KORN FERRY ASSESS

Talent management assessment tools to develop the talent in your organization

Korn Ferry Assess provides a range of flexible, powerful talent management assessment tools to evaluate and develop employees and leaders in your talent pipeline:

• Our Potential solution looks for high performers with potential leadership talent.
• Our Professional solution helps organizations develop talent at all levels.
• Our Leadership solution assesses the readiness of individuals for immediate roles as leaders.

Our science-based talent assessments offer organizations a non-biased approach to evaluating their talent, ensuring they have the skills, competencies, and personality necessary to succeed in a specific role, or at the levels above the job they currently have.

Why it’s critical to use talent management assessments to identify high potential talent

Korn Ferry research finds that 98% of organizations say that identifying high potentials is important for success, with 82% reporting that they place more emphasis on their high potential program compared with five years ago. Yet only 14% feel very confident that the right people have been selected for their program.

The problem is that high performers aren’t synonymous with high potential employees. In fact, there’s only a 30% overlap between high performers and high potentials. According to research from Harvard Business Review, while the remaining 70% can succeed in their current position, they lack at least one critical component that’s necessary to succeed in a more challenging, more senior role.

That’s where talent management assessment solutions come in.

Korn Ferry’s high potential assessment tool

Korn Ferry Assess, our high potential assessment tool, helps organizations identify employees with the greatest ability to take on more significant roles.

What is an employee’s potential? It’s their capacity and interest to perform effectively in significantly more challenging leadership roles. As individuals progress to leadership positions with greater responsibility, the breadth and complexity of their roles expand. Leaders are required to tackle difficult problems, all while leading and coaching others to better performance. They must balance a host of skills, including planning, coordinating, and making time to develop their team. Leadership attributes like these grow over the course of a career; they don’t simply appear when a person is promoted. That’s why talent management assessments like Korn Ferry Assess, Korn Ferry’s high potential assessment tool, are essential.

Potential relies on decades of Korn Ferry’s research and analysis to measure three critical aspects of individuals in their high potential assessments: traits, drivers, and experiences. Traits are the personality characteristics that exert a strong influence on a person’s behavior and affects how people develop, based on what comes naturally to them and what takes more effort. Drivers are the aspect that creates engagement and energy for a task or role: the more closely a person’s drivers align with a role, the more they’ll be energized by it. Experiences are the formative experiences that individuals have experienced, including “vertical” or leadership experience, “horizontal experience” or perspective and key developmental challenges that they have faced.

The Korn Ferry Potential talent management assessment also evaluates individuals’ derailment risks, such as insensitivity to others, a tendency to over-manage, and an inability to adapt to differences, all of which may thwart an individual’s attempt to lead.

Our Potential assessment tool translates all of this data into actionable insights that organizations can use to make the right decisions about how to address development gaps and about how to invest in the future.

The benefits of our high potential assessment tool

With Potential, organizations get access to a data-driven, science-based talent management assessment that quickly and accurately identifies individuals with high leadership potential. They also receive in-depth reports that help them decide which training should be delivered to particular individuals, improving the return on their development spend. As a result, they develop a robust leadership pipeline that helps to future-proof their organization.

Meanwhile, individual performers learn about their future potential and discover how to improve their skill set to continue their trajectory up the organization’s leadership ladder.

The Potential talent management assessment tool delivers detailed reports including:

• Participant Potential Report: This report delivers a series of insights broken into six groups: leadership traits, learning agility, drivers, experience, derailment risks, and expanding potential. The organization gets a realistic view into the individual’s leadership potential, while the individual receives valuable development tips.
• Talent Grid Export: This report stack-ranks all of the insights for each participant in the cohort, facilitating quick analysis and comparisons of participants.
• Risk Factors Report: This optional report evaluates individuals more deeply on traits that could stall the individual’s progression without proactive development. Our standard report offers three individual risks, but this report delves more deeply into the full set of derailment risks.

How organization-wide professional development benefits organizations

When organizations offer professional development opportunities to employees other than leaders, they see an incredible return on their investment in terms of higher employee productivity, engagement, and retention. Research shows that learning opportunities, professional development, and career progression not only drive employee performance but also are consistently are listed among the three top drivers of employee satisfaction. The problem is that, without talent management assessment, organizations can’t target these resources effectively.

Korn Ferry’s Professional Development self-assessment allows organizations to improve development across their entire workforce. Our scalable self-assessment tools are designed to measure combinations of competencies, traits, and drivers for all employees, regardless of level. They deliver comprehensive insights into employee development plus a guide to helping individuals succeed in their roles and in their careers as a whole. And they put psychometrically informed self-development tools directly in the hands of learners.

Our professional development improves the performance of talent across your organization

Our talent management assessment tools help individuals, managers, learning and development teams, and entire organizations.

• Individuals: Employees receive critical data, action plans, and self-guidance that they can use to own their development for their current role and entire career.
• Managers: Managers learn how to structure meaningful development plans and discussions for their team members.
• Learning and development (L&D) teams: L&D teams understand how to enhance the quality of their professional development planning and execution.
• Organizations: Organizations and their leaders discover how to strengthen performance and engagement across the workforce.

How our professional development assessment tool works

Our self-service Professional Development talent management assessment relies on our extensive collection of more than 4,000 Success Profiles. A Success Profile tells us what high performers look like for a role: we combine our decades of job analysis and research to distill a job’s responsibilities plus the skills, competencies, traits, and experiences that successful job holders are likely to possess. We then help organizations configure the Success Profile to make them more specific to a role, level, or organizational outcome.

Individuals can then, on their own, take the assessment tool. Our Professional assessment tool compares individuals to the Success Profile’s competencies, traits, and drivers to identify development needs and delivers an easy-to-understand Participant Development Report. This report shows the manager how individuals rate against the Success Profile, highlighting their highest-scoring and lowest-scoring capabilities. It also contains practical guidance with built-in development content and includes suggestions on how to develop their lowest-scored capabilities. Managers can use the report to identify development priorities and as the foundation for an initial professional development plan. Individuals can use the report to evaluate their approach to work, reflect on their successes, discover their opportunities for development, and plot a course to improve.

Korn Ferry’s leadership assessments identify the best leaders for your business

It typically takes new executives at least six months to become productive in a new role. However, organizations have a much lower tolerance: 53% of organizations expect leaders to show optimal performance more quickly, according to the Korn Ferry Real World Leadership Study.

With only 17% of organizations confident that they have the right leadership to deliver on strategic priorities, how can organizations choose individuals that demonstrate a good fit for a leadership role—before they’re tested in the position?

They can use the Korn Ferry Leadership talent management assessment tool.

How our leadership assessment tool identifies the best leaders for your organization

Organizations that want to identify individuals who are ready for immediate mid-level and higher leadership positions should turn to our Leadership assessment tool.

Our Leadership talent management assessment uses our library of more than 4,000 Success Profiles to evaluate how ready candidates are ready to progress to a more challenging leadership role. We configure our Success Profile to match your desired role, level, or organizational outcome. Then our assessment compares leaders, both within and outside the organization, to the Success Profile and delivers a data-driven assessment of how well their skills, preferences, and personality fit with your organization’s key leadership roles. Our experienced consultants then review the assessment outputs with you, giving you deep, valuable insights into each assessed individual’s leadership potential.

Our Leadership assessment delivers a number of insight-rich output reports, including:

• Interview Guide: A collection of questions tailored to the participant’s talent management assessment responses to ensure a consistent approach to interviewing all candidates.
• Candidate Report with Development: A broad and deep view of the participant, so you can evaluate how well they fit the role and prioritize any gaps in their development to strengthen their leadership performance.
• Learning Agility Report: A review of the candidate’s willingness and ability to learn from experience and apply that learning to perform successful under new conditions, a critical skill in today’s complex, dynamic business environment.
• Risk Factors Report: A list of indicators that may derail the participant from success in a role and that may be overcome with proactive development.
• Individual Report: A detailed report that gives participants feedback on their skills, characteristics, and motivations to help them build self-awareness as well as engagement with professional development opportunities.
• Learning Agility Coaching Report: An optional, add-on report that offers more detailed insights into the five factors that inform a candidate’s learning agility to shape leadership development conversations, tips for strengthening learning agility, and an editable development planning section.

The benefits of our leadership assessment tool

Organizations that use our leadership assessment tools improve their ability to identify high-performing leaders. They build a robust leadership talent pool, enabling them to place and promote the right individuals in the roles where they will be the most effective. They can also ensure that they’ve devoted development resources on the appropriate skills and targets. Meanwhile, individual leaders gain insight into how well they fit with specific leadership roles and learn how they can close any gaps in their development that may otherwise hold them back from progressing in the organization.

Korn Ferry Assess is part of a holistic talent solution

Korn Ferry’s data-driven talent management assessments give organizations the insights they need to make smarter decisions about professional development, the development of high potential individuals, and the promotion of top performers. Combined with the other solutions in our Korn Ferry Digital platform, organizations can onboard top talent and create a comprehensive development plan that follows them throughout the organization.

Contact us to learn more about how Korn Ferry Assess can help your organization build a strong talent pipeline and a bench of leadership talent to ensure sustainable success for your organization.