Developing Your Talent is as Easy as Looking in Your Own Backyard

It has always been a best practice for us to advise our clients beyond the hiring decision. In other words, we ask our clients to think about the candidate in a more strategic way. Sure, it’s critical to know at a high level of predictive validity how likely it is that the candidate will perform well in a specific position. However, what is too rarely considered is how well the candidate might do in other roles higher up the ladder.

When you make a successful hire, you feel you have struck gold. You may have hired a top-performing service professional to handle customer inquiries, but that same person could easily be your next head of customer service, or even your best salesperson.

And you can know that the moment you bring them on board.

What is particularly interesting is that the best candidates, as we look to fill positions up the ladder, are the easiest and least expensive to find – the people you already have on board. Over the course of our 53 years in this business, we have found that those companies that conduct a Talent Audit of their teams (a diagnostic process of evaluating current staff to see what strengths they exhibit and the potential they have for success in future roles) are usually able to home in on this information the fastest and garner success from it.

You may find that a productive salesperson, service manager, or claims adjuster might currently hold a position in your company that is unrelated to a role to which they could contribute in the future.

So, what I’m suggesting here is that before you invest dollars and time in sweeping the market to find a hidden nugget of gold, evaluate your current people to see if that nugget of gold is waiting in your own backyard. Those nuggets do exist, and the morale value of giving a current employee an opportunity to play to their strengths and advance within your company is immeasurable.

Herb Greenberg, Ph,D,
Founder & CEO