for the right role. In particular, it offers the ability to customise the selection process around any competency framework relevant to an organisation.

The digital features enable the interviewer to interactively probe the candidate using an iPad or tablet device, with all their psychological traits and associated relationships with key competencies linked to focused interview questions.

Digital Lumina Select has a key advantage over other offerings in the market in that it also looks at what may block a candidate in expressing a competency at work, as well as assessing where a candidate may overplay their key strengths (another key way of limiting their performance).

As well as reducing the cost of the recruitment process, this approach enables greater depth to be brought to bear throughout the assessment process.

Finally, the digital Lumina Select offering enables organisations to both sift and ultimately select the right people, then on-board them into the organisation, all supported by one consistent framework.

Q: Where did the idea of Lumina Select come from?

A: Organisations around the globe have given us feedback that they really appreciate our holistic and humanistic approach to psychometrics using Lumina Spark. The idea of an inclusive approach that minimises evaluative bias, valuing all the different personality traits from around the mandala, has proved highly effective in the market of developing individuals, teams, and organisations. It was a natural extension of this for many of our key customers to ask if we could apply this approach in the area of selection and recruitment. In particular, clients were reporting that the old traditional psychometrics were too black-and-white, labelling, and reductionist. Instead they wanted all candidates to feel valued throughout the selection process, and for the competencies at work associated with Introversion and being more Inspiration Driven to be fully valued in job profiling. In a nutshell, they wanted some of the bias many traditional psychometrics suffer from taken out of the selection processes.

Q: How can looking at candidates’ personalities support the selection process?

A: Lumina Select is focused on using personality to assess competency potential. This is the set of behavioural characteristics that provide a foundation for a certain competency to be displayed. This is measured by assessing how personality aligns with the behaviours required to do a job effectively. For each competency we are not passing judgement on a candidate’s levels of competence or skill in the traditional sense (these should be measured and verified using other methods in your recruitment process). Instead, we talk about it in terms of potential and how much effort engaging in these behaviours is likely to take.

So, for an individual who scores lower on a competency, it will take them more conscious effort to engage in these behaviours, whereas for someone who scores high, these behaviours will come more easily. The purpose of Lumina Select is to identify the key behavioural characteristics required for the role and we use the 16 Lumina Learning behavioural Competencies as a framework, with each competency correlated with a unique combination of personality traits.

Using Lumina Select as part of your recruitment process helps identify individuals whose behavioural preferences are aligned to the behavioural needs of the role. This helps ensure they are matched to roles that will energise them in a sustainable way. There is plenty of research showing the incremental value of using personality assessments and, when combined with other relevant and valid assessment measures, they greatly improve the predictive validity of your hiring decisions.

Q: What were the main goals you set out to achieve by creating Lumina Select?

A: The Lumina Select offering has two main goals. The first is to reduce the cost of the recruitment process, through slick administration and the quicker onboarding of the right people. The second goal is to enhance the quality of the process so that the selected candidates are much more likely to stay for longer and be happy in their roles.

Q: In what scenarios would you advise using Lumina Select? Who will most benefit from it?

A: If an organisation needs to bring new people in, Lumina Select is for them. If an organisation needs to on-board its new people around a specific culture, Lumina Select is for them. If an organisation needs to develop its people and ultimately develop high-performing teams and transformational leaders, Lumina Select is for them.

Q: What was the hardest part of developing this product?

A: We spent a number of years immersing ourselves in large organisations and their recruitment needs. The key features embedded in Lumina Select are designed to meet these deeply and well understood organisational needs.

The biggest challenge in implementing the product has been the technology. It is critical that it is secure and works to the highest GDPR standards, as well as being able to integrate with large organisations and systems. We have chosen to base our infrastructure on a macro services architecture, using the latest technology. Importantly, at the sharp end, the digital Lumina Select offering works on tablets and is highly interactive. It’s digital but designed to be used by human beings in a very human context.

Q: What is your favourite digital Lumina Select feature?

A: It’s hard to choose, as a lot of the features offer something valuable. Probably one of the best features generally is the enhanced level of customisation that it gives. Our experience is that clients need a recruitment offering that can be tailored to any role and adapted quickly and easily to the evolving needs of that role. The Job Profiler is great as clients can select their critical competencies easily, but importantly can change this as many times as they require at no extra cost. Also, we wanted to ensure the Interview Guide would work for clients who may also have their own competency-based questions. They can integrate these questions easily into the Lumina Select Interview Guide or combine them with the Lumina Select suggested questions. Again, the focus is always to help the client tailor the tool, so it works for them.

Q: How can Lumina Select be used alongside other Lumina Learning products?

A: One of the key advantages of Lumina Select, and all of Lumina Learning’s products, is that they are built around one unifying framework that acts as a ‘golden thread’ running through everything. We often find that clients use very different psychometrics in development and recruitment, and so the process and language used can feel a bit disjointed, particularly for employees. Creating a unified suite of tools has been a conscious decision from the beginning with the primary aim being to make the transition from using Lumina Select to the other Lumina Learning products as easy as possible, and vice versa. Clients really value the cohesion this brings as it allows a common language to be used consistently, whether that be in a recruitment, on-boarding, or development context.

Q: What are you most excited about for digital Lumina Select’s future?

A: We want to continue to expand our Lumina Select offering and develop the ATS to really enhance what it can do. We have big plans that we are already putting into motion that will centre around making the platform even more customisable, having the option to integrate CV and candidate information into the ATS, as well as expanding the competency library to include competencies that build on Lumina Emotion.

Q: Where do you see the role of psychometrics in selection going in future?

A: There continues to be more of a shift towards valuing the candidate experience, with more emphasis than ever that recruitment should feel like a two-way experience, rather than something that is ‘done to’ the candidate. Recruitment should offer the candidate an opportunity to learn and grow, and not feel like they have wasted their time, particularly when they are unsuccessful. One place where we have had great feedback is where clients share the Lumina Splash App with their candidates so they can go away and explore their personality in a cool and accessible way, and it acts as a nice ‘take away’ that aids their development.