Let me share with you my journey in building a great team.
When I first started out, I focused on hiring very smart people. But after going through tough times and a few business failures, I learned that being smart wasn’t enough—character mattered more.
Just like good cooking starts with fresh, high-quality ingredients, building a great company begins with hiring people whose values and beliefs align with yours.
To improve our hiring process, I experimented with various personality profiling tools. Early on, I used The Personality and Preference Inventory (PAPI), developed by Max Kostick of Boston State College. While it was useful, it could be manipulated, making the results unreliable for recruitment.
I later explored Myers-Briggs and DISC. Both offered helpful insights but shared the same flaw: they couldn’t assess the truthfulness of a candidate’s responses.
Then in 1996, I discovered Harrison Assessments through a newspaper article. I contacted the company, and coincidentally, Dr. Harrison himself was in town. His system had a reliability score, and it allowed us to design job-specific templates based on the profiles of our best performers. I was sold immediately.
Our rule is simple: if the reliability score is below 80%, we don’t pay and we don’t proceed—because the report isn’t accurate.
We now have templates for most of our roles. The system also offers a job fit score. For instance, an 80% fit means there’s an 80% likelihood that the candidate will succeed in that role.
For management trainees, we insist on a minimum 85% fit against our leadership template. That’s because training leaders is expensive, and we want our investment to succeed. A high bar ensures a 6 out of 7 success rate.
We also apply a two-strike policy on reliability: if a candidate scores low twice, we stop the process.
Here’s an example:
Reliability score – 91.6%
Job Fit score – 94%
That’s a very promising candidate.
Another advantage is that the tool doesn’t require in-house expertise to interpret. Anyone can administer it, and a single template match costs less than RM 100—a small price to pay when you’re hiring staff at a minimum wage of RM 1,700/month.
For managerial roles, we often invest in the full report, which includes detailed trait analysis and paradox reporting—showing how a person behaves under stress. That report costs around RM 500 (volume pricing) and is well worth the cost.
While I won’t go into all the technical features here, I hope this gives you a sense of how we use data and science to guide our people decisions—not just instinct.
The purpose is just to provide a taste of what you can learn about a person and not to explain it in detail. This is a tool to be used as part of your interviewing process. We ask our management staff to redo the assessment every 3–4 years to fine-tune their development based on any weaknesses identified.
You can reach out to the company at https://lnkd.in/g-mkBNFs
Final Thoughts
Recruiting and developing the right people is not just about instincts or credentials—it’s about understanding potential, character, and alignment with your values. The right tools, like the Harrison Assessment, can help you take the guesswork out of hiring and focus your energy on growing people who will grow the business.
✅ If you’re serious about building a strong team, start looking beyond the CV. Use data, structure, and tools that support long-term development—not just short-term fit.
