Are we hiring the right people? Assessing talent to improve top talent re-hire rates to scale.
Claire Mula
Entrepreneur & Scaling Up Coach | Lasting Change | Immediate Impact | Innovation Ecosystem
There are two types of highly capable Talent.
One has deep skills and incredible expertise. They get the job done. Maybe they break a few rules and make a few enemies along the way. But the results are there. They speak for themselves.
The other is Top Talent.
In a previous article “How to get the right people in the right seats during Scaling” we covered how to determine the “right seats” and how to think about right skills and capabilities necessary for successful scaling.
Now we will dive deeper into "Right People" and the Scaling Up Talent Assessment tool. The Talent Assessment Chart will help leaders discover how many of each we have in our business and what to do next.
“The most important decisions we will make as leaders is not “what” but “who”.” Jim Collins, Good to Great.
What versus Who?
How much business success comes down to what they do (or strategy) versus who? Geoff Smart asks just this question in his book “Who? The A method for hiring.”
Skills and capabilities are important. But they are not the most important factor to consider when it comes to deciding Who? Particularly in a dynamic scaling organization.
Both Top Talent and B/C-players (sometimes referred to as Terrorists as they tend to terrorise an organisation) are high on skills, capability and productivity for the role.
But one of them breaks the "rules of the road" which your business has been built on. This limits overall teams performance and usually means more time for the CEO and leadership in oversight.
See the problem with this Talent is they are very very good at achieving job outcomes. Therefore, harder to let go versus someone less productive.
I’ve experienced working with people high on skill and low on core values congruence myself. Here are some of the more obvious signals I came across:
Team Performance vs. Individual Performance
CEO and organisations tolerate incongruent core values and behaviour because the short-term financial results kept coming in. I’ve learnt people can tolerate a thousand cuts for a short time if it's good for short-term business wins. Until it's not.
By then, other top talent in their team has left. The company is left in a much weaker position, despite their financial success and growth.
In my experience, the company managed to bring in new leadership, turn over the exec and recover. But not without serious cost and risk to the business.
Right People = T x V
The concept of Top Talent or “Right People” goes beyond skills and capability. Like B/C-players, Top Talent are also highly productive and skilled.They regularly wow you with their capability to do their job. But unlike Terrorists, they have high congruence with core values and behaviours you want to see in the organization.
Why are core values so important to performance in a scaling organisation?
Because you can't build capacity (structures, no of staff, specialists) without it. Setting out the boundaries of cool and non-cool behaviours, boundaries and the way we do things helps founders/CEOs and early hires let go. It helps the organization to act more autonomously, even without the founders and leaders there all the time. It allows people to take holidays away from the business knowing that when they get back, there should be no (less) fires to put out.
How do you assess if your organization is hiring and retaining the right people for your business and stage of scaling?
Wouldn’t we all rather have best of both worlds? Talent that are both high on productivity AND organizational values. The best people in industry that our money can afford fit to our core values and behaviours. We are looking for:
T = deep and broad skills, outcomes / productivity in role and
Recommended by LinkedIn
V = shared / core values, rules of the road, behaviours
Time for a talent assessment.
In a talent-hungry world, this is ideal, but not always easy. So we end up compromising to fill the seat. And then you have it.
We should be regularly reviewing our people based on both their ability to perform their role AND their congruence with our core values or “rules of the road”.
Talent Assessment Chart
A relatively straightforward way of understanding the profile of our Talent is through this 2 x 2 matrix known as the Talent Assessment Charts.
You can use this any time to get a quick pulse on how effective your hiring and talent development processes are at attracting and developing the right people for your organization.
Your Re-hire rate
Continuous monitoring and improvement of your re-hire rate should be a KPI for every scale up leadership team.
Many entrepreneurial firms I work with will tell me their “enthusiastic re-hire rate" is between 60% and 90%. This is an average as it’s never the same for everyone on the exec team.
At 60% we obviously are missing out on major productivity and team performance improvements as a result of 40% mis-hires. We are probably also spending lots of time mediating and solving people problems, that could be spent working on strategy and hiring A-talent.
A better method for hiring and screening for culture/values fit is needed in these firms.
A Word about Hiring Fit for Stage
As firms progress through different stage of scaling, they likely need different capabilities and roles. Specialisation increases from an overall Head of Marketing to perhaps Head of Customer Insights, Head of Growth, Head of Digital channels, Head of Data etc....
For example, in a start-up, being agile, lean and flexible, is important for figuring out products, market, business model etc...So people who come from much larger corporate environments expecting lots of support, process, clarity, budget, where the company is not yet at that stage, may struggle to transition.
Scaling firms also need to continually balance tensions between being "entrepreneurial" and increasing structure, process, tech-enablement, data-driving decisions, and routines. Entrepreneurial orientation refers to things like inventiveness, proactivity, risk-taking, flexibility and agility.
Firms that are able to balance being entrepreneurial and increasing structure, process and efficiency during scaling, are more likely to sustain high growth rates over the long-term.
Therefore, think about the level of entrepreneurial orientation and behaviours you would like to sustain and see in your organisation both at a firm level and for individual roles.
Key Takeaways
If you would like support with Talent Assessment and putting place better processes and methods for Hiring and developing Top Talent, please reach out to me at claire@made4scaleup.com .
Have a terrific week of scaling.
Claire