Evaluating Talent in the Most Effective Ways

The performance and overall health of an organization depends on the performance of its workforce. Having the right talents with the right competencies and behaviors to match the proper roles is thus key. To reliably get to that stage, it is important for the HR professional to understand the most valid and effective means for identifying and assessing talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities. We’ll discuss some of these methods in the paragraphs that follow.

What is the Functional Role?

The first step is to understand the functional role the talent is supposed to fill. This is best done through a job analysis profile that identifies the competencies, behaviors, and critical functions of the role and a job profile of the ideal candidate for that role. Planning and setting up competencies models and profiles should aid in the identification of talents to roles and ought to help the recruitment efforts (Dessler, 174-175).

Organizations must tailor their job analysis and the competencies and behaviors required for each role to their unique strategic objectives and competitive goals. Once a job analysis is completed, the organization should commence its search for talents which will entail looking at its talent acquisition framework to identify its best pipelines of internal and external sources including educational institutions, job postings, agencies, and referrals to gather a representative pool of prospective talents.

The Talent Pool

Once a prospective talent pool has been impaneled, it becomes important to winnow the grain from the chaff. In this early stage, using unsupervised online testing is gaining momentum in assessing prospective talent competencies because it is deemed to be efficient in decreasing time to fill thus reducing costs.

There have been concerns raised about candidates’ integrity and security of the tests. The tests should be randomized to avoid cheating and security protocols should be put in place to improve reliability of these tests. Some companies are using Computer Adaptive Testing to minimize cheating incidences. (SHRM, “Choosing Effective Talent Assessments to Strengthen Your Organization,” 2) The goal of the organization at this stage is to have a sufficient number of prospective candidates to ultimately satisfy the personnel needs of the organization.

Experienced Candidate?

Job experience is one measure to objectively quantify a candidate’s abilities, skills and knowledge, all things being equal. Job experience relates to competencies and capabilities that have been tried and used by the prospective talent. Thus, when dealing with a particular industry or trade, past experience in this area is very relevant and useful in identifying talent because both the industry and functional experiences help in identifying relevant skills, knowledge and abilities, at least in the early stages.

Relevant job experience should translate to minimal training for the incoming employee; thus, the employee can be expected to hit the ground running and be productive in a brief period of time, all things being equal.

Experience comes in different ways, including with respect to roles and functions and with respect to size of organizations that the applicants have worked in within an industry. There are large firm experiences and then there are small firm experiences, for instance in manufacturing, accounting, legal and technology fields. They are entirely different skill sets. Smaller firms tend to have more cross-functional utilizations, while bigger firms tend to have more silos. Cultures in large and small firms also differ so much as to make them so distinct even within the same industry. To be sure that the applicant comes possessed of the presumed skills, it will be necessary to administer a job knowledge assessment test or work simulations (Ibid 7-8)

While prior job experience can be a tangible assessment tool, there are situations where the relevant experience is not present in the pool of applicants, and one must then look at potential. In the HBR article “21st-Centruy Talent Spotting,” Fernandez-Araoz posits that organizations should prioritize potential in candidates given today’s businesses that have become “more volatile and complex” with a corresponding tight job market for which no known model can fill vacancies. He identifies the traits to help spot potential in a candidate as motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. (Ibid 4-8)

Qualifications and Competencies

Another valid and effective means of identifying and assessing talent is educational qualifications. Inherent in the educational requirement is the presumption that having such education, degree or certificate is de facto evidence of possession of certain knowledge and abilities. It may prove not to be so, but that presumption exists, nonetheless. Certain educational institutions are reputed for reliably producing certain kinds of talents in different fields and they are fertile grounds for recruitment by organizations. Educational qualification should be assessed with intellectual and analytical abilities.

One possessed of the requisite educational background should have the ability to demonstrate understanding, distilling, and rendering a proper analysis on a relevant subject matter. To test these skills a company may use automated writing assessments to judge critical thinking, focus, persuasiveness, and organization. Writing samples may be requested in lieu of the writing assessment.

While relevant job experience and educational background might infer that a prospective employee can indeed perform a role, they do not tell how the employee works or how they will interact with others within the organization. These intangibles that cannot be ascertained from a resume include motivation, intellectual ability, analytical skills, judgement, decision-making style, creativity, dominance, extroversion, patience, emotional stability, and integrity (“Note on the Hiring and Selection Process,” 4-6). For instance, there are jobs that require less interactions with co-workers and there are those that require extensive collaboration, for which different personal attributes ought to be required. Thus, a personality profile presents another valid and effective means to identify and assess the viability of a prospective talent. To employ this method, the organization should first develop a personality profile for a given function or role, which should include indicators of emotional intelligence. Since not everyone walks around with their personality trait written all over them, it will be necessary to extract these through some valid and reliable means like integrity assessment, situational judgment assessment and personality assessment measure. (SHRM, “Choosing Effective Talent Assessments to Strengthen Your Organization,” 6-8).

The Talent’s Background

Finally, all the information garnered must be corroborated with proper background checks that should help to confirm the competencies, skills, knowledge, abilities, personality profiles and background information gleaned through the recruitment process.

Background checks should include contacting references, verifying schools attended, work history, licensing requirements, driving records, and where necessary substance abuse screening. Employers must confirm the prospective employee’s eligibility to work in the United States through form I-9, social security checks, work permits, passports and/or alien registration cards. Some employers use credit checks to screen applicants.

According to CNBC, the number one reason cited for the use of credit checks by organizations is the security of their clients. https://www.cnbc.com/select/can-employers-see-your-credit-score/ However, is it really? After all a credit report gives a lot more information than financial responsibility. While credit checks are standard in the financial industry, it will seem to have no articulable vital business reason for an employee who does not handle finances. The good news is that employers running credit checks have invariably already decided to extend an employment offer to the target applicant.

Decision Time

At the end of this process, the organization should now sort through the information in order to decide which candidate an employment offer should be extended to. There are three predominant methods used to distill the information to arrive at the final candidates, viz: (1) clinical or intuitive or judgment, (2) statistical method and (3) a combination of the intuitive and mechanical statistical analysis. In some cases, especially when recruiting for senior or executive roles, it will be prudent to hire an outside entity to perform an objective, independent and professional assessment of all candidates shortlisted for those roles (21st-Centruy Talent Spotting, 9).