In today's fast-changing environment, firms' competitive positions are constantly challenged by the emergence of new technologies, products, markets and competitors. Flexibility and adaptability have become key management concepts to develop a sustainable competitive advantage; successful firms apply them in new organizational strategies that put into question many conventional tenets on organizations and their management.

That makes the strategic direction of human resource management a key differentiator for financially successful organizations. Beyond traditional human resources activities, a strong human resource strategy requires direct connections between the value employees’ offer and the company's bottom line.

One of the strategies to answers this challenge is through competency based human resource management. Competency management utilizes a competency framework to align the strategic objectives of the organization with the competencies of your human resources. By applying a systematic approach of measuring individual competencies, ongoing snapshots of the overall knowledge capital could be built within the organization.

An organization can utilize this information to perform individual and organizational analysis, reduce education costs, improve hiring practices, improve retention, improve your human resources performance and developmental planning processes, deploy your human capital more effectively, and help management make strategic decisions regarding readiness to take on more or new projects. In short, competency management is trying to understand where an organization will sit in tomorrow’s world, not where it hopes to sit, accessing where it can be and where it wants to be.

The competency management in SunFish HR allows executives, HR managers, supervisors and employees to work together in ensuring that employees develop the skills and personality traits necessary to achieve corporate goals both current and future. This is done by measuring the hard skills related to their current and future jobs as well as soft skills such as personality, both of which will contribute to their success. The results of this measurement provides the primary input required to effectively develop talent through methods such as training, coaching and new job assignments while also allowing managers to understand obstacles to achieving performance targets and reposition employees appropriately.

In SunFish HR a list of all the organizations competencies, such as hard, soft and job specific competencies is defined in the Competency Library. Individual competencies are assigned to groupings of employees that share a similar job function (job family levels) and as such are expected to show the same ‘must-have’ and ‘should-demonstrate’ qualities. Each competency definition includes detailed scoring information and targets specific to each job family level in order to ensure consistency across the company and to enable cross-functional comparisons. Once the competency library is set up, its data is intertwined with all the strategic features throughout the HR system: Performance Management and Employee Development, Assessment, Career (Path) Planning and Succession Analysis, Training, and Recruitment.

Benefits SunFish HR embeds a complete and flexible competency management system that tracks employees’ skills and competencies, and identifies gaps in order to drive continuous development that ultimately aims at improving individual and organizational performance. Specifically Competency Management delivers the following benefits: Increased HR Department Efficiency The HR Department configures the competency library, with competencies needed for all job family level. Once configured, exceptions and changes can be made quickly without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time. HR department can be completely free from the current time-consuming job of competency management and focus their full effort on employee development. Improved Resource Planning and Deployment Utilizing the competency framework, the company can easily identify and track the knowledge and skills necessary to meet business needs and ever-changing market environments. Knowing its critical skills and competencies is important for any company whether its growing, downsizing or restructuring in order to effectively deploy resources across positions. Over or under competent employees can be minimized since the system will identified the most appropriate position for certain employees based on their competencies. In the case of an employee positioned inappropriately, an alert will inform the HR department to take an appropriate action. Improved Analysis of Employee Competency & Strong Foundation for Talent Management Supervisors, managers and the HR department easily track employee’s core competencies, skills and knowledge, and thus identify any gaps compared to the current or even future position in question. These data then can be used to deliver learning, training, or other developments plans necessary to close these gaps or conduct promotions or career transitions; and since competencies are linked to training, career planning, IDP, assessment, etc. the system will automatically suggest the proper course of action. Additionally, by identifying specific roles with associated competencies for leadership at any level, HRD and managers can build a sustainable leadership pipeline and take action for potential leaders to grow or develop into their envisioned positions.   Better Definition and Adherence to Company Policies Competency management allows the company to define competencies needed for certain positions based on company values and policies. This gives them a clear definition of what their policies are, and once set up, the system guarantees adherence to such policies automatically. Small adjustments to policies that may be required to adapt to the ever changing business and regulatory environment can be done easily and quickly without having to change the overall framework. Improved Standardization    Once competencies have been defined in the library they become the standard of the competency assessment system throughout the organization, ensuring that offices in different cities commit their employees to the same requirements in skills and training to close gaps and have the same position fulfillment criteria for applicants. This brings great consistency to enterprise-wide skill requirements and skill recognition capabilities and enhances employee mobility while management has a clear view of skills and competencies throughout the whole company. Happier Employees and Managers Utilizing competencies allows managers to easily communicate performance expectations and clarify standards of excellence so that employees can clearly understand the key criteria required to be successful in their roles. Together with a more objective assessment of employee strengths, the system provides a clear foundation for dialogue between manager and employee about performance, and career-related issues including targeting areas for professional development and recommending the most beneficial method for skill enhancement.

Features Competency Library With the competency library, organizations can maintain many categories of hard, soft and job specific competencies related to job family levels. Configurations related to competency description, weight, scoring targets, etc. can be adjusted easily based on the company policy, culture, or HR analysis ensuring consistency across the organization. Once set up the competencies are used to analyze employees’ performance, training results, succession, career planning, and applicants’ position match against company standards and job requirements, making cross-functional comparison possible as well. In addition to hard and soft competencies the library further allows the definition of psychological factors that can be assessed when following up an underwhelming, or also outstanding, performance in order to determine the right development approach. Career Planning SunFish HR allows employees to perform self-analysis of their skill match for current and future positions. The system will clearly show them competency gaps and suggest training programs with which to develop certain skills in order to close these gaps. Employees can utilize this analysis to create their career path plan including improvements need to achieve each career milestone. Succession Planning Based on their competencies, SunFish HR identifies the most appropriate employees to replace planned or unplanned losses of key personnel, allowing HRD to build a pool of qualified successor for different positions. When an ideal match is not found, the system recommends alternative candidates and the competencies and skills that each candidate has to develop in order to meet the requirements of the future position. Optionally, the HR and other manager can always request alternative candidates (internally or externally) even if the system has identified an “ideal” match. Succession Analysis and Assignment Once successor have been identified, the succession analysis and assignment feature allows to compare multiple successors for the same position with each other in terms of who matches the competency requirements best overall, who is stronger in which competency, how wide exactly is the competency gap between employee and position requirement, and which training programs should be planned for different successor to close gaps. Additionally, a link is provided to the ‘Employee Dashboard’ to access further information about the successor including his/her last performance evaluation, competency match percentage to the current position, length of service in the company, previous career steps, job grade, etc. - everything to have a more complete picture of the candidates. If there is no successor for certain employee, the system automatically shows an alert and the HR department may take further action. Competency-Based Recruitment in SunFish HR, competencies are also the basis of the recruitment process in two ways: Firstly, recruiters can track applicant’s competencies and compare them to the competencies required for an applied position to determine the candidate with the best match percentage. This can be done within or outside the selection process, which secondly, uses competencies as the standards for assessing shortlisted candidates throughout the different steps of the screening and selection cycle. Search Based on Competency SunFish HR is integrated with a search engine that enables HR administrators to search employees or applicants by certain levels of competency ratings. Trouble Lights Dashboard lights in SunFish HR allow managers and HR department users to watch for and identify issues related to employee competency. Dashboard lights can be configured to identify employees with low level competency, low number of succession candidates for certain positions or virtually any other aspect of the competency management that needs to be tracked. Dashboard lights allow the system to keep track of the company weaknesses from the competency point of view; this feature also relieves the HR department from manually analyzing the competency status that will consume a lot of time and effort.