Benchmarking | Skillsarena

Overview

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking allows you to conduct a skill comparison among the employees within your company, identify trends and provide your recruitment team with a benchmark (average) skill level that future employees would need to meet.

Benchmarking is an exercise to ensure that when you recruit in the future, the assessments you choose and your expected ‘pass mark’ are realistically aligned to the skills of your employees who are already successful in the role.

In this way, benchmarking is a fantastic tool for improving your recruitment strategy and staying ahead of your industry competitors.

For example, we often hear our clients say that they would like people to have a content writing ability of X number of words per minute (WPM). On paper, this sounds great, but it may not be an actual representation of those who are already successful in the organisation. A way to improve this would be to identify the WPM count of the company's most successful employees and use that as the skill benchmark when recruiting the next employee.

By using the Skillsarena testing process to assess applicants, you can objectively measure and select new recruits based on their suitability and skills for the role.

Benchmarking

How to benchmark

You select a number of great performers to take the skills test and then take their average score as the benchmark for passing the test for future candidates.

Identify Your Metrics

Identify the skills you want to measure and recruit for in the future.

Select Your Targets

Select and engage the successful team members whose skill levels you want to clone. This will likely involve management analysing their peers' work to determine the top performers within the company.

Assess Employee Metrics

Measure and review the group's results against the expectations and needs of your company. By analysing trends in their performance, productivity, output and efficiency, your company is provided with insightful metrics about what skills and strengths make a high-quality, top-performing individual in a particular role.

Set the Benchmarks

After completing your metric analysis and conducting a comparison of your team's proficiency, use the average score from your top-performing team members as the benchmark for your future hires.

Crucial for Recruitment

Why should I benchmark?

How do you know what skills and skill levels you are looking for if you don’t have a comparison of these from your company's top performers? Benchmarking your current employees is the answer! You can ensure that the assessments you choose contain a pass mark and selection criteria that are beneficial to, and realistic for, the success of your future hires. Selecting the right candidates to interview is crucial to your recruitment process. By using the Skillsarena testing process to assess candidates, you can objectively measure and select new hires based on their suitability and skills, and keep your company performing well against industry competitors.

Optimise Your Company's Skillset

When hiring a new team member, you need to make sure that they can keep up with their colleagues. By tailoring your selection criteria and pre-employment assessments to the average skill and performance levels of your company's top-performing talent, benchmarking ensures that you maintain and enhance your organisation's skillset.

Enhance Your Recruitment Strategy

Having a benchmark in place that ensures best-practice skill levels in your future recruits is an easy and effective way to enhance your recruitment strategy - regardless of your industry or how small/large your business is. Not only does benchmarking make it that much easier to make management decisions about who to hire and who to cut from your talent pool, but it also ensures that there are no drastic skills gaps or performance gaps between your existing employees and new recruits.

Improve Your Company's Performance

When your team has the best skills, it leads to superior performance and drives improvements in your company's productivity and growth.

Improve Your Standing Against Industry Competitors

Having a skills benchmark in place when recruiting benefits your competitive edge for all the above reasons. Regardless of your industry, the business world is highly competitive, so it's absolutely essential for the growth and success of your organisation to stay ahead of the game. Using a skills benchmark allows you to become a key competitor in the market.

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