Case Study – Competency Based Interviewing skills of Hiring Managers and Recruiters
Training recruiters and hiring managers on Competency Based Interviewing
Situation
The organization is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services.
In India they are based out of four major cities from which business processes and IT processes are delivered to the US organization.
Over the last five years the client has grown in size and complexity – hiring a large number of employees to meet its business needs.
The Complexity
The organization was facing an issue where recruiters and hiring managers were not in the same page and the quality of hiring was quite patchy.
The organization realized that it needed to standardize the process as well as get the recruiters and hiring managers to do better quality of interviewing.
The Engagement
The organization chose to partner with Vyaktitva to help them think through the solution. Vyaktitva consultants as part of the ADDIE model – conducted Analysis, interviewing hiring managers, recruiters, business leaders and HR leaders to find the true learning and performance gap.
After conducting the Analysis, Vyaktitva came to the conclusion that the hiring managers and recruiters needed to be on the same page as far as the process of staffing was concerned, and also to clarify their specific roles in the process and which areas they would interview candidates on.
Vyaktitva designed and developed the intervention. The focus was making people skilled in using Competency Based Interviewing and also to clarify issues around the process and give feedback to the organization on the process.
The Intervention
It involved the people going through a learning and doing program, clearing a test, and then conducting a real life interview using the concepts learned in the intervention, using real world feedback. They also brainstormed on how the organization could improve the process.
Impact
Recruiters and Hiring Managers shared that the process was helpful in interviewing people for high impact roles.
Eventually around 75 people who cleared the program were awarded certificates in being able to use Competency Based Interviewing.
The organization also listened to the feedback and inculcated the feedback of the employees from the training program as a process improvement in the Staffing process.
Case Study – Developing the Training group’s capability
“Leapfrogging the Organization Training Capability”
The Situation
The organization is a diversified global financial services company that is headquartered in New York.
The company is best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses and is one of the top 30 Most Admired Companies in the World.
The organization is based out of four major cities in India, where back office operations are taken care of. The client had recently grown significantly in both grown in size and complexity. A large number of new hires had come into the system and many people had moved into higher roles to manage the ramp up.
The complexity
The steep ramp up meant that more people had to be trained for doing the operations and many others were required to be trained on doing their new roles. All this had to be done consistently over a period of time with great efficiency and effectiveness. To do this the internal training team needed to do training on both process and other behavioral skills.
Most of the trainers in the training team were internal hires. They had good communication/ presentation skills and keen on becoming trainers, but were not from the training/ HR domain nor trained on the science and art of training and development. The organization wanted to ensure that the investment being made on training and developing these employees were giving the desired results in the best possible manner.
One of the biggest pivots for this was to ensure that the trainers were adequately skilled to deliver the training in an effective manner to ensure learning among the participants. The other was to re look at the design of some of the key programs and make them more efficient in terms of ensuring learning and the program duration.
The solution
The organization invited Vyaktitva to partner with them to help meet these objectives. Vyaktitva used the ADDIE* model for the intervention and begun by conducting a detailed Analysis – talking to hiring managers, participants, training team, business and HR leaders to excavate the true learning and performance gap and opportunities. Based on the Analysis, Vyaktitva recommended and designed a ‘Learn + Do’ intervention.
It involved the trainers to attend the customized intensive ‘Big Ticket’ program of Vyaktitva on Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. This program was spread across 5 weeks and conducted 1 day a week. Teams of trainers were created and each team was given one of the key programs to re-design. Each session focused on an aspect of Instructional Design which the trainers learned about during the session and during the week used on their real life project/program. This was presented and discussed in the next session and feedback was given by the instructor and the other participants. The instructor was also available to each team during the week for more focused coaching on the project.
The final presentations/mock sessions were made to an internal Learning and Development team who along with the instructor evaluated the participants on the detailed competency indicators of Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. Participants who qualified were certified and felicitated at an organization ceremony.
The Organizational Impact
1) Better Designs = more learning + less training duration: The intervention ensured that all the key programs were revamped to become better instructionally designed and thus ensuring better learning. Better designs also enabled the organization to cut down the duration of some of the programs leading to huge savings.
2) Better Delivery of Training = more learning + less attrition during training : The organizational competence on training delivery leapfrogged with all the trainers getting certified leading to more impactful training, better management of participants’ learning needs.
3) Common framework of training design = better future interventions: A shared understanding of the principles of people development, common framework, templates and vocabulary was established in the organizations which help ensure that all future interventions were of a certain standard and quality. This would ensure the sustainability and long term impact.
*Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation & Evaluation
The McKinsey quarterly has an interesting article which says that frontline managers should shift their focus from adminstrative tasks to coaching their employees.
As the article says:
Found in almost any company, such managers are particularly important in industries with distributed networks of sites and employees. These industries—for instance, infrastructure, travel and logistics, manufacturing, health care, and retailing (including food service and retail banking)—make up more than half of the global economy.
Vyaktitva has done path breaking work in this area using an intervention that focuses on building a front line manager’s ability to understand the aspirations of his/her team member and to develop the ability to coach them.
Here’s a case study on how Vyaktitva did this for a client in business process outsourcing industry.
Developing the First Line Leader – A Force Multiplier
The Situation
A BPO client of Vyaktitva was a pioneer in the industry. The BPO industry was young and dynamic. It grew at a rapid rate in its initial years; this resulted in a lot of learning, standardization of systems but also brought with it a set of challenges.
The complexity
Rapid growth and attrition had resulted in a lot of young associates / agents getting promoted to the team leader role very quickly. Their teams typically consisted of 12-15 associates in the age group of 20-27 yrs; at times some of the team leaders had team members who were more experienced and older than them. The client was facing a lot of attrition within these teams which was also impacting business. Vyaktitva was invited to come in and design an intervention that addressed attrition.
The Engagement
As a part of the ADDIE process Vyaktitva met a cross section of stakeholders to identify the real cause of attrition.
The analysis clearly indicated that the team leaders were young and did not possess either the experience or the skills to handle the people related issues of their teams. Detailed analysis around some key indicators further revealed that the team leader was specifically unable to understand the aspirations of his team members.
The team members expected their team leader to understand their aspirations and help them achieve their potential. This was a key skill required in team leaders that was leading to attrition.
Vyaktitva realized that building skills that helped team leaders identify team member aspirations and address them needed to be a process; looking at it as a one off training program would not give the desired results. Vyaktitva designed an intervention that built these skills as a process.
The Intervention
The intervention started with pre-work that the participants were required to complete over 2 weeks. The team leaders had to follow a pre-defined process and work along with their team members to complete this pre-work. The pre-work formed a part of the workshop; during the 3 days of the workshop participants applied learnings from each session through a customised tool called the “Real World Connect Document”
Each participant could therefore apply learning on the floor.
The workshop also required participants to take targets on controlling attrition. They were required to share the “Real World Connect Document” with their supervisors; the attrition control targets and action plans were discussed before being signed off by the team leader and supervisor.
The post training process also had two check points that assessed progress against interim milestones. The first check point was assessed after fifteen days and the second after forty five days. Team leaders were certified only if they had managed to achieve their attrition control targets.
Impact
The teams and processes that went through the intervention showed dramatic drop in attrition.
The ability to understand team member aspirations and address them actually helped the organization manage attrition.
Big Ticket program on Instructional Design
The next Big Ticket Instructional Design program is in October 2009.
Check the details and nominate people 
Adaptive Leadership
Came across this interesting article by Agatha Gilmore in the Talent Management magazine
“It’s our view that the single most important capacity in people, particularly in the times in which we are living, is the capacity to adapt to new realities,” said Marty Linsky, co-founder and principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates and co-author of the new book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
Those leaders who will be successful will exhibit the following characteristics and behaviors, according to Linsky:
1. A blend of optimism and realism
2. Empathy
3. An experimental mindset
4. Trade autonomy for interdependence.
Read the whole article here.
