At Posterus Consulting, we regularly use Success Profiles as the foundation of a lot of our Talent work. Focussing on these first means that all other talent processes are so much easier.
Helping you stand out against your competition, these incredibly powerful tools give you the foundations that set you out as an innovative employer dedicated to hiring, promoting, and developing the right people within your organisation. The result is a better employer brand, better quality of hire, higher employee retention, a diverse and inclusive workplace, and improved overall business success.
Where do I start with...
Recruitment and Talent Acquisition? Success Profiles
Performance Management? Success Profiles
Improving Diversity & Inclusion? Success Profiles
Internal Mobility & Promotions? Success Profiles
Hiring to Company Values? Success Profiles
Learning & Development? Success Profiles
So what, exactly, are Success Profiles, and how do they work?
As a starting point, it’s a case of flipping your talent process on its head and identifying what Behaviours, Skills, Knowledge, Competencies and Attributes an individual will possess and display when they are successful in a particular role. Note that this list does NOT include Experience.
Gone are the unnecessary and nonsensical experience criteria that simply stand to reinforce privilege and reduce diversity and social mobility. (Can anyone really explain why a plodder with 15 years experience in a particular role makes them more qualified than a superstar with 8 years experience if the person with 8 performs the role better? Or why there is always an insistence on degrees from a particular college/university when data shows there is ZERO correlation between someone’s GPA and their success in any given role?)
The key, of course, is to make sure you're asking the right questions to ascertain what these criteria are. And you don't want too many of them. After a comprehensive process of selecting and refining, you should end up with, perhaps, a handful for each area.
Once these criteria are chosen and refined, weight them based on importance to the role and then objectively score people against them.
Now you have an objective way of knowing who to hire, who to promote, who can sidestep into a different function, what areas of development different team members need, and so on.
Basing your talent approach on Success Profiles and focusing on key business outcomes (perhaps wrapping in OKRs) ensures diversity by design, a level playing field for all, and more successful, happy employees.
Want to know more about how to make your company a true meritocracy with exciting career paths for all your employees? Get in touch with us for an initial consultation to see if we can help elevate your talent strategy.
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