6 HR Trends That Will Amplify In 2017

2016 was interesting for HR and talent management. Lots of things moved in terms of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud.  Let me take some bets for 2017 (and I am supporting each of them with anecdotal data from the field.)

ROI On Psychometrics

This is a growing trend. Companies are adding manager feedback, performance rating and attrition to the mix to evaluate ROI on the usage of psychometrics. For e.g. one of the Life Insurance companies, which has been using Jombay Psychometrics for hiring, ran a study with their hiring managers (post 6-12 months of the joining) to check accuracy of the Jombay Assessment (they saw a 70% match between the Jombay Assessment scores and the Manager’s observation about the hired employees).

They even went one level up and checked retention in the same period – it went up by 9% for a 6 month period compared to the same period last year. I see a lot more companies doing such analyses in 2017.

DemocratiSation & Participant Experience As Top Success Metrics of ACDC

How do you cast a wider net for your top talent programme? And when this talent goes through your ACDC process – how do you avoid putting them off? This would be a large focus area for multiple companies. For e.g. A large beverages company conducted ACDC for their Sales HiPot program. Along with filtering candidates from a wider set of people for the next level, there was also a clear mandate to focus on the Participant Experience through gamification, tech-enabled tools and then, of course, the personal touch through Role Plays. This is true for several other mandates we received and the trend will amplify next year.

Customer-Centric Behavior as Lead Indicator of Customer Happiness

There is finally a realisation that just process and products are not going to guarantee customer happiness. It is ‘people’ who are going to deliver it. So, one needs to measure the inherent customer-centric behaviours of the employees and fix the gaps there.

For e.g. A large auto manufacturer ran Assessments for all the Service Managers across all their dealerships. Results? As the Jombay Assessment Score (on customer-centric behaviours) increased, the customer complaint rate for that dealership decreased! So, clearly people are realising that Customer centric behaviour is one of the lead indicators of Customer Happiness and a lot more work will happen here next year.

Perception Gap Analytics On 360-degree Exercises For Organisational Development

360-degree is now no longer restricted to the individuals. It is moving towards deriving organisational level insights to fix “perception gaps” and foster organisational development. For e.g. I was personally involved in debriefing the CEO of one of India’s largest BPOs and the whole focus of the discussion was which are the competencies that have the maximum perception gaps in different parts of the organisation and what could be quick fixes to bridge those gaps. This trend on 360 analytics to fix organisational issues beyond just the individual, as well as leadership issues will be on the rise.

Integrated Assessments vs. Segregated (‘Functional+Attitude+Aptitude’)

Companies would like to have an integrated measurement for hiring. This is again to reduce internal dependencies, enhance candidate experience and increase objectivity of the exercise. For e.g. one of the largest pharma companies in the country has already started measuring medical knowledge, sales aptitude and sales attitude in one go. And this should save the company interview bandwidth, human errors, and in the process provide a seamless experience to the candidate. I see many more following suit already.

Success Profiling Using Psychometrics To Improve Retention

This would have a lot of interesting use cases. Companies are profiling (using Psychometrics) their existing top talent, whom they have been able to successfully retain; we call it ‘Success Profile.’  This success profile is then used for hiring new talent. For e.g. A large broking house used this methodology and they have already seen an increase in retention by 10% compared to same time last year.

Talent retention will continue to be a big focus next year.

About The Author

[The author of this post is Mohit Gundecha, co-founder and CEO, Jombay– India’s fastest growing assessments and capability building platform.]

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