How to Tie Skills and Competencies to Business Outcomes
Picture this: You’re interviewing two candidates for a hard-to-fill management position, and you’re not sure which one you should choose. Candidate A has ten years of experience in an identical position, and a degree from an Ivy League university. Candidate B doesn’t have a degree, but they do have extensive related experience in a similar field, and their enthusiasm and knowledge shine through in the interviews.
It’s really important to choose the right candidate for this job, since your department has been struggling with high turnover. You need someone capable who will be able to turn things around, engage employees, and stay with your organization for the long term. How can you predict who will be the best fit?
While credentials give you some useful information about a candidate, they’re not the full story. To find the best and most loyal performers, you need to utilize comprehensive, unbiased assessments of key competencies that reflect today’s environment (e.g. inclusion, COVID crisis, remote work).
How Hutrics Identified Our Core List of Skills and Competencies
To get the best results from competency-based hiring, you need a data-driven way to select and measure competencies that have a proven effect on candidate success—their ability to drive business outcomes such as turnover and performance results. Different positions will require different competencies, and it is crucial to choose the most relevant ones for each position.
Most assessment firms use competency models which consist of eight to 12 competencies, with a handful of behaviors attached to each. But there are some important problems with these models: they’re not frequently updated, and they haven’t been validated using data—i.e. they sound good, but have not been directly linked to business outcomes.
Hutrics does things differently. We’ve conducted research with our clients and used criterion analysis from classic assessment tools, such as employee surveys, and actual business outcomes, to come up with a list of 10 key competencies for leadership hiring. These competencies also reflect the reality in which we currently live and work—remote working, diversity & inclusion and crisis management are key leadership competencies.
The Best Leadership Skills and Competencies to Drive Business Outcomes
According to Hutrics’ research-driven analysis, leaders who demonstrated these ten competencies were able to successfully drive business outcomes—even during a global pandemic.
Assessing candidates for these competencies will help inform the selection process and increase the likelihood of candidate success. HR professionals should seek out candidates with a proven track record in:
- Managing through a crisis: Making quick, bold, and well-executed decisions under unexpected circumstances.
- Managing a remote workforce: Successfully leading remote or hybrid teams.
- Building cohesive teams: Rallying individuals around a shared goal.
- Building resilient teams: Leading a team through a crisis period, such as the coronavirus pandemic, while maintaining low turnover and high performance.
- Creating a climate of inclusion: Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the organization.
- Hiring for job fit: Finding best-fit, high-performing candidates when selecting new hires for their team.
- Creating a sense of belonging: Preventing turnover by building an inclusive team culture.
- Developing talent: Encouraging learning and development, cultivating talent to its highest potential, and identifying promising candidates for promotion.
- Executing for results: Producing measurable business results in terms of KPIs and growth.
- Making sound decisions: A proven track-record of solid decision making, even under pressure.
So, there you have it: Hutrics’ ten key competencies for successful leaders. We’ve included these competencies in our integrated, bias-free leadership hiring assessment tools. We’ve also created proprietary personality and values-fit assessments to add context to these key competencies, and assess leader performance in a reliable and valid way.
To learn more about how Hutrics’ proprietary assessments can help you find and keep great leadership candidates, contact us today.
