The Most Important Skill to Build into Your Talent Pipeline

3 upscreens 2017 July

Whether your organization is looking to promote internally or recruit a new crop of employees, hiring managers are laser-focused on the talent pipeline: the pool of candidates qualified for open positions.

But what should they be looking for, exactly? Great references, job or academic history, and relevant skills all play a role, of course, but recent studies have shown that, when it comes to hiring or promoting employees, the number one skill employers look for is communication.

In their 2017 Corporate Recruiter Survey, the Graduate Management Admission Council found that communication is the most important skill category for new mid-level hires (followed by teamwork, technical, leadership, and managerial skills). And of the specific skills employers look for, four of the top five are related to communication.

Similarly, Bloomberg’s 2016 Job Skills Report showed that communication is the number one skill recruiters look for. This just goes to show that, whether you’re building a talent pipeline within your organization or recruiting new hires, your focus should be on communication skills.

But Bloomberg’s report also noted that, despite their desirability in the talent pipeline, those communication skills are among the most difficult to find.

Why Are Strong Communication Skills So Hard to Find?

The problem may not be that there aren’t enough candidates with strong communication skills, but that, traditionally, that trait has been difficult to measure.

Communication evaluation has always been subjective and inefficient. Not to mention how difficult it is to make a clear comparison of the candidate who was in your office last Tuesday to the one sitting across from you today. While a hiring manager can look at two candidates’ data side-by-side to compare hard metrics around things like past job performance, so-called “soft” skills are tougher to pin down.

That’s how it used to be, anyway.

Today, communication analytics can objectively measure candidates to help you identify the right hire for every position.

What if you could upload videos of each candidate’s interview—or a recent product pitch or meeting presentation—and receive objective evaluations of their communication skills, comparisons to other candidates, and personalized recommendations showing exactly what each needs to work on?

QC’s data-driven, automated approach to communication analytics offers exactly that.

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The easy-to-use platform delivers objective feedback and actionable insights about each user, and it provides leaders with the aggregate data they need to understand their talent pipelines’ overall strengths and weaknesses and rank their candidates by communication skills.

Communication is the most important skill to look for in an employee. So why leave it to chance?

If you’re interested in learning more about how Quantified Communications can help your organization’s leaders and talent pipeline improve their communication skills, fill out the form below and one of our experts will contact you to walk you through our platform and process.