Whether you are selecting the team that will remain or hiring for growth or attrition, if you have a group of top performers and you add anything but a top performer to join their group, bad things happen. Within days, if not hours, everyone understands their level of performance. The top producers then compare their compensation package and output with the new arrival, and are upset. Ask top producers how they feel in a situation like this, they will say “insulted, angry, and that they are hoping for management to step in and correct the error.” If nothing is done, the top producers know that, even in tough economic times they can be quickly reemployed, and they leave.
Simply put, to not focus on top producers results in a retention problem of the worst kind - the average producers stay. The poor producers stay. The superior producers find places where they are welcome. This kind of retention problem may not show up on normal retention statistics, because many organizations do not have a performance management system that allows tracking of the retention of superior producers. As top producers are less than 20 percent of the overall organization, high turnover in their segment may not show up as an alarm in the overall retention numbers.
What can be done? Manage the talent pipeline as if your organization's life depended on it. Use assessments, applicant tracking, and talent management to keep your organization's efficiency high, and getting higher.
Moving with the morning rush hour, I fished the camera out of the back seat, rolled down the window and used one hand to wave my camera in the (cold) wind and fired off a dozen shots. I always have my camera with me, and so I thought nothing of it.
An hour ago, I was on the phone with a client. We had just set up a new assessment system that will help them screen for job fit, and I was checking in. After we had done our business, he asked if I had seen the sunrise this morning.
"Why, yes."
He said he was very frustrated. He felt it was one of the more beautiful ones he had seen, and that he had pulled off the interstate, gotten out of his car, and thought he had taken a photo of it to remember it by. He had just tried to show the photo to his staff, and the cell phone had not worked. Grr.
I smiled. "Would you like me to email some of mine?"
I could tell it made his day.
As HR professionals, we are always expected to anticipate needs and have everything that our staffs and employees and bosses want. It always feels good to have exactly what a client wants, when they want it - be they internal clients or external. Even if it's just a photo of a sunrise.
In these stressful economic times, good customer service and high performance is everything. Enjoy the pictures. Maybe it's what you need right now...
In bad news for business, more than one in three boys (35 percent) and one-fourth of the girls (26 percent) — a total of 30 percent overall — admitted stealing from a store within the past year. this is up significantly from only 2 years ago - in 2006 the overall theft rate was 28 percent (32 percent males, 23 percent females).
Read the entire report here.
The survey results were just released yesterday, and the question remains if the drop in personal ethics comes from increased pressures on people, or from apathy about ethical standards. Whatever the cause, it waves the warning flag for employers that better screening methods are a must, especially for any position that handles cash or merchandise that is easily taken.
Additionally, the inreasing economic pressure from the downturn will be applying more pressure, not less. I recommend a mix of pre-hire assessments, applicant tracking, and a strong fucus on job fit - all a part of a good talent acquisition system.
Heads up!
There are some great resources on the applicant's side. On-line research about your industry in general and you, the employer, in specific. Software to craft a very impressive resume. Videos and podcasts to guide the "soft skills" part of the interview. All of this produces a predictable result - erratic job fit and poor job performance.
Want to see what the applicants are using? Try this link for some interview advice. Try this link to review a blog that is intended to help applicants get by your pre-employment testing. Or even read this website that is intended to help applicants fool drug testing.
My point is simple. As the employment pressure climbs, raise your standards and get pre-employment assessments into the mix. As applicants are preparing their answers, you should be preparing your questions...and building them into your talent management system.
It is always interesting to get a view from the other side of the desk...especially if you interview applicants in these modern times. I was impressed with how much they knew of two things - the power of the internet to find out A LOT about the organizations that they were interviewing with, and that current trends in interviewing questions were favoring a lot of behavioral questions. Therefore, they were well-rehearsed in their answers to any interview questions that began with "Give me an example of a time when..."
They are using new tools to outflank you - try this link -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqI0mAp2AY
Straightforward advice, right? Generic, right?
Well, they have done specific training videos for most positions. Here is one for pharmaceutical sales representative -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR-IhZJOq3U
When I say that the "arms race" is on for the upper hand in hiring, these are the tools that I see applicants using. Savvy organizations are moving to screening methods that are not as easily fooled - Applicant tracking software aimed at producing job fit, employee assessments used as a part of hiring, and good human capital management policies are the best weapons...
At ExactHire, we believe through preemployment testing, applicant management you can acquire the talent who will deliver world class customer service. Through human resource planning, you can differentiate your company. Too many companies try to streamline customer service with telephone trees and automated push buttons. That may be fine if all that is needed is to check balances and change profile data. But, if you have a business that needs to help clients implement new systems or you provide products that require service, then the telephone tree doesn’t work as well. You need outstanding job performance from your customer service department! Job fit is paramount and equals success!
To acquire the ideal talent, management must have the right definition of "world class customer service" and manage applicant flow to produce the right fit. With the availability of reliable and valid employee assessment tests, you can discover who those people are. And, by asking some key questions right on an on-line application, through an on-line tracking system, you can get a higher quality, pre-screened applicant pool from which to draw.
Consider this—If you eliminate that time consuming stack of resumes, ask key questions on an application, test your candidates against a valid benchmark created for your own environment, you can guarantee that your turnover rate in customer service will go down. Results: Turnover rates go down, training costs go down, customers feel cared for and appreciated, you get their return business, they tell their friends, employees will feel engaged, and profits will rise. Isn’t it worth a try? What have you got to lose? Start thinking how to achieve your ideal talent acquisition needs!
My remarks a week or so ago about the election just being a hiring process with some strange public interviews proved to be true. In the last few days, both national and local candidates were using the same logic - "Hire me, and I'll work for you..."
I have lived in other countries and cultures, and find that our electoral process, while somewhat flawed and quirky, works better than most of the other models out there. Of couse, I would add some good applicant management software and some assessments, but the basics appear to be sound. No matter your thoughts on the outcome, we should all applaud that the system works.
I was feeling very patriotic as I walked to the polls, and was pleased to take this photo of a flag hung near the Noblesville courthouse: Enjoy.
The economy is affecting hiring in surprising ways. At a time where the volume of hiring is slowing, each hire becomes more crucial. Before the downturn, there was a problem with people not telling the truth in the hiring process. Now, it gets worse.
As unemployment numbers start heading up, the pressure on screening and hiring systems increases. Advanced applicant tracking and assessment tools that apply "LEAN HR" are part of the modern Human Resources software suite. These tools are the first line of defense for an organization trying to maintain their "employer of choice" status. Good human resource planning requires good support tools.
Admit it - the arms race of the hiring process had kind of slowed down. Now, the race is speeding up again because of the combined forces of a slowing economy pushing unemployment up and organizations properly focused on building a high performing work force.
Organizations must use proper talent aquisition to produce job fit, employee engagement, and great job performance. At the same time, they must use whatever advanced tools they can find to keep applicants out of the process that are not sharing their true values and attitudes, and are simply trying to get inside an organization - any organization - and are willing to say whatever it takes to get there.
So, the arms race is on. Let's keep a step ahead....I'm looking for links to good blogs and sites that might help - share them if you have them!
Things to do that will help with survival in these times -
Develop, Develop, Develop - Catch up on technical and soft-skills training. Don't miss opportunities to build employee competencies. Pay particular attention to your cross training and coaching efforts. Now is exactly the time to build bench strength.
Maintain, Maintain, Maintain – This is a great time to do preventative maintenance in all of your systems – both physical and virtual.
Retain, Retain, Retain - This mantra remains vital for ongoing success. Use creative redeployment, job sharing, contract and gain sharing techniques coupled with developmental strategies to retain talent for the upturn. A key ingredient is a detailed and well communicated plan for keeping and developing your talent.
What are YOU doing?
Then, there are the people you already have...
You may have noticed some disquieting trends in your organization at the end of summer of 2008 – absentee numbers that are higher that you prefer, low productivity numbers, the occasional loss of key employees, and the difficulty of hiring good people. They are all connected – and most businesses are feeling the same pinch.
Don’t get caught in the trap of focusing just on hiring new employees and bailing out the leaking ship. You have probably noticed that your top performers – the 16% that are stars – produce 80% of the bottom line results. The remaining 20% of good results come from the 68% of employees that are average performers.
Do the math – that’s 100%. Let’s also agree that about 16% of employees hide under rocks, hoping that you won’t notice that they haven’t produced anything useful, ever. Continue to ignore them for a moment - today, we’re talking about the high performers.
My point is simple - retaining all employees at any cost should no longer be your goal. Focus your retention effort on those few people that are producing 80% of your results. Do whatever you can do to keep your best on board. I am not recommending that you ignore the rest – just focus your efforts in the short term on a very important part of your staff.
I'll wager that if you were to shadow a manager for a day, most of their time would be spent on the lower performing people, leaving the high performers to self-manage. Not a good strategy...the high performers feel under-loved and will, over time, either become average performers or, worse yet, leave.
Even if you have a good human resource management system, practice good lean hr, and read all of the talent management books you can find, you will still be at risk for the departure of your high performers.
Action point - sit down with your supervisors and make the above point with them...and get them to spend more of their time with the ones they want to keep.
Then, there was a magical moment about halfway through where everything stopped and the world suddenly became more complex . Objective feedback appeared that we were not expecting.
It had begun simply enough, with a discussion of how assessment tools might be applied to measure job fit, leading to the secondary ability of measuring engagement. Fine so far. We had all agreed that leading edge indicators were superior to trailing edge indicators, and the challenge was figuring out leading edge indicators that made sense. My point was that most people in the room were measuring turnover, a trailing indicator because the individuals that are a part of it had already left the organization when they were measured. On the surface, employee engagement seemed to be a better metric because it was a measurement of people who were still a part of the organization, and therefore a leading edge metric.
I asked for further input, and got it. A woman leaning against the back corner quietly asked “Isn’t it true that high performing people would challenge the system more than mediocre people, and therefore high performing people would score worse on engagement metrics?” Well. Interesting. Most people in the room leaned back from their note taking, thoughtfully started chewing on their pens, and nodded in agreement. The discussion immediately took an unexpected turn, and several audience members have volunteered to give me more data on the subject.
To me, the most important point was not that high performers may score differently on engagement assessments. The most important point is that we must always keep feedback loops in place, to make sure that what we think we’re measuring is actually reflected in real life.
It is human nature to see the world through the filter of what we already know. For our work in measuring human capital and applying modern assessment tools to human resources, we must always remember to keep objective the backboards in place to keep us on target.
Simply put, I hope this blog can be a part of your personal feedback loop and keep you on target. I look forward to the challenge.
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