RECRUITING FOR PERFORMANCE: COMPETENCY–BASED RECRUITMENT

Recruitment refers to an organizational process of identifying and engaging talent for specific roles that arise in the organization. It is a Human Resources Management function which involves attracting, shortlisting, selecting and engaging suitable candidates that best meet the set criteria. As an organizational process, recruitment in itself is ideally driven by strategic imperatives – the organization would have realized that for it to be able to successfully execute its strategy, it requires certain critical tasks to be performed. These tasks are then consolidated together in the form of a job and a job description which then informs the caliber of people required to perform that job. The underlying principle of the recruitment process is therefore performance – the ability to identify talent that positively impacts on the organization by contributing towards the successful execution of the organization’s strategy. How then do recruiting officers determine those individuals that bring the most value to the organization through performance?

In Zimbabwe, recruitment processes have traditionally been heavily influenced by academic qualifications, whereas the possession of certain qualifications has for a long time been deemed to be an essential predictor of good performance in the job. This was influenced by the post-independence Government policies on promoting formal education across the economy. It was therefore imperative for one to possess certain academic qualifications in order to be considered for formal employment. A lot of companies in post-independence employed people purely on the basis of possession of academic qualifications irrespective of what one knows or is able to do. The country has also witnessed a proliferation of professional bodies that certify possession of professional knowledge in different fields of study. However, over time, flaws in this strategy were observed whereas people where “qualified” to do the job but the required performance was not forthcoming. Even up to this day, there are many organizations in Zimbabwe that are still caught up in this historical conundrum where employees are highly qualified, but this in not reflected in their performance or impact in the organization – yet the intrinsic objective of recruitment is to improve organizational performance.

This realization that educational qualifications on their own are not a good predictor of performance in the job gave rise to a new “recruitment craze” – skills. A skill refer to practical knowledge that can be demonstrated through execution of tasks to achieve predetermined results. Companies shifted their focus from emphasizing educational qualifications to focusing on possession of practical skills than can be applied to given tasks in a job. Recruitment officers then began focusing on experience acquired, where it became imperative to have a certain amount of experience of performing certain tasks or operating in a certain environment for one to be considered for a job. Although this has resulted in improved performance in many organizations, there is still the realization that optimum performance is not being achieved. Something more needs to be done at the point of talent acquisition in order to achieve optimum performance. The recruitment discourse in Zimbabwe has thus now shifted to “competencies”. The recruitment philosophy is changing slowly to align to the need to focus on competencies rather than focusing on educational qualifications or on skills in isolation. This has given rise to the concept of “competency-based recruitment”.

Competency refers to the demonstrable ability to perform given tasks in an effective and efficient manner in order to produce results. It is an integration of knowledge, skills and attributes (KSA) that employees need in order to perform the job effectively. As discussed above, a lot of emphasis has been placed on knowledge and skills, but very little emphasis, if any, on attributes. Attributes refer to attitudes/characteristics and behaviour patterns that form the foundation of how well the possessed knowledge and skills are employed in a given context. Competencies basically refers to the job inputs that employees bring into the organization. Competence is therefore at the heart of performance – once an employee possesses the right competencies then performance is guaranteed. Progressive organizations the world over focus on competencies so much that even in the overall scheme of employee development they refer to “competency-gap” rather than the narrower “skills-gap” The recruitment process should therefore be re-engineered to assess these competencies in their entirety than its isolated elements.

Competency-based recruitment is therefore an ability-based recruitment process that seeks to assess a candidate’s possession and more importantly ability to apply knowledge and skills within a given context. It is a process that is designed to extract evidence of a candidate’s ability to perform given tasks that bring real value to an organization. The process is designed in such a way that throughout the stages of recruitment from candidate sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing, reference checking and even probation, competencies are assessed. Re-engineering the recruitment process to focus on competencies means:

• Ensuring that assessments focus on real value drivers for the organization
• Prediction of future performance
• Complete elimination of biases in recruitment
• Low staff turnover
• Job and organizational fit for the employee
• Clear and comprehensive candidate feedback

Competencies are organization and job-specific. They need to be defined upfront and should be informed by the work that needs to be done. This ensures that recruitment process only assesses candidates on those competencies that positively impact on the organization. Organizations in Zimbabwe need to embrace competency-based recruitment in order to derive real value from its talent acquisition processes. An organization is only as good as its people – it is therefore imperative that recruitment systems are re-engineered to get the right people into the organization. Recruitment has a long term bearing on the organization in terms of organizational effectiveness. They say “garbage in, garbage out” – if organizations fail to get the right competencies at the point of talent acquisition, optimum performance will remain a pipe dream.

Emmanuel Jinda is the Managing Consultant of PROSERVE Consulting Group, a leading supplier of Professional Human Resources and Management services locally, regionally and internationally. He can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Tel: 263 773004143 or 263 4 772778