Every organization already has a blueprint for success — it’s embedded in how your top performers do their work.
Every employer considers “what the job is.” Few organizations have a clear, objective answer to the tougher question: how do the people who truly succeed in that role behave day after day? Scheig’s experience is simple: the blueprint for success is found in the behaviors of your top performers. When you identify those behaviors, prioritize them, and measure them, you create a Job Success Profile™ — a consistent, defendable standard that makes hiring less of a gamble and more of a predictable investment.
This essay explains why the Job Success Profile matters, how Scheig creates one, and what organizations gain when they move beyond hiring based on paper qualifications and focus on how the work is really done.
The Insight: 30% Skill, 70% Behavior
Let’s start with a simple and useful truth: even the most technical jobs are about 30% technical skills. The other 70% — the human behaviors — explain most of the differences in productivity, reliability, safety, and quality. Technical skill is the entry point; habits and judgment are what lead to consistent results over time. Scheig’s job analyses repeatedly show this pattern: knowing how to do a task doesn’t ensure someone will do it consistently, correctly, and under pressure. That’s why credentials alone don’t reliably predict excellent outcomes.
This insight shifts the way we approach hiring. Resumes and credentials show who can do the job; the Job Success Profile shows who will do it reliably.
Where The Job Success Profile Comes From: Start with the Best
A Job Success Profile is not just an opinion. It’s an evidence-based construct developed through a thorough job analysis with top performers in the role.
- Identify recognized top performers. Scheig starts by collaborating with the client to nominate and verify the actual top performers — those whose output the organization aims to replicate. These are not necessarily the employees with the longest tenure; they are the ones whose daily work clearly drives business results.
- Document the work in behavioral terms. Through a thorough, detailed job analysis, Scheig collects a comprehensive inventory of job behaviors — the concrete “how” of the job. This inventory is typically large: hundreds of discrete behavior statements describing knowledge, skill, ability, willingness, and personal characteristics — all phrased as observable actions. In practice, job analyses often produce 300–500 statements that together describe the job as it is actually done, not how it’s written on paper.
- Rank-order by what predicts success. Here, Scheig’s unique work is critical. The behavior inventory is not an end; it’s a source. Using a proprietary methodology — an SME-guided process combined with psychometric/statistical techniques — Scheig rank-orders the behaviors from most to least predictive. The result is a prioritized set of top high-performance behaviors: the Job Success Profile™. This profile is the distilled signal you can use in hiring and development.
The emphasis here is practical: the Job Success Profile™ is the behavioral blueprint that reflects how the best people do the job now.
Why The Statistical Step Matters
Collecting hundreds of behaviors is essential; deciding which matter most is the core analytical step. Scheig’s panels and statistical analysis do two things:
- Convert qualitative SME judgment into quantitative priority. SME input is vital; statistical methods translate that expertise into a ranked list of behaviors that consistently correlate with performance. This objective weighting prevents over-reliance on charisma, anecdotes, or managerial gut.
- Produce defensible, valid content. Because the behaviors are drawn from superior performers and have been statistically validated, the profile has content validity and criterion-related validity. That’s why Scheig’s materials point to strong test-retest reliability and high predictive accuracy when systems are built from a rigorous job analysis.
In short, the statistical weighting tells you what matters, not just what someone thinks matters.
From profile to practical tools
A Job Success Profile™ is useful only if it becomes operational. Scheig converts the prioritized behaviors into a suite of practical tools that hiring teams and managers can use:
- SelectRight™ assessment. Built directly from the behaviors, this pre-employment instrument typically includes an Interest & Willingness checklist, a Self-Rating section (high/low behavior pairs to minimize social desirability), and an optional Critical Incidents multiple-choice section that asks applicants to choose how a superior performer would handle real on-the-job scenarios. The assessment measures behavioral match to the Job Success Profile™ and produces standardized scores.
- Applicant Score Report (ASR) and T-Score. Scheig standardizes results into a T distribution (T=50 mean, SD=10), producing the ASR — a concise output showing behavioral match, unwilling responses, and areas for interviewer follow-up. The ASR is the practical decision tool hiring teams use to compare applicants.
- Behaviorally anchored structured interview guides. Interviews become evidence-gathering: every question maps to a prioritized behavior, and answers are scored against anchors. This reduces subjectivity and aligns the conversation with the Job Success Profile™.
- AdvanceRight™ development tools. Post-hire, the same profile drives performance evaluation and training needs assessments, so development is explicitly tied to the behaviors that matter. This alignment makes onboarding and upskilling coherent and measurable.
These deliverables are intentionally linked: the ranked behaviors that powered the assessment are the same behaviors used in interview scoring and in identifying training gaps.
What organizations gain
The Job Success Profile™ changes the hiring conversation in three practical ways:
- Predictability. Selection moves from guesswork to measurable evidence. When assessments and interviews align with the same behavior-based profile, hiring decisions are more likely to yield the intended performance outcomes.
- Operational alignment. Hiring, onboarding, and development use the same language and measures. That reduces managerial firefighting and shortens time-to-productivity because the organization has a shared picture of what good looks like.
- Legal and ethical defensibility. When selection is based on a job-specific, SME-validated profile and standardized scoring, organizations are better equipped to defend hiring decisions against bias claims. The assessments are created from content that directly relates to job performance.
In practical terms, this means fewer costly mismatches, fewer safety incidents in regulated work, and faster returns from training investment.
A short pragmatic checklist for getting started
If you want to create a Job Success Profile for a role tomorrow, Scheig’s method suggests this starter plan:
- Identify the SMEs — nominate the people whose output you want to scale.
- Run a focused behavior inventory workshop — capture the job in observable actions rather than job-description language. Aim for comprehensiveness; expect hundreds of statements.
- Apply a prioritization method — use SME scoring plus statistical weighting to rank the behaviors and surface the top behaviors that predict success.
- Build an assessment and interview guide — translate the top behaviors into Self-Rating pairs and Critical Incidents MCQs, and create anchored interview questions.
- Pilot, measure, refine — validate item statistics, check reliability, and track hire-to-performance outcomes to improve prediction over time.
Closing: The Job Success Profile as the Organization’s Hidden Blueprint
Every organization already has a blueprint for success — it’s hidden in the habits of its top performers. The Job Success Profile makes that blueprint explicit, measurable, and repeatable. By capturing hundreds of behaviors, statistically prioritizing them, and turning the top behaviors into assessments, interview guides, and development tools, organizations stop hiring for what looks good on paper and start hiring for the behaviors that actually produce results.
Get started instantly with Scheig’s pre-configured SelectRight™ assessments — or partner with us to build a bespoke Job Success Profile™ for roles that matter most to your business. Connect with our team to explore the best fit for your roles and turn your hidden blueprint into predictable performance.
