Success Story: Hiring Right at Edelweiss Financial Services
Hiring right is a top priority for all organizations! Recognizing organizational culture fit, role fit and managerial capability go a long way in ensuring that the right talent is brought on board. And that it is retained. In our work with Edelweiss Financial Services, we were able to impact this by using Online Assessments powerfully! We worked with them to design a Behavioral Assessment for Recruitment across roles. It has allowed the organization to make a transformational and culture-changing impact, as they have used competence-based hiring to ensure culture and performance fit previously, Jombay brought in a more scientific approach to hiring and used people analytics-based insights to further strengthen the hiring process.
I proudly present an interview with Manoj Kumar Chaudhary (Head HR- Public Markets at Edelweiss Financial Services). We asked him about the learning from this successful implementation. And as always, I am grateful for the continued support from the leadership team at Edelweiss - Rashmi Nagori (Executive Vice President & Co-Head HR, Edelweiss Global Investment Advisors) & Natasha Patel (Head HR - Personal Wealth Advisory)
- What was the business need for running this exercise?
Hiring quality talent goes a long way in building a performance oriented culture. In line with this objective, it was important for us to design a robust hiring process using the right mix of art and science. We have been using Jombay’s Behavioral Assessment for Recruitment across roles.
We used a well-detailed competency framework, behavioral science, and analytics to assess Organisational Culture Fit, Role Fit and Managerial/Leadership Capability. It was aimed at getting quality talent onboard (Hiring “A” Raters).
2. How did you go about designing the Assessments?
In partnership with Jombay, a detailed Competency Framework was designed. Challenge was to come up with a standard yet differentiated competency model for various roles in the organization. To derive the framework, discussions were held with High-Performers in the roles and the leadership team. For organization culture fitment, Edelweiss guiding principles were taken as a reference point
In this way, we identified competencies that we wanted to assess and built a holistic Behavioral Assessment that would measure these with Jombay. These behavioral assessments became an integral part of our hiring process.
3. What was the impact of using the Assessments for Recruitment at your organisation? What were some of the user responses?
Today, we use Jombay to validate all our candidates. We have seen a high correlation between people who perform well on the assessment, those who continue to do well once hired, and those who are being retained.
1. Basis analytics on the assessment results, employee performance on the job and employee retention, we made the assessment more robust by recommending traits to be excluded as well as recommending benchmarks for traits. This helped us to make the assessments more accurate.
2. We found out that the scores of active employees were much higher than scores of inactive (exited) employees. This shows that the assessment could find out the employees who align well with our culture
3. We found out that the scores of productive employees were much higher than the scores of unproductive employees. This shows that the assessment was able to provide an indication of future performance
Once we had these results, we were able to map which competencies are MORE correlating to performance and retention. Over time, we have focussed on these very competencies. We prioritize these in the hiring assessments and candidates who perform poorly on these are a red flag which are further evaluated using behavioral event interviewing.
We were able to use Assessments powerfully! It has allowed us to make a transformational and culture changing impact. Usually, hiring interventions and processes are driven by HR. In this case, within 6-8 months of driving the project, hiring managers started coming back and asking for Jombay reports!
4. How have you evaluated the success of this initiative?
- It enabled us to bring quality talent onboard, Quality of Hire (QoH) scores have seen a clear hike with the use of the behavioral assessment.
- Our infant attrition (less than 6-month attrition) numbers saw a significant dip on the retail front.
- Most importantly, it helped us build a strong Performance-Based Hiring Culture which in turn has helped us to build a performance oriented organization.
If you would like to run assessment & development centers and strengthen your organisation’s hiring process, do get in touch!