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Competency Frameworks: Useful Tool or Corporate Overkill?
3 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we tackle whether competency frameworks are genuinely useful or just corporate overkill. The short answer? It depends.
Depends on how they’re built, how they’re used, and whether they actually support the business. Listen to find out.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fractional Frequency'
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Welcome to Fractional Frequency, our take on talent, people trends, and the reality of building up businesses in an economy that keeps rewriting the rules.
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I'm Amy Crook, founder of Strativus.
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And I'm Erin Totis, Managing Director of Talent Delivery, which basically means I live in the universe of finding the right people to make an impact for our clients fast.
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Around here, we talk about the real side of HR and talent, what works, what absolutely doesn't, and how to build teams that can carry a business, not drag it down.
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We'll break down trends, share the behind the scenes of scaling a consultancy from zero, and probably overshare a little because that's where the good lessons live.
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So whether you're building, hiring, leading, or just trying to keep your company profitable, you're in the right place.
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This is Fractional Frequency.
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Let's get to it.
HR Clients and Competency Framework Challenges
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So today we are gonna talk about competency frameworks because
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Every single client and connection that works in HR that I have seems to be focused on putting together some form of new competency framework.
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And it's interesting because as we kind of have the conversations, it seems that very few people
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have a good sense of how they're going to use it.
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And even fewer seem to have a plan to weave it into performance and development.
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They're just thinking about hiring.
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Absolutely.
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And the reason they fail is not because competency frameworks are a bad idea, right?
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Right.
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They're failing because they're over-engineered, under-adopted, and honestly disconnected from the real work.
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And so let's talk about that for a minute here.
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Where do you feel like companies are just over-complicating the issue?
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Yeah.
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So I've seen...
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like leaders want to go to like 12 to 20 competencies per like job function, like not even just department, but like job function.
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And so that becomes really difficult to manage and really difficult to measure.
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And when the language in them is like not tied to
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how people really talk in the organization or how the departments talk, it doesn't resonate.
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So it's hard to get people to buy into it.
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And then,
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There's always that collection of like generic leadership behaviors that are just slapped on on everybody's competencies.
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And that's fine if you truly do value, you know, communication and grit and agility, which I think everybody does, but they have to have some definitions that go along with them so people understand what good looks like to the organization.
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And it's hard to get buy-in from the business on what that good looks like if it's been a solely HR-owned project.
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And so that would kind of be my final thing is that if you are going to build a framework that you bring the business along with you from the start, they need to have some input to feel ownership and to see where the value comes in.
Designing Effective Competency Frameworks
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for them in terms of managing their talent.
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So I think just to, you know, sprout on a little bit more, I think if you're looking right now to create a framework, I think come together with the business on some shared language of what good looks like, intend for it to improve the decision quality and not just be another level of documentation.
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I know some companies are
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even creating like little workbooks in excel for uh their candidates um it's just so hard to manage and then what do you do with that afterwards and how do you measure afterwards you know um and then
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If you can set the levels and be explicit about what the expectations are, then that will mitigate some bias in your interview process, but it will also make it easier to weave it into those key moments of an employee life cycle.
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Obviously, hiring is crucial, but it should be part of that feedback cycle as well when we're talking about performance.
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And then if you've got some kind of
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pathway for people to follow in terms of their development these competencies should be showing up all throughout that journey
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I think the consistency is key to your point.
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And it's also not about describing everything that someone does.
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And I think that's another common confusion point in that a competency framework is not a job description.
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And so delineating between the two will set you up for success.
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They should align.
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There should not be a job description that doesn't
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support or sort of complement the framework that is assigned to that role, but they shouldn't be the same.
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Right.
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And I think, too, the other thing that really resonated as you were talking through some of those points a minute ago is that it really should clarify what matters most to an organization.
Competency Frameworks in Recruitment
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That's something that I've seen over and over again in hiring loops is that you get a hiring manager or even an interview panelist
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who decides to interview or pass judgment or, or prioritize what's important to them individually and not to the group, the team, the organization as a whole.
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And that's a really critical anchor in making these decisions.
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A hundred percent.
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Yeah, totally agree.
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And so as I've been having these conversations, I, I,
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Notice that there is, however, like a heavy impact on the recruitment teams and hiring managers when it comes to implementing these frameworks.
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So I'm just interested to get your take on, you know, what you think that realistically looks like.
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You know, they're getting given the responsibility, but what does that look like, do you think?
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I think there's a ton of opportunity for a competency framework to create lots of good throughout the TA life cycle.
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And if there are people listening who know me, maybe there are some sort of questioning gazes because I don't know that my brand would suggest a big fan of competency frameworks, but I want to debunk that for a minute here.
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You know, the first thing I think that is a huge opportunity is to drive enhanced
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depth and richness in the intake conversation.
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This is the jumping off point for a search, the opportunity for a recruiter and a hiring manager to get really clear together about what the shared goal is and how we will get there, how we intend to get there.
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And more often than not, we rush these conversations.
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We ask really weak, open-ended questions.
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And it just doesn't set us up for the success that we want.
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And so applying a competency framework allows a recruiter to ask really pointed questions of the hiring manager.
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It guides the hiring manager to use more illustrative language and talking about the behaviors that they're targeting and that the recruiter should be listening for along the way.
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So I think that's a critical opportunity.
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Yeah.
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The second thing that comes to mind is calibration across interviewers.
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And as I think about common pitfalls and where recruiters sometimes sit back where they should be taking the lead, it's in owning the content of the interview conversations.
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And of course we own our own and the hiring manager tends to have a good grasp on theirs, but it's really easy for us to lose sight of the panel and to allow them to wander into these conversations and ask whatever, right?
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And so they're coming back and taking some sort of a vote in a debrief conversation rather than bringing signals.
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that will allow the hiring manager to make an informed decision.
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And so this allows you to drive their conversations and get really clear about, I'm not looking for your yay, nay.
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I'm looking for you to go collect these specific signals and bring them back to this team.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And so on the point of the hiring managers and the panels, what do you think's in it for them?
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I think confidence.
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Yeah.
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And, you know, this is something that I talked about, you and I talked about recently, actually, is that in today's market, there are fewer and fewer positions that are prioritized.
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Where teams may have had a headcount plan of five in previous years, this year they might just get one.
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And so that position is critical to get right.
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And if you've been a manager for any period of time, you likely have been bitten and experienced what it's like when you get a hire wrong or at least not perfect.
Driving Adoption Through Simplicity
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And so when you look at the signals that you're collecting, how you're making your decisions,
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making decisions on really clear evidence rather than gut checks and vibes is a much higher confidence way to support your convictions.
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Yeah, I totally agree.
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I think, you know, as you mentioned, with the clearer expectations from everyone that's part of the process, that's going to lead to better interviews and just better information to make decisions on hires.
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So I guess like what would be your kind of summary of kind of this section in terms of like tips for folks out there that might be undertaking a competency framework right now?
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From a hiring perspective, I think remembering that it's that experience is driven by the hiring manager and the recruiter, not the HR team.
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And so you need to create something that they can and will use.
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And so to your point, bringing them along, but also designing for usability and not for the theory of it is really critical in this step.
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And then maybe doubling back to the consistency, the same work that we're using for hiring should align with the framework we're applying to performance management, to job architecture, internal mobility, career ladders, all of those things.
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Yeah, I think, you know, that's such a good point.
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Because, again, like what I've seen is that a lot of effort will go into the design side.
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But where it falls down is in that adoption phase.
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Absolutely.
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Good point.
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And so what do you think actually drives adoption?
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Well, I think you've got to keep the language simple because if people can't understand it or doesn't know what it means or don't know what it means, then they're not going to use it.
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I think have it tied to some real day-to-day work.
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Think about the behaviors that show up in the actual organization that do lead to good outcomes rather than picking from a list that, you know, insert HR guidebook here type thing.
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Like think about what's relevant to your organization and then spend time with the managers on putting it together and how to use it.
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And make sure that you're inspiring them to believe in it, because if they can't see the value and they don't feel like it's
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going to be beneficial, then they're not going to follow it.
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And to your point, again, like embedding it into interviews is great, but it has to be in those performance cycles and career conversations for it to really run through the employee experience and be consistent.
Tips for Successful Implementation
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Absolutely.
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Okay.
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So,
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Let's talk about the one thing that people should take away from this conversation to get it right.
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I think, well, can it be two things?
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Yes, it can.
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I think start smaller than you think.
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It's the kind of project that can feel really daunting if you try to boil the ocean all at once.
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And so small steps in the right direction are better than no steps at all.
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And then I think to designing things
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for real people to actually use it day to day, being thoughtful about who those people are, how much time they have, their level of interaction with similar tools in the past or lack thereof, and being really conscious of that throughout from design to implementation.
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How about you?
Concluding Success Measures
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I love it.
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I think, think about your success measures, like are people actually using it
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Is it weaved through the full talent lifecycle?
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Are people able to make better decisions and are the conversations better?
00:14:48
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You know, it's not about what it looks like or, you know, a fancy slide deck.
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It's these are your success measures if it's working.
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Totally.
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And the goal isn't a perfect framework.
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It's better hiring, better feedback and better outcomes set by consistent standards.
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Totally agree.
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Okay.
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That's a wrap for this one.
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Cheers.
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Take care.
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Bye.