We can’t clone your top people, but we can come close. Benchmarking will enable you to effectively ‘clone’ your best people by identifying the behavioural qualities and capabilities of those who perform well in a particular job using both PPA and TST Once you know what makes your best people just that, you can recruit more of them. Poor recruitment decisions have huge cost implications for a business, in terms of both money and other less tangible factors such as morale and motivation.

A benchmark is effectively a continuous improvement process that uses a systematic standard to raise and maintain high performance standards, against which new employees can be assessed and selected.

Benchmarking can be used to:

• Help your managers identify and select your top performers
• Assess what makes your top performers the best and why others struggle
• Reduce costly recruitment errors
• Reduce staff turnover
• Achieve sales objectives
• Encourage higher standards
• Develop a better understanding between team workers

The product has several key benefits:

Eliminates interview bias – Managers are likely to recruit people with a similar profile to themselves which can lead to interview bias. This item alerts an organisation if there is any evidence indicating possible bias of this kind.

• Coaching and managing summary – This summary is designed to be given to all those who manage or lead any person included in the benchmark. It helps the managers and leaders to understand why each person in their team behaves the way they do and coaches them to respond accordingly. This insight will lead to a deeper understanding of others that can then be used to hone a manager’s communication skills and maximise the performance of the team. The summary is set out in bullet point format and looks at what motivates the top performers, what they expect and want, and the type of manager for who they work best.
• Family Profiles – In the section headed Statistical and Detailed Analysis you are provided with all of the family profiles, ranked in order of best performance using the following criteria:
  Most top performers
  Most fully acceptable performers
  Least to most poor performers

In addition, the percentage of poor performers is identified.

• Goodness of Fit - Once the profiles of top, acceptable and poor perfomers have been identified and a Benchmark established, Thomas Goodness of Fit may be applied to determine the probability of success of new employees into the role.

How Does a Benchmark Work?

A benchmark can be used to assess a sample group people doing a similar job. The process involves PPA and TST assessments of each person within the sample. The results are compared to actual performance.

As part of this process the company needs to assess its organisational performance. It is up to the individual company to decide how it should do this but it should use areas with measured performance levels. These could include:

• Ability to achieve budget and plans
• Ability to achieve sales budgets
• Ability to provide customer service, care and advice
• Communication skills
• Leadership skills

The performance of each person in the sample is then ranked, based on the company’s agreed parameters for organisational performance. Typically 25 per cent of the sample should be from top performers , 50 per cent from fully acceptable performers and 25 per cent from poor performers.