A Guide to Talent Selection, Pt. 1 (Version 2, pt. 1)

Today's post is about talent selection-- what it is, why it's important, and how to do it well.

What is talent selection?

Talent selection is the process of hiring employees based on their fit with a particular position and
organization. When done well, talent selection begins by identifying the most critical skills, abilities, and experience a candidate must bring to the position to be successful. In other words, what is the “success profile” for the targeted role?
     Then, well developed and validated pre-hire assessment  tools should be used to assess how well the candidate “fits” or how closely he/she matches the success profile.
       Talent selection is important because companies want to hire strong performers and avoid problems in the future.  Hiring is expensive, time-consuming and has important consequences for the business. Companies that engage in high volume hiring for front-line positions, such as in a call center or retail store, want to  reduce the amount of “person hours” spent reviewing and comparing candidates using processes such as interviews.  The use of well developed, standardized, valid, objective, and automated selection tools  is an excellent way to let technology and science do the “heavy lifting”, accurately and reliably predict a
candidate’s likelihood of on-the-job success, and focus the company’s time and resources on only those
candidates who have been “pre-qualified” via the use of such tools..
          Getting hiring right the first time is crucial because the quality of your new employee affects your organization’s performance. Employee performance, particularly in customer facing roles, affects sales and customer  satisfaction, which in turn affect revenue and customer retention. The absence of a well developed, job relevant, and data driven hiring process can cost your organization money by leading you to reject the
right candidates and hire the wrong ones.
         The research and data required to develop a thorough understanding of the job and a quality
talent selection process can also help to create critical alignment among your hiring managers, HR
representatives, and recruiters.  If all parties involved have  agreed on the skills, abilities, and characteristics candidates need in order to succeed in the targeted role, it reduces the likelihood that recruiters/HR will pass on candidates to the hiring manager who do not meet the requirements or that your hiring team will struggle to fill positions because candidates with the desired combination of skills and experience do not exist or are not interested in the job.

How do the wrong people get hired?

Most hiring managers have hired people who performed poorly or left the job because they hired these candidates on the basis of a resume and/or an in-person interview. There are a few reasons hiring  managers make bad hiring decisions: 

• Not understanding the job: Organizations that fail to conduct a thorough analysis of the job and the competencies necessary to fit with and succeed in that job will often fail to attract the right candidates because they create job descriptions and job advertisements based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the job itself. 

• Not evaluating the “whole person”: Hiring a candidate who has the right personal characteristics and motivations to fit with the job, but who lacks the knowledge, skills, or abilities to perform the job well leaves your organization in a position of deciding  whether you can train your new hires to develop the necessary skills, an endeavor that may prove less than cost effective. Hiring a candidate who has the right skills but lacks the personality/motivational fit with the role often leads to employees who dislike the job and view it only as a stop gap until something better comes along. Selection processes that address as many of the critical job competencies as possible will be the most effective in helping your organization to identify the right candidates for the role.  Unfortunately, assessing all aspects related to a candidate’s potential success in the role can be somewhat time consuming – there is no “magic test” than can measure all of the critical competencies for a given job in 10 minutes or less.  But if you are willing to invest a little extra time in the pre-hire process, the payoff will be higher quality employees who stay on the job and generate revenue for your organization.
•  Not evaluating whether the hiring process is effective: Many recruiters and hiring managers view the talent selection process as simply a “necessary evil” – merely a series of steps through which candidates must pass or boxes that must be checked off in order to eventually fill open positions. They often fail to review the effectiveness of the hiring process itself, and therefore ineffective talent selection systems can become embedded in an organization simply because “we've always done it this way.”  Organizations that truly understand talent selection, however, understand that the process should be an evolving one, constantly being reviewed and improved over times as jobs change, organizations change, candidates change, and cultures change.  Regular and continuous research should be conducted to analyze the quality of hire resulting from the selection process itself and to identify opportunities to improve the talent selection system.

Come back tomorrow for part 2, which will be about how you can make your talent selection and hiring process more effective. We hope you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at xxxx@example.com. Happy hiring!