There are many talent measurement solutions on the market. Some are paper based to collect data while others require hours of one on one interviews perhaps with an I/O psychologist. While this approach works for some businesses, many organizations are looking for insights beyond individual employees. They want to tie talent data back to strategies and business outcomes at the team or organizational level. Most talent measurement solutions focus on measuring communication or performance preferences.
Measuring Communication and Performance Preferences
The preferences provide business leaders, consultants and human capital professionals with important (but more surface) answers to questions like:
- Are my employees aggressive or collaborative in decision making?
- Do my people naturally engage customers and co-workers or take time to warm up?
- Do our employees prefer structure or a changing work environment?
- Are our employees more detail-oriented or more carefree?
Here is an example of a group of Marketing MBA students at one of our customers, a forward thinking US university:
Communication Preferences of MBA Students. n=59
Considering the distribution, relying solely on Communication Preferences of these MBA students may yield limited insight as a group. There seems to be absolutely nothing in common, no patterns about what makes a top MBA student.
For additional insight, the analysis needs to go deeper. People are more than “how they communicate or behave”. Lots more. Advisor continues the conversation where 95% of the talent measurement solutions stop.
Measuring Ambitions
With one click, Advisor instantly transitions from reviewing only their communications style to a deeper view – their Ambitions. This graph shows the Ambitions and Drivers of this same MBA class.
WOW!
Now, trends are revealed and actionable insights emerge. This view answers questions in the aggregate like:
- What do these MBAs care most about?
- What do they avoid?
This is useful to know when developing incentives. It also provides insight about the corporate cultures they would work best in. Based on their talent analytics above, this group of MBAs would be most likely to thrive in these types of corporate cultures (in the image above, “economic” is the strongest driver, “individualistic” is least):
- Results-driven
- Highly competitive
- Does not reward altruism
- Does not reward individualism
Deeper Insights
Talent Analytics Solutions go a step further and measure 7 metrics around what employees care about (Ambitions) in addition to 4 behavioral metrics. The business value of measuring Ambitions in addition to the more traditional “surface” measurement of communications style is the ability to dive deeper and learn more about your employees below the water line – what they care about – what keeps them engaged.
Technology now allows it. Don’t keep measuring surface characteristics when so much more is available.
Get in touch to learn more.
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Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics, Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com.
