Good talent selection sets your company up for success.
Do you know how good your current talent selection process is? Would you be able to spot the signs of a bad system? And would you know how to improve it?
Making even small improvements, including helping your employees understand why talent selection is important, can go a long way towards helping your company reach its goals.
8 Signs Your Talent Selection Needs Improvement
If you see several of the following indicators within your organization, it is time to examine and evaluate your talent selection. (Of course, it’s also a good idea to examine your processes regularly—perhaps every six months—so that your company is always looking for ways to do better.)
As a talent management advisor and coach, here are some of the indicators I have seen that lead to a bad or ineffective talent selection process:
- Employees who don’t stay around. What is your company’s turnover rate? And how does it compare to others in your industry? One way to find out is look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics quit levels per industry. If you’re not retaining as many employees as your competitors, or your turnover rate is high, these could be signs that your talent selection could be better.
- A shortage of internal candidates worth promoting. Hiring internally makes the most sense: You know the people and the people know the company and fit into the culture. But if your company usually hires external people instead of promoting from within, you might not be choosing people who have potential to grow with you.
- New hires who require excessive training. Training new employees—and all employees, for that matter—is a good practice. But if externally hired employees aren’t able to become productive without a lot of training, ask yourself if you’re hiring people with the right skills.
- Interviewers who often disagree on candidates. If this is the case, you probably don’t have good job descriptions and/or the interviewers haven’t been trained on effective interviewing techniques. Reviewing your job descriptions and evaluating your training will help interviewers come to a consensus on hiring decisions.
- Inexperienced or untrained interviewers. Interviewing effectively is a discipline; coaching and training all your interviewers will improve the quality of selections and provide a better experience to the candidates.
- Neglecting to do reference checks. These help reduce the risk of bad hires and are inexpensive and easy to implement.
- Assessments are not part of the selection process. Integrating assessments as part of your selection process will add independent and unbiased information into the selection decision.
- New hires who aren’t meeting or exceeding job expectations. If new people aren’t achieving their goals in the expected time frame then many things can be going wrong and a total talent selection process assessment is in order.
How can you improve your system? Identify which of these talent selection best practices might be able to help your company, and then take action to improve your process.
What other signs of bad talent selection would you add to the list above? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Photo Flickr user goodrob13
