Choosing the Right Method to Assess and Rate Competencies in Your Organization

When implementing their new web-based employee performance management system, many of our customers wrestle with deciding which is the best way to rate competencies. As with so many things in HR, there’s no one right answer.

The best method for your organization depends on what you’re trying to accomplish by evaluating competencies. Some of the questions you need to think about include things like:

• Do employees across the organization demonstrate the same competency in the same way?
• Is it important for your employees to know specific details on their competency demonstration or need for improvement?
• Is there a risk that different managers will evaluate a competency inconsistently? Is that a problem?
• Do you want to force scores to be either better or worse than average?
• Will you be using competency ratings to drive compensation (pay for performance) strategies?

These considerations affect both the rating scale you choose and the rating method.

We recently published a new reference article, Choosing the Right Method to Assess and Rate Competencies in Your Organization, to give them some guidance. The reference articles walks you through the various methods available, and some of the pros and cons of each one.

The methods aren’t really specific to Halogen eAppraisal, so even if you’re not using our system, you’ll find it helpful.

Can you think of any other considerations? Have you found any pros and cons with your method(s)?