Welcome to our High-potential employee assessment design. High-potentials (HiPos) make sizable contributions to the present and future success of the organisation.
Our High-potential employee assessment designs
- A high-potential is an employee who possesses the intellect, drive, agility, and leadership orientation to successfully undertake broader and complex roles in the future.
- High-potentials are part of the larger pool of top talent in any organization.
- HiPo employees drive the overall business performance by making significant and consistent contributions, delivering superior levels of performance while outperforming others.
High-potential identification
- What is High-potential identification? It is a process that intends to discover individuals who possess competencies that are essential to succeed in more evolved roles for personal and organizational advancement.
- The process aims to find employees who demonstrate a higher possibility of outperforming other role holders and depict a differentiated leadership/role potential.
- High-potential employees display not only high levels of competencies for their current role but also exhibit a high future propensity for taking up bigger responsibilities and challenges.
Why should companies focus on future competencies?
The absence of a clear definition of a HiPo employee for your organization, and it could vary based on the industry, size, etc., leads to ambiguity on who and what competencies qualify as a high-potential.
- Instead of focussing on future competencies, most competency frameworks focus solely on present business requirements.
- Without acknowledging the changing business landscape and future competencies aligned to this.
- So there is no future proofing encapsulated with in their competency framework design(s).
- Most organizations arrive at a loosely defined competency framework based on the subjective opinions of only a handful of people within the organization.
- Hence later struggle to objectively identify specific attributes/competencies they would need their high-potentials or future workforce to demonstrate.
- As a result, no one has a clear picture of the characteristics required for assessing the potential.
Confusing performance and potential
- This can be an expensive miss for an organisation. It push high- potential employees to look for alternative roles or even switch jobs.
- Assessing HiPos current performance is NOT the same as assessing their potential.
- Many organizations confuse performance with potential, two concepts that are often used interchangeably but don’t always mean the same thing.
- Considering that the expectations and demands of the future role might be starkly different from the one being currently performed, organizations can put their high performing employees in a position that might lead to unfavorable results.
- These results may stem from their inability to cope with the transition or the lack of skills required to excel in that particular role.
- While performance and potential are not mutually exclusive in a way that potential includes elements of performance, a high performer doesn’t guarantee a high-potential.
Assessing Candidates Subjectively
- Organizations often rely on the manager’s feedback to assess an individual’s performance for appraisals and promotions.
- That this practice is mostly subjective and prone to bias is known and can be detrimental to the process of high-potential identification.
- Relying solely on the manager’s feedback means that candidates are being nominated for subjective reasons rather than scientific and standardized tools.
- The amalgamation of these factors has left many organizations struggling while designing a successful strategy for high-potential identification for organizational planning and talent development.
High-potential employee identification
- Regularly assessing your internal talent pool is critical for better people management.
While new talent could be recruited for the same positions, instead of training existing employees. - From an organizational perspective, recruitment is always more expensive than development.
- HiPo Identification, Succession Planning, Leadership Development, and Training Need Identification go together with the broader construct of future readiness.
- While the objectives may differ based on the organizational requirement at a given time, all of them stem from the same need, which is the identification of a talent pool and deployment of developmental interventions to ensure organizational success in the long run.
- High-potential employees prefer to be challenged at the workplace and are often aware that they are outperforming their peers.
- Often, acknowledging their contribution in one way or the other – providing them better learning opportunities, promoting or appraising them, placing them in strategic or more challenging roles, training them to be future leaders, etc. – can help retain these individuals.
Build a High-potential talent pool
- Investing in your high-potentials can help you build a talent pipeline in case of loss of talent owing to attrition, retirement, or any other such issues.
- A high-potential talent pool can be accessed when the need arises. This could be to fill a critical business position. It could be to create a new business unit or team, consider employees for leadership pipeline, or carry out succession planning.
How best to develop HiPos
- placing them in advanced developmental programs to prepare them for future roles.
- exposing them to better opportunities.
- putting them on fast track training programs.
- assigning them to special assignments that provide advanced growth opportunities.
Retain High- potential employees
- With attrition being one of the most prominent challenges confronted by organizations, losing a high-potential employee can be a significant setback for any organization.
- High-potential identification provides organisations with objective data to focus their efforts on retaining the right people.
- By engaging high-potential employees, organisations take note of their need for achievement and advancement, giving them a reason to stay in their current organisation.
How best to reward HiPos
- Promotions and appraisals are powerful tools to reward high-potential employees and keep them motivated.
- Traditionally, performance has been the central focus of appraisals. While performance has and should always be rewarded, identifying and rewarding potential is equally critical.
- Potential data serves as an enabler to better people’s decisions.
- Since high-potential employees are often driven, agile and ambitious individuals, promotions become an extremely effective tool in ensuring that they are motivated to work to the best of their ability, delivering consistent results.
- The addition of potential to already existing performance parameters, thus, allows you to make appraisal decisions objectively and accurately.
Tools to measure HiPos
- With the focus shifting on combining potential and performance, the conventional methods are giving way to more dynamic ones.
- High-potential employee identification is an essential component of the shifting global work environment filled with new challenges and uncertainties.
- These High-potential identification tools are designed, keeping the present business environment in mind.
- While high-potential identification is often carried out for select employees based on seniority, these highly flexible and customized tools allow your organization to implement HiPo identification at scale across all employee levels (frontline and managers) timely and cost-efficiently.
Assessment & Development Centers for HiPos
- While assessment centers primarily match an employee to a particular role, development centers are used for employee development. Together, they make an excellent tool for identifying high-potential employees.
- Assessment and development centers combine roleplays, situational judgment tests, presentations, group discussions, interviews, simulations, psychometric and aptitude tests, and other such techniques to make critical people decisions.
- The above allows assessors to objectively evaluate candidates in situations that imitate real-life workplace scenarios and observe skills and behaviors specific to the defined competencies.
360-Degree feedback for HiPos
- A holistic process where an employee’s superiors, peers, direct reports, and, sometimes, even customers, evaluate an individual’s performance and potential.
- 360-degree feedback tools are often used for performance appraisals and promotions but can be adapted to look at potential as one of the metrics.
- In other words, through additional indicators of potential that stakeholders use to evaluate employees on.
HiPos Assessment Battery
- A comprehensive battery of assessments can quickly help organizations zero in on their high-potential employees by evaluating employees on their personality and ability.
- Best suited for entry-level employees and first-time managers, the assessment battery can be used as part of advanced tools for a holistic understanding of an employee’s potential.
Our other psychometric test design specialities
- Firstly, here are some examples of our specialist situational judgment test designs.
- Secondly, our values situational and competency values-based assessment designs.
- We also specialise in aptitude test design projects.
- Then next our customised leadership assessment projects and pre-employment sift designs.
- Plus, our emotional intelligence assessment designs.
- And then next, our top bespoke personality test design projects and our school aptitude test designs.
- Finally, some examples of the bespoke psychometric tests designed recently for clients.