March Madness: Talent Recruiting Edition

At first glance, employees may seem unusually attentive to their work this week: sitting at their desks, heads down, conducting research, making decisions and dutifully completing required forms. And then it dawns on you: March Madness has arrived, and they’re filling out their brackets before the start of this year’s NCAA Tournament. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s also a great illustration of how to go about selecting the best talent to ensure that your company has a championship-caliber workforce.

Recruiting the Best Talent

Just as information is vital to making the right choices in the “Big Dance,” data is now a prime driver in deciding which candidates to hire and which employees to promote. Even better, that data is enabling organizations not only to match the right person with right job, but more importantly, to predict with greater certainty which employees will be most successful.

Take the process of hiring a corporate manager. Starting with a field of 38 competencies that can be used to help select successful talent, we’ve narrowed the field to the 6 competencies that – according to the data – are the most important for selecting corporate managers:

• Driving for results.

  Effective managers must have the ability to encourage employees to perform at their best in order to complete required tasks.

• Managing others.

  Companies rely on managers to motivate and direct teams so that goals can be accomplished in successful and productive ways.

• Coaching and developing others.

  A leader who encourages and inspires his or her team to grow to its potential understands the importance of a culture of development.

• Decisive judgment.

  People with this trait know which facts to take into account, whom to communicate their ideas to, and have the confidence to follow through on their choices.

• Planning and organizing.

  The ability to look at tasks and decide what needs to happen to ensure that everything is completed in a timely manner is imperative.

• Championing change.

  There is no substitute for the ability to prepare teams to implement inevitable change.

Using these critical competencies, an assessment profile can be used to generate predictive data that can identify the ideal candidate – based not only on meeting the required job skills, but also measuring the candidate’s fit with the culture of a particular organization. Let’s face it: picking teams by gut feeling probably won’t win your office’s NCAA Tournament pool. Why would you take that chance when hiring the people that are most critical to your company’s success?

About out Author: Greg Moran, CEO of OutMatch, has authored two books, Building the Talent Edge (AuthorHouse, 2002) and Hire, Fire & The Walking Dead (W Business Books, 2006), has been featured in just about every major business publication and spoken to thousands of people at too many conferences around the world to mention on how to rationalize recruitment process and get HR aligned with candidates and business results.

OutMatch is a cloud-based platform that uses competency-based job-fit assessments, behavioral interviewing, and online reference checking. Whether hiring new talent or promoting from within, OutMatch adds a new level of confidence and clarity to the selection process that enables businesses to make the best decisions about job fit. Visit www.outmatch.com.

By Greg Moran