Liseth Velez’s Boston-based construction management company pays extra attention to one key factor when making hiring decisions.
Most leaders hope that their employees feel comfortable being themselves at work. Liseth Velez, founder and CEO of LJV Development, makes sure of it.
Since 2018, Velez’s Boston-based LJV Development has specialized in renovating work and living spaces, including government and corporate facilities and private development. And the business is doing quite well: Last year, LJV landed at No. 115 on the Inc. 5000.
One of the keys to such success, says Velez, is building a strong team. Like many new founders, she initially looked to hire the people she knew best. But when managing five of her family members became a slippery slope, she knew something had to change.
That’s when she began operationalizing psychometrics in hiring, which she says transformed her life this year. She spoke about her strategy on an episode of the Your Next Move podcast earlier this year.
The psychometric Culture Index transforms personality inventories into data, assessing traits often demonstrated at work like logic and pace. Among the results are two graphs: The first details who a person is generally, while the second explains their behavior at work. Velez’s team is able to predict not only whether a potential hire will effectively contribute to the LJV team, but in which roles they are most likely to perform well. When she took the test, Velez discovered that her two graphs were almost identical, meaning she utilizes her strengths in her role at LJV.
This is the goal in showing employees their psychometrics results: to make sure they can be themselves at work and contribute to the areas where they excel. Velez says that sometimes she sees that an applicant has been trying to be someone they’re not, which she says is not sustainable long term.
Other times, the team needs an employee to step up in an area that might not come as naturally to them. In that case, the data allows Velez to better coach her employees. Before entering this interview, for example, she encouraged her brother, the company’s construction finance manager, to boost his social skills more than he typically would.
“Just saying, ‘Hey, we see you, we know you’re like this and that’s all good, but just know that we’re about to be in the situation where we’re going to need you to adjust in a certain way,’ ” she says. “So it’s just preparing and being a lot more in tune with how people think.”
Now enrolled in the MIT Executive MBA program, Velez plans to continue developing Gorilla Ops, LJV’s software solution platform which works to automate the company’s workflows. Alongside a push for AI and technology, she is striving to improve her team’s experience.
“It’s always going to be about, ‘How do we give our employees more time to do the things that they actually want to do? How do we make more time or more space for the things that we’re actually excited to do instead of sitting in front of a laptop and just typing away or doing data?’”