Last week I was in a session with several executives benchmarking a job.   That term is used to describe a number of different activities or approaches, so let me give you an insiders view of what we did.  

Our task was to determine what the organization needed from this job for superior performance (in our case it was the job of President of the company).  We discussed key results that the person filling the role of President was accountable for producing.  When we agreed on the five key results, our assignment next was to “let the job speak”.  Essentially, we were defining the talent profile of this job without thinking about people currently in the job, top performers or average workers.  If the job were done excellently in a way to produce the key results, what would that look like? 

We went online and completed a profile that automatically joined our responses so we had a composite picture of what our group thought about the talent needed to do this job well.  We analyzed and scrutinized the report so that we weren’t surrendering our collective wisdom to some kind of artificial intelligence system. 

In the end, we were very satisfied with the picture of talent needed to deliver top performance in this job.  We had worked to eliminate (or at least mitigate bias) and subjectivity in the process.   There was openness and transparency  in the process, and we had a standard for accountability.  In short, we had a repeatable practice for effective top talent management.