Bells & Whistles » Taking the Wheel: Charting Your Course

Taking the Wheel: Charting Your Course

Author: Anna Kassulke
Posted: June 18, 2007
Category: Profiling
Tags: Center of Excellence, Performance Staffing, Profiling, STREAMline Training, Training
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The Right Fit: Profiling In Relief, Part 2

In Part 1, From Pears to Plums: The Changing Employment Landscape, we explored mapping the changing employment landscape. Now we go forward with how to navigate this challenging topography.

Consider: The combined cost of losing an employee and hiring a replacement can be as much as 200% of the position’s annual salary.

The development of a talent management strategy is vital to all organizations today, regardless of their size or industry. Profiling will give your organization the competitive edge when it comes to recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people. It can take time, months or even years, but those who have sought expert guidance know that the bottom line pays off; the costs involved in poor hiring will be eliminated.

We would be willing to wager that 100% of those organizations that have been through this absolutely critical process would never turn back; they have a distinct advantage right now. Think of it in these terms: profiling is a great and rewarding business process, it will deliver ROI, and it will mean that you will take to the waters knowing who you want in advance, rather than believing or thinking that you do.

Companies spend an average of 36% of their revenue on human capital expenses

What have we all traditionally done? We have normally reacted at the point when a position becomes open, not before. Sound familiar? We place a print ad or post a job to get candidates to find us when the position becomes open because we have no available talent pool. Organizations that do not have a talent management process in place are at a distinct disadvantage in today’s environment.

Let’s consider how we have traditionally operated (and how all but one percent of organizations continue to operate). Traditionally we would:

Create a job description
Develop an overly complex and non-appealing recruitment message
Rush together a sourcing strategy that hopefully reaches the ideal and active position seeker
Screen countless unqualified or unsuitable applicants
Hope to hire the best candidate

Many organizations continue to operate this way and continue to experience disappointment. They find themselves hiring the wrong people and incurring considerable expense as a consequence. The solution: exhaustive screening. But this directionless extra screening drives time-to-fill, and, even worse, is ineffectual. Reacting this way is the end result of drifting on the open seas, at the mercy of the elements. This is not the most effective way to attract qualified applicants.

The fundamental part of the process that is missing here is profiling, and without it, no subsequent recruitment processes will reliably get you the right applicant.

Now consider this: The Centre for Creative Leadership finds that 35% of all executives in a new job leave voluntarily, are terminated, or received a poor performance review within 18 months of their hiring.

According to Laurence Karsh, President of SHL Americas, “U.S. managers waste an average of 34 days per year dealing with underperformance. Senior executives claim they spend seven weeks a year-or over an hour per day-managing badly performing employees.”

He continues, “By not matching the right people with the right jobs, U.S. companies are also compromising the productivity of their experienced, well-paid managers, because their managerial time could be more wisely used. When we advertise, what do we look for? - Hard skills, such as expertise, background, experience and education. One of the most fundamental things to understand is that profiling can help us develop an appreciation for soft skills.

These are the intangibles, but they have the potential to make or break the hire. Generally when we advertise for a position, we focus on duties. For example, we might seek a JAVA programmer, so we look for that particular skill alone. But we may not also consider the necessity for this programmer to be able to interact and innovate independently.

More to think about: Profiling could eliminate a lot of bad hiring decisions by helping employers distinguish between those applicants “who can” and those “who will.”

Soft skills include position-specific competencies, personality traits, and organizational and motivational fit. An exclusive focus on hard skills is insufficient. You need to identify the qualities and attributes (a target profile) that a candidate would need to succeed - not just exist - in a specific position.

We call this the ‘DNA’: It is made up of personality traits, habits, outlook and so on. What kind of traits would you look for in a sales hire, for example? David Kurlan of Objective Management Group Inc., identifies desire, commitment, a specific outlook, and a sense of responsibility as four elements that are crucial to sales success. What are the critical elements that you are looking for in each of your positions?

Identifying essential soft skills is critical to the profiling process. These skills work in tandem with hard skills. Each and every one of us is driven by different imperatives, goals, aspirations, and in some ways we want for organizations to be populated by those who fit and are aligned with those goals.

Surprisingly perhaps, most breakdowns in performance are not technical in nature; they are the consequence of competencies, interface and fit. Nonetheless, many organizations continue to neglect soft skills, or aspects of them, as they focus on the ‘what’ or the ‘who,’ rather than the ‘how’.

All things considered, here’s some more: According to results out of a DDI survey, 74% of respondents said that they continue to rely on gut feelings, despite the availability of various tools and systematic processes for determining cultural fit.

We are who we are. Likewise, each and every applicant has a personality, and they either will or will not fit with the culture of your organization. So how do we get the people with the hard as well as soft skills that we require?

First, we identify the key attributes of our successful team members and apply that knowledge to identify the target for our search. This demands no less than a research-based model. Some ready-made models are available which provide profiles for specific industries, but they are not tailor-made for your specific organization. An alternative is to seek the assistance of professionals. Bear in mind: we are talking about a scientific process here.

So unless you have someone with expertise in industrial psychology within your organization, you will need to seek some form of outside help.

Many organizations fail at this juncture, because they feel confident that they know what they are doing, but chances are they may have profiled incorrectly. Has the degree to which the work itself is satisfying been taken into account (job fit)? What about organizational fit? Are your organization’s operations and values consistent with an environment conducive to attaining satisfaction outcomes?

How do we rigorously identify attributes of successful team members? First in the profiling process is interviewing. Executives, hiring managers, successful employees and former employees are asked specific questions such as: What do they consider the personality traits are for a person in a particular job family? What are the positives about working for your organization? And for former employees: Why did they leave?

Companies such as DDI who create scientifically-validated profiles undertake structured interviews, competency ratings, Job Fit Analysis Questionnaires, and Organizational Fit Questionnaires, among other data collection methodologies.

In the next post, Part 3, we’ll take a closer look at now that we’ve got a profile, how to use it. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions!