Step 1—Create a foundation of support and expertise. Successful talent strategies must be founded on real business goals, which makes talking to all the areas within an organization essential. It goes well beyond HR, so liaise with other business disciplines to identify the metrics that really measure an employee’s performance.

Measurement matters – both making comparisons over time and setting definable targets. For example, aiming to reduce employee attrition by a set percentage in a particular role, division or market is more likely to produce a return on investment than a general aspiration to improve retention. Similarly, organizations should define the outcomes they want to deliver from assessment programs and reverse-engineer the process to capture, aggregate and measure relevant talent data.

Step 2—Identify and measure what underpins business success. Consider a specific role, then ask three key questions:

• What does good performance look like? A business should be able to define the attributes or DNA of high performance, communicating with employees the qualities it considers to be markers of success. Whether your company defines high performance using a competency framework, a leadership model or a job description, the assessment must be up-to-date, understandable and aligned to the organization’s overall strategy.
• How are HIPOs measured? Any process should measure a candidate’s skills, personality, actions and aspirations, particularly for high-level roles. You will need to look at a person’s potential holistically, measuring their cognitive ability, their knowledge, skills and judgment, plus on-the-job behavior and motivation to progress to higher levels.
• Does the assessment process still work? As job roles evolve and companies grow, talent strategies should be monitored and updated constantly.

Step 3—Provide answers, not test results. Traditional talent assessments require HR to interpret test scores and personality profiles. This approach has evolved, allowing hirers to customize assessments to specific jobs, with precise results, faster turnaround and employees who are a better match. Leveraging data in this way can provide a picture over time of the genuine performance of new hires and existing staff. This highlights areas of development, as well as aiding future hiring and succession planning.

Step 4—Capitalize on advanced analytics and big data. HR professionals around the world are agree that talent analytics is valuable, yet a just a third of respondents to our survey ranked it as a top priority in 2018. We know that analytics is only as good as the data fed into it and less than 77% of companies feed in data from objective assessment. These results indicate a surprising lack of clarity on the current role and/or potential of big data and analytics in talent management.

Analytics should be built into talent assessment from the outset. This means storing assessment results and standardizing metrics, which allows for company-wide analysis. Data must be collected from a range of sources, including performance management and HRIS systems, as well as external labor market information.

Step 5—Align assessment innovations with technological advances. Filling jobs is taking longer and costing more money, so it’s no surprise companies are eager to speed up hiring. But no one wants to compromise on quality and rigor. HR technology can help by integrating assessment processes into the talent management system to automate routine tasks. Estimates suggest this can cut the time it takes to make a hire by up to 50%.

For more tips on using talent assessment to make better hires and boost performance, stay tuned to read the second post in this series.