Experience tells us that virtually every business process is regularly evaluated and reviewed to consider improvements and changes for the benefit of the organisation. However, when it comes to evaluating the success of the hiring process, this is lacking.
You would be amazed at how many of the organisations we speak to don't know how successful their hiring is at anything other than a high brow level or cant quote their staff retention levels to us, never mind getting under the skin of it and rectifying the issues they may be facing.
Strange, when few would argue of the significance of hiring in the success and evolution of the organisation, that so many don't analyse and evaluate the hiring.
So how do we measure this and what needs to be put in place.
Here are the 5 Steps:
1. Assess and Identify existing Best Performers
Its important to establish success in the role. So to do this, its a good idea to benchmark against the best people already in the role, department or division. Analyse what they do to make them stand out in their role compared to their peers.
2. Assess Best Performance Criteria
At the same time it is important to assess and document what the difference is between average, good and excellent performance in a role. This may be hitting certain levels of activity or performing certain tasks, either way these need to be quantified.
3. Prioritise Performance based Objectives
For each role prioritise the tasks and deliverables in order of importance, so that you can assess, on an objective basis, the performance of each new starter at given intervals. This will allow you to assess success and speed of success comparatively.
4. Define High Performance Indicators for the Role
This should not be defined by what the successful applicant came into the role looking like, but what they have achieved within set timeframes.
Ideally, this should be set by the hiring manager, establishing what the person needs to do in the role to be successful and again this should be quantifiable, e.g. launching a new product line within 3 months; rewriting a system within 6 months. This allows a metric to be developed and applicants to be compared.
5.Compare Pre-employment Assessment with Post-employment Performance
Using the criteria listed above, we then recommend that using your assessment notes pre-employment, together with the scorecard you have hopefully measured them against as well, you can then compare a score pre employment with a post-employment performance score.
This can be developed over time, but if to start with you can identify that your high performing pre-employment assessment are turning into your post employment high performers it would tend to suggest your hiring processes are producing good quality hires.
If however you identify discrepancies and limited correlation between pre and post-employment assessments, it would suggest that further measures need to be put in place with your pre-employment hiring processes.
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