8 Steps for Developing a Competency Model in SHRM

By Emily Pribanic - Last Updated on January 6, 2020
Developing a Competency Model in SHRM

A proper competency model is essential for your business leaders to be able to hire employees that will not only help the business stay successful but decrease turnover rates as well.

What are the proper steps to develop an accurate SHRM competency model?

Since competencies are sets of skills, knowledge, abilities, and attributes that enable people to successfully perform their jobs, a proper competency model is essential to achieve higher ROI of employees hired and lower turnover. There are many steps in developing a competency model for you to ensure that you’re hiring competent employees to work for your company.

Your competency model development should begin with a desire to support your associates throughout their entire employee lifecycle including selection, performance, management, training, and succession planning. HR competencies like pre-hire selection assessments, performance management criteria, succession planning programs, and training and development curriculums are essential to ensure that you’re not only hiring the best employees, to begin with, but that those employees continue to do well in their positions and help your company grow and stay successful. 

SHRM Competency Model

Competency model development begins with aligning relevant business outcomes with your HR competency model. To ensure that your competency model process is business-focused from start to finish, follow these steps and you’ll be able to rest easy knowing you’re hiring the best employees to help your company achieve success.

Step 1-Collect Data It’s not enough to rely solely on interviews with potential employees as the cornerstone of your competency model development. This strategy is not only shortsighted but doesn’t provide the necessary information needed to identify critical competencies for a particular job. By collecting data from potential employees, leaders, and internal or external customers through multiple formats, you’ll be able to obtain more information and enhance the relevance of your HR competency model.

Step 2-Integrate Data
While it’s essential to collect data from multiple perspectives, it’s not enough. Data must be analyzed separately then brought together to create a cohesive story around the critical knowledge, skills, abilities, and characteristics that will ensure the success of your competency model.

Step 3- Focus on Goals

When you focus on specific goals, you reinforce the alignment between your competency model development with the needs of your organization, creating a sense of urgency.

Step 4- Make it Practical

Your competency model is not useful unless everyone in the company can follow along. Avoid using technical jargon and fancy acronyms when describing the competencies needed for particular roles within your organization. By making your competency model interesting instead of a tedious process, you bring it to a level where action can be taken easily.

Step 5- Establish a Strategy

Since your competency model can be used to determine whether you should hire new talent to join your organization or provide internal staff training to meet essential HR competencies, your competency model should be used to assess the time, effort, and budget available to create a strategy that will provide your organization with personnel that meet these requirements.

Step 6- Set Minimum Requirements

Your HR competency model needs to address the minimum acceptable levels of performance for each competency included in your model. Without leaders and managers across the organization understanding the minimum level at which individuals can perform and still be successful in their roles, they will not be able to hire employees that meet the requirements of your competency model.

Step 7- Business Outcomes

By linking your competency model to your desired business outcomes, you’ll be able to validate your HR competency model and show its direct business impact. This is an essential step in developing your competency model because it helps to drive your training, hiring, and performance strategies since you have a better understanding of which competencies to focus on based on their importance to your bottom line.

Step 8- Include Standards of Performance

It is essential that you make values and standards of performance a central part of your competency model because these standards represent a key piece of how the job should be performed.

Your SHRM competency model isn’t complete once you’ve created the perfect version of it. It is essential that you continue to refine your HR competency model and the strategy you use to create it. Try revising your competency model at least every year and a half to reflect the new roles of your organization and to ensure its comprehensiveness and relevance to your business objectives. Without an updated competency model on hand, the leaders of your organization will not be able to hire competent employees and your bottom line will suffer.

Emily Pribanic | Emily is a graduate of the University of North Texas. She has her B.A. in Advertising with a concentration in Copywriting. Emily has been writing since she was young and has a creative imagination. She lives in Dallas, Texas with her family and two cats.

Emily Pribanic | Emily is a graduate of the University of North Texas. She has her B.A. in Advertising with a concentration in Copywriting. Emily has been writing s...

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