How the GC Index is the solution for finding and retaining the right employees for your business
Author Mike Meyer, Portman Partners Managing Director
What if I said I had a crystal ball to measure the impact someone could and would make on your business? Would you snatch my hand off?
By now, everyone knows hiring the wrong person or the right person at the wrong time is costly. A Forbes article revealed that the US Department of Labor estimates the cost of a failed executive hire to be more than $240,000. Similarly, around the globe, the price of a bad hire is at least 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings. The Uptime Institute forecasts that sector staffing requirements will grow from 2019 levels of 2 million to nearly 2.3 million in 2025, covering more than 230 roles. By adding the pending ‘great’ retirement numbers, which predict up to a third of our sector’s leadership exchanging their business attire for bikinis, trunks and sunscreen, the shortfall could potentially double.
Where do we find all these extra people? They certainly aren’t lost, nor are they hiding within our sector. Instead, they reside in close parallel sectors and potentially well beyond those boundaries. Finding them pressures the search element of any executive search and creates additional challenges for all of us at Portman Partners. For instance, as we go about our headhunting, how should we assess transferable skills, the individual’s suitability, the impact they could make, and the diversity of their experience and thinking? Just as necessary to us and the businesses for which we are identifying candidates are retention and business growth. What are companies in the sector doing to retain the people they have?
The crystal ball solution to those problems is here. It is the GC Index® (GCI). As a partner, Portman Partners is now proudly powered by this digital Organimetric, which measures and describes five proclivities, the five different ways in which people are inclined to make an impact and contribution. The GCI is a unique, global business language that immediately affects 20 business areas, including strategy, organisation and culture, talent acquisition, management and development, change and transformation, DEI, well-being and much more.
Back to my earlier point, Portman Partners manages the additional challenges we face by using robust business tools like the GCI to assess sector newbies. The GCI supplements or can even supplant conventional go-to criteria like those on a traditional CV, such as expertise and experience, and it is far more revealing than any personality test. By the way, I’ve never seen a business decision made based on personality! While valuable, those diagnostic tools cannot measure what The GCI measures–how individuals and teams impact and contribute to a business cycle. How transferable one’s skills and expertise are is important, but assessing what impact those individuals will have is priceless.
The GCI is the world’s first Organimetric that connects people and businesses with data organisations have never had before. It is the only people assessment companies can use in all their business processes and decision-making, enabling leadership teams to align their organisation to the business objectives. The GCI helps employers identify the strengths of their team members and understand the impact each individual will make. This valuable insight lets employers make informed decisions about who is best suited for different roles and how to create the right environment for them to thrive. This leads to unbiased decisions that support the diversity of thought and achieve objectives.
More than ever, organisations need a way to quickly and effectively align all of their people to make their best impact on changing business demands. When someone contributes positively to an organisation, and that contribution is valued, they feel potent. Unleashing individual and collective impact across a distributed workforce is what The GCI does.
Imagine the possibilities if you had at your fingertips a tool that identified your company’s:
Strategists – people who see patterns and the future and engage others with a clear direction that brings focus to action.
Game Changers – people who see possibilities and generate ideas that have the potential to be transformational.
PlayMakers – people who see people who focus on getting the best from others, individually and collectively, in support of agreed objectives.
Implementers – people who see practicalities, get things done, shape strategic plans and deliver tangible outcomes as leaders.
Polishers – people who see potential, create a future to be proud of and focus on continual improvement and the pursuit of excellence.
The GCI augments and complements existing HR and Talent data, enabling organisations to drive better people decisions based on the impact and contribution their people can actually make, enabling them to:
Gain unique insight into people’s impact
Improve business outcomes
Create a common language across the business
Increase individual performance
Increase team performance
Make more informed and accurate people decisions
The GCI is a language and framework that aligns the impact and contribution of all of an organisation’s people to business processes and outcomes.
Portman Partners have adopted the GCI and other technical tools that form part of our processes. When used in conjunction with our unrivalled sector knowledge, our well-established network and our 100% success rate, these tools add significant value to our clients, and are far more reliable than any crystal ball.
About Portman
Portman Partners is the leading niche executive search firm within the digital infrastructure and datacenter sectors working exclusively at the leadership level. The leadership team are sector veterans who have successfully built, operated and sold numerous DI and DC sector businesses before turning their hands to search and recruitment, giving Portman a unique inside-out approach.
About the Author
Mike Meyer (Game Changer/Polisher) is Managing Director and GCologist at Portman Partners who has an established track record of structuring, restructuring and building successful and cohesive teams globally. Through his career in the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa and Africa, he has developed excellent technical knowledge, a true grasp of multicultural and multinational organisations and an impressive industry network.
Mike is a practised industry leader with 25+ years of hands-on experience across Digital Infrastructure, Data Centre, IT, and Telecoms businesses. As a seasoned director, founder, and entrepreneur, he has successfully founded, grown, and exited numerous companies.
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