An organization evaluates an employee from the myopic confines of a role. There is no attempt to capture the complete competence map of an individual. The assessment sheet, for recording interviewer comments, rarely provides any guidelines for the interviewer and the assistance of HR professionals who are trained at competency elicitation techniques. The assessment sheets vary across organizations and there is no standardization of interviews and the grading process.
A candidate who does not get selected for a role in one organization may end up being mapped to a higher role in another organization. In fact, a competence map must exist for every single candidate interviewed by a company. A candidate interviewed for a role may have been fit for another role. This would speed up the hiring timelines and reduce the cost, as and when an opportunity arises.
The complete competence map of an employee and/or potential hires would
have been helpful in career and succession planning. For example: An individual who is a part of the L&D team might have the background and aptitude for people management. When a need arises, the competence map of an employee will provide a basis for evaluating the internal fitment for the role, thereby providing career progression opportunities, saving hiring costs and time besides improving employee morale and engagement.
Figure 1 – Understanding the concept of Competency Flow
The HCM function must have dashboards that depict the competence flow (Refer figure 1) within an organization. The table 1 indicates an example of a simple
‘competence flow’ tracker, for an organization, categorized
function wise. In the example I have taken a parameter, labelled Competency
Quotient (CQ), to track the flow.
An increase of CQ above the design value should trigger the career progression evaluation while a fall below a threshold should kick in the performance evaluation of employees and/or the talent acquisition process.
The tracker can be customized to aid strategic management and can be used as a yardstick for the HCM function. For example, one could add the manpower
cost to table 1. Significant increase above a threshold could trigger internal
movement across the organization, based on requirements and alignment of
competence map.
Table 1 – Tracking Competency Flows in an Organization
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