Performance Profiles: The Building Blocks of an Evidence-Based Talent Strategy

Executive Summary

The business task of hiring better people has spawned a deluge of potential solutions from voices in the talent management space. NEWS FLASH: There are no quick fixes to improve your workforce. The real potential for workforce improvement lies within your company—in the natural behaviors of your own employees. To effectively tap into and improve your workforce, you will need an evidence-based talent strategy that provides you with these elements: proof of its efficiency, real data, better people for your jobs, and a substantiated, strong ROI.

Important Definitions

Let’s start with a little background on evidence-based HR and Performance Profiles. Evidence-based talent strategies are proving to be the most effective means of continually improving your workforce, hire after hire. What is “evidence-based,” and why is it the most effective hiring approach? The term is deceivingly simple: evidence-based talent selection is based on hard, scientific facts that prove the approach works through verifiable reduction of turnover, improved employee performance, and returns on investment in actual practice. Performance Profiles are a cutting-edge technique that embodies evidence-based methods. A true Performance Profile can only be created by those with the required expertise and sophisticated software to measure behavioral traits in conjunction with job-relevant performance data.

This article challenges common misconceptions regarding Performance Profiles, explains the fundamentals of Performance Profiles, and illustrates why this author considers it to be the most sophisticated and most predictive approach to talent assessment. There is a reason why so many HR professionals choose Performance Profiles to help successful corporations around the world reduce turnover and improve employee performance.

Performance Profiles Embrace the Uniqueness of your Workforce

Natural Fit A “natural fit” to a job is attained when an individual’s behavioral and personality preferences are a close match to those preferences proven to deliver success in actual job performance. A natural fit cannot be determined by using information obtained from another company, or worse, an average compiled from a collection of companies that may or may not be in your specific industry. Scientifically, a good profile creation process identifies the behavioral and personality preferences proven to be successful in your jobs in your company based on your performance data. The Performance Profile then provides the company with a benchmark against which all future candidates can be compared to determine if they are a natural fit. Research indicates that the closer the natural fit of the candidate, the higher the probability of a longer tenure in the job, producing at higher levels, and having increased long-term job satisfaction.

Stay Current Performance Profiles are built using your current employees and their recent performance data, allowing your organization to capture the most relevant and accurate measurements available. As a result, the Performance Profile process accounts for the current needs, goals, values, and the cultural aspects of your organization.

Maximize Probability Probability simply refers to the odds of hiring people that will stay longer, produce more, and fit into your organization. Performance Profiles provide you with the best odds of scientifically hiring the most productive employees that will be successful in your organization. Great success is unlocked by understanding the unique formula that greatly increases the probability of hiring the right person for the job. Relying on old data collected from companies that have no relation to your unique situation does not give you the best opportunity for success.

Think About It: Your organization is unique! You can’t copy someone else and be successful, but you can embrace and leverage your strengths to maximize your success.

Performance Profiles vs. Job Analysis: Knowing the Facts, not Thinking You Have the Facts

Those outside of the Performance Profile creation process often confuse the merits, positioning, legality, and use of Performance Profiles versus a traditional job analysis. As an experiment, take a moment and search the phrase “job analysis” on your favorite search engine. Consistently, you will find the oft-stated purpose of a job analysis is to capture, document, and understand the requirements and work performed for a specific job. This approach is not evidence-based, and proponents of this approach have the unenviable task of convincing organizations to be content with subjective opinions (thinking) and to overlook the evidence-based approach of documented facts (knowing). Through years of repetitive traditional job analyses, many organizations have lost sight of the end goal and are not fulfilling the legal intent of conducting a job analysis in the first place. The goal of any job analysis is not just about discussing what it takes to achieve success in a specific job, but proving it in a specific organization, in a specific industry, and basing findings on actual performance data (evidence).

Think About It: A traditional job analysis represents a consensus (compromise) of opinions of a few people, or what they “think” is needed for success. An evidence-based job analysis uses actual performance data to provide real results that predict success.

From Better Measurement to Greater Predictability

The following section answers some commonly asked questions about Performance Profiles.

Which Performers Do I Use?
The key to successful Performance Profile creation is that they be built on data obtained from the largest possible foundation: sample size, multiple performance metrics, ample objective results versus subjective evaluations, etc. The largest data pool is certainly preferred, but the real world sometimes presents challenges to achieving that ideal. By considering the following guidelines, companies can optimize the type and number of employees used to create the best possible Performance Profiles.
Some assessment vendors make the mistake of believing that using a few strong employees accurately captures the successful behavioral pattern of a job. Unfortunately, a few high performers will only tell you a small part of the story. To maximize predictability, the evidence–based Performance Profile model requires a random sample of employees that represent all levels of performance. Practically, it is just as important to understand those workers who are not successful as well as those only moderately successful in the job, and not just the best workers.

How Many Performers are Sufficient? If you have had the pleasure of serving on jury duty, you know that the more relevant evidence you have to make a decision, the easier it is to reach the proper verdict. The same principle applies to the Performance Profile process—the larger the sample, the more stable the data gathered from the process. In some positions, it will be easy to capture large volumes of data, whereas in other jobs you may have smaller population sizes or practical challenges collecting high volumes of assessment data. In those cases you should focus on obtaining the largest feasible percentage of the job population.

What is the Best Performance Data?
The choice of which performance data to use should be made on a case by case basis. Some jobs will have a wide variety of objective metrics. In these cases, the best approach is to leverage your SMEs to aid in the selection of the most appropriate performance measures. Be sure to consider quality of the data, number of observations, time frames and, most importantly, job-relatedness. Evaluate the data to ensure that the employees in the position are directly responsible for those outcomes, i.e., that their behavior directly impacts the final outcome. Other positions may not have specific, quantifiable performance metrics. In these cases, you may consider building a performance evaluation as part of the Performance Profile creation process. Once again, your SME’s can be invaluable in helping to create an evaluation in which important aspects of job performance are listed and the incumbents are rated for their strengths and weaknesses.

Performance Profile creation should include quality checks of the performance data (to make sure that it is reliable, relevant, objective, and possesses good variation), the assessment data, and the sample size. This is a very important step to ensure that the data used meets certain standards and directly measures actual performance on the job.

Think About It: Research shows that a Performance Profile that joins individual-level behavioral characteristics with high quality data, robust sample sizes, and all levels of performance increases the probability of scientifically predicting future performance.

Summary

The Performance Profile concept is proving to be a powerful strategy within the employee selection arena, and it comes as no surprise when those espousing more traditional hiring methods misunderstand or even attempt to discredit the methodology. Despite being a new concept, search engine results for “Performance Profile” will return nearly 100,000,000 results and many differing definitions of what constitutes a Performance Profile. For those trying to improve the quality of their people and the ROI of their HR department, the only Performance Profile that matters is the one that incorporates an evidence-based approach that will help them hire a better workforce, reduce employee turnover, improve employee performance, and generate more cash flow.