Baked to Perfection: Modern Foods’ Journey of Identifying High-Potentials

Modern Foods was eyeing expansion in multiple geographies along with branching its business into new categories. An underachieving sales team was a significant hurdle for the company in its growth ambitions. Unable to meet its sales targets, Modern Foods revived its processes, introduced sales automation software, and undertook all possible measures to boost the team’s strength and capabilities. The management considered the need for people intervention after the sales unit was unable to meet its targets.

Modern Foods needed to expand and build a high-performing sales unit along with restructuring its team to utilize its existing talent better. The company required a robust strategy and platform partner to elevate its sales team to the next level.

Modern Foods faced three critical challenges:

It was evident that Modern Foods needed a three-pronged approach for:

• An efficient, accurate, and scalable sales hiring strategy to hire the right people to meet its growing business needs.
• Identifying high-potentials from its existing sales team to create a high-performing business unit.
• An objective plan to manage a multi-generational workforce, team restructuring and promotions.

All of this, tied up with an interactive platform with validated assessments and easy-to-understand reports, positioned Mercer | Mettl as the strategic partner for the organizational growth of Modern Foods.

With the expansion of Modern Foods’ footprints in newer geographies, its first ask was a fool-proof hiring strategy to support its growing business needs. Mercer | Mettl accurately analyzed the competencies needed by Modern Foods for its employees and created a one-of-its-kind sales profiler, carefully mapped to each competency specific and critical to the role.

The profiler identified critical behavioral and cognitive competencies to evaluate a sales person’s true potential.

This battery of sales assessments broadly evaluate candidates on:

The results provided insights into the candidates’ personality at work, identified their strengths and areas of improvement, which enabled Modern Foods to simplify its hiring process and deliver excellent candidate experience.

Identifying High-Potentials through VADC

Modern Foods intended to identify high-potentials from its existing team that would have enabled the expansion of business into untapped territories. A virtual assessment and development center (VADC) was the tool of choice. The teams were spread across the country, in addition to being multi-generational and of certain seniority, and thus were unwilling to travel. Mercer | Mettl simulated a real assessment center for them through the VADC tool.

Given its easy scalability, logistical comfort, and ease of access for candidates, VADC was considered to be the best forecast of job performance and future potential as it consisted of tasks and activities that made up the job.

Mercer | Mettl’s VADC toolkit helped Modern Foods to identify high-performing, high-potential candidates to form a new team that would bring about the significant transformation with improved targets. A first in the history of Modern Foods, Mercer | Mettl’s VADC empowered them to move away from relying solely on performance data and adopt a more forward-looking approach with potential data. VADC combined psychometric, cognitive, and situational judgement tests, with an external assessor, to consolidate a team that would drive the future of business.

The tool enabled objective assessments by eliminating internal stakeholder biases. It offered a comprehensive evaluation of the candidate’s behavior, traits, and cognition. It also provided immediate reports that helped Modern Foods make timely decisions for organizational restructuring and workforce optimization and facilitated an environment for further learning and development initiatives.

Organizational restructuring: promotion and retention

Lastly, being an old organization it employed a multi-generational workforce. With conventional practices like promotions being tied to the time spent in the organization, Modern Foods was facing stagnancy. In the current dynamic business environment, it was essential for Modern Foods to move away from this age-old practice and adopt a more agile strategy.

Mercer | Mettl’s solutions helped their workforce to evolve in their career paths by enabling them to take objective decisions on promotions that were not just linked to the past performance, where a suite of assessments was used to identify, retain, and promote high-potentials.

Through its extensive library of highly validated assessments, interactive and user-friendly platform, subject-matter expertise, customizable and scalable solutions, consultative approach, easy-to-understand reports, committed customer team, and quick turnaround time, Mercer | Mettl helped Modern Foods to revamp its people management strategy for organizational growth entirely.

Here are some key results:

• Enabled building a high-performing sales team to respond to growing business needs and challenges.
• Reduced new-hire attrition in sales by 33%.
• Improved accuracy in screening by 66%.
• 75% of candidates hired through Mercer | Mettl’s assessments performed significantly better than candidates hired through other means.
• Created a competency framework that was in-line with business goals.
• Helped identify high-potentials, and differentiate performance data from potential data.
• Lowered cost and eliminated logistical hassles by conducting a virtual assessment and development center.
• Suggested a further learning and development plan, marking areas of improvement, through immediate feedback and interactive reports.
• Helped Modern Foods move away from a time-bound appraisal approach to a more scientifically validated approach.
• Optimized workforce by assessing a multi-generational workforce on accountability, collaboration, agility, and people management.

Modern Foods has demonstrated faith in Mercer | Mettl’s products and services, buoyed by the results of the product offerings. It partnered with Mercer | Mettl to make data-backed decisions to promote its blue-collar workforce. Mercer | Mettl has assisted Modern Foods in identifying, developing, and improving its frontline workforce and is poised to play a vital role in its ongoing growth story.