If the weak economy is a concern for your business, take a moment to look out across the office, branch or factory floor. The people there are all you’ve got. These are the people who will find the cost savings, woo new customers, get more done with less, deliver great service and drive your bottom line even when they are feeling stressed. In boom times there is a lot of talk of talent wars, but it’s the tough times when the reality of just how much top talent matters, strikes home. So now is a good time to pause and think, Are the processes we use to attract, identify, hire, engage and retain top performing talent the right ones? Are we doing what we need to do so that our team is strong enough to take us through uncertain, perhaps daunting, business conditions?
Finding and hiring top performers is not a mysterious art it’s a matter of employing the right processes and technologies. Are you confident that your hiring process identifies people who will be top performers? Just as engineers know a lot about how to build a bridge, the HR consulting industry and employment agencies know a lot about acquiring talent. There are specific processes and technologies you can employ to assess the skills, knowledge and behaviours of a potential new employee just as engineers have specific processes and technologies to assess the strength of a span of steel.
There are a series of steps in a well defined recruitment process that will reliably and consistently bring in top talent, here is an overview:
Developing an accurate understanding of the job and the skills, knowledge and behaviours required for the new employee to perform quickly and at a fast pace
Writing the job ad to attract only the best quality candidates
Short listing resumes for qualifications and experience
Resume and telephone screening
Creating a structured interview with appropriate Behavioural Descriptive Interview (BDI) questions
Administering psychometric and skills testing
Conducting reference and background checking
Providing a robust Onboarding and Orientation program
One thing that surprises many managers is how a good employment agency will ask a lot of questions upfront to understand a job before commencing to fill the position. Isn’t it enough to know you are looking for an accounting clerk? The answer is no because not all accounting clerks are the same and this brings us to the first key piece of advice for finding top performers: take time to understand the job. What is the difference between someone who excels in the job and someone who just gets by? What is the difference between someone who leaves after a few months and someone who thrives in your business for years? Nail this and you are well on the way to getting the right person.
Simply taking twenty minutes to carefully think about the job before you rush out to hire someone is a wise thing to do. The HR consulting industry has developed a special weapon to make this process much more scientific: the psychometric assessment test. If you test your existing top performers in that job you can develop a profile of the behaviours and personality traits that lead to successfully replicating a top performer in that job. This job profile greatly augments your work in understanding the attributes necessary to attract top performers to your company. Now give the same psychometric test to candidates on the short list, compare both tests and you have a reliable way of telling who is likely to perform well, fit in and stay with your firm.
Another important solution that both sophisticated employment agencies and HR consulting businesses endorse is the structured interview. Research on unstructured interview techniques has been scathing they simply don’t help you identify good performers. If you don’t use structured interviews then putting them in place has got to be a high priority. A company simply cannot accept risk by taking on mediocre performers and if you are not using both psychometric tests and structured interviews then it will be next to impossible to distinguish between the good, reliable worker from the person who is simply good at taking a job interview.
There is some good news for companies new to structured interviewing, some psychometric testing systems, the Drake P3 for example, can generate a list of behavioural questions to ask in the interview. This is particularly useful for organizations with an overburdened HR staff as this solution is easily administered online and at a very low cost.
The word inexpensive is worth dwelling on. It doesn’t take a big investment to put in place processes that reliably bring in top performers. A company like Drake, known both for its excellence in the HR consulting business and pioneering work as a temp agency, argues that what’s needed is to put in place a standard, repeatable hiring process that reflects the best practices we’ve described. This takes discipline, but it is not unduly expensive or complex.
Author Resource:-
In this short article we have only touched on some of the most pressing issues in hiring people who will become top performers. You can learn much more by viewing the information on Drake’s new website. http://www.drakeintl.com
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