This month, as I work with a lot of really dynamic companies that have interesting challenges, it feels a bit like the annual college basketball tournament – crazy, exciting, with some of ups and downs.
Three client projects this month are about making talent decisions using talent analytics; the work is evaluating the talent, identify fits and gaps, make talent recommendations, help create job standards/job benchmarks, and help set up hiring processes that are based more on information and less on gut.
Job Benchmark Example
Company #1: A technology business that wants to improve the performance of their 60+ salesperson organization. Turnover is around 20% which is below their industry average of 34% but their hiring practices are based too much on “gut” decisions. We assessed all their salespeople and sales managers and worked with them to create an agreed job benchmark for each of their three sales divisions (each sales division has slightly different needs) and they are now using a “balanced hiring scorecard” process to consistently evaluate sales candidates and take most of the “gut” out of the hiring process.
Company #2: An established manufacturer with about 40 employees. They want to improve their hiring processes and improve company performance by getting employees better positioned in roles with responsibilities that match their skill set. We assessed the whole company and are now shifting some employees to roles that allow their skills to be better used, a promotion or two for individuals with management potential, and have improved the hiring decision-making process for the open requisitions.
Example of Management Team Ambitions
Company #3 is a New York City based publishing firm. They recently launched two new businesses and are evaluating which current employees fit which roles in the two new companies. Who is ready for management, who is better for selling which business offering, is this person a fit for quality control, etc.
Now imagine the work I would have had trying to evaluate all of this talent at three different companies by looking at the employees’ self-assessments one at a time – it wouldn’t have worked. I’d have had to print over 100 different assessments, and organize them by team, division, and/or company and it would have been really hard to “see” the trends and to easily quickly compare people to their job benchmarks.
I’m pleased to say I didn’t have that problem; I use an on-line system called Advisor 
that collects the assessments, organizes them any way I want, and then allows me to conduct real-time talent analytics. I can create real-time “Team-at-a-Glance” reports and conduct on-the-fly “what if” visualization like “what if we promoted this person to manage this team” or “what is the common characteristic between all of the top salespeople in this division.” Advisor (from Talent Analytics Corp) is a powerful talent analytics tool for making talent decisions.
