HR Practitioners, people will show up at your doorsteps.  They’ll come for reasons they can’t even fathom.  They’ll click on your careers page not knowing for sure why they’re doing it.  They’ll review all your social media presence as innocent as children, longing for the answers or discoveries.  Of course, you won’t mind if they look around, you’ll say.  It’s increasing my employment brand awareness, it’s attracting a possible HiPo, and it just might be attracting the right candidates for the open requisitions.  They’ll pass over certain needs or wants without even thinking about it: for it is skills they have and jobs they want.  And they’ll apply for several jobs; send a cover letter with a perfect pitch.  

If You Build the Hiring Scorecards, The Right Talent Will Come

They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along the hiring timeline, where they sit in hopes of an email or phone call awaiting a chance to be part of the company brand.  And they’ll watch the company’s blogs, tweets, and website and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.  The social crowds will be so thick you’ll have to brush yourself away from the heavy social presence.  People will come, HR Practitioners.  The one constant through all the years, HR Practitioners, has been employment.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.  But employment has marked the time.  This skill-set, this machine: it’s a part of our past, HR Practitioners.  It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.  Oh… people will come, HR Practitioners.  People will most definitely come.  The main question you need to ask yourself is “What are you doing to prepare for their coming?”

Many of you are remembering this same conversation from the movie Field of Dreams when Terence Mann was instructing and motivating Ray Kinsella on why he must continue forward with the building of the baseball field on his farm in Iowa.  It is highly applicable to us in finishing out the Year of Human Capital and how to carry the strategic objectives and initiatives forward into the coming year.

One most important tool that attracts the right talent to an organization is building hiring scorecards for each position within the company.  In order to attract the right talent and increase retention of engaged and performing employees, you must have your Talent Acquisition team partnering with the hiring managers to build hiring scorecards for each position.

Why You Should Create the Hiring Scorecards?

Interviewing potential hires without a scorecard brings into the process all the subjective reasoning vs. the objective reasoning in making a decision on the candidate.  By creating the scorecards, you are increasing the chances of making the right hire and reducing the chances of legal repercussions that might occur due to subjective hiring practices.  The hiring scorecards provide behavioral, character, and performance indicators mappings, which aligns your Human Capital to the business strategy.

How To Build Hiring Scorecards?

The Talent Acquisition (TA) team will need to partner with each Hiring Manager (HM) to create the scorecards. The below breakout shows each persons role in the creation of the scorecards.

Hiring Managers

(1) Conduct performance analysis on each of their employees to gather the proven data for shining the light on their engaged employees.

(2) Benchmark top performers for each role within the department

(3) Analyze the data for discovering the attitudinal traits (top 5), performance drivers (top 8), personal motivators (top 5), soft and hard skills (top 5-8), and team performance indicators (top 5)

Talent Acquisition Specialist (team)

(1) Build the hiring scorecard templates for populating each score within each hiring team members scorecard.  These should include the internal recruiter, hiring team members, hiring manager, and hr manager.  Each person interviewing will have specific scores to assess during the interviewing process.

Example Scorecards

Internal Recruiter: Culture, Soft-skills, Top-grading Performance, Experience-Tenure-Work History, Team Fit

Team Member 1: Hard Skills, Soft-skills

Team Member 2: Attitudinal Traits, Top-grading Past Performance

Hiring Manager: Performance, Soft-skills, Team Fit

HR Manager: Culture, Motivators, Team Fit

(2) Schedule a meeting with the HM to pull all the data together for each scorecard.

Example Data Compiling

Team Member 1 Scorecard: Hard Skills – The HM provides a lists of the most important hard skills that drive performance within the job role and these are based on the bench-marked employees.  A couple examples within the sales force would be “designing customer solutions” or “strong customer market research analyst”.

Team Member 2 Scorecard: Attitudinal Traits – The HM provides the top attitudinal traits of their bench-marked employees in order to determine the candidates that will have high retention rates and solid career pathing opportunities. A couple examples would be “decisive” or “determined” or “analytical” or “problem solving”.

Hiring Manager: Performance – The HM provides the key performers of their bench-marked employees that are moving them to higher levels of engagement and productivity.  A couple examples within the sales-force would be “relationship building” or “effective consultative abilities” or “software demoing”.

HR Manager: Motivators – The HM provides the top motivators that keep the bench-marked employee engaged and continually performing at higher levels.  A couple examples would be “sense of meaningfulness” or “sense of purpose” or “sense of competence” or “sense of progress”.

(3) Compile the scores within each hiring teams scorecard and create questions/examples of “right” and “wrong” answers for each score in order to increase hiring accuracy.

Implementing the Hiring Scorecards

The TA and HM partner to conduct a hiring team meeting to discuss each members role during the interviewing process. The TA and HM will share the hiring team scorecards, along with the explanation of each score and answer team questions related to their individual interviewing scorecards.

Each team member will conduct the interviews using their scorecard and provide the final score of the candidate to the TA. Once all scores are provided, the TA completes the final scorecard and sends it to the HM for final review.  The HM is able to make an executive decision based on individual and overall scores of the candidate.

If You Build It, They Will Come

This year has been a tipping point for companies CEO’s strategic understanding of the value alignment of their human capital to the business strategy.  The CEO’s are moving their focus in greater percentages on the acquisition of their Human Capital (HC).  They are strongly focused on building the right leaders and team members within the organization that will drive their company to achieve market leadership and increase revenue growth year-over-year.

One of the talent drivers of 2015 will be coming from the c-suite and it will be building a Human Capital Strategic Team that focuses solely on analyzing key human capital data in order to build the necessary tools for ensuring their talent acquisition teams are finding the right people and the hiring managers are placing them in the right seats.

Why not do as Ray did in Field of Dreams and start building your own Talent of Dreams?  The hiring scorecard is a great starting point in ensuring solid hires, increasing retention rates, increasing numbers of engaged employees and greatly increasing the companies market growth and bottom line.  There is no better time than the present to attract the right talent to your organization.

“Stop waiting for the right moment because sometimes its now or never.”