How To Measure Potential In Employees

When making hiring decisions, are you considering your candidates’ potential for future progression?

It’s an easy part of the hiring process to gloss over. After all, it’s not an immediate concern, right? But actually, hiring candidates who don’t have the right future potential your company needs can really impact their future success and, by extension, the future success of their department and the business as a whole.

Let us introduce to you the Peter Principle that demonstrates exactly this:

Dr Laurence Peter’s profound observation was that “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.

His logic is very sound. You hire a software developer because of their fantastic Javascript skills. You promote them to team leader because they do great work, not because they are a great people leader. They lean heavily on their technical skills to ensure the team delivers and so you promote them to department head, and now they are totally out of their depth!

So, what’s the solution to this? How do you promote people based on potential for the future role, not just past performance? How do you measure potential?

Assess your candidates with a PeopleFactors Leadership Assessment – get our free trial here. It’s what we do best.