This FAQ should be shared with people leaders and internal stakeholders to address their most frequently asked questions when they start using Plum. You can also download this FAQ to PDF here.
What is Plum?
Plum helps leaders future-proof their businesses by quantifying human potential. Plum maps the transferrable nature of innate talents like adaptability, innovation, and communication to opportunities where employees will thrive at every step in their journey. From hiring, workforce planning and re-org, to employee development, emerging leader identification, and beyond, Plum enables companies to design an unbiased and transparent talent strategy at scale.
What does Plum Measure?
Plum measures Talents, also known as soft skills. They are the recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that naturally adapt. While talents are harder to measure, they are a much worthier talent decision criteria. Talents are 4X more accurate at predicting how successful a person will be in a role versus evaluating hard skills, knowledge, and previous work experience. Talents predict an individual’s competency for a role, rather than just their eligibility.
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What is unique about Plum?
Plum is built on decades of scientifically proven Industrial/Organizational psychology to help organizations truly understand their workforce and actively map the transferable nature of people's talents to adapt to changing job requirements.
What are the benefits of Plum?
- Scalable - Plum can be applied across different use cases and across the entire workforce with the use of one assessment.
- Objective – Plum provides an objective measure of potential and support unbiased decision making.
- Universal – Create a talent language that crosses teams, functions, departments, and geographies, allowing leaders to tap into a broader pool of talent as changing roles and business strategies emerge.
- Supports DE&I – Plum provides an accurate view of the innate talents while helping leaders take an unbiased and transparent approach to mapping talent to opportunities.
- Informative – The Discovery Survey measures problem solving, personality and social intelligence. Each person who completes the survey gets a comprehensive analysis driven by scientific data to help them with their current role and career decisions.
How does Plum work?
Plum follows a 3-step process:
- Create a Job Analysis (Match Criteria) to identify which Talents are needed for success in a particular role.
- Employees create a Plum Profile, to understand their talents and potential.
- Match employees to roles where they can thrive based on their Talent fit.
What are Talents, competencies, and behaviors?
Talents are sometimes better known as abilities or soft skills. These are distinct from knowledge and skills and have been proven to be important predictors of performance. Talents are made up of a combination of personality traits, cognitive ability, and social intelligence.
Competencies are the building blocks that make up the Plum Talents. Each Talent is composed of a number of competencies that combine to determine a person's natural ability in that Talent. For example, the Talent Adaptation is composed of the competencies Preparing for Change, Responding to Change, and Embracing Uncertainty.
Behaviors are the portions of competencies that can be observed readily. They are the most granular building blocks for the Plum competencies, and ultimately the Plum Talents.
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What are drivers and drainers?
Drivers are those behaviors that come naturally. There is a greater likelihood that a person will excel in performing activities that require Talents which are in fact driving and energizing them. A drainer is a talent that a person will not naturally gravitate towards – in other words it will take more effort from them to exhibit behaviors in a draining Talent. However, if a Talent is NOT a driver, it does not infer that a person will not be able to perform well. They may have received training or have developed certain skills to compensate. That being said, because it is not natural for them, it will require much effort to perform well in a draining Talent.
Is Plum an accurate assessment? Can it be faked?
The Plum Discovery Survey is based on the Big Five Personality Model, a well-regarded and highly researched framework. This is the most widely accepted framework for personality and for use as a predictor of job performance. Since the creation of The Plum Discovery Survey, it has undergone rigorous testing to establish test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and criterion-related validity.
While there is a lot of advice on how to lie on resumes, ace interviews, and write excellent cover letters, applicants are just as likely to worsen their match to a role as they are to improve their match to a role if they fake their Plum responses.
The technology of Plum is extremely difficult to fake or cheat. Our research shows that when people were motivated to improve their match to a desired role, they were unable to reliably do so.
Plum uses forced choice and other limited response options to ensure that individuals who are being screened for a given position cannot produce overly positive responses.
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What is a Match Score?
The Match Score is a combination of a candidate's natural ability in the 5 Talents that were determined to be the most important in the role by the Match Criteria Survey. A candidate's score is a specific combination of the traits Plum measures in the Discovery Survey.
A candidate Match Score can range from 30-99, based on how good of a behavioral fit they are for the role.
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What are the benefits for candidates/employees asked to complete a Plum Profile?
Plum for Talent Acquisition: Each candidate will receive a personalized Plum Profile, which outlines their Talents. The Plum Profile is designed to help candidates with self-discovery and professional development.
Plum for Talent Management: Each employee will receive a detailed Plum Profile, outlining their Talents to help them with self-discovery and building their career development plans. Employees and their managers can leverage their Plum Profiles to build personalized development plans.
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Why are we using Plum?
Why is your organization using Plum? Ask your internal project lead for more details around your specific use case.
Why use Plum?
- Plum will provide a consistent way to measure key talent and a unified language for talent management across the organization.
- Plum will help with decisions on how to manage and develop key talent.
- Plum provides a way to better understand our people’s natural strengths and what makes them thrive. It also gives insights to what drains them so we can take action on coping strategies to fully support them in their roles.
- Plum data will help boost internal mobility and internal marketplace – we want to look inside organization before look outside in order to promote our people.
Will employees/candidates see their Match Score?
No, Match Scores will only be made available to individuals who have administrative access to the Plum Platform.
Who will have access to the Plum platform?
There will be different platform roles and permission depending on your role in the organizations. This will be communicated separately.