No one or company succeeds alone. Unpinning every significant achievement are teams of talented people working well together to achieve their common goals. Alas, anyone who has ever attempted to build a high-performance team knows that not everyone contributes equally; some people get better results than others. The best are typically a lot better than even the better ones.
How can your company raise its skill level—and in particular, how can you hire better talents? Our research and experience suggests five important keys.
1- “Who do you really need to hire and get onboard successfully?
The hiring team needs a composite profile of the ideal candidate by answering these 3 questions:
- What must the candidate be able to do?
- How well must this candidate be able to do it?
- What structure, environment, resources, constraints will this candidate be subjected in the daily course of his/her work?
2- Control the source of your candidate supply.
The source of your supply of candidates will determine the quality of the candidates you will get. Successful people seldom look for jobs, deposit their resumes in job banks, or respond to job advertisements. Good fresh graduates are often recruited prior to graduation. “Success-basis” or “contingency” search firms do not have the financial wherewithal and patience to source for better supply of candidates due to their own self-interest to close their assignments and getting paid.
3- Assess your talent pool using multiple assessment methods.
Unstructured interviews and reference checks are two of the most common hiring methods, but they are also the least reliable in hiring better talents (see the table above). Assessment centres use multiple instruments, including advanced behavioural profiling tools like Devine Inventory, to increase their odds of choosing the right people to best-fit their requirements. Devine Inventory will enhance your odds of hiring the right people multiple folds because it comes with structured behaviour interview questions, and a program to help your managers onboard and coach new leaders successfully.
4- Check your ego at the door
Attracting the right candidates to join your team often entails hiring people better than yourself or your hiring managers for that particular jobs or tasks at hand. Many good “rare-finds” often do not fit into the average concept of hiring “nice people” who fits into your company’s culture. Many good candidates are often rejected because the recruiters or hiring managers’ egos were bruised. Hiring is not a popularity contest. Leaders often have to remind themselves, “When the jobs get done right, people often said they did it themselves.”
5- Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Always be assessing your existing talents to mine for much needed talents. Devine Consulting has a large repertoire of tools to assist your organization to assess talents, identify gaps and develop your existing talents with better skills to assume greater responsibilities and new challenges.
Building a high performance team requires the leaders to have heighten awareness of one’s internal strengths and weaknesses, behavioural inclinations, competencies, et-cetera. These competencies are seldom available to one person, or even one human resources department. Almost every organization need external help for specialists with special skills, instruments and experience to complement their core competence. Isn’t asking for help by purposefully seeking out talents the raison d’être for building a high-performance team?