Job profiles are at the core of talent management practices such as recruitment, selection, and succession planning. But how can organisations ensure that they have the right profiles, constructed properly, for the intended purpose?
In helping our clients make better talent decisions, we have developed several robust methods of constructing job, competency, and success profiles. Here are important lessons we have learnt that should be kept in mind when creating profiles:
- Start with Strategy.Profiles should not exist in a vacuum. Effective profiles are founded on organisational strategy and the talent strategy that flows from that. It is important to ensure that the end-product does the work the organisational strategy demands. For instance, if the strategy calls for a strong focus on succession planning, profiles should contain detailed information about the critical experience needed to transition into the role as well as competencies that are essential for success at the next level.
- Connect Competencies to Assessments. Many organisations work with competency profiles that might look good on paper, but prove to be less than ideal when IO practitioners apply them to real-world talent challenges. Especially when selecting the right people for the role. One way to ensure that your profiles are useful is to make sure that the competency model they are based on was designed with assessments in mind. At TTS, our profiling system, tts define, can accommodate a variety of competency models that facilitate assessments, such as the Saville Wave, UCF, and cut-e Shapes frameworks, to name a few
- Utilise Competencies and Profiles Fully. Profiles and competencies are not only useful when recruiting and selecting talent. Effective profiles aid the IO professional in making informed choices when developing talent and in constructing fair and internally-consistent performance management processes. Make sure that you have a well-founded profile methodology and system that delivers on these goals. Overly narrow profiling misses the mark and true potential of best-practice role profiling.
- Maintain and Refresh. As organisational strategy shifts based on market forces, so too should competencies and role profiles be updated to reflect the new reality. Now more than ever, IO professionals will be challenged with new career paths and roles emerging from fast-paced technological progression and agile ways of working. Role profiles should never be static, so make sure to have regular annual or even quarterly sessions to sense-check your profiles and competencies against what is happening on the ground.
If you enjoyed this article and would like to know how TTS can assist you in best-practice profiling, drop us a line at info@tts-talent.com or visit us at www.tts-talent.com.