Hiring and promoting the right talent are timeless challenges for organisations. Mistakes in this area can prove extremely costly. They are not only a drain on financial resources, but also reduce productivity, diminish morale and distract the organisation from effectively focusing on business strategy.
With productivity and profitability at stake, organisations, regardless of size, industry or geography must work towards increasing their strike rate in talent evaluation and decision making, through seamless, efficient, focused and accurate hiring solutions that help hire the right leaders and also help place in them in the right position.
How do we identify the right leaders? The better question would be: What are the qualities expected in leaders?
Four key factors
Leaders have to be evaluated on the basis of four factors which are essential for successful performance in a leadership role. They are: knowledge, experience, competencies and personal attributes.
Developing success profiles will require you to review job documentation, interview job incumbents, conduct a focused group discussion with other stakeholders of the job and have senior leader visionary meetings.
Job simulations
While knowledge and experience are best assessed by the hiring manager, assessment of competencies and personal attributes require a thoughtful design, which includes a combination of job simulations, personality and aptitude test, cognitive tests and structured behavioural interviewing. Job simulations, if validated, have high predictability of a candidate’s behaviour in a realistic job scenario.
Validated tools
The caution for organisations is to use validated tools for assessing leaders. Despite the quantity of candidate information that is collected, the quality is often poor. The data is either incomplete, ambiguous or inconsistently integrated and applied.
Consider, for example, the massive move to digital. While it may be easy to identify the knowledge and past experience needed to drive technological transformation, it is much more difficult to assess the most relevant behaviour ( for example, creating disruptive innovation) and personal attributes (example: navigating ambiguity), with high accuracy.
Operational excellence
If a business has process inefficiencies and breakdowns leading to sagging customer confidence, the leaders at the helm have to drive operational excellence to meet its strategic objectives.
Operational excellence in the context of a leadership role includes an ability to drive change, strong operational decision-making and a tremendous focus on executing plans.
They must also be pragmatic and process-focused and demonstrate high energy to drive themselves and others.
( Dipali Naidu is Head of Consulting at DDI India Pvt. Ltd. )
