Hire People Today who Can Also Deliver Tommorow

 With globalization and the continuing emergence of new disruptive players in the marketplace, the business world is becoming more competitive than it has ever been. And having the right talent in place at the right time is becoming a key performance differentiator for businesses to get an edge on their competition.

When you combine this pressure to get top talent in fast with the scarcity of talent in the marketplace, a hiring culture of instant gratification is created when candidates are hired to meet the immediate needs of the business, but without an eye on the future.

But, the law of diminishing returns suggests that if you continue with this strategy you may actually raise turnover as you hire employees who don’t have the ability to progress and who subsequently depart the business prematurely, creating more vacancies. Also, you will not be creating a pipeline to replace any talent that actually does progress further into the business. This means that your business may become overly dependent on new hires to support its talent pool and may not be making effective use of existing talent to fill empty posts. This will negatively impact cost-to-hire, time-to-hire and morale.

So, it makes sense for recruiters/hiring managers to have a clear understanding of the team’s/organization’s future expansion plans and the kind of roles and positions that may be needed over the next two to five years. With this in mind, businesses can begin to hire employees who can not only do the job today, but can progress and take on advanced responsibilities tomorrow, to enable your business to be flexible, adaptable and able to grow efficiently and in a suitable way.

So, how can employers identify whether talent that is good for today’s job may also be suitable to progress into a leader of the future? Well, clearly a desire and interest to progress, plus some evidence of past career progression or leadership are strong indicators they may be progression potential. And, employers should be careful to screen for this, where future progression is relevant.

But, being a high potential takes more than just wanting to lead tomorrow; they need to show the traits and qualities of a high potential. So, what are these traits?

Well, there are two ways to establish the traits of high potentials.

The first is to use a research-based indicator  of high potential status, such as Learning Agility  and screening for this during the hiring process. So, what is learning agility?

Multiples studies (Charan Drotter & Noel, 2011; Goldsmith, 2007; Mcall, 1998) have shown  that being able to learn from experience is what distinguishes successful executives from unsuccessful ones. The studies showed that the more successful executives had strong and active learning patterns from key job assignments. It seems that they learn faster, but this was not down to being more intelligent, but they simply possess more effective learning strategies. They are termed ‘learning agile’.

And now learning agility is regarded as a key sign of being a high potential (Eichinger & Lombardo, 2004; Spreitzer, McCall & Mahoney, 1997). And to perform effectively and progress in today’s business world executives need to be open; have a willingness to learn; are curious about the world; can tolerate ambiguity; and have excellent people skills, vision and innovation.

The second way to understand what a high potential looks like is to simply identify and map out the key behavioral traits of your current high performers and build a high potential character profile, which is tailored specifically to your organization, and then screen for these qualities at interviews.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you from using a combination of these two approaches to build a highly optimized model of a high potential in your business.