"The Art of Hiring Smart: Finding the Right Person for the Job"
Benchmarking is a process which establishes behavioral standards
most appropriate for a given position - that is, what behaviors
are most effective most of the time in this job. A well-defined
Behavioral Job Description acts as a standard in evaluating
existing employees as well as a guide in hiring new employees.
Today's benchmarking tools are powerful, but they can cause as
much damage as good if they are carelessly applied. With the
help of objective tools and targeted guidance, the process has
productive results. No matter which quality tools are used in
the benchmarking process, more and more companies, because they
have experienced misguided application, are turning to
professional help. Traditionally, most benchmarking has involved
profiling employees in a target position to determine which
attributes are most common in your best performers. This
imperfect method has several potential dangers. First, it
actually assumes you already have the best performers and that
you can find none that can perform better. This assumption
limits benchmark standards to your current employees only, and
does not consider standards outside your current environment.
Another common mistake is that guidelines for selecting and
ranking the top performers have not been well-defined. For
example, sales statistics have been erroneously used to rank
performance. As an example, Joe has been selling for us forever.
His figures make him look like a top performer, but Joe
developed his client base back when all he had to do was take
orders as people called in. He was the only salesperson in an
easy market with little or no competition. Today, however, is
much different. Competition is fierce. If Joe had to start from
scratch in today's market, how would he fare? How long would it
take to build that client base now, if he could at all? If you
based your sales position's benchmark on Joe because his
statistics look good and hired people with this benchmark as
your guide, you may have hired ineffective people with Joe's
traits.
Still another common error is profiling only your top
performers. Unless you profile your bottom performers as well,
your information is invalid. If, for instance, your bottom
performers scored the same as top performers in a certain
category, that trait could be an insignificant concern in the
hiring process. Yet, testing just the top performers would
narrow your field and decrease your chances of successful job
matching. The benchmarking process is intended to improve
productivity and performance but the opposite can occur if
certain variables in the environment are not accounted for in
the ranking process. It will not be an effective benchmark if
your top ranking performers are in a "flush" market - that is,
where almost anyone could do a good job. Other environmental
factors such as the consistency of systems and procedures across
all employees considered in the benchmarking process may also
have a powerful influence. If only half of your team is
computerized, the behavioral job description may not be the same
at all. Likewise, communication behaviors appropriate for
supporting Sales & Marketing staff is probably quite different
from doing that same support work for Auditing. A better method
is to have those who work, manage and know the position do an
objective behavioral job analysis, starting 'from the beginning'
- that is, don't look at current people, but evaluate the job
itself. Some of the newer tools on the market make this exercise
convenient (15 to 20 minutes), accurate and inexpensive. Once
the ideal behaviors are prioritized, the job description becomes
much easier to define and fulfill. This refinement also
accelerates the orientation process, greatly reducing that
period of time it takes to "get the feel" of a new job. Turnover
is reduced, performance is enhanced.