by Rich Rackers
Job benchmarking is an efficient way to identify, attract and leverage the right talent for your business. From a financial perspective, it’s important to make sure you have benchmarks tied to each job. This will help insure your employees understand and embrace the goals of the organization.
Typical hiring scenario – The owner says to hire someone. You find a copy of an old job description for the position. You place an ad or have a recruiter round up candidates based on the job description. You interview them, review their resumes, and determine the most qualified (sometimes you even check their references). The owner hires who he/she likes the best!
The results – maybe you get lucky and the person turns out to be a good fit, or…more likely, the person is not right for the position and you end up going through the rehiring process all over again in six months.
There is a better way – Job benchmarking is a tool that offers a disciplined approach to measuring, managing, and improving the performance of your most volatile and valuable assets – your employees – to drive financial performance.
The process – Identify the job to be benchmarked. The stakeholders identify the key accountabilities (KA) of the job. Stakeholders should be people who know how the job should be done. The KA of the job consists of the expectation of the job. If the job could talk, what would it say?
Based on a consensus of the KA, the stakeholders identify the personal attributes, core values and behaviors required by the individual to accomplish the key accountabilities of the job.
Identify the candidate that most closely matches the benchmark.
Key benefits – Stakeholders come to consensus on job requirements; this represents a huge value to the leadership of the company, sets appropriate expectations of the new hire; increases effectiveness and productivity of the new hire; establishes performance measures for the new hire; streamlines and systemizes the hiring process for the future; reduces turnover and associated costs; increases the likelihood that the company has the right person “in the right seat on the bus”.
Job Benchmarking gives business owners the opportunity to prevent a problem before it becomes a problem. Just like great coaches are able to make adjustments while the game is still in play – job benchmarking gives business owners the ability to make adjustments that will ultimately impact the bottom line.
