How to Hire the Perfect Person Every Time

In this webinar, Brian Downes of Performance Cubed takes an in-depth look at recruitment strategy, providing tips on how you can implement a successful strategy in your organisation.

Introduction

This is a series called ‘Building a World-Class Team: The 4 Essential Elements’. It could just as easily have been called ‘How to Get the Right People in the Right Seats Doing the Right Things Right’. In this series, we show you how you can use the DEAP system. It’s a TTI Success Insights model, combined with the ONEThing planning system, which is Padraig Berry’s design, to find, retain, lead and performance manage your people. Today we’re going to focus on a system for finding the right people.

The Rockefeller Habits

You’ve probably come across this before, the Rockefeller Habits, in your management meetings. If you haven’t before, I certainly recommend looking it up. You’ll find plenty of information through Google. It’s remarkable that they’re as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.

We’ll just take a look at some of them:

• The executive team is healthy and aligned, that’s common sense.
•  Everyone is aligned with the number one thing that needs to be accomplished this quarter to move the company forward. (I think this is probably a little bit rarer than the first.) Communication rhythm is established and information moves through the organisation accurately and quickly. This can be a challenge for many organisations nowadays.
• Every facet of the organisation has a person assigned with accountability for ensuring goals are met. Who owns the goals? Who’s responsible for driving them forward?
• On-going employee input is collected to identify obstacles and opportunities. Again, an incredibly valuable action.
• Reporting and analysis of customer feedback data is as frequent and accurate as financial data.
• Core values and purpose are alive in the organisation. This is one that I see in many organisations where the core values and purpose are not so much alive. They’re not lived. They may be presented in the reception area on a nice plaque, but very often these aren’t lived within the organisation.
• Employees can articulate the key components of the company’s strategy accurately. Again, we tend not to cascade strategy down throughout the organisation. It tends to stay at the top table. I think this is damaging performance within organisations.
• All employees can answer quantitatively whether they had a good day or week. How often do we walk down the hall and meet somebody in the hall and say, “How are you doing?” It becomes small talk rather than it being a really valuable conversation.
• The company’s plans and performance are visible to everyone. Transparency - so everybody can see what’s going on, who’s doing what, when and where - a very valuable performance tool that isn’t really used.

In his book, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”, Verne Harnish talks about four decisions that management of growing companies must make. The four decisions are around people, strategy, execution and cash.

People decisions are about getting, keeping and growing good people. Do you have the right people and are they in the right seats? Strategy decisions drive revenue and growth. Do you have a plan? Are you just reacting? Are you doing the right things? Do you have growth and recruitment strategies to help you execute on the plans?

Execution decisions are about profit, RoI, RoIT? Are you doing things right? Cash decisions produce the oxygen for your business. You can survive a long time without profit, but you can’t survive a day without cash. Are you maximising your cash conversion cycle?

The DEAP System

This series of webinars is actually built around a live case study of an organisation we’re working with in the hotel industry that is implementing this system to drive growth. Their goal is to grow the business by tenfold in the next 10 years. Absolutely it’s an ambitious target, but the model you see over the four events in the series is the foundation of their approach.

Let me ask you a question. If you had to make a choice between having the right people, the right strategy and flawless execution, what would you pick? For me, I’d always go with the right people on the basis that they will find the right strategy and execute flawlessly. I suggest that people, strategy and execution are in the appropriate order of importance.

This is the first model we’ve used. This is the DEAP System from TTI Success Insights. It revolves around DISCOVER, ENGAGE, ADVANCE and PERFORM, the talent management pipeline. This is the second: this is called the ONEThing Plan. In the four events in the series, we’ll use these two models to show you how to find, retain, lead, performance manage your people and to grow your organisation.

This one is “How do I find the right people?” This attempts to answer the question of how to find the right people. The focus is on understanding the role you’re trying to fill and giving yourself the best chance of picking the right person to fill it.

Live in NCI in December I answered the question “How do I keep good people?” Here, we look at understanding how to build engagement and develop your people so as to meet your needs now and as you grow.

The third event in the series is “How do I manage the performance of my people?” Here, we explore a range of tools to allow you to build accountability, so things like peer reviews, war rooms, performance reviews, gap analysis and development plans.

Then the fourth in the series answers the question “How do I lead my people?” It’s all about developing a shared vision with your team and converting it into an execution plan that they own.

Let’s push on. Chances are you’ve assessed quite a few individuals in your careers to date using various tools and approaches, I’m sure. Any experienced consultant will tell you that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to an individual’s behaviours, motivators, skills, acumen, etc. An experienced consultant also understands that certain behaviours, certain motivators and certain skills are a better fit for certain jobs than others. This is a core issue in finding, retaining, developing and performance managing good people, getting the right fit between the job and the person.

In his book “Good to Great,” Jim Collins talks about injecting an endless stream of talent into the veins of the organisation. I’m sure you’ll agree this is important. I would happen to agree with him. I’d add that recruiting talented candidates is just not enough on its own. It’s crucial that people are assigned to the specific roles where their talents will have the greatest impact on achieving company goals and where they are most likely to remain on board and fully engaged.

Let me ask you a few questions again. Have you ever hired someone who didn’t meet your expectations? Why do you think that was? Do you know what the real costs of a bad hire are in money, negativity in the organisation, waste of management time, etc.? Do you know what your turnover percentage is and the associated costs, and how do you feel about that? Have recruiters in the past failed you, and why do you think that was? Do your recruiters or HR people truly understand what they’re looking for in a candidate?

The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

In a Harvard Business Review article, and the article is called “The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad,” published in May of 2009, researchers reasoned that many companies fail to hire and retain the best talent because without an effective recruitment process in place, they inadvertently treat hiring situations like an emergency. As a result, about a third of promising new hires departed within three years. That’s a startling figure.

The authors noted that far too many companies rely on subjective personal preferences or false assumptions, such as making relevant work experience the number one reason for hiring. They fail to assess a person’s ability to collaborate on teams. Only one in 10 companies factor in a drive for continuous learning, which is crucial as a measure of adaptability. It’s a top attribute that most superior performers will have in common.

They said that the most important finding is that improving the quality of assessments is three times more profitable than increasing the size of the candidate pool and six times more profitable than getting the chosen candidate to accept a lower compensation package. HBR also noted that it’s more important to choose the right assessment tools than to focus on the assessment technique.

Interestingly, the “Wall Street Journal” says that large companies using assessments as part of their hiring in 2001 was 21% and in 2015, it was 57%. Clearly, the message is sinking in.

Let’s have a look at the model. Benchmarking a job minimises bias. It provides a clear objective and collective voice to what behaviours, motivators and skills the job needs. When job benchmarking is implemented properly, you not only attract the best candidates, but you’ll save time and money by hiring the right people the first time and then reducing the learning curve of new employees who are strategically matched to fit your company.

The first part of this is discovering. That’s about finding the right people. The job benchmarking process and cutting edge assessments that I show you later on will help you to discover the right talent internally and externally to drive the organisation and personal performance.

The second step and second part of this is engagementor retention. The assessments are designed to engage people at the deepest level using five integrated sciences. You have behaviours, motivators, competencies, potential and EQ.

Companies who strategically use the resources to provide superior employment experience are going to stand out more dramatically than ever when compared to competitors with a poor employer brand. Going forward, company survival, staff development and employee job stability are entwined as businesses compete not just to maintain a foothold in their industry but to retain the top talent that will help them thrive.

Next comes advanceor development. The assessments allow people to utilise a deeper insight to help the organisation and individual advance to higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and effectiveness, which I’m sure you know are very important.

Finally we have perform, manageor lead. Again, the assessments give us a deeper understanding of the individuals and how they can relate to the company goals.

Recruitment as an Investment in the Future

Again, if we just look at the true cost of a bad hire, 80% of turnover is estimated to be because of bad hires. I don't know what your experience is, but this is what Gallup say. They estimate that a bad hire costs a five times annual salary. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate the cost of it in an SME company at $190,000 because of the multifunctional nature of the roles in smaller companies.

When you add up the hiring cost, the totally compensation for the period, the cost of maintaining the employee, the disruption costs, the severance costs, the lost opportunity, mistakes, failures, UndercoverRecruiter.com estimates a manager on a $62,000 per annum salary terminated after two and a half years costs a company $840,000. Whatever way you slice it or dice it, a bad hire is a huge cost to an organisation.

What’s funny is that most of this is avoidable. We have the technology. We have the processes. We have the tools that can help us avoid these things. In a CareerBuilder survey of 6,000 HR professionals worldwide in 2014, the reasons given for bad hires were 38% needed to fill the position fast, 34% said it just didn’t work out, 21% said they didn’t test research the employee’s skills well enough and 11% said the company didn’t do adequate checks. A lot of that is avoidable.

I’m sure you remember this old chestnut: Hire slow, fire fast. I think this is true. I think we need to take our time when we hire. Obviously, firing people isn’t as easy in this part of the world, but certainly taking our time to hire will make a big difference.

I think we need to look at recruitment as an investment in the future. It’s something that will prove to impact company performance and profitability for better or worse, but the initial experience of hiring isn’t the true cost. The real cost is revealed over time. When a new employee either fails or flourishes in the role, as I said in a blog a couple months ago, it’s a bit like a wasteland. You are what you eat. How effective the recruitment turns out to be depends on whether the hire is someone who is actually capable of reaching a superior performance, on how long it will take the performance to ramp up on the level of engagement that results.

By the way, it’s worth mentioning that using objective hiring criteria helps employers avoid costly mistakes that can lead to litigation, too. It’s important that the job matching process creates hiring records that prove the company is doing everything possible to remove bias from the recruitment process, supporting the business in a legally defensible position.

Throughout the process, documentation must clearly prove the employer is using unbiased objective criteria to hire safely under the law. Of course, you have to use tools that are validated and don’t have adverse impact.

As I said, turnover is expensive and much of it is regrettable. It’s a mistake to accept turnover as normal, when it and the ripple of diminished productivity can be reduced. As I said, we have the tools. We have the processes.

Job Matching

Good jobs are hard to find. Employees are more aware of that now than ever before. People really do prefer to settle into a good job fit where they can enjoy the benefits of career success and economic stability. When the match between the job and the employee is right, each employee experiences the job satisfaction and the success that makes it easy to stay. I think this is a really important point.

Job matching reduces the expenses related to turnover. It boosts the bottom line. With the TTI job matching system, which we’re talking about today, clients have achieved a retention rate of 92% over four years. That’s an impressive number.

We need to also look at the true cost of non-performing staff if we’re looking at recruitment as well. Where an employee isn’t engaged, obviously their productivity is going to suffer. There’s also a wider cost to the organisation: lost opportunity. There are untold business benefits that the person could have contributed if their energy and creativity were flowing in their work.

When that person goes beyond being disengaged to become seriously negative, the effect on the organisation can be devastating. Again, a Gallup study in 2015 found that only about 30% of people are actively engaged, 55% not engaged, or in other words doing the minimum, and 15% actively disengaged.

 The actively disengaged are damaging the team. They’re damaging the company. They’re losing business by not treating the customer properly. I’m sure you’re familiar with all of the negative connotations of this. These are consistent statistics year after year with little improvement in the last decade.

In a research piece by Felps, Mitchell and Byington, they reckoned that one bad apple can reduce team performance by 30% to 40%. That’s very serious. That’s leaving a lot of potential performance on the table.

According to a recent Gallup survey among German workers, 31% felt stress yesterday, 24% felt tired or burnt out yesterday, 22% felt they have behaved poorly with their family or friends on three or more days in the past 30 days due to stress, and 12% reported that they had mental or emotional distress such as burnout, depression or anxiety disorders in the last 12 months. I’ll contend that a large part of that is a poor job fit.

If the job could talk, what would it say? I think it would explain precisely what was necessarily to achieve superior performance. We could ask it to tell us about the knowledge a person needs, the personal attributes required to drive success, the rewards for superior performance, the hard skills that are vital for the job, the behaviours necessary to perform at peak levels and the intrinsic motivators and drivers of behaviour.

We all know jobs can’t talk, but if they did, we would certainly hear the real story. Instead, we have to get the truth from another source: subject matter experts. These are people in and around a given job who understand it well.

Even asking people about a job presents a challenge, so before we can learn the true meaning of superior performance for any particular job, the experts must remove their natural biases.

Biases can create a blind spot, blocking out a single thing or act like a set of blinkers, making only one thing visible. Sometimes the unconscious biases enter into the hiring process. Many people are unknowingly biased in regards to experience, education or intelligence. They may overemphasise the importance of these factors at the expense of factors that are actually much more accurate indicators of performance potentially.

For example, everyone knows someone with a high level of education or experience who’s definitely not highly productive on the job. Over-emphasising these factors in the hiring process may result in hiring someone who won’t produce the results you need.

Most businesses are quick to answer the question “How do I know what the job truly needs?” with “Let’s take our top performers and try to clone them,” or, “I know what it takes. I’ll just tell you.” I think this approach limits objectivity and it promotes bias. Organisations using this method may become narrow in focus and develop benchmarks and competencies that are incongruent with the actual needs of the job. Consider if you only have C-level employees when you’re looking for A-level people. Should you clone the C-level employees or consider if you just hire individuals like yourself? Not good either way.

The job match benchmarking process then leads to an understanding of the knowledge, the intrinsic motivators, the personal attributes, the behaviour, the hard skills required of each key accountability for the job in question. A comprehensive picture of each employee’s talent and potential is automatically in place, along with a complete professional development programme so managers have an individualised guidebook for coaching and mentoring the person in the job.

After the process, businesses can compare all current and new staff members to the results and provide a development plan for each. This is really powerful data and really powerful information.

Development plans that are job related are much better than those based on one person’s opinion. Job matching is the subtle science and the exact art of carefully matching the right person to the job that’s ideally suited for them.

Hire a match for the job, identify measurable job performance indicators, create a performance appraisal system, providing an on-boarding programme and create a personalised development plan. These are going to help right throughout the talent management process.

It’s also important because people who aren’t job matched experience stress because they struggle to meet the requirements of a position that isn’t a good fit for their natural inclinations or talents. They’re likely to respond to hire stress levels with higher absenteeism. Instead of channelling the passion for the work into productivity, as job match employees will do, their performance suffers.

What’s a benchmark and how do we match people and jobs?

The first step must be a clear understanding of the job. We must benchmark the job. The term ‘benchmark’ originates from the chiselled horizontal mark (usually indicated with chiselled arrow below it) that surveyors made in stone structures into which an angle iron could be placed to form a bench, thus ensuring that a levelling rod could be accurately repositioned in the same plane in the future. In business, it relates to best practice: people, execution and process.

What can you measure in a benchmark? We do a complete analysis of 61 job-related factors to produce factual data that describes the optimum job match. It’s incorporated into an ideal candidate form. The form provides a detailed roadmap for steering recruitment and professional development throughout the organisation.

We have 12 behavioural traits, and they show how a person will get the job done and what environment they need. We have 12 intrinsic driving forces or motivators. They reveal why a person is motivated to perform on the job and how to reward them. We look at 25 professional competencies that a person has demonstrated or been recognised for in their prior work, and 12 acumen indicators showing the potential a person can access within themselves for job performance.

This is part of it. You also look at the CV. You’re also interviewing the individual. In terms of the measurements, we don’t measure education and training or intelligence, nor do we look at hard skills required for a role. You’d include these in the ideal candidate form that we’ll discuss in a little bit.

Matching Behavioural Style with Job Profile

If we just look at behaviours first, every behavioural style has a natural head start toward performing well in certain roles, and the best-case scenario is to put them in that role.

The job matching process identifies the unconscious, gut-level behavioural style that comes naturally to a person. With that information, their tendencies in regards to the 12 behavioural traits can be compared to the behavioural traits required by the job. If they correspond, you have one component of a great job match.

There are four fundamental aspects of behaviour that are involved in every aspect of life and they’re necessary to varying degrees in every job. Understanding a person’s natural way of operating in each of these areas gives a reliable indication of how they tend to perform on the job.

• Decision making (which on the slide you see there is the red or dominance) is how a person addresses problems and challenges.
•  Influence (which is the yellow) is how a person handles situations involving other people.
•  Steadiness is how a person demonstrates pace and consistency in their work.
• Compliance is how a person responds to rules and procedures set by others.

Everyone has a natural behaviour style that helps them to perform only moderately well in some situations, but prepares them to truly excel in others. It also means that there are some positions where they’ll be challenged just to keep up. Imagine trying to put an outstanding programmer into a sales role or vice versa. You get the idea!

It’s normal for a person to make some small adaptations in any work environment, but if a person’s natural behaviour is not fairly close to the style required by the job, they’re going to have limitations and they may feel stressed. They will have to expend a significant amount of energy just adapting to the situation before they can begin to start to work and accomplish the work at hand. These are important pieces of information.

Then there are 12 behavioural traits that we look at off of that. They are analysis of data, competitiveness, consistency, customer relations, versatility, follow-up and follow-through, following policy, frequent change, frequent interactions with others, organised workplace, people-oriented and urgency.

Actually, this particular graph belongs to Padraig, who would have been my co-presenter on this previously. Let’s take a look at this profile. This is somebody who’s ambitious and optimistic, ambitious in terms of the dominance piece, and optimistic in terms of how they interact with others. They would be flexible in terms of their consistency and steadiness and an independent thinker in terms of how they look at rules.

What type of role do you think this profile would fit? Is this somebody who would be sitting at a desk crunching numbers, or out and about doing business? Of course, like a doctor examining you, this is only one of you. We can’t tell solely from this. We need more than just the X-ray. We need a blood test, an MRI scan, a CAT scan, etc. You get what I’m saying.

Motivators

We start to look at other aspects. What you see here are driving forces, previously known as motivators. Driving forces are the energy from within that drive behaviour. Because they indicate what a person cares most and least about, driving forces describe why individuals act the way they do, revealing the inner motivation for the behaviour.

Motivators are measured in six areas. You see them down the spine of this graph. They are knowledge, utility, surroundings, others, power and methodologies. Each has two sides giving 12 driving forces.

With knowledge of which of these driving forces a job satisfies, each employee can be matched to a job that matches their inner drive, which makes sense. When a person clearly demonstrates a passion for the work, it’s because the motivators are well matched to the job. They’re going to be more productive and they’re going to enjoy doing the work. Driving forces are a powerful underlying source of a person’s energy to perform on the job.

This is the same graph, but it’s just represented on a wheel. Typically, we’d look at the primary cluster of the top four driving forces. In this case, you can see here that they resourceful, receptive, intentional and commanding. This is somebody who’s looking to maximise return resources and personal freedom by bringing new ideas and methods to receptive people.

Professional Competencies

Another measure is the professional competencies. All jobs require a variety of skills, such as planning and organisation, resilience, conflict management, continuous learning, etc. There are 25 professional competencies that are generally agreed to be necessary in the workplace at varying degrees according to the position. Here, we have the 25.

How important or unimportant each skill is for effective job performance will vary from job to job. It may also be unique for similar jobs at different companies. For example, a high level of mastery in negotiation and project management may be important to success for a sales person in one field, while neither will matter at all for a sales person in a different industry.

Skills competencies don’t have to be difficult to identify or painstakingly slotted out with the trick interview questions. An individual’s level of mastery of each skill can be readily determined. They’re based on 30 years of research, frequently validated and accompanied by documentation and support for material for managing the person’s skill development to the next level.

The job-matching process guides the team of subject-matter experts through the process of defining precisely what level of mastery of each of these competencies an employee will need in their arsenal if they’re to reach peak performance in a given position. The result is specific to your industry and to your company.

You can see from this one that the behavioural style, the driving force and competency is starting to indicate a particular type of role which might be suitable for this person. These are all Padraig’s, in fact. If we had a job measured with the same tools telling us what the job needs, then we could compare this assessment to the job and see if we have a match.

Acumen Indicators

Here is a fourth science we can use. We don’t always use it, but we can use it. The acumen indicators give an idea of how astutely a person analyses and interprets experiences as situations unfold. Based on a person’s results in each of the six dimensions, they give a view into how a person thinks.

The acumen indicator gives insight into a person’s self-view with three internal factors and their view of the world with three external factors. It illuminates how clearly they understand situations and thus their capacity for meeting challenges in business. It can reveal skills that an individual possesses that they may not have fully utilised on the job yet.

By revealing what they potentially can do, acumen indicators help match the job to a person who can reach superior performance in that position. It’s good to know what a person has been recognised for in the professional competency section. It’s also useful to understand what the person has the potential for as well.

The Benchmarking Process – Key Accountabilities

We’re almost there, but let’s just look at the benchmarking process and how we do all of this. Job matching starts with first understanding the job and then matching people to it. You saw four assessments used to profile someone in terms of behaviours, driving forces, professional competencies and acumen indicators. We can also profile a job using the same tools and then compare the person to the job.

It can be broken down into a few key steps, and each step is contingent on the one prior, and the entire benchmarking process can be replicated across all positions within a company. It’s important to understand why the job exists, how success in the job is measured, the history of the position and how it fits the company strategy. We must review and thoroughly understand the job that’s about to be benchmarked.

We need to identify the job and the subject matter experts. The subject matter experts are people within the organisation that have a direct connection to the job. Their expertise will help you create the job benchmark. Actually, as we’ve been doing this, it’s also useful to have somebody who may be external to the organisation, an individual who would understand what’s involved also.

You can identify three to seven people who have a stake in the success of the job, such as managers, former job holders, current job holders, etc., and brief each one of them on the process and the exact job description, verify their commitment to participate and then, with these experts, identify the key accountabilities of the job.

The key accountabilities then provide a background for determining the skills, the knowledge, the behaviours, the motivators, the certifications, the experience, the intelligence, etc. and other factors that are involved in the job.

This then informs part of the ideal candidate form. They’re the starting point for developing this. Then matching is based on education, certification, salary, behaviours, motivators, skills, acumen and experience.

You want to end up being able to compare a candidate to a job like this. As you’ll see on the slide here, if we just look at customer focus, the white hoop is the job. The blue dot is the person. As we can see here, there’s a gap between the two. This person may not be meeting that criteria, but again, this follows through into an interview.

We get the same with job rewards and culture. Again, you can see the white hoop being the job and the blue dot being the person and where they sit. Job-related behaviour, again, is the same idea. We’re seeing in all of these where the individual candidate sits in relation to the job and, again, with the acumen indicators. Putting all this together, we can start to develop a picture of the person and how they relate to that particular job.

Then we want to work on the key accountabilities of this job. This is where your subject matter experts, again, come in. It’s always the best recommendation to start from scratch in establishing the accountability, and to not assume that one pre-defined set will suit your company’s unique requirements.

The process of defining a position’s accountability focuses management’s attention on assuring that the organisation’s key success factors are supported by the critical accountability of the position that they create, which in turn assures maximum return on investment for the organisation.

A position’s accountabilities are not the same as a job description. They’re instead a succinct summary of critical goals and key successes the position is held accountable to produce for the organisation. The accountabilities define the reasons why the position is necessary in the first place. They’ve laid the groundwork for management to move forward in defining and supporting behaviours, motivators, skills, capacities and cultural rewards that would support successful achievement of the position’s accountabilities.

A position’s critical accountabilities are defined through a facilitated process in which the participants who are familiar with the position explore, validate and quantify its reason for being. Through discussion, the SMEs, or subject matter experts, will define a comprehensive yet succinct group of three to five accountabilities for the position, and these will be ranked by importance and time requirement.

Ideally, three or more people with current actual working knowledge of the position should be involved at every step of the process, and it’s important for each participant to focus on the simple objective: defining a short list of critical accountabilities for the position. When complete, the resulting list of accountabilities typically number from three to five in total.

We then categorise. Write up category headings with bullet points of activities under each category, as you can see here. The reason a job exists and through discussion, we’ve come up with this list. We categorise them. We have the job experts boil down the most important components of the position and consolidate the brainstorm entities into groups that make sense. Wordsmithing is important here as you craft the group ideas into key accountability statements.

We then establish measurements for each key accountability. We then prioritise them and rank them, and we allocate a weight to each, allocating a time percentage to each category. This is to identify what behaviour type the role is looking for and which of these would require most of the position’s time.

Finally, we can come up with a summary of the key accountability worksheet. This is basically everything that’s been brainstormed and discussed boiled down into these pieces you see here.

Along with the subject matter experts, you respond to a survey done online based on the competencies, rewards, behaviours and the acumen of a job using these key accountabilities to eliminate the personal bias we spoke about earlier on. You can think of a benchmark as a 360 survey, but one is not asking about a person, but a job, completed by those that know the job best.

The report we come up with combines the input of all the subject matter experts to create a benchmark for the job. The end results are going to tell you the behaviours most needed for a job, the motivators, the job rewards, the skills required to perform at a superior level and the acumen required.

It’s really important that the subject matter experts do this as soon as possible after the key accountability exercise, ideally immediately. If it’s left longer, you can lose the thinking that’s been developed over the couple of hours developing the key accountabilities. It’s very hard to get back into that place after a few days. It all becomes a bit vague. We’re all very busy, but the report then allows you to later compare individuals to a job benchmark.

Once the job benchmark is produced, we can reassemble the stakeholders to review the results, achieve buy-in and basically look at what we’ve come up with, verify that they’re happy with it, validate it and sign it off.

Talent Assessment

A talent assessment on the same scale as a job will identify the characteristics an individual will bring to the job, allowing you to easily determine the best job fit and identify coaching opportunities with that person. Within the framework of a company’s overall selection process, effective hiring decisions can be made and productivity can begin immediately.

In terms of working with the candidates then, we measure them. Have candidates complete the online behaviours, motivators, skills and acumen assessments and then we can produce a gap report that allows you to compare one person to one job benchmark. We can use that gap report then to identify the job match of a candidate or a current employee. 

The job talent comparison report, which you see here, allows you to compare up to five candidates to a job benchmark. This is a great report to quickly identify the job matching multiple candidates.

Also, when a candidate completes the online assessments, you’ll be able to generate a talent report or a more comprehensive coaching report based on this portfolio. The debriefing guides allow you walk through the report for the step-by-step model to guide you in the debriefing.

We also get this very useful summary page. As you can see here, on the right-hand side, the blue box is an exact match. The green box is a good compatibility, yellow is fair compatibility, red is poor and if you had a white box, which we don’t have here, it’s somebody who has exceeded the benchmark and they’re possibly over-focused.

We can also produce interview questions. They’re generated by the reports in each of the behaviours, the motivators and the professional competency areas. Again, very useful in terms of drilling into an individual candidate and really understanding them better.

We complete the benchmarking process then by fully documenting the process and results for the job’s file. Use this documentation for talent selection, development, etc. It’s objectively defining the ideal candidate. The ideal candidate form is used to document all of the job requirement details before a selection process begins. This will include a description of the position and the work environment, along with education, experience and any other requirements. It combines the factual data assembled in the job matching process with all the other requirements an ideal candidate must meet.

This is a very important step and one that should be given full consideration as the recruitment and screen process highly depends on the decision made in this step. The hiring manager and everyone involved to the hiring process should contribute to it. It’s a way to clearly define deal breakers, such as technical skills, etc.

The experience required should be carefully thought through. We need to consider how to proceed with a candidate who might lack part of the experience but who meets or exceeds all of the other highly detailed critical requirements. In some cases, it’s worth discussing exactly what might be done and how much it will cost to provide the additional experience so that you don’t miss out on superior performers.