Category Archive: Uncategorized

  1. Great talent – is it in the right place?

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    27Do you have the capability to source great talent for your organisation?

    A recent article in People Management entitled ‘How Do You Pick a Winner from 5,000 Candidates’ highlighted the challenges still faced by recruiters in picking candidates that not only have the right qualifications and experience but who will fit the suitability criteria for the organisation.

    CIPD research* also shows that only 8% of organisations rank their talent management activities as ‘very effective’, and highlights the top 3 Learning and Development objectives for talent management activities to be:

    1. Growing future senior managers / leaders
    2. Retaining key staff
    3. Developing high potential employees

    It seems many companies are having difficulty retaining top talent. Sometimes job advertisements fall short of expectations, but there is another quite stark dynamic to the talent problem. HR professionals and operational managers are more aware today than ever before of the consequences of recruiting the wrong talent. For example, retail want people who are talented at giving superb customer service, whilst technical firms want people who can communicate in plain language and collaborate with peers and clients. It is no longer enough to have a technical or academic ability, or to have years of experience – companies want people who naturally express the behaviour they see as needed in order to remain competitive, and this is the current challenge.

    It’s more about the culture than technical skill

    More companies are seeking to create the ultimate cultural environment where high performance can flourish. They have learned that it is not so easy to teach non-technical traits such as customer service, collaboration, empathy, initiative, trustworthiness, enthusiasm and interpersonal skills, or to assess negative traits such as permissiveness, bluntness, blind optimism, harshness and dogmatism. These can be referred to as suitability traits as opposed to eligibility traits. Eligibility traits are the clearly measurable ones that appear on a CV – number of years’ experience, qualifications, achievements both personal and business. If you can find candidates with the right suitability as well as eligibility then you can usually plug any gaps they may have in your technical requirements through training, coaching, shadowing and mentoring.

    High performance of any kind is easier when backed up by certain suitability traits such as the tendency to collaborate, listen well, empathise and take initiative. Sadly these traits often take a back seat in our schools, colleges and universities, and the tendency is to rely on a person’s natural abilities in these areas.

    Conventional ways of recruiting no longer cut the mustard

    Sifting through CVs, all formatted differently, formal interviews, and psychometric tests that don’t relate to the workplace still exist for many companies. Agencies that filter based on CVs and interviews and charge the relative manual labour fees are still the most common form of hiring. It can also be the most costly form of hiring as it is often quite hit and miss, with only an average of 45% prediction of job success. Online agencies are becoming more prevalent today, and some of these are making strides to reduce cost, but behind the scenes you often find a conventional process of CV filtering and interviewing. There simply has to be a better, more value for money way of attracting and hiring top talent.

    Ben recently applied for a key role with a major technology company, attracted by the promise of high autonomy to make decisions and a development path into top leadership. Unfortunately the job was hyped up and he found he had to refer to the USA HQ for every single decision. He left after just 3 months!

    The solution is at hand!

    What if you could identify and capture both the suitability traits and eligibility factors required for a role and measure your candidates against them without the need for manual sifting whilst increasing your prediction of job success from 45% to 90-95% at the same time?

    Harrison Assessment Talent Solutions allows you to just this at a fraction of the cost –

    • Set eligibility and suitability criteria using one of 6,500 job profile templates
    • Invite candidates to complete their own eligibility information and the online SmartQuestionnaire™ (no more paper sifting by you or your recruitment agent)
    • Receive processed list of candidates in order of suitability for role (no more subjectivity)
    • For each candidate selected for interview receive –
      • An Interview Guide
      • A How to Attract this Candidate Guide
      • A How to Manage this Candidate Guide
      • A Job Success Analysis
      • Other reports as required

    Smarter technology

    Harrison Assessments is the result of over 30 years of research by Dr Dan Harrison. It is designed specifically for the workplace and is based on enjoyment and paradox theory. It utilises 175 behavioural traits (nearly 4 times as many as its closest competitors) in an online SmartQuestionnaire™. It offers a complete talent management solution from – recruitment, development, performance management, succession planning, benchmarking and cultural change measurement.

    If you would like to know more about this exceptional Talent Management System call +44 (0)7768 922244.

    *CIPD Annual survey report 2013, over 1,000 respondents from senior L&D professionals

  2. How do you measure company values?

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    4In our role as development consultants to organisations we see many different cultures – some highly effective, some not so. The interesting thing about a culture is the way it evolves – a strong leader or leaders, the development of best practice, a strong set of company values, intense promotion of the brand and what it stands for or maybe something else. As Peter Cheese, the chief executive of the CIPD, reported in a recent article –

    Culture in the workplace is among the biggest challenges facing organisations and their leaders.

    The culture will often attract like-minded people and those that don’t buy into it seek employment elsewhere. When a culture becomes restrictive, or is causing the organisation to lag behind its competitors or has become financially unviable there are attempts to change the culture but how? Even where a culture is healthy and strong it can be difficult to measure individual compliance. It’s not uncommon to take a look around a workplace where values are displayed for all to see yet observe behaviours which bear no relation to them at all. An example of this is a company with a high value around communication. So high was this value that everyone in the organisation was focused on communicating just about everything to everybody, clogging up email inboxes. Often the communication was one way and there was an obvious lack of focus on the results of the communication. As long as communication had taken place, job done!

    So how do you measure values?

    Behind every value is a set of behavioural traits. If you can determine the behavioural expectations that are linked with the values then measurement can be a simple process. Dan Harrison has spent over 20 years studying what makes people successful in their roles. Besides being eligible in terms of qualifications and experience, success is the result of a number of suitability factors – working preferences, motivations, interpersonal skills, interests, work values and attitudes. Harrison Assessments is designed specifically to assess success in the workplace based on enjoyment theory: the more we enjoy what we do, the more successful we will be and the more we are likely to commit to our role. The online SmartQuestionnaire™ has a consistency rating which ensures a very high degree of accuracy and cross matches 175 traits based on the suitability factors mentioned above.

    It’s a simple process!

    • Outline cultural expectations in line with organisational values
    • Work with Quadrant 1 to produce a cultural profile
    • Ask all employees to take the SmartQuestionnaire™
    • Run results for each person against the profile

    To fully integrate cultural values consider including the Harrison traits into your appraisal document. This ensures that performance is appraised and behaviour continually aligned with values.

    Results

    • Highly motivated staff that know exactly what is expected of them
    • The opportunity to have conversations around attitudes and working preferences which may previously have been avoided
    • Opportunities for development
    • The opportunity to pick up mismatches before engaging staff who may leave due to cultural discomfort thus saving all the associated costs of re-recruitment

  3. Leadership – what are you measuring?

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    42Most people would agree they would like their leaders to be competent, knowledgeable, visionary, progressive and decisive with excellent interpersonal skills, innovative and open to new ideas. How about a propensity for self improvement, a desire to lead, an outgoing personality, a reasonable level of self acceptance, a balance of analytical and intuitive skills, a balance of diplomacy and frankness and a balance between assertiveness and helpfulness. There is, I am sure, an endless list of traits we would like our leaders and upcoming leaders to possess.

    As a rule leaders tend to gain their positions through demonstration of exceptional skills in the operational side of their roles together with an enthusiastic and optimistic attitude and relevant experience. Operational expertise and experience are relatively easy to measure and as such dominate the decision making process of leader selection. But what of the rest? How do you measure all the traits mentioned above?

    Many companies have introduced comprehensive work based competency frameworks – in some cases documents running into 30 + pages. Such frameworks clearly indicate the type of attitudes and competencies the organisation is striving for but rarely get it right when it comes to measurement. Measurement is often done on a scale based on the subjective opinion of as few as one person (often the manager), I have often spoken to Learning and Development specialists who don’t even use their own competency frameworks, not because they lack substance but because of their lack of user friendliness and reliability in measurement.

    We have been working recently with an organisation which has just undergone a merger. Initially we worked with the smaller organisation who were fearful of being ’swallowed up’ by the larger and that prime jobs would escape them. We were able to help them position themselves and the outcome was very positive. Since the merger the organisation has been streamlining its talent management approach. They began with the senior team spending time identifying what an ‘outstanding’ organisation might look like. They came up with 23 behavioural traits they believed would be demonstrated in such an organisation.

    So this is where the measurement comes in. Harrison Assessments measure 156 traits based on work based preferences. It is highly accurate and measures the very things mentioned above. The 23 traits were mapped across to produce a Harrison Assessment capable of measuring them. This has been incorporated into their appraisal system so that everyone in the organisation is measured against these basic traits. Staff are now able to have conversations around such things as ‘taking initiative’, levels of enthusiasm, optimism, ability to handle stress in difficult circumstances and so on.

    The Assessments are also used for recruiting people into roles. They measure suitability for a role over and above eligibility – leaving nothing to chance and increasing talent management accuracy manifold!

Quadrant 1 International