How Competencies Can Help Support Your HR Practices

Today, we want to focus on how competencies add value across the employee lifecycle and why you should map competencies to your jobs.  

In our last post, we reviewed how software is reinventing competency profiling -- the process of selecting competencies at a specific level of proficiency required for successful performance in a job.

In this post, we'll look at the following points:

• 3 Ways Competencies Enhance HR Processes
• Why Map Competencies to A Job Description: A Practical Example
• The Value of Using Competencies in Your Organization

(Just getting started with competencies? Learn more by clicking this link to download our awesome Competency Toolkit today.)

3 Ways Competencies Enhance HR Processes 

1. Unify talent management processes 

Competencies describe the behaviors required by an employee to be successful in their job. These behaviors are defined in measurable terms so they can be used to assess performance across the employee lifecycle, laying a common foundation for all HR applications.      

2. Hire based on real job requirements 

Once the work is done to map competencies to a job, leverage tools to instantly roll these competencies into other HR processes, like interviewing. Structured, competency-based interviews are proven to improve hiring outcomes because they allow you to explore a candidate’s experience as it relates to current job requirements. 

3. Establish pathways to advancement 

Understanding how the requirements of different jobs relate to each other creates a system where employees can explore how their competencies match other jobs across the organization, identify competency gaps, and put in place concrete development plans to address those gaps.  

Why Map Competencies to A Job Description: A Practical Example 

Since most of our readers work in HR, we’re going to illustrate how this works within the HR context.  

Let’s suppose that we have an HR Manager, Cynthia, who has created a job description for a common HR role, a Recruitment and Selection Specialist, with some help from CompetencyCore.  

Rather than start from scratch, Cynthia has selected a draft job description with pre-mapped competencies from the bank of jobs and customized it to meet the needs of her organization. Once the job description is finalized and approved, she’s ready to roll this out across her HR processes.  

Example 1: 

As a first application, maybe Cynthia need to fill this role for her organization. How will having competencies help her in this task? 

Using her approved Job Description, she can now quickly generate a job post and start promoting the opening.  

Once she is ready to bring candidates in for an interview, Cynthia can quickly generate an interview guide with the questions related to specific job requirements.  

All candidates can be scored and evaluated against the same, standardized job requirements and identify the best fit candidate.   

Example 2: 

But what if there was already someone in that job? How do the competencies help in that scenario? 

Adam, who currently holds the position of Recruitment and Selection Specialist, is assigned the job and can review his complete Job Description and all the competencies associated with his job. How will he use this information? 

By looking at the behavioral indicators associated with one of the competencies for his job, let’s use the example of Recruitment and Selection, Level 4.

Adam knows that he is responsible for providing advice and services related to attracting, sourcing, evaluating, and interviewing talent to meet the organization’s HR needs, and applying that competency in complex situations. 

Already, Adam has a clear understanding of how he can demonstrate the competency. Cynthia can launch an assessment for Adam that checks if he displays the competency at the desired level.  

If Adam displays only a Level 3 understanding of the Recruitment and Selection competency, Cynthia can create a development plan that includes learning activities to address the gap.  

Adam can also use the competencies associated with his current position to explore other jobs where a similar level of ability is needed, such as a Customer Success Representative in Sales or a Training Manager in HR.  

He can look at adding those jobs as goals on his career path and can see what other competencies and knowledge areas he needs to work on to be successful.

The Value of Using Competencies in Your Organization 

Save tons of time and develop your employees today. All of these processes are within CompetencyCore, our software solution and each one of our features can add tremendous value to your current HR processes (see below).  

• Our AI-suggestions make it easier to map the competencies onto any job in question, which means that every job can be described using the same terminology that is included on the 540+ templates HRSG have available.  
• For hiring practices, HRSG has over 1,500 interview questions designed to assess candidates on their past behavior and use that to determine future performance in their role.  
• Competency Assessments and Development plans can be created for any employee with a structured and simplified process, that makes it easy to identify gaps and suggest remedies for those gaps. 
• Career Pathing provides a visual navigational experience for employees to chart their own course to professional growth within your organization.  It also can highlight roles employees may not have considered before and use that to shape their potential career pathing.  

Next Steps

Not sure how to use competencies for your job descriptions? Want to learn more about competencies? 

Fill out the form below to get your competency toolkit and learn more about how competencies can help you today.  

Want to learn more about using competencies? Get started with our Competency Toolkit:

Download your Competency Toolkit using the form below.

Post last updated: July 2, 2019.