Inside Talent

Last week I promised to give a sample questionnaire that you could use as a starting point for interviewing your high performers. Keep in mind that some of these questions may not apply to you because you may already have a system that gets at some of the underlying data these questions try to address. It's still a good idea to ask the questions because this kind of amiable chat can lead to insights that the data itself can't give you. So, even if you know the referral source for your HiPo, ask anyway, it will probably spark a discussion about the events around their recruiting experience that might give you a completely different set of questions to use.

1. Did we find you or did you find us?
2. If you found us, how did you find us? Was it a search on a job board like Monster or did you seek us out as a company? Did you know someone who worked here before you interviewed with us? Who was it? Was that person still working here when they referred you or were they a former employee?
3. During the recruiting process, was there anything that happened that gave you any reason to doubt working for us? If you were trying to recruit others like you, what advice could you give us?
4. What is one thing that we do as a company *for you* that you think supports your efforts at being successful the most?
5. What is one thing we did for you to support you as a high performer?
6. What is one thing that we don't do for you as a company that you feel you need to be more successful?
7. What is one thing that we do that keeps you from being more successful?
8. Beyond just attitude and work ethic, what do you think makes you more successful at this company than other people in similar positions?
9. Who would you consider to be other high performers in the company? What do you think is similar about you?
10. If you were to describe your value to the company to someone that was asking you if they should work here, what would you tell them?
11. Is there a type of person that you would try to discourage working here? Why?
12. How much training have you done since you started here? Do you prefer to self-pace or go through training in a classroom type environment?
13. How often are you given a performance review? Would you rather it were more frequent or less frequent? Would you rather have formal reviews or more ad hoc reviews? Who would you most like to get feedback from? Who would you least like to get feedback from?
14. Do you use our entire benefits package? Why or why not? What would you like to improve or remove when it comes to our benefits package?
15. What kinds of awards have you received? Would you rather have more awards or fewer? What kinds of awards do you really respect? Which are not that important to you?

There are obviously no right or wrong answers to these questions. What you are trying to do is ask questions in such a way that you can get some input that you can then compare. When you go to each HiPo and ask the questions (go to them personally, don't do it in an online survey), be sure to keep track of both what they say and how they say it for comparison. Keep adding questions and removing questions as you talk to HiPos and get a picture of them. Don't judge the responses. Ultimately, for the purposes of coming up with a model for identifying HiPos, the answers themselves aren't important, the answers' similarity to other HiPo answers is what you're after.

 

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For those of you whom attended our webinar today, we appreciate the incredible feedback and participation. We'd really like to keep the conversation going to get better insight into what your are doing today for workforce planning, what challenges you face planning your workforce strategy or executing your strategy based on your research. We encourage you to leave comments here and we'll give you our responses as we go and include them in the white paper to be released on this topic soon.

The answers to the polling questions during the webinar were very insightful and we really enjoyed getting feedback from all of the attendees. As promised, the questions and results are below.

1. How do you currently calculate quality of hire?

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Every once in a while, we get a prospect that asks us, "How do I know I'm ready to buy HR software?" The answer is as varied as the companies that ask. Generally there are a few simple things to think about when considering buying HR software.

If your main goal is automation, take a week to record how much time of your day is spent on different tasks. For instance, watch your recruiters and try to figure out how many hours they spend sifting through their inbox and estimate how much faster it would be to have only candidate resumes to sift through instead of spam, internal communications, follow up emails AND candidate resumes. Or, watch your managers during an appraisal cycle fill out form after form with roughly the same information and try to estimate time savings if managers had one place to go and appraisals forms were pre-populated with the right competencies.

Then try to put a real dollar value on the estimated time savings. How much value does basic automation provide to you and your company? If your main goal is to create unified processes to drive efficiency, the same sort of activity applies. Though slightly more difficult, try to estimate a real dollar value for aligning goals and providing clear direction to your employees.

We find that efficiency numbers increase within an organization somewhere between 30 to 50 percent depending on the process that the software addresses. Take what you think you will save in hard dollars and compare it to your cost per hire across your organization. If what you will save in dollars is roughly equal to or less than 30 percent of your entire year's recruiting budget based on cost per hire, then the time to look at HR software is now.

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 We haven't spoken before but you probably already know me if you've attended any conferences or done business with HRsmart. I'm Greg Strange, the Vice President of Product Management here at HRsmart. In my 4 years with HRsmart, I've watched the company grow to be a leader in total talent management, overseeing the growth in feature breadth and knowledge depth that typifies the high quality, insightful suite of tools that we produce. I'm thrilled to have this channel to communicate with you about HRsmart's products and goals as well as how they fit into the HR talent management industry and your organization.

If you haven't noticed it by now, HRsmart is putting on a new face. We're still the same great company devoted to our clients, committed to excellence and driven to innovate. Now, we're building upon our years' of experience in talent management and releasing products with incredible flexibility and configurability. Although we still customize for some clients, most clients have come to realize that our standard solutions exceed their expectations by more than meeting their needs. Our passion for creating the best products on the market means we listened to every user, collaborated with our client partners, and executed flawlessly.

The HRsmart Unified Application is better than ever combining the power of a single application platform with extensive and easy-to -use configurability. This powerhouse means that organizations can implement faster, manage change within their organizations easier and ultimately make changes to their suite of tools as they grow, mature or refine their HR processes. It's not just about flexibility and configurability though. HRsmart's suite of tools helps you and your organization enforce best practice, align goals and succeed against your competition by giving you incredible insight into your people -- the foundation for your success.

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