When a company goes to hire someone for a particular position, the trusted method for a long time has been to accumulate a large number of resumes. From there, somebody sorts through the resumes and then attempts to find potential candidates that will suit the position and be a good employee. Those that are selected from the pile of resumes are then invited for a face to face interview.

Consider how many things can go wrong with this process; the person who is screening the resumes is likely not familiar with the job duties. The resumes might have incorrect or completely falsified information on them. Most screeners are looking more for spelling mistakes than they are for the proper skill set.

Now consider what can go wrong when some of those people who submit resumes are invited to go for an interview. There is a personal bias on the part of many interviewers. People might get selected more on their looks or the clothes that they wear instead of how effective they are going to be. They may be from the interviewer's home town or they may have practiced the correct canned answers and ace the interview as a result.

Wouldn't it be good if there were a better approach?

There is, and that is working from the standpoint that the requirements necessary to be successful in the job should first be analyzed, instead of finding good candidates first and trying to fit them to a job. Job benchmarking involves taking all of the necessary key accountabilities, personal skills, behaviors, and motivators for a position and identifying them. When this is done, you can then look for those qualities in the candidates to find a match. The best performer is not necessarily going to be somebody who has had that same job title in the past at a different company, or somebody who has worked in the same industry for a long time. It is somebody who fits the requirements of the job and possesses many of the qualities & traits that the benchmark identified.

From the start, companies who utilize job benchmarking will have a better understanding of what is needed in the candidates filling the positions. Not only will they be more likely to effectively perform in their role because of their job match, but they will do so enthusiastically. The hiring manager can go over all of the things that are necessary for the job so everyone is on the same page. At this early stage, the candidate can be asked to commit to those responsibilities.

Once hired, employees are more productive and happier if they clearly know what their objectives are and are more likely to have the ability to meet them. It's obvious that more productive employees are good for a company. An added benefit to having fulfilled employees is that retention is better. If you consider how much it costs to go through the process of hiring an employee and then subsequently training them, you can see how this can affect the bottom line.

Companies that engage in job benchmarking will show better profitability because getting the right people into the right position at the beginning means less strain on human resources and more productivity from employees who are engaged in their job.

Here a just a couple of our job benchmarking successes:

·     Success Story - 50% of a company's new hires were lost during the training program. After benchmarking the job, they were able to hire the right people and increase retention to 80%.

·     Success Story - An organization had a 74% turnover in their sales force. After benchmarking and debriefing, they retained 100% of the sales force for the last 18 months.

In our next issue we will explore how to use job benchmarking to avoid unnecessary costs. 

~ © Copyright protected, all rights reserved worldwide. Written for us by Gary Sorrell