The Secret is how to hire

Success is not an accident. Behind any successful business there are people with the right competencies, motives, traits and skills. Productivity and efficiency build on these employees. And there are people out there with the competencies that your organisation needs to increase productivity and efficiency, and to achieve overall success. All organisations are aware of this fact. But it is not easy to identify them. That’s where the need to change our perspective and to integrate the competency concept into hiring process.

Traditional Hiring

Hiring is a process that involves thousands of applicants and requires a lot of precision, objectivity, transparency, sensitivity and rigorous screening. The vacancies have to be filled up in the shortest time frame by identifying and reaching out to the right person with the right skills for the right job. It’s a Herculean task considering the manpower, paper work, time and finances involved. This is where the cutting edge strategies can help to ensure quality hiring and to avoid costly hiring mistakes.

Before appearing before the interview panel a ‘smart’ candidate will check the company website, rehearse the possible interview scenario, choose the appropriate dialogue and use conscious pretensions to present himself/herself as the best candidate. The subjectivism of the members of the interview panel gets highly impressed by the feat and is ready to hire this mask. It takes only a few challenges in the work place to tear away this mask and our hero is judged a misfit to the job. What is important is to cut through this mask at the time of hiring and identify the true talents, aptitudes and attitudes that will ensure the performance excellence of an employee.

Need for Competency Assessment

No one is good at everything…No one is bad at everything…. Everyone is good at something… Identifying that something that matters for life ahead.

The classical understanding of 4M output model, namely, Man power, Material, Method and Machinery will not help the ability of a worker to do the job. Unit measure of success, there, is neither the business volume nor the number of people working in the organisation. It is the competency and the ability of the employee to do the job that really rate a company’s success. If competency is the performance requisite for any job, competency management is performance management. Hence competency mapping is the most important thing before hiring, recruitment, promotions and development.

Hiring the wrong people could ruin the company while effective, motivated and productive employees would cause business run smoothly, minimize the mistakes, lift the morale and increase the profits. Most of the time, employers do not know what kind of workers they have hired until it is too late. So what they do is to force-fit the employee into the job.

Recently a friend of mine appointed a Marketing Executive. He had an MBA Degree in Marketing and was well qualified for the job. Soon my friend found out to his dismay that the new marketing executive he had hired did not like to go out and talk to strangers, avoided calling the customers, and had difficulty to keep to schedules or meet the deadlines. Being an introvert and a moody person, he did not enjoy marketing though that was what he was qualified to do.

In any field, excellence in performance does not only depend on technical knowledge alone but also on the supporting competencies or life skills of the person. With technical skills one knows how to do the job. To excel one needs the support of the soft skills. That’s why we need to give due importance to competency mapping and assessment, and match the candidates against specific job profiles.

For example, if a person during a long distance travel does not talk a single word to the person sitting on the next seat, we can predict with 100% accuracy that s/he will find it difficult to talk to a stranger and convince him in a sales context. Imagine a person, when eating out prefers to go to her/his favourite restaurant, and to sit at the same table, order the same menu, enjoy the food and come back. Well, hire him for jobs that are repeated; and not for work involving constant challenges and changes.

The competencies, aptitudes, traits, thinking ways and future behaviour of a candidate depend very much on his/her unconsciously repeated behaviour and response patterns that s/he exhibits. These patterns have been repeated umpteen times in the life of the candidates and they will begin to show, once the conscious pretensions are replaced by the original. In fact, we can easily pick up, before hiring, using appropriate tools, these patterns which are responsible for the skill sets, attitudes and capabilities of people and match them against specific competencies that companies are looking for in a particular area.

We need to look at the personal patterns of people to identify their strengths, weaknesses and areas they need to improve. If we know these patterns we can predict, before hiring, the future behaviour of a candidate in the work place.

The Competency Model

The competency model is a collection of positive patterns of behaviour and response necessary for achieving important results in a specific job in a particular organization. It is a standardized set of requirements of a company for its employees to properly perform a specific job. These patterns are combinations of knowledge, skills and attributes that are described in terms of specific behavior and response, and are demonstrated by superior performers in those jobs. They include: personal characteristics, traits, motives, values and ways of thinking that impact an individual's behavior and response in a given situation.

The value of competency mapping is that many employers can now identify and evaluate purposefully the emotional strengths and weaknesses of candidates and screen them, before hiring, with specific competencies that are the most critical to success in a work situation. It helps in ensuring a consistent standard in the company. The competency model used in hiring process will place the right people in the right job and motivate employees to facilitate and support company’s strategic objectives.

It can increase the productivity by identifying relevant skill gaps and encourage employees to acquire the needed talents by giving them training or by acquiring new hands. It also ensures that the 360 degree feedback relates specifically to competencies that are important to individual or organisational success. It gives a competitive advantage to the company which uses it and prepares the organisation to confidently look to the future. The success of the competency based selection process can be measured by looking at the number of high potential employees hired by these process v/s traditional methods.

Assessment tools

A good competency model should be objective, company specific, flexible in the choice of competencies, have the possibility for multiple job profile analysis, future oriented, and linked to company’s strategy, goals and productivity.

There are basically two types of tools in the market. In the first type candidates are given Different Value Options (DVO). Each answer carries different value options. The questions are framed in such a way that the candidate is given an option to tick on what s/he honestly thinks about her/his level of a specific competency.

Eg: My confidence level is …. ○Excellent ○Very good ○good ○average ○below average

But the problem is that a candidate responding to a questionnaire will be tempted to choose the best option. Here, it is the candidate who is assessing himself/herself. Some correction is made with critical test-questions; but it can definitely affect the assessment.

In the second type the questions are with Equal Value Options (EVO).

Eg: When I go out for dinner...

1. I always go to a restaurant where I have been before.
2. I sometimes go to a different restaurant which serves to my taste.
3. I go to an entirely different restaurant.

In the second type the possibility of manipulation by the candidate in minimized making it more effective.

Integration

• Study the features of available models, like type of questions, economics of implementation, and easy integration.

• Understand thoroughly the vision and mission of the company
• Identify superior performers’ behaviour and response patterns and functional aspects required to perform a job effectively
• Specify the competencies and technical skills required for high performance in different job profiles in the company
• Job profiles should be developed with a specific job in mind
• Tools should objectively measure the entire range of competencies required
• Prioritise the competencies into core competencies and supporting competencies
• Assess the candidates’ competencies and match them against specific job profiles before hiring
• Link the HR process to productivity and performance appraisals

Useful questions

• What business needs to be addressed in the profiling?
• What skills, knowledge, skills and traits are required to do the job?
• What behaviour has the most direct impact on performance and success on the job?

Benefits of integration

For the company

• Reinforces corporate strategy, culture, and vision
• Establishes expectations for performance excellence
• Creates a systematic approach to professional development, improved job satisfaction, and better employee retention.
• Increases the effectiveness of training and professional development programs by linking them to the performance criteria
• Provides a common understanding of the scope and requirements of a specific role.
• Provides common standards for career levels that enable employees to move across business boundaries.

• Identifies performance criteria to improve the accuracy and ease of the hiring and selection process.
• Provides more objective performance standards.
• Ensure cost effective hiring process

For the employees:

• Enables the employees to identify the success criteria of the company required to excel in their role.
• Supports a more specific and objective assessment of their strengths and specifies targeted areas for professional development.
• Able to easily align personal values to company values

Conclusion

The competency model does not do away with hiring interviews. It complements the traditional hiring process making it more effective and efficient. We need to know what traditional hiring method can and cannot do. Many companies using the traditional hiring process find it difficult to utilise their human capital fully and profitably. They need to look beyond to the future, build capabilities, put people development plans into action, manage performance and increase organisation’s productivity to achieve business success. They need to introduce a competent system to integrate the HR activities into employees’ competencies, development and productivity. There is no guarantee that you will always hire the right employee. By integrating a competency model into the recruitment process the organisations can minimize the hiring mistakes and increase productivity.