Beware of competency con, it's performance you should hire for
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I'M CONFIDENT that most people reading this will have a competency model, or even several competency models, in their workplace.
I googled “job competency model” and found 1.98 million hits, while “leadership competency” generated more than a million hits.
And that is just the commercially or academically published models. It doesn’t take account of all the in-house corporate competency models out there.
There’s no doubt that competency modelling has become a phenomenon over the last 20 years, but I’d like to ask an important question: Are your competency models really helping you find high performers?
The problem
As competency models have grown in popularity, so have the rigour behind them and the link to workplace performance diminished.
Instead of being generated through thorough job-analysis techniques, competency models are generally written by corporate human-resources professionals and consultants with limited insight into the job, and at best represent a description of behaviour that “logically” should be important in the role.
There is no reliable linkage to what drives actual performance on the job. This situation is exaggerated further when many jobs are covered under an umbrella competency model, such as a management, leadership or sales competency model.
The behavioural descriptions in the models are usually not written by assessment professionals or organisational psychologists and tend to be a mixture of the vague, the contradictory and the all-encompassing rather than the precise and differentiating behaviours that they should be.
Companies begin with a poorly written competency model that has no established links to performance.
All too often they then rely on assessment approaches with low correlations to competency measurement, such as interviews or the manual interpretation of assessment tools against the competency model.
So we end up with an unreliable measurement of an unreliable model with no links to performance. Little wonder that the results are disappointing.
Measuring performance
I think we can all agree that the purpose of selection is to screen in high performers and screen out low performers.
Almost every organisation has some high performers in every role and will say, “I want more people like this.”
The good news is that this is actually very easy to deliver, but it
requires a mindset shift away from looking at competency models to looking at performance profiles.
The easiest way to identify what differentiates a high performer from a low performer is to select a group of proven high performers and a group of low performers in a particular role and then have them complete personality and cognitive assessments.
These data can then be analysed against objective performance data to establish strong statistical relationships with particular personality traits that predict high or low performance.
This results in reliable screening profiles that can identify high or low performers for specific roles.
Our experience shows that we can identify profiles that predict whether someone will be a high or low performer with over 80-per-cent accuracy.
Right tool for right job
My point is not to suggest that competency models have no value. When effectively researched and professionally written, they can help to understand how to develop people already in the role, and to screen people in low volume selection situations.
However, when it comes to general and high-volume selection, using performance profiles is significantly more effective in identifying high performers – and easier to apply. My final advice is to think about which approach is will work in your situation and use the right tool for the right job.
Richard Gilman, a corporate consulting
specialist at APMGroup, can be reached at [email protected]
