A practical insight.

• After a process of reorganisation and repositioning on the market, our customer – an internationally active IT company – wanted to conduct a management audit of the 1st and 2nd reporting levels below the management board. The goal was to use the results to identify any requirements, amongst those managers included in the process, for development and support due to the repositioning of the company.
• It was important for our customer in this process that the design and implementation of the measure differed to the greatest possible degree from standard approaches.

• As the group of participants was made up of experienced managers from a diverse range of European and North African countries, we used an approach that took appropriate recognition and account of the previous experience, age and (life) achievements of the management personnel. In our experience, seasoned managers are not scared of audits as long as they are completed on an equal footing and reflect the reality of their professional situation.
• In our business reviews – full-day individual audits – the participants presented their areas of responsibility in the form of an overview of their (business) performance over recent years, their strategies, their management philosophy and their convictions about the management process. These factors were then discussed in an intensive disputation throughout the entire day.
• A biographical interview and a questionnaire developed by us (Leadership Behaviour Inventory) rounded off the diagnostic process.
• At the end of every business review, we shared our observations and notes with the participants in an in-depth closing session. This enabled us, on the one hand, to ensure the transparency of information and, on the other hand, to verify the substantive results together with the participating managers.

• As a result of the approach we developed, we were able to provide our client with a well-founded and comprehensive evaluation of the issues important to them, namely strategic competency, decision-making skills, ability to take action and entrepreneurial conviction. More personality-based dimensions were included as secondary observations.
• In the comprehensive documentation, it was possible to provide a good reproduction of the results of the audit and thus illustrate a solid and transparent basis for the measures derived from them. All of the participating managers attested to the fact that this process delivered a high degree of reality, fairness and transparency, which was reflected in the highest possible acceptance of the results.

• Our customer, a large internationally active company, was experiencing bottlenecks when filling management functions in the area of production, so-called “managers controlling operations”. The focus of the assignment that resulted from this situation was the development of a “talent programme” for employees in the area of production which was designed to identify and promote employees with particularly high potential. The goal of the programme was to safeguard the realisation of the quantitative and qualitative HR plans for filling positions classified as “managers controlling operations”.

A comprehensive approach for analysing potential was developed – taking into account appraisals of performance and assessments of an employee's potential delivered by their immediate superior. The results were to be supported by an online self-assessment completed by the participants. We proceeded as follows:

• Development of the content for the self-assessment
  This involved conducting interviews with superiors and those performing other functions to develop realistic short case studies with modal answers, which were oriented towards the criteria in the underlying competency model provided by the customer (Part I); Part II of the self-assessment consisted of a psychometrically evaluated tool for self-evaluation based on the competency model
• Project management
  Provision of the technical platform and realisation of the self-assessment for more than 1000 individually coded logins and help desk support for the participants
• Generation of individual evaluation reports
• Evaluation
  Checking the design of the self-assessment, the mode of implementation and the acceptance of the substantive results via a subsequent survey of the participants

In the reports prepared about the results of the self-assessment, which received a high level of acceptance from both the participants themselves and their superiors, we were able to deliver important additional information for identifying potential to the decision-makers. The participants attested in their evaluation that they had received important impetus for their own personal development from the results – and this was irrespective of whether they had been accepted into the “talent programme” or not.

One of our customers, a leading Europe-wide group of companies in the logistics sector, was the first mover in a new market in a highly innovative product environment. Our task was to support the business unit in its recruitment and selection of employees as it was changing from a project-based organisation to a linear organisation.

The specific task was to newly fill around 200 non-tariff positions within a time period of 2 years. The targeted profiles could at their core be split into two clusters; on the one hand, one from the area of product management and customer services and, on the other hand, one from the area of project management and IT (development and operations/service management) – profiles that can be assumed to fit more to an applicant's market rather than an employer's market.

On the basis of the described challenge, we proposed a concept to our customer that placed the emphasis both on the personnel marketing aspect and on the communication with candidates on an equal footing during the selection process.

The following individual aspects made up the overall concept:

The on-going feedback from the management personnel responsible for the new employees demonstrates that the outlined concept represented a robust process for making valid statements in the recruitment process.

In addition, the evaluation of the process carried out over a number of months by completing a survey of the applicants – both the applicants with a job offer and also those applicants without a job offer – led to convincing results:

• 76% of those surveyed indicated that the process they experienced was in their view better than the one had experienced at other companies
• 74% of those surveyed stated retrospectively that their image of the recruiting company had been positively changed by the recruitment process
• 97% stated that they would recommend applying to the recruiting company to their own circle of acquaintances

These results demonstrate that even when dealing with an applicant's market it is possible to establish a high-quality, sophisticated selection process from the perspective of the employer: namely when the perspective of the applicant has been sufficiently embedded into all internal processes and selection tools.