What if I said I had a crystal ball to measure the impact someone could and would make on your business?
By now everyone knows hiring the wrong person—or the right person at the wrong time—is costly. According to recent statistics reported by the US Department of Labor, the estimated cost of a failed executive hire could be more than 240,000 USD. Around the globe, the cost of a bad or poorly timed hire is estimated to be at least 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings.
This cost sounds massive enough when it’s attached to one hire, but what happens when you’re in a position where you need to fill several possible roles? The Uptime Institute forecasts that sector staffing requirements will grow from 2019 levels of 2 million to nearly 2.3 million people in 2025. Add the pending ‘great’ retirement numbers, which predict up to a third of our sector’s leadership exchanging their business attire for swimsuits and sunscreen, and the shortfall could potentially double.
So where do we find all these extra people? They certainly aren’t lost nor are they hiding within our sector. Instead, they reside in close parallel sectors and potentially well beyond those boundaries. Finding them pressures the search process of any executive hiring and creates additional challenges for all of us at Portman Partners. For instance, how should we assess transferable skills, the individual’s suitability, the impact they could make, and the diversity of their experience and thinking? Just as necessary to us and the businesses for which we are identifying candidates are retention and business growth. What are companies in the sector doing to retain the people they have?
The crystal ball solution to those problems is actually here and it’s the GC Index¨. The game-changing (GC) index is a language and framework that aligns the impact and contribution of all of an organization’s people to business processes and outcomes. As a partner of the GC Index¨, Portman Partners is now proudly powered by this digital organimetric, which measures and describes the five different ways in which people are inclined to make an impact. The GCI is a uique global business language that immediately affects 20 business areas, including strategy, organisation and culture, talent acquisition, management and development, change and transformation, DEI, well-being and much more. The GCI supplements or can even supplant conventional go-to criteria like those on a traditional CV (such as expertise and experience), and it is far more revealing than any personality test. As an aside, I’ve never seen a business decision made based on personality! While valuable, those diagnostic tools cannot measure what the GCI measuresÐhow individuals and teams impact and contribute to a business cycle. How transferable their skills and expertise are is important, but assessing what impact those individuals will have is priceless.
