The Four Pillars of Effective Hiring in Agribusiness — Putting It into Play
February 26, 2025 Talent management is an organization approach to attracting, motivating, developing, and retaining employees. It’s an ongoing process that involves identifying the right talent prospects, bringing them on board within your company, and helping them develop and grow their abilities to align with the organization’s objectives and enable the entire team’s success.
Every company has a unique approach to talent management based on its size, scope, resources, and goals, and there is no single best method. However, regardless of company size and talent needs, one constant in every talent management program is that it will never succeed if it doesn’t have the right people in the right seats.
No level of investment in resources can improve a team if they aren’t the right people for your team or aren’t in the right role. Who are the right people, and how do we know the right seats? The right people are those who share your company’s core values. They fit and thrive into your company’s culture; their style is a great fit for their responsibilities in the work environment; and their abilities provide them with the capability to meet or exceed the expectations of the role.
Examining the Pillars
In past articles, we discussed the four-pillar approach to effective hiring. In the next two installments, we will explore how you can implement those concepts and enable the success of your talent management program.
Each category of the Four Pillars is equally important in deciding if you have the right person and placing them in the right seat. The Four Pillars include:
- Culture. Are they a fit for the organization’s culture?
- Behavioral Style. Are they a natural fit for the role?
- Performance Profile. Do they have what it takes to succeed?
- Skills. Do they have the required skills to do the job?
Culture
Defining your culture is a challenging step in hiring that tends to be the most overlooked. Without it, it’s impossible to know the attributes you are looking for in your next hire, yet it isn’t easy to describe and define your culture when you are used to working within it every day. One of the simplest ways to define your culture is to think about those on your team who possess the attributes you are looking for in your next hire. We call it the STAR Employee exercise.
Start by asking yourself: “Who are the culture stars of our company? Who would I nominate to represent our culture?”
Then answer the following questions when you have each person in mind:
- What attributes do they bring from past experiences that shape how they show up daily?
- What do they do that helps them fit into the team?
- How does their influence show up in the organization?
- What do they do that’s different and exceptional?
- What is a big achievement that makes them STAR employees?
- What is a small detail that makes them a STAR employee?
Do this exercise for a handful of employees you would love to hire more of, and you will start to see similarities in their traits, approaches, attitudes, and more. Write these key attributes down and make them a target list. This isn’t a wish list, it’s a target list. Hiring employees who don’t share these attributes will only set you back regardless of the strength of their skills and experiences. It’s time to put your culture first in your process.
Defining the Right Style
The next step in the Four Pillars is understanding the right behavioral style for the position. Before hiring an employee, it’s important to identify “how” you want them to do their job, not just “what” you expect them to do! A person’s behavioral style is a group of indicators that outline the actions, habits, and characteristics that affect how people engage, talk, and do their jobs. This can be recognized in their conversation style, teamwork, leadership traits, flexibility, creativity, and problem-solving abilities.
Technical skills, on the other hand, focus on specific tasks related to the job. It is important to be aware of and understand both to measure and judge an employee’s general performance and overall potential. All too often, these indicators of “what” a person has done in the past are used to hire a candidate when it’s the “how” that ensured their success!
The most effective way to define the ideal style for a role is to use a certified behavioral assessment tool focused on the right style for the position, not the style of the actual job candidates. If you don’t have access to that resource, you can complete a few exercises to provide enough insight to outline the ideal style.
In 22 years of helping organizations find and retain top talent, we’ve discovered there are typically two key criteria that will ultimately determine a candidate’s match for a position: 1) Will they have maximum success and happiness in this position if they are more introverted or extroverted? and 2) Will they need to be task-oriented or people-oriented to maintain that level of satisfaction?
- Introvert or Extrovert?
- Is this role better for a person who talks to think or thinks to talk?
- Do they do their best work in collaboration with others or by themselves?
- Will they be energized by meetings and group work or be depleted by those activities?
- Task or people oriented?
- Will they focus on the work or the people doing it?
- Is speed and efficiency valued, or is a consistent and effective process more important?
- When faced with a problem, do they think about solutions or gather perspectives from others before taking action?
Note the attributes you identified. How do they intersect with the expectations of the role? Remember that the ideal style for a role is constantly evolving and rarely consistent from one position to the next. For example, even though you might have a team of field salespeople with similar expectations, the right style might differ for each employee.
Consider this: Is one sales position in a new territory with few customers requiring a driven and outgoing approach, or is it a key territory with top customers needing customer service focus? Do the customers in this territory expect data-driven service from a detail-oriented person or creative ideas and approaches from a less detailed and creative thinker? Does this territory require the salesperson to think and act independently, or are they part of a team approach?
You’ll notice that each of the above territories can exist in the same company, have the same title, and even have the same responsibilities, yet the best style of a person who would excel in each territory is very different. This is just a sales representative example, but you can see how this concept can impact all aspects of your business.
It’s easy to identify the skills and experience required to do a role, but it takes the right cultural fit and behavioral style to excel. The next time you plan to add to your team, I encourage you to take the time to define your team’s culture and determine the ideal style for the role before you post the position.
You, your team, and your bottom line will be glad you did!
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