Creating Effective Talent Snapshot Questions

Customer Success Updated by Customer Success

Talent Snapshots enables you to collate data from your managers about your employees' performance, potential, or other related matters. You may wish to gather this kind of data once or twice a year to help inform your decisions around reward, promotions and talent/succession planning.

However, creating the right questions and answers is key to its success and this can sometimes prove challenging. So, we've created a simple framework (below) that you can work through to help you to come up with the right questions.

Work through the following steps in turn:  

1. Although there is no limit to the number of questions Clear Review lets you create, think about what Talent Snapshot question you would ask if you could only have one. 

This will help you to get to the heart of what you are trying to uncover.

2. With this fundamental understanding, expand this to a maximum four or five questions, however, limit yourself to only Yes or No responses at this stage.

Having only yes or no responses forces the question wording to be as targeted as possible. Yes/no questions are easier for managers to answer and less prone to subjectivity.

3. Review your questions above. Is there any information that you need that you cannot get from these yes/no answer questions?

If so, consider whether additional response options or an additional question is required. If you feel you need to add additional questions, is it possible to drop some of your existing questions to keep the number to 5?

4. Imagine what most of your managers might answer for each of the questions. Will such answers provide the differentiation that you need? If not, you might need to reword one or more of the questions.

For example, if you have a question that attempts to identify high performers and you can imagine a lot of your managers answering 'Yes' for many of their team members, then that question will not be an effective differentiator. You need to set the bar higher or make the question more specific.

5. Give the draft questions to a few of your managers to answer for their team members.

  • Could they answer the questions easily, or did they require a long time to think about them? If the questions are worded well with the right answer options, managers should be able to answer them quickly and easily without much thought.
  • Was it obvious to them what the questions meant or did they feel they needed further guidance? If further guidance was needed, then the questions are not specific or targeted enough.
  • How long did it take them to answer the questions for all of their team members? Did they stay engaged with the process for all of their team members, or did they start to lose focus/interest part way through? If they began to lose focus, their answers for the last team members they answered for are likely to be less considered and objective than the first team members. In which case you need to reduce the number of questions to avoid 'question fatigue'.

6. Make any final adjustments to your questions based on the feedback from your managers.

General Tips:

  • Less is more - try to keep to a maximum of 5 questions. The answers you get from your managers will be more accurate and objective if there are fewer questions. If you ask too many questions, it will become a box ticking exercise without much thought going into it.
  • Read your questions as if you are a manager answering them for your team. Do you understand exactly what each question means and can you answer them quickly and easily?
  • Remember, if there are a number of different insights that you are looking to gain from Talent Snapshots, it does not all need to be done in one single round. It is possible to have separate rounds during the year that are specific and targeted to a particular outcome (e.g. pay questions could be separated from promotion/succession questions). 

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