In today’s competitive talent market, hiring the right person is only half the battle—hiring them for the right role is what drives long-term success. That’s why the job benchmarking process is one of the most comprehensive and effective ways to find top talent.
We’ve outlined the benchmarking process; so now let’s dive into the advantages. What are the benefits of job benchmarking? How does job benchmarking help businesses? What’s the value add for you?
Benefits of Job Benchmarking
“Job benchmarking is a holistic approach to set both the company and talent up for success,” said Teresa Adams-Nault, founder of TheTalentMatchmaker. “It scales the company, increases profitability, and moves the needle.”
That holistic approach is one of the most important parts of job benchmarking and touches on every benefit we’ll share. Benchmarking increases profitability, not only by helping you better understand a candidate before committing to their onboarding, but by creating a deeper understanding of a role’s responsibilities throughout the lifetime of the role. This knowledge boosts employee engagement and development, which improves productivity and reduces turnover.
Job benchmarking can transform the way your organization thinks about a role by providing a clear, data-driven foundation for talent decisions, in the hiring process, and everyday experience in roles. Here are three more specific benefits of utilizing job benchmarking in your organization.
Job Benchmarking Helps You Understand the Role
One of the best benefits of job benchmarking is the way it creates clarity about a job’s responsibilities, function, and future in the organization.
By dedicating thoughtful, guided discussion to a position’s impact, all team members and leaders will have solid insights into exactly what that role will bring to the workforce. Through discussions about the job’s function, responsibilities, and what success in the role looks like, the team and manager will have a shared understanding of what they need to discover about applicants. In turn, that clarity helps the candidate as they ask questions and understand the role in a short amount of time during the interview process.
The discussion of the role should bring up daily responsibilities, collaborative connections, and clarification about the position’s purpose. When that information is agreed upon and is used to create a job benchmark, it builds a valuable, robust methodology.
“Benchmarking is crucial for aligning expectations and ensuring everyone is on the same page, especially when multiple leaders are involved,” said Juan Kingsbury, founder of Career Blindspot. “Without benchmarking, there is a risk of perpetuating different mission, vision, and value sets, leading to disappointment and a lack of progress towards goals.”
Job benchmarking helps avoid misalignment regarding the role. By gathering Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who, together, can outline what the ideal candidate looks like using an applicant assessment, the organization’s understanding of the role will align.
Job Benchmarking Measures Employees with Real Data
Many people think they’re being objective in the workplace, but “at the end of the day, people are going to bring biases, no matter what,” said Kingsbury. Bias often occurs subconsciously, where people gravitate towards others similar to themselves, through behavior, motivation, or skill set. This can cause enormous blind spots in talent strategy, where the best fit for a role is overlooked because of non-relevant personal preferences.
The good news is that job benchmarking helps take bias out of talent management by lining up personalized validated assessment data with the benchmark created by a group of SMEs.
Instead of relying on personal opinion and judgment, use data and tangible insights to take action. “Role clarity isn’t about the person—it’s about the job. Job benchmarking takes away that bias,” said Adams-Nault. “It aligns expectations with objective data and enables the team to make expert decisions. Looking at the how, why, and what of the job lets you find what is needed on a skills basis.”
Job Benchmarking Reduces Turnover and Enhances Retention
Prevent costly hiring mistakes and role confusion by understanding the job and the candidate with real data and better clarity.
Gallup shared that 51% of employees aren’t engaged—one way to improve engagement is to make sure everyone has the same expectations of the job role.
“I’m working with a new Director of Operations at a highly profitable company,” Adams-Nault said. “He was struggling, and his assessment confirmed it. The issue? His job description had 29 key responsibilities—he was trying to do everything for everyone. I explained that the organization was overextending his talent, and now I’m helping them refine the role to focus on what truly matters. With that clarity, he’ll have a much better chance of success.”
The right assessment, effective coaching, and a clear job benchmark helped the company retain valuable talent and prevented the candidate from struggling due to confusion about his new role. Job benchmarking helps prevent burn out for new employees and supports overall understanding of a role, so new employees can engage in their work and stay in the right position for them.
Job Benchmarking Enhances Hiring
Benchmarks help both employers and candidates understand the needs of a position with real, measurable data.
“Benchmarking is a tool in your toolbox,” said Adams-Nault. “By using TTI’s data analytics, we’re looking for gaps—the indicators that are telling us where we might want to work with either an internal employee or a new candidate and develop them. Benchmarking helps gauge that decision. It’s all about setting up both the organization and the talent for success.”
That being said, job benchmarks are a starting point, not an end destination. You can and should hire against a job benchmark if that’s what the SMEs and hiring team decide is the best fit for the role.
Don’t disqualify someone if their assessment results don’t perfectly match the benchmark. For example, if a candidate has a different behavioral style than the initial job benchmark but is qualified and talented and gets along with their future team, you can re-evaluate and determine how important that behavior is for their success. That behavioral style might have been a preference of the SMEs, or it might be crucial to job success. The goal is to have a conversation, dedicate time to understanding the role's needs, and then move forward with confidence.
“Even if someone is a perfect match, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing a job correctly,” Kingsbury cautioned. “Just because you know how to play the saxophone doesn’t mean you’re hitting the right notes. The benchmarking process represents the notes on the page; it’s a way to guide you and hone in your focus.”
Moving Forward with Benchmarking
Job benchmarking is a valuable process, not just for hiring but for all levels of organizational and personal development. It helps teams fully understand a job’s purpose; everyone involved in the hiring process can take new perspectives on candidates and the function of their roles.
If you want to harness the power of benchmarking for your organization, TTI can help.
