“This was a very comprehensive course with an excellent consolidation, explanation and emphasis on basically every skill necessary to create high performance teams at all levels, both as a leader and team member. This is quite honestly one of the most useful, interesting, and practical training classes I have attended during my 22 years with NASA. I wish this training were available to every employee, because of the importance of the skills taught and the strong emphasis on enabling successful teams.”
– Training participant, NASA
It’s a fundamental truth in business: every organization wants to hire and retain high performing employees. However, achieving this goal is much easier said than done, with larger companies that are well-resourced often winning top talent through their own, internal talent management teams dedicated to acquisition, management, and employee experience. Smaller organizations lacking the same human capital resources often struggle to adequately seek and manage talent, particularly if their processes are cumbersome and outdated.
No matter organization size, finding the right fit talent match and optimizing their performance and experience as employees is crucial as, according to the Harvard Business Review, 80% of turnover can be attributed to a bad hire. Such turnover can cost an organization up to five times the new hire’s first year total cost.
Great hires leave too — often due to company culture issues that first show up during the hiring process such as poor communication, application hurdles, “lack of transparency” and other problems that are “likely an unfortunate reflection of how you’ll be treated once you join,” warns Recruiter Dawn Graham in Forbes. “No matter what the website highlights as their company values, if you’re not seeing these enacted during their first impression… it’s a good sign of what’s ahead.”
Fortunately, organizations can prevent some of this turnover and employee experience pain by utilizing a range of talent assessment and training tools, diagnosing and correcting culture issues and instituting smart and scalable practices that do not require dedicated talent management teams.
Read our article How to Determine Actual Culture vs. Aspirational Culture
HigherEchelon partners with organizations to solve the full range of talent management challenges from navigating complex technology implementations to diagnosing culture problems to training leaders and teams throughout the recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and long-term employee experience stages. We bring together expertise in Human Capital, Change Management, and Salesforce Implementations to reengineer business processes and train teams in high performance skills that lead to drastic savings in time, money, and talent management headaches while producing a much better experience for team members.
Our team of Ph.D. level staff has worked with a range of small, medium, and large organizations to optimize talent management processes, including a massive effort to help the U.S. Army transition their recruiting system from outdated, paper-based processes to a streamlined, efficient, effective system. We apply our technical Salesforce expertise along with our change management and resilience and adaptability training to measurably improve business outcomes, as well as employee experience and wellbeing.
Read our white paper – Talent Management – A Fresh Look at Recruitment.
“Previously our organization was fragmented utilizing different solutions for each of our [divisions]. …Normally the process would take several days and sometimes weeks to gather all relevant information… and then process that file via our internal processes. …HigherEchelon…provided us with amazing service. They were there every step of the way and guided us through the process of planning, developing, implementing, testing and maintenance for our new cloudbased database built by them. They were quick and with our new system, we are saving 100s of work hours a month.”
– SSG Cotton, California Guard Military Department Residential Academies
Our clients often need better tools to manage the talent management process from start to finish. This includes all steps from formalizing and approving the requirements of a role to flexibly sourcing and tracking qualified candidates, and coordinating across multiple resources before, during, and after the interview process. Clients often need better ways to manage multiple handoffs within and across divisions, along with the numerous and potentially redundant forms within multiple systems required as applicants move through each stage. They need to improve confusing and frustrating workflows involving hiring managers, human resources officers, interview panel members, the candidate, and others throughout an organization.
We specialize in addressing these challenges and more through evidence-based human capital approaches combined with digital tools expertise so you get the most out of your workforce and ensure your employees feel valued.
Does your company appear attractive to prospective candidates? We help you understand your marketing pipelines, analyze staffing needs, develop job descriptions and competencies required, design targeting strategies, implement applicant tracking and screening processes, and track source yield ratios to inform you where your dollars are best spent.
High performance often happens when individuals are already strong in (or trainable in) a set of certain skills that may not show up on a resume. Assessing candidates for their capacity to be trained as high performers is a better strategy than focusing on employment history and ‘fit’ with the organization alone. We tend to over-evaluate skillset and under-evaluate mindset and “heartset”. The latter includes emotional intelligence (EQ), ability to relate to coworkers, and empathy — crucial traits for high performance that we may not think to ask about in an interview.
HigherEchelon will work with you to develop standardized and quantifiable interview protocols for each job that enable a clean rank ordering of candidates that suit the job, the organization, and help you assess for high performance pre-hire. In addition, we take the traditional selection process one step further and offer onboarding methods to ensure candidates have the proper tools, resources, and support needed to succeed and hit the ground running.
Millions of Americans quit their jobs every month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLT survey. It may surprise many employers to know a whopping 94% of workers said they would stay with a company longer if their employer invested in their learning and development, according to a LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report. Does what you offer (salary, autonomy, purpose, mastery, flexibility, training and development, etc.) match the reality of what your employees need?
We will work directly with your organization to design retention and development strategies that produce achievable improvements in your overall employee experience. We will also help you develop clear cut performance management processes focused on defining performance expectations, measuring performance, and communicating performance to employees.
Read our white paper – Modernizing the Employee Experience: Driving Organizational Performance Through Digital Transformation
Don’t wait any longer to get your talent management processes up-to-speed and optimized for growth. You can rest easy knowing HigherEchelon will guide you through a step-by-step plan that eliminates guesswork. Call us at 866-488-9228 or fill out this form to get started.