4 Competencies You Must Assess Before You Hire Your Next HR Leader and How to Assess Them

For your HR leadership roles, assessing the right competencies is beneficial to both candidates and employees. HR Leadership assessment during hiring helps organisations test the candidate's skills to become an inspiring leader, drive business results, and enhance organisational performance.?

There are several competencies to assess for HR leadership roles but, in this article, I will discuss my top four competencies you must evaluate before hiring your next HR Lead and the type of assessments you can use to assess them.?

4 Competencies You Must Assess Before You Hire Your Next HR Leader?

1. Effective Communication: I doubt anyone can build a successful HR leadership career if they cannot communicate effectively. In most cases, when effective communication is mentioned during a recruitment process, organisations often relegate the other aspects of active listening, understanding and non-verbal communication.?

?Roleplay, presentation and review meetings are some of the assessments that can be deployed here, which would help you ascertain candidates' ability to comprehend and understand situations. My advice is to ensure they are tailored to a specific organisation's needs in key skill areas that determine success in the position.?

?2. Strategic Thinking: We saw how quickly HR business leaders had to adapt to managing human resources in a pandemic world. If you took note of those who have been hugely successful at driving outstanding strategy in human capital within their organisation, it is because they are strategic thinkers. To avoid your HR leader being too administrative and not business-minded, you must assess for this competence.?

Business simulation exercises, case studies, analytical exercises, focus group assessments can be deployed here to examine your candidate's soft skill abilities in this area.?

?3. HR Knowledge: The HR knowledge of an HR leader is non-negotiable as it forms the bedrock for other skills they need to be successful in the role. You'll be checking key HR knowledge areas such as recruitment and selection, performance management, learning & development, succession planning, compensation and benefits and HR data and analytics.?

?The assessments to be used here are role relevant situational judgement tests and scenario-based exercises to assess their experience and knowledge of those critical areas.?

?4. Business Acumen: Often also referred to as business sense or business savvy, it means how much your next HR leader can understand the business. The "whys" and "how's"; mission, vision goals and aligning HR strategy to drive them.?

There's always an inevitable frustration for most CEOs or business leaders when HR doesn't just get it. As a result, there's a disconnect in the type of leadership HR needs to provide for the organisation to drive its business goals in sync with HR strategy.?

To assess the Business Acumen competence in a prospective candidate for an HR leader position, Case studies, simulation games, and situational-judgement tests (SJT) that speak to the business acumen skill are more relevant. Others such as analytical exercise, a day-in-life can equally be deployed as well.?

In conclusion, I believe that for HR leadership roles, these competencies are the non-negotiables. Of course, you must assess other critical non-negotiable skills relevant to your business context and for success in the role.??

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