Your best employees can help define what to look for in your next hire.
Every organization has a few: the account manager clients ask for by name, the supervisor whose team rarely seems to turn over, the employee hired two years ago who now trains everyone else. This time of year, when many of us take stock of what went right, those people are usually near the top of the list. But there is another question worth considering over the holiday: if one of them left tomorrow, could you describe exactly what you would need in their replacement?
Many employers cannot, at least not with much precision. They reach for words like “hardworking,” “great with people,” or “just gets it.” Those descriptions may be sincere, but they are not especially useful when a stack of applications lands on your desk in January. Most candidates will describe themselves in similar terms, and a resume alone cannot tell you who will actually perform that way on the job.
Gratitude Is a Starting Point, Not a Hiring Plan
When a top performer succeeds, it is tempting to credit effort or attitude and leave it there. But strong performance in a specific role usually comes from a particular combination of abilities, traits, and work preferences. A successful collections specialist might pair strong numerical reasoning with a high tolerance for confrontation and a steady temperament. A strong project coordinator might combine fast information processing with a need for order and consistent follow-through.
Those combinations are rarely visible from the outside. Two employees can appear equally capable in an interview and perform very differently six months later because the qualities that matter most in the role were not the ones anyone thought to measure.
That is why the employees you value most are also one of your best sources of hiring data. They have already shown you what success looks like in your organization, in a particular role, and with your customers. The next step is to make that success measurable.
What Benchmarking Your Best People Looks Like
Benchmarking starts with a straightforward idea. You assess the employees who are excelling in a particular role, identify the qualities they have in common, and use that profile as a reference point when evaluating candidates for the same position.
The Achiever™ Assessment measures mental aptitude across seven dimensions and personality across ten factors. When several strong performers in the same role are assessed, useful patterns can begin to emerge. You may find, for example, that your most successful sales representatives consistently score high in social boldness but vary widely in verbal ability. That tells you something important about which qualities to prioritize and which ones you may be giving too much weight during interviews.
The built-in Distortion and Equivocation scales add another layer by helping evaluate the candor and reliability of the responses. That gives you greater confidence that the profile reflects how your employees actually think and work, rather than how they hoped to appear.
A Benchmark Is a Reference, Not a Mold
The goal is not to hire copies of the people you already have. Strong teams need a range of perspectives and working styles, and a benchmark based on a small group of employees should inform judgment rather than replace it.
The value is in clarity. Instead of hoping the next hire has “that something” your best employee seems to possess, you can identify which qualities are carrying the most weight in the role. That allows you to ask better interview questions, compare candidates more fairly, and recognize a strong fit even when someone does not resemble your usual hire on paper.
A clear success profile can also help the people already on your team. It gives managers a more concrete way to coach employees who are close but not quite there, identify areas for development, and recognize who may be ready for greater responsibility.
Put Your Gratitude to Work
Thanking your best people matters, but learning from them makes that appreciation useful. Before hiring picks up again in the new year, identify the employees whose performance you would most like to understand and begin building a benchmark around their roles. Assessing one or two employees can provide a useful starting point, while comparing several strong performers over time creates a more dependable reference.
CRI has been helping employers measure the factors that drive performance since 1957. To see what The Achiever™ reveals about one of your top performers, start with a free assessment at criw.com/the-achiever.