How to identify High-Potential Employees?
By: Softray Solutions
Tags: Employees, Information Technology, Recruitment

However, in the large tech-savvy teams, such as Softray Solutions, constituted of young professionals with a relatively short retention span and the dynamism of the ever-changing workforce, the HR team should also turn to the agile mode and work on the go. This also refers to the strategies of finding, identifying, training, and rewarding their HiPos.

The optimal approach here is three rules in setting up the auspicious conditions that would promote the seasoning of those desirable traits and their unraveling into the future team leaders.

The first step should be a clear-cut and well-defined selection, profiling, and setting up of the expectations between the company and the candidate.

The second step would be recognition of their key talents, followed by the projection of their growth and the subsequent planning of the career path within the company while taking into account the candidates’ preferences, their cultural fitness, and their autonomy.

The third step would be the transactional model of knowledge/experience exchange between the employees of varying seniority. The theory behind this approach promotes the idea that the employees with the higher seniority when put in a mentor position vis-à-vis zealous junior colleague, can be positively challenged by the zeal of their younger colleague. The same goes in the case when we want to give an extra push to the already-progressive junior developer — where the leadership skills come to the light when challenged with the player known as the intern. This strategy of accelerating the emergence of the mentor archetype among the employees that indicate the possibility of a HiPo by putting them in a challenging position is a great method to identify the hidden traits.

Although, one must differentiate between the high potential and high-performance players — a confusion that sometimes results in a mismatch between what one can do and what one could do, so to speak. There is nothing worse than presuming that just because the employee does her job without a speck in her code, means she would manage a team of people doing the same. The cost is losing an invaluable employee in a position in which they perform well, to placing them in leadership and managerial roles for which they are far from qualified.

To circumvent these failures, it would be useful to mention Wittenberg who suggested four types of agility inherent to true HiPos:

People agility — getting on well with the professional diversity within the workforce;

— getting on well with the professional diversity within the workforce; Results agility — stepping aside and grasping a whole picture;

— stepping aside and grasping a whole picture; Learning and Mental agility — cerebral adaptability to organizational change;

— cerebral adaptability to organizational change; Change agility — being open to challenges.

These different agility types are good indicators of the employees’ engagement in their work and company environment, as well as their future trajectories.

By paying close attention to the people dynamics, posing a challenge, as well as investing and supporting your people, HiPos will come to you without employing those extensive “personality testing kits”, or losing people to one’s unsubstantiated HR intuition voice.

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