Horizon Management Group

In our May issue we discussed defining the corporate competencies of an organization and how these help define the behaviours that will be successful in your business and help people fit in.

These competencies can determine what sort of business you are going to have - customer focussed, high growth, innovative, high quality - any number or combination of attributes. These need to be defined in advance. Trying to get there without deciding on what are the important competencies, how you will recruit for them and how they will be managed is doing it the hard way. Yet this is how most organizations try to do it. Someone decides what sort of business it will be and then tries to manage with what is there to achieve it.

A recent survey of 175 businesses by the National Australia Bank found that there are three major issues that give business owners and managers nightmares - and staff concerns were number one. These included solving staff problems, such as conflict between employees, to attracting and retaining the best staff. The next two were cash flow and compliance.

While assisting existing employees to adapt to the predetermined culture is important, significant progress can be made by ensuring new people match the competencies at the start.

The likelihood of this happening is increased if the recruitment process is geared to identifying past behaviours that reflect those you are seeking. Once the behaviours are defined during the process of identifying the corporate competencies, questions can be designed to elicit the information you need to make correct selection decisions - and these can be used effectively by any recruiting manager.

If you are looking for team workers and one of the behaviours you have defined is to share information, a question such as "tell me how you shared information with other team workers on the XYZ project" should provide some evidence of someone who actively does this. Keep asking similar questions until you are sure this is a normal behaviour for this person. You can then be reasonably sure they will repeat this behaviour.

Make sure you have asked for the name and number of the manager they had at this time so they know you are going to check. Then make sure you do check. Reference checking is very powerful and can save you some very embarrassing and expensive consequences. Do the reference checking yourself or use a third party. Ask the same question of the referee "how did Andrew share information.......?" Do not rely on a recruitment consultant who is being paid a percentage of the salary to do this - there may be too much of a conflict of interest.

Preparing questions like the one above to directly link to the competencies you are seeking is much more powerful than asking scenario questions such as "how would you.......?" If the applicant has read the right books he can give you a good answer but it may not be how he would behave in the job.

If you would like more information on how you can start determining the type of organization you want and how people should perform within it please contact us for an obligation free discussion.