HR Benchmarking

The Next Step to a Great Hire

HR Benchmarking is taking the hiring process to the next level. To avoid mistakes in the hiring process, HR departments are using a job benchmark process to find the qualities of a good hire for their company. This tools helps them hire the right candidates and minimize bad hires.

What is HR Benchmarking?

To explain benchmarking it think it is best to borrow from my engineering background with a simple example from the computer industry. Suppose you have a PC doing a great job for you and now you need to double your capacity and get another one to double your capacity.

The problem is your computer is not made anymore. So how do you figure out what to buy? Well suppose you can look at the specifications and narrow it down to 2 PC's both have similar processors and components and prices. But your really need to know how they will each perform and you don't want to just rely on what the packaging says. (Analogy Alert - Kind of like finding 2 candidates with great resumes??) So how should you decide which is the best one to buy? In engineering, we used benchmarking.

Requirements - Job Description

Engineers would decide on the most important aspects of performance. For instance, if the computer was simply to play video games, it would need to run really fast to keep up with the action. If the computer were for editing video, it would need to be fairly fast but it would have to have lots of storage that it could access quickly. In this case you have a PC that is doing a great job for you so you have the perfect example of the performance you need. (Analogy Alert - Sort of like a current employee doing a great job at your company??)

Test Program - Personality Test

With these requirements in mind (Analogy Alert - Kind of like a job description??) they would write a program to run on both computers. The result of the program would be a series of measurements of the performance for each computer. (Analogy Alert - Sort of like a personality test?... see where we are going here...)

Informed Decision

By comparing the performance aspects of each computer for each of the key requirements, the engineer could make an informed decision about which computer to purchase.

By using the process of HR benchmarking you can determine the hidden aspects of a great employee using in house examples of excellent performance. Once you have the job benchmark, you can employ personality tests along with interviews, resume screening and reference checks to find yourself that diamond your company wants to hire.

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