Neil Morelli, Ph.D., Chief I-O Psychologist, Codility.
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Your team needs to solve problems, out-innovate the competition, serve customers and build things. But, imagine for a moment that I just gave you a blank check for any resources you needed to solve those problems and build those things. What resource would you need the most?
I argue that the resource you need most is talent. I know this because many leaders say something like, “Our people are our greatest asset” or “We're nothing without our team.” They're right to think this. A 2021 survey found that 68% of nearly 2,000 U.S.-based human resources professionals said finding and recruiting talent with the right skills was their most important priority for 2022.
But what is “talent”? It’s the collective capability of your people to accomplish your company's goals. It is your company's most important resource—but it is hard to measure, which makes this resource uniquely hard to manage. Organizational scientists call this measurement problem the “intangibility” of talent.
According to industrial-organization (I-O) psychologists Robert E. Ployhart, Jeff A. Weekley and Julian Dalzell in their book, Talent Without Borders: Global Talent Acquisition for Competitive Advantage, talent, unlike financial and other tangible resources, is “intangible” because there is no direct or universally accepted measuring stick for what's needed to achieve goals and execute strategy.
Consider a front-end developer. Many engineers might agree that front-end developers need to know how to design or implement user interfaces, understand or apply responsive design principles and develop software across browsers. But even those skills aren't the things that make a front-end developer an asset to their organization.
Don't believe me? Consider these questions: What would have defined front-end development talent one, five or 10 years ago? How much of a front-end developer's talent depends on the unique tech stack and development history of the application they’re working on? Which soft skills such as teamwork and communication factor into an agreed-upon “standard” for front-end talent?
As you can see, universal definitions of talent in this one job family change with time, location, culture and technology. But what if you could measure talent, making it tangible for your team? Would it make managing your team easier? Would you have more certainty around finding and recruiting the right talent for your team? Would it give you a competitive advantage over your competitors?
If you said yes to any of these questions, here are three ways you can make your company's talent tangible:
Have a shared definition of 'good' talent.
For many teams, measuring talent only says “We want the best we can get.” But what does the “best,” or “good,” really mean?
Start a dialogue with the hiring managers in your department or team about what knowledge, skills, abilities, characteristics and values define a “good” candidate or team member. List the behaviors that make talent observable in your business. These are effective ways to create a shared frame of reference for your team's incoming and current talent. Creating shared frames of reference can be as simple as revisiting your job descriptions for the roles on your team, updating them as necessary and getting buy-in if there are multiple decision-makers involved.
Defining talent, at least qualitatively, is something HR or your people team can help with. In larger organizations, there are usually HR, recruiting and performance management systems that act as the systems of record for this definition. If you've never reviewed what's there or would like to have more say in how talent is defined, now is the time to work with these other stakeholders to have a voice in describing the talent you need.
Quantify talent.
To move beyond qualitative, intuition-based definitions, you'll need to quantify your talent's abilities. Systemically measuring the hard or soft skills that lead to valuable outcomes is a great way to measure talent. Technical skills assessments can help quantify candidates' capabilities in technical problem-solving and other job-specific skills.
Quantifying talent this way can help you make evidence-based comparisons, benchmark talent over time and address skill gaps among new hires or your current team.
The beauty of making talent tangible through validated, job-related measurement is that by applying the same standard across candidate or employee cohorts and points in time, defining talent individually or collectively becomes repeatable.
Update your shared definition and measurements regularly.
On this, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the definitions and measurements that make talent tangible might not have a long shelf life. But the good news is that you can learn how to make talent tangible and integrate it into your HR processes, making updating talent definitions easier over time.
Updating these definitions gets faster as you learn the methods and have clearer reference points. HR, consultants and I-O psychology can help you learn the basics if needed.
Making your talent more tangible could make your life easier as a talent acquisition professional or hiring manager. It could also increase your most crucial resource's impact on your bottom line.
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