KPA and Career Visioning for Real Estate Executive Assistants

In an earlier post, I talked about several types of personality assessments that will help you in your job as a real estate executive assistant.

Keller Williams has just released their new personality assessment called the KPA (Keller Personality Assessment) which has a couple of additional components to further enhance the resulting outcome.

The KPA is now used in place of the AVA. The most obvious difference is the price. One AVA assessment was over $200. The KPA is only $20 and teams are charged a maximum of $100. This means you can five people take the KPA for $100 and every assessment ordered after that is free. What a deal!

The MCA in each Keller Williams market center has a dashboard where he or she is responsible for ordering the KPA and sending out the results. Just give the person’s email address to the MCA and he or she will email a link for the person to access the assessment.

The assessment takes approximately an hour to complete. It is imperative that the person know they need an hour of uninterrupted time to take the assessment. There are timed portions where interruptions can skew the results.

There are five parts to the KPA assessment.

1. A behavioral assessment where you choose the words that are most like you and least like you.
2. A skills test where you fill in the blanks in a sentence with the words provided in a list below the sentence.
3. A skills test for spacial relations where you are presented with a 3D object and four comparable objects. You goal is to determine which of the four is the same object as the subject just rotated in a different way.
4. A vocabulary test where you are given a word and have to choose a word in a list that is similar.
5. A category test where you are given six to eight words and you have to chose those words in the list which belong in the same category.

Each of the five are timed except for the first.

The results look like this:

The rest of the report goes in-depth and defines each of these as it relates to the subject.

Additionally, the MCA puts the job title into the system and the KPA also determines how close a match to the job the subject is. When my MCA entered my information, the Executive Assistant job wasn’t available so she chose “Generic: Leader.” (EA has since been added to the system.)

Here are my results:

As you can see, I would not be a very good fit for a “Leader.” I’m clearly not assertive enough. You will notice though, that all of the skills tests came back as green or “Strong match between the person and the job.”

Clearly the behavioral profile of a Team Leader or Operating Principle is quite different from that of Executive Assistant. Which is why you are also given a Job Fit Match page with the assessment to show you which jobs the subject would be a match for. Here’s mine:

Here you will notice that I came back a high match for Executive Assistant.

One thing that was reiterated at Career Visioning is that the KPA results is only 25% of the hiring process. The KPA needs to be verified with the subject. It is during this verification process that the true nature of the subject is revealed.

What I like about the new Career Visioning process is that the process itself is now quite simplified. All the interview questions you will need are given to you. All the set-up, prep, and execution steps are laid out for you. As the executive assistant, it could be your job to hire all new team members. Career Visioning is a process and a system. EA’s are notoriously good at following processes and systems. Agents tend to cheat the system and circumvent the process, am I right? That’s why I think the EA should be the one conducting the interviews and following up on the references.

And as long as you follow the process, and don’t cheat, you will likely hire a new team member that will stay with you for a long time and be quite happy in the role.

What was iterated at the Career Visioning class is that the subject’s results are compared to those of all the other people who have taken the assessment. This is unlike the AVA where your answers were only compared to yourself. I thought that was interesting because it makes sense that I would want to know if the new buyer’s agent I’m about to hire is similar in personality and skills to those of other successful buyer’s agents.

Let me know what questions you have about the KPA or about Career Visioning. You MUST attend Career Visioning when it comes to your area. Contact your MCA, or if you are not with Keller Williams, you can still attend the course. Just call your local Keller Williams office. Tell them Elizabeth Gilbert from Keller Williams Kansas City North said you should talk to the MCA about attending Career Visioning.

For questions, email me directly: egilbert@kw.com