Do you need to hire rockstars?
Did you know that an important predictor of performance is organisation citizenship behaviour. Organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is a term that researchers use to define any '‘going overboard’ that employees do. Employees high on OCBs tend to go the extra mile to support work at their organisation and to help their coworkers even when they receive no explicit rewards for such behaviours. These employees are also likely to be more loyal and compliant, are advocates of their organisation even outside work and are more likely to focus on self-development (Podaskoff et al. 2000).
Interestingly work passion, measured by how invested someone is in their work, has a positive impact on OCB, but only to a certain point after which increasing work passion tends to negatively impact OCB (Astakhova 2015). Therefore, while it is extremely important to hire people who identify strongly with their work, it is equally important to hire people who help sustain the values that help you succeed!
If your hiring process is optimised to only look for highly competent people, you need to sit with your recruitment partners to fix this, ASAP! You need a different candidate pool - one that is full not just of people who are passionate, competent but also people who are extremely likely to exhibit OCBs - positive behaviours like altruism and conscientiousness and values unique to the citizenship culture in your organisation.
Yes, you need to hire nicer people who are competent and can be trained quickly!
Your People & Culture team should be able to work with your recruitment partners to identify the right assessments, tools that can be employed to build and sustain high levels of performance and morale! More importantly, your People and Culture experts should be able to track the quality of your hires.
Your People Processes should be able to help you track how your hiring practices are impacting the quality of work getting done at your organisation. Additionally, you should be able to establish data pipelines that provide credible feedback to your recruitment partners to constantly improve their processes and practices and in-turn your candidate pool!
Effective skill and talent assessment practices can help your people and culture teams establish these data pipelines. In place of long, tiresome competency, performance assessment forms, you need to introduce smart, slick and peppy tools that gather and track data on candidate, employee values and preference and employee performance and behaviours thoroughly and continuously.
Once all this is accomplished, you will be able to use data streams and dashboards that help you visualise the rich landscape of talent in your organisations and ensure that you are not just hiring rockstars but groups of musicians creating magic together!
