Benefits of a Talent Assessment Strategy

1. Benefits of a Talent Assessment Strategy

2. If a business wants to grow it has to hire and retain the best talent available in the marketplace. The quality of a company’s workforce is what sustains its competitive advantages. When seeking to outperform competitors many businesses focus on their talent assessment strategy.

3. Talent assessments are designed to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of your current employees and your potential hires. Talent assessment strategy drives positive, measurable outcomes. Talent assessments have been proven to improve efficiency, morale, retention, customer service, and sales. All of these outcomes lead to a better bottom-line for your business.

4. Improve Your Hiring Success Rate If your company relies only on an in-person interview your probability of hiring a high performer is about 12% to 25%. Research shows interviews alone aren’t an accurate way to assess the candidate’s skills and abilities. Pre-employment assessments will show you what the candidate’s strengths are, as well as the areas where they need to improve to be effective in the position.

5. This information can then be used to create an interview focused on their Challenge Areas. If the talent assessment has identified that the candidate will likely struggle working with a team, your candidate interview should have questions focused on that challenge. In 1998, Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter found that cognitive ability accounts for about 50% of job performance. Their research publication was titled:

6. The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings. This research presents the validity of 19 selection procedures for predicting job performance and training performance. Overall, the 3 combinations with the highest validity and utility for job performance were:

7. GMA (general cognitive ability) plus a work sample test (mean validity of .63) • GMA (general cognitive ability) plus an integrity test (mean validity of .65) • GMA (general cognitive ability) plus a structured interview (mean validity of .63)

8. Identify Competency Gaps Periodically assessing your employees will help you understand their strengths, weaknesses and competency gaps. Talent assessments can also help you understand when an employee is ready to take on a management role. Individualized training and coaching can be used to close these competency gaps.

9. Define Top Performance Talent assessment tools can also help you define high performance and identify future top performers. High performer benchmarks are created around a specific set of behaviors, work motivations and cognitive abilities.

10. Once established, you can create business strategies around your highest-performing employees, moving them into specific brainstorming sessions, and bringing them into the decision-making process for problem-solving and innovation strategies. These high performer profiles should be updated periodically by integrating new high performers into the Benchmark.

11. Conflict Management In the business world, we usually think of conflict as a destructive force on productivity. Poorly managed conflict costs businesses millions of dollars per year. Conflict in business is inevitable.

12. Given the variety of personality types in any workplace, and the types of internal and external pressures that exist, it is no surprise that conflict occurs. Talent assessments can help you identify the root causes of the conflict. Opposite personality types or traits are very often the root cause of the conflict. It is not realistic to think that we can remove conflict from the workplace. However, it is possible to manage conflict competently. If managed poorly, productivity, operational effectiveness and workforce morale decrease.

13. When managed competently, conflict can lead to positive outcomes like solving workplace problems and innovation. Poorly managed conflicts have a cost attached to them. Employees spend about 2.1 hours a week dealing with conflict. That is equivalent to about one day a month. Poorly managed conflict can lead to the loss of customers and employees.

14. When conflicts are not managed effectively, emotions can run high and individuals suffer. About 18% of employees say that people have left the organization because of conflict. About 16% of employees say that people were fired due to conflicts. About 9% say a project failed due to disagreements between those involved.

15. Next Steps Review and discuss the benefits of your current Talent Assessments. Contact us for some ideas on how your Talent Assessment Strategy could be improved.