Hire based on Competencies OR based on Performance?

Today's increasingly dynamic business environment is forcing organizations to find out new ways to gain an advantage or an edge over their competitors. For many organizations, the best way to gain a competitive advantage might be to focus on the human resource management (HRM) system. In the past, some organizations have viewed technological advances or innovations as the primary means of gaining an edge over their competitors. But in today's new service and information economy, the quality of an organization's employees or human resources has become more critical to organizational success. Another reason why it may be wise to focus on the area of HRM to enhance organizational competitiveness is that very few organizations currently make use of the best HRM practices.

Human Resource Management and Organizational Performance are being strongly linked together these days. The HR practices and their link to Organizational performance in most cases should not address the issue of horizontal integration and vertical alignment. This is centrally to HRM principle of synergetic relationship among various practices. Indeed there is a need to have measures of the contribution of synergetic relationship of these practices to the performance of the organization. Additionally their link to the overall business strategy and consequently its effect on performance. The relationship between HR practices and performance can be investigated in various ways. The independent HR practices and their contribution to organizational performance can be investigated. Importantly, synergetic relationship among the HR variables and contribution to organizational performance should be explored. HRM practices have a strong relationship with organizational performance but weak relationship with market performance. Recruitment, training and performance based pay all have a significant positive relationship with organizational performance. 

So after saying so, shall we as HR professional hire candidates based on their competencies or based on their performance?

My answer to this question would be with other more valid questions, can we measure performance without measuring the competencies? Or shall we measure performance regardless of the competencies? Is the focus here on what we do or on how we do what we do?

In my humble opinion achieving the results are important but how to achieve it is even more important.

We can’t segregate performance from competencies, competencies are essential for proper performance to reach the desired results in the desired way.

So, we must redraw our interview questions not only to measure the competencies needed for the job but also to measure previous performance and how well was the candidate exercising these competencies in their previous endeavors.

The key always lie in matching the right people with the right competencies and the required performance to the right jobs to achieve the desired business outcomes.

Currently organizations, HR professionals frequently face challenges in understanding the performance capability within their organization, formulating a plan to match organizational capability to mission, engaging and retaining the right people, and sustaining the organization’s capability to perform over time.  And this is mainly because they either focus on competencies only or on performance and results only, but not on both together side by side, to ensure sustaining the organization’s capability to perform and grow over time.