Partial profile · Book Profile — full narrative profile planned
People Analytics For Dummies - Measuring Competence
A practical guide to measuring the human competencies that actually predict job performance, so HR can hire, reward, and develop people using reliable, valid, and legally defensible data.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
When people perform the same task under the same conditions, differences in results come down to differences in people—but which differences actually matter? This book shows human resources professionals and business leaders how to move beyond the guesswork of 'I know a good one when I see one' toward a disciplined, evidence-based practice of competency measurement. It defines competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics), explains the technical foundations of reliability and validity, surveys the full toolkit of selection instruments (from structured interviews to cognitive, personality, and work-sample tests), and walks step-by-step through building or buying a competency model, validating it against performance criteria, and embedding it across HR systems. Grounded in decades of selection research (including Schmidt and Hunter's meta-analysis) and federal legal guidelines, it helps you make better, fairer, more effective, and more defensible people decisions.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- An HR professional or business leader who wants to hire, reward, and develop the right people and make people decisions that actually improve company performance.
- The problem
- People decisions rest on unreliable, invalid methods like unstructured interviews that fail to predict who will actually perform well. They feel uncertain and exposed—guessing at what matters and worried their choices are arbitrary or unfair.
- The plan
- Identify the performance criteria and the individuals who exceed, meet, or fall below them.
- Choose a competency framework—build your own (DIY) or start with a tried-and-true commercial dictionary.
- Survey knowledgeable people to reduce and rank the competencies to the critical few.
- Convert selected competencies into a behavior-based feedback instrument (e.g., BARS or frequency scale).
- Administer the instrument with many raters and validate statistically against performance criteria.
- The payoff
- More reliable, valid, and important people measures that predict performance. · Better, fairer hiring, pay, and promotion decisions that are legally defensible. · A competency system embedded across HR that improves company performance over time.
See our guide
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