by Gerlie Corachea, Director of Talent Pairing at Cyberbacker
Today’s labor market remains tight, meaning businesses must continue to prioritize worker retention. Talent pairing is an onboarding strategy that can help companies keep their valuable workers. This approach is especially important for service-based businesses, which often rely on the relationships employees build with clients to generate revenue.
As Director of Talent Pairing at Cyberbacker, I spend the vast majority of my time thinking about how to match the right people to the right roles. Below, I explain the benefits of talent pairing, as well as best practices for doing it successfully.
Why service-based businesses should employ talent pairing
Talent pairing is just like it sounds — the process of pairing talent with the appropriate roles.
Matching individuals with the roles that fit them best is an effective way to keep workers happy and engaged. When people feel capable, competent, and valued in a role that suits their own unique strengths and talents, they rate their job satisfaction higher. This makes them more committed to their organizations and boosts their performance.
Talent pairing is also an effective retention strategy. Since many service-based businesses depend on the connections that employees establish and maintain with customers, when employees leave, clients may also face the decision of whether to stay or go. This makes employees’ job satisfaction even more important for service-based businesses than other kinds.
Effective talent pairing is essential because when people are in the wrong roles, it’s only natural for them to seek alternatives. Some of those options may come from within your organization, but the majority will be found elsewhere.
The US Department of Labor estimates that employers lose at least 30 percent of an employee’s first-year salary when they make a bad hiring decision. By putting people in the right positions from the beginning, you can ensure that new hires will not only be productive, but also want to stay.
If companies don’t invest enough time and resources into talent pairing, they can miss opportunities, fritter away productivity, and lose good staff. All those problems lead to a negative impact on the bottom line.
Best practices for talent pairing
When pairing talent with open roles, it’s necessary to know as much as possible about the available position. Toward that end, I take lots of time to understand the role in concrete detail. How would an employee in that job spend their day? Is the work predominantly task-focused, or would it involve relating with other people?
It’s also necessary to spend a lot of time paying attention to the candidates. Even in a competitive labor market, organizations should take care to select the best people. There’s a big difference between talent and non-talent, but the key difference is that talent will give you solutions to problems and continuously raise the bar. Those are the kinds of people you should look for.
While reading resumes will give you a sense of candidates’ training, skills, and abilities, each is a unique human being. Spend time getting to know them. How are they wired? What are their strengths?
Conducting formal assessments of candidates’ values and personalities can be a big help for this part of the process. For instance, extroverts who love to talk to people are generally good for public-facing roles, while those who find interaction draining are probably a better fit for back-office or administrative roles.
The employees’ own sources of motivation should also be considered, perhaps even as the most important factor when it comes to talent pairing. For instance, some people love to establish order and provide structure, while others like to explore and expose themselves to new ideas. It’s important to know what motivates any given employee, so you can ensure their role meets these needs.
Matches shouldn’t just look good on paper
Many HR professionals and business leaders may feel tempted to place an individual in a role if he or she has special expertise in that area, but this can be a mistake if the given worker doesn’t have the desire to do that kind of work. They might be supremely qualified, but what would they actually enjoy doing? What do they want to do and how do they desire to grow professionally?
In my experience, it can be better to put someone in a new area they want to learn about — as long as there is a reasonable expectation they would succeed — than to insist they do something that replicates their decades of experience on paper.
In addition, I like to keep the culture of the particular team in mind when looking for the right new employee. However, there is a limit to the amount that any human resources professional can foresee. At the end of the day, some people get along and others don’t, sometimes for no apparent reason. That’s why it’s also important to arrange meetings between existing team members and new prospects — everyone needs to feel comfortable. When both sides can discuss their expectations, outcomes improve.
How to employ talent pairing
If talent pairing sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. I would be lying if I said that hiring managers can control every part of the process and that mistakes never happen. But the more you get to know your candidates, roles, and teams, the greater the chance you’ll pair people successfully.
In addition, the more time and effort you invest upfront, the less likely you are to be fooled if someone stretched the truth on their resume or lied on their personality inventory. By pairing talent with the right roles and avoiding bad hires, you can ensure your entire business will grow.
Gerlie Corachea is the Director of Talent Pairing at Cyberbacker, the leading provider of virtual assistance services worldwide. An expert in talent management, onboarding, culture, and skills training, she manages the Career Division at Cyberbacker, which is responsible for pairing candidates and clients within the organization.
