Category Archives: Talent Identification

How do you get managers to think outside the box when they are recruiting into their team? One pattern HR constantly struggles with is managers who fall into the trap of trying to get people into their teams who have followed a similar pattern to their own career path or history.

Often organisations want objective benchmarking of people who managers rate as having high potential. A common ‘gateway’ to the high potential pool is by using a Development Centre to identify the best 2-3% of talent for fast tracking. But there is a risk – the risk of demotivating 50% of your potential high fliers – those who DON’T get tagged as high potentials.

I recently saw a talent management question on LinkedIn – “Do you use a basic performance curve to force distribution of performance grades? If so what are the pros/cons?” This refers to the practice of asking managers to plot their team against a performance curve, so that they are only allowed to put 10% of names in the top category, and must put 10% of the names in the bottom category, to achieve a normal distribution of ratings. In some organisations, the bottom 10% are routinely managed out of the organisation.

When building a talent pipeline within your business, the question many organisations focus on is ‘How many promotions has this person got in them?’. Typically this involves asking managers whether they feel the person has the potential to make one or two upwards moves. The problem is, most of the managers you ask to make this distinction may not make good judgement calls on this question.