Sova was founded in 2015 by well-known innovator in the world of psychometric assessment, Dr Alan Bourne.
With a team comprising organisational psychologists, product developers and technical experts, they are a leading innovator in the assessment market, providing a future-focussed view of people and potential for recruitment and development at every career stage.
Getting the right talent in the business is, for some leaders, even more important than having the right business strategy. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, is famous for his candid, talent centric leadership style: “This whole game of business revolves around one thing, you build the best team, you win.” His strategy is built on the theory that successful talent management is critical to business performance and therefore success in a business’s chosen markets.
Ensuring that your talent management strategy aligns to your business strategy is, of course, key. However, the biggest issue facing anyone designing a talent management strategy for business success today is how much organisations are changing and have to change in order to succeed. This is particularly prevalent in the Middle East where the speed of change is exponential, driven by public sector as well as private, for example, the UAE government’s work in activating their strategy for Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The ‘gap’ between the pace of transformational change (from forces such as AI and digitalisation) and business capability means that leaders have work to do to ensure the people side of change is a success. They also have work to do to ensure those people, and therefore their organisations, are agile enough to deal with that transformational change.
To achieve organisational agility, we must put people at the heart of organisation design, aiming for structures where no one group is privileged and where power is distributed in egalitarian and evidence-based ways. This is achieved by optimising four key elements of organisational agility – leadership (leading and managing complex change), culture (building connection, clarity and visible commitment), business (structural, physical and operational flexibility) and career (agile talent and performance systems).
The most logical and natural place to start to introduce this agility into a workforce is when hiring staff, quickly followed by ensuring that staff are then assessed against the same values during performance management. Traditional approaches of hiring talent using biased recruitment techniques (such as unstructured interviews or tests which are difficult to understand) has changed. We are now seeing a desire from organisations to use the latest technology in recruitment, and 2020 should start to deliver tech solutions that are outcomes driven, compliant, joined-up and strategic. HRDs will be able to optimise process, deliver cost savings, increase diversity and improve speed to hire and quality of hire, and at the same time ensure legal compliance.
Increasingly, organisations are asking for customised digital assessment solutions that fit their needs – by measuring talent against their own requirements, this increases the quality of talent within a business and in turn, business success. It also improves the ability of an organisation to hire for agility and other key future skills that complement the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, for example, interpersonal and analytical skills, having a growth mindset, intuition and morality.
Five questions to ask if your talent assessment process is fit for the future
1. Are your assessments aligned with your business objectives?
Getting the right talent in place from the front line all the way through to leadership has a clear long-term impact on business success, and organisational agility is essential to enable organisations to prosper in today’s fast-paced, digital world.
The connection between the two is ensuring that a talent management strategy is put in place that links inseparably with an agile business strategy. You can do this by ensuring it is future-focussed, outcome-driven (aligned to business goals) and data rich, and once defined, begins at recruitment and follows the employee journey through to line management, productivity and retention. Modern assessments can be more precise and targeted through the use of assessment content that is designed specifically to measure those competencies or skill requirements specific to your organisation.
Through the use of tailored assessment content, it is now possible to reduce the time required to complete assessments, whilst at the same time increasing the scientific robustness of the assessment given that it is measuring those things specific to your organisation.
2. Is the way in which you attract talent into the business time efficient and cost effective?
Increasingly, organisations deploy an online filtering process of some sort to ensure a faster process. This could include realistic job previews which are extremely useful in helping to establish culture and values fit to your organisation; they can also help candidates to de-select themselves from the hiring process.
3. Are your assessments engaging and a positive reflection of your brand?
Even if candidates are unsuccessful in their applications, ensuring that they have a positive experience of the organisational brand is key. Technology means that it is now possible to make assessments, whether online or face to face, engaging in terms brand look and feel and the use of digital technology to enable a seamless and positive experience.
It is also vital that candidates receive appropriate and targeted feedback on their performance and to understand where they stand in the application process – automated candidate feedback reports and reports giving scores against organisational requirements can ensure feedback is appropriate and talent professionals can deliver it quickly and accurately.
4. Are you measuring the right things and are they aligned to your future needs?
Often, if organisations have decided to use assessments beyond the traditional unstructured interview, such as a personability or cognitive assessment, there is still a risk that it might not be measuring the right things. For industry 4.0, it is important to assess and measure the psychological attributes that are important to your organisation – this will differ depending on the role and organisational requirements, but it is vital to ensure that you are measuring the attributes to future proof your business.
5. Are you able to understand the data from your assessments and link it to job performance and organisational success?
Organisations have struggled to make the connections between how people are performing in jobs to how they were recruited. It’s important to understand an employee journey in the same way as you would a customer journey.
If you join up all the processes and capture the data in one platform from the whole recruitment journey, not only do you then have the ability to start automating it, but you are able to start applying the learning through human and AI to your talent management and planning as well.