With the spectacular Super Bowl ended, I’m dreaming of baseball season – perhaps as a way to conjure up an early spring. The players of professional baseball teams will report for practice later this month honing their skills in batting, fielding, etc.
They’ll have lots of time to practice those skills. But in the area of staffing, how does one improve hit rate or batting average? Each time at bat in filling a full-time position is for real. There is no practice. You must get it right the first time or suffer the consequences long-term in terms of productivity and staff morale. Here are some ways to improve your batting average in bringing new staff to your team.
Bring in a pinch-hitter
If you have an open position on your field, consider bringing a pinch-hitter onto your team quickly to make sure that team morale does not slip due to overwork as they try to compensate for the missing player. Talencio can help you scope out the needs of the position and provide you with an experienced well-vetted substitute player. This will allow your team to be productive, allow you to assess the effectiveness of the substitute player, and perhaps to more fully define the skills and attributes you require in the position on a full-time basis. Perhaps you’ll find you’d like to make the substitute player a full member of your team. Talencio is delighted to work with you on those negotiations.
Benchmark and assess
If the substitute player does not have that “magic something” that you are looking for in a full-time member of your team, having a substitute on-board on a temporary basis will give you the time needed to operationalize the ideal skills and capabilities you’re seeking. The operationalization of skills and job requirements of the position is known in the staffing industry as benchmarking. Talencio can be helpful here as well, working with your staff to develop benchmarks against which to assess candidates for your team.
When benchmarks have been defined, Talencio can work with your team to evaluate candidates. We can arrange for the use of a well-validated assessment tool (such as TTI Success Insights) and a professional to interpret the results to help measure candidates’ skills and attributes against your team’s specific benchmarks. Benchmarking a candidate against the requirements of the job leads to a higher rate of job/company success.
Perhaps an example will help explain how the benchmarking and assessment process can benefit your selection. Say your team is looking to hire new sales talent. The assessment will measure how many times the candidate chose the MOST effective sales strategy, the SECOND, THIRD and the LEAST. Of course, you want to hire the talent that choses the MOST effective strategy nearly all of the time, and the assessment helps us to measure this ahead of time, and greatly improve your batting average. The assessment tool can also tell how candidates measure up on specific skills indices. If you need a sales professional who is a strong closer and the candidate rates low in this skill, either the candidate is not right for your position, or we can predict that you will need to do a lot of training and coaching in this area.
The assessment can also point out candidates’ specific strengths and obstacles to success. Other insights from the use of our recommended assessment tool include value to the organization, ways to communicate, ways not to communicate, self-perception and others’ perception, personality descriptors, time wasters that may impact overall time use effectiveness, areas for improvement and behavioral style. The assessment will also provide knowledge of an individual’s motivators and why they do things. Finally, the assessment identifies the ideal work environment, keys to motivating, and keys to managing. The depth of information available from a formalized assessment goes beyond information that can be garnered from interviews alone. Each of these factors is important in determining whether a candidate is right for the organization and the job – whether they are the one who can hit it out of the park for your team. Taking this extra step of using a formalized assessment will also give you the most information to protect you against making a bad hire and the costs associated with that hire.
Let us help
We’re invested in the success of the Life Science industry and we’d like to help your company be successful, too. To learn more about how other Life Science companies have partnered with us to overcome hurdles and capacity issues, and make well-informed hiring decisions, contact me at 612.703.4236 or email me at: pnorbom@talencio.com. Talencio, LLC has been the preferred provider of vetted, accomplished professionals to the Life Sciences community for over seven years.