According to recent research, CEOs attribute 72% of their companies’ value to their employees. Although labor costs account for an organization’s largest expense, making the right hires can lead to 34% higher performance, a 30% greater likelihood of keeping those top performers, and a strategic success rate near 90%.
When employees use their skills in meaningful ways that contribute to business success, your organizational purpose becomes part of their personal mission, and they’re motivated to perform. However, ensuring that these two functions are working in sync can be a challenge.
Learn what you can do to align your hiring practices with your business goals.
Understanding Key Characteristics for Success
Your strategic objectives are what define success for your organization. However, you know you can’t carry out your business strategy without having the right employees who are taking the right actions. To nail down the key characteristics for employee success, you’ll need to ask yourself two critical questions:
- What are those “right actions” that will drive business success?
- What are the tangible skills, knowledge, and behaviors that enable employees to take those actions?
To identify these competencies, consult industry standards, use analytics data from your workforce, and talk with your leaders and managers about what skills your most successful employees have that others may need.
Identifying Hiring Characteristics
Before you can know who to hire, you need to know who you already have.
Use skills assessments, current performance data, and analytics to figure out who your high performers are and understand their competencies. This will help you identify skills gaps and understand what to look for as part of the hiring process.
Take time to define your organizational culture and values as well. Doing so can help you identify desired soft skills, such as collaboration and innovative thinking, that will promote employee alignment.
Tools and Techniques to Assess Potential Hires
Workplace-validated assessments measure the unique skills, values, and traits you’ve identified as essential to employee and organizational success.
They should be a critical part of your talent management strategy, as they provide objective information that can enable you to match competencies with the role you’re hiring for. Ultimately, this will lead to higher-quality hires, better productivity, and reduced turnover.
You might also consider using behavioral interviews and role-specific simulations and exercises as part of your employee-selection process. These tools allow you to dive deeper with candidates to uncover additional core competencies that may aid organizational success.
Creating a Customized Assessment Process
Your assessment process should be tailored to your company’s unique needs. Using standardized assessment tools results in information that’s unhelpful when hiring for the core competencies you need. It can also lead to the hiring of employees who don’t have the skills to help you accomplish your goals.
When developing or selecting assessments, make it a point to incorporate feedback from leadership and consult industry benchmarks. This creates a fuller picture and may reveal competencies and traits you hadn’t initially thought about.
Practical Steps to Implement Strategic Talent Management
Moving forward with a new talent management strategy can be daunting, but keeping these best practices in mind can guide your decision-making:
- Start by identifying your organization’s goals and objectives
- Build a competency framework for key roles based on those objectives
- Establish a standardized hiring process that can be repeated and scaled
- Ensure that leadership teams have a say in the hiring and selection process
These steps can help you formulate a strategy that aligns with your goals and leads to success.
Monitoring and Refining Hiring Strategies
Tracking new-hire performance is key to understanding whether your employee selection and talent management strategies are working as planned. Make sure your performance management framework reflects the core competencies you hired for, as this will offer critical insight into whether new hires are meeting expectations.
Monitoring new-hire performance through data and feedback will also help you figure out how to adjust your process to get the results you want.
Strategic Talent Management Is Vital for Long-Term Growth
Strategic talent management is a significant contributor to business growth. When you have the right mix of employees with the necessary skills and traits to meet key business objectives, your organization is more likely to retain talent and hit its performance targets.
If you’re looking to improve your employee selection process, our tailored workplace assessments can help you accurately measure what’s most important. Contact us today to leverage our unmatched industry knowledge and experience.
