“Hiring top talent” has become a catchy phrase that leaders and talent acquisition teams use. But what exactly is top talent and how do you identify it?
Identifying Top Talent in 2020
Top talent is not about who has the best college GPA, a diploma from an elite university, or even history at other successful companies. Finding the best employees requires you to define the values, skills, qualities, natural tendencies, and learning capacity needed to be successful in a specific role and to then find the person who is the most aligned with those targets.
Talent Harvest, a Recruitment as a Service company, leverages talent optimization practices to help you fill your open positions with the best people for those roles. Talent optimization is backed by data that can predict job success in any given role.
The Cost of Disengaged Employees
Every company has business goals, and most likely (hopefully!) every company has a designated business strategy to achieve those goals. But what happens in between the beginning and the end of a year? How does that strategy get executed? How do those goals get met?
By employees!
Talent optimization is the practice of aligning your people strategy with your business strategy to achieve your business results. It’s no secret sauce that employees who are happy and feel valued at work are more productive and willing to go beyond the status quo in their role, which in turn helps the organization accomplish its larger goals.
According to Gallup, a disengaged employee costs an organization approximately 34% of their salary, or $3,400 for every $10,000 in their annual salary. This means that someone earning $40,000 per year is costing the company $13,600 if they are disengaged, and someone who is paid $100,000 is costing the company $34,000. Gallup also discovered that disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year due to lost productivity, and since then other organizations have released numbers even higher than that.
Employees are happier and more engaged when they work on projects that meet their natural needs and motivational drives in the workplace and when they work with coworkers and managers who understand those needs and drives.
The Predictive Index
At Talent Harvest, we encourage our clients to use The Predictive Index talent optimization platform to align candidates with open roles that are best suited for them. The Predictive Index Hire solution offers many features, including the Behavioral Assessment (BA), which has been scientifically validated in more than 500 studies.
The BA is a 6-minute free-choice assessment that evaluates someone’s need for influence, extraversion, consistency, and structure. This data tells a lot of important information about someone, such as if they prefer to lead a team or contribute & collaborate and whether they prefer a variety of projects or enjoy performing routine tasks.
Another tool is the Cognitive Assessment (CA), which measures the ability to learn and process new information. When used correctly, the BA and the CA can predict job success in a specific role.
The Job Target is another useful feature in the PI software. To use this tool, a group of stakeholders relevant to the open position will provide information about that role. Once they submit their responses, a job profile is created that defines the type of employee who would be most successful in that role. When candidates complete the Behavioral Assessment, their results are mapped back to the Job Target. You can see a visual overlay of both patterns and how they compare to one another, and a Match Score is generated based on the strength of the match between the candidate and the Job Target. This can help you narrow it down if you have a large pool of applicants to sort through.
The Predictive Index platform has numerous other tools to align teams on their strategy, hire and promote top talent, inspire your workforce, and assess employee engagement.
The Whole Person
Beneath talent optimization is the fundamental belief that people are greater than the sum of their parts. All people are composed of the Head, Heart, and Briefcase.
The Head is the behavioral and cognitive data we know about a person. Heart refers to their professional values and passions. Finally, the Briefcase is their resume: the skills and experience they have built. It’s essential to evaluate a candidate on the unique combination of their Head, Heart, and Briefcase (what we call The Whole Person) to find the right match for a role.
Talent Harvest does the work to discover the details of a candidate’s Heart and Briefcase by screening candidates. If their values match a company’s culture and their skills match the requirements of the open role, we recommend that our client take the time to interview them further and, ideally, administer The Predictive Index assessments to collect their behavioral and cognitive data.
Talent Harvest Recruitment Consultants
We have more than 20 years of experience in professional recruiting and offer a flat-fee rate based on the number of open requisitions you want us to fill. By merging our expertise in recruiting with the ability to equip hiring managers with important people data, we are prepared to source, identify, and hire the top talent for your team.
As a Recruitment as a Service company, we care about the long-term health of your business.
Talent Harvest prefers to work with clients who invite us to become an extension of their team – to learn about their challenges and successes, to define their current talent gap, and to find prospective employees who are a fit for both skill and culture.
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to learn more about how our recruitment service can help you fulfill your people strategy and achieve your goals.