Measuring Future Productivity

When hiring, chances are you’ve done it all: put out a call for resumes on LinkedIn, posted job ads on Indeed, and even made a couple of phone calls to your network. You found a few candidates that fit the job, fell in love with one or two during the interview, and finally hired the best one.

But soon, you realize they aren’t as good as you thought they would be. They don’t fit well in the team. And you weren’t too happy with how they handled a few workplace decisions.

So you end up having to do it all over again. You cross your fingers and hope that this time, you won’t lose as much in hiring costs and time. And you’re starting to get the feeling your VP doesn’t think you’re up for the task anymore.

What could you have done differently? 

The answer lies in how candidates are evaluated in the first place. Most hiring authorities look for resumes with a certain skill set, and ask a few generic interview questions to confirm experience. In reality, a candidate’s future performance has a lot more to do with who they are and how they behave in various situations, than to do with what they know. In order for a hire to add value to an organization, they must work well within the organization’s culture and help other members with their skills. 

Currently, hiring authorities assess hires based on qualitative aspects alone. At Planet, we use an analytical approach to recruitment. Our hiring process is based on concrete math, and the numbers speak for themselves. Our hires are a better fit, more productive, and bigger contributors to overall team dynamic. 

So, let’s talk about our formula to measure the value of a candidates’ future productivity. Nearly 20 years ago, we conceptualized this formula during a workplace transformation project. Today, you can use it to determine which one of your candidates will perform better and improve team performance. Because, as all hiring authorities know, team composition is a key factor to consider when setting up an organization for success.

A candidate's Skills and Knowledge determine if they can get the job done. Experience makes a candidate better at applying their Skills and Knowledge to situations. While all three factors are important, what makes them effective is the Competence multiplier. This is what a candidate really brings - the ability and emotional intelligence to perform well in your organization. 

We start by listing out all of the requirements under Skills, Knowledge, and Experience. We use a rating scale out of 5, and give the candidate a rating for each requirement. For example, let’s say 8 years of experience is a requirement for a Lead Developer position. If the candidate had 8 years of experience, or more, we would rate them a 5. Adding together all of these ratings gives us a total for Skills, Knowledge, and Experience. 

Now we look for competencies. For a given job, there can be anywhere between 2 to 7 competencies. Project Managers, for example, are measured against 7 competencies, with Leadership being the most important of them. Each competency is rated out of 5, as well, and the ratings for Competencies are added together.

Multiplying the total for Competencies with the total for Skills, Knowledge, and Experience gives us a Performance Value. Let’s suppose we have two candidates, A and B. Both have the same total for Skills, Knowledge, and Experience. What differentiates them is the Competencies they possess. At the end of the day, their Performance Values will be different. The hiring authority will choose the higher value, because this is the candidate that will add the most productivity to the workplace. And this is why a multiplier is used - it is a big leap in how well people perform.

We have tried and tested this formula over the last 20 years. Our results show that, using this method, hires perform better and grow quickly within organizations. Turnover costs are low in these organizations. And hiring authorities, much like yourself, are seen as experts in recruiting consistently extraordinary talent. 

Over this series of articles, we’ll show you how we use numbers and analytics to hire the right candidate. In our next post, we’ll tell you why your interview technique isn’t producing the results you want, and explore ways to optimize your hiring process.