Interview with Peter Romeyn, Sonar6

Transcript from the Online Recruitment Telegraph - Edition 2 - video

Sonar6 gives its customers a dynamic way of setting and monitoring goals, recognizing wins, planning careers and developing employees.

Sonar6 was founded in 2006 based on the idea that performance management should be simple and rewarding. Growth since then has been rapid. Sonar6 has customers all around the world and is known as an innovator in Human Resource software. Their goal is straight forward: to provide the simplest way to help businesses make better people decisions.

Jafeth Rodriguez, Chairman of RecruitAdvantage interviewed Peter Romayn from Sonar6.

[Jafeth] What is performance management?

[Peter] I talk to thousands of people about performance management and there would be as many definitions of performance management as people you talk to about it. From my perspective, performance management is about helping employees, managers and executives to achieve their objectives in a sustainable manner. It is all about helping people and organisations to achieve their potential.

[Jafeth] What is involved in implementing a performance management system?

[Peter] It can be a simple or a complex process. The first step in any case is to have clear organisational goals. The goals need to be translated to employees’ clear and transparent goals, that take the form of measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). Competencies and desired behaviours need to be selected as part of this process against the job to be performed by the employee. We typically help our clients with all that.

[Jafeth] Is performance management the same as yearly appraisals?

[Peter] They are kind of tied together. Performance management is a continuous process. Appraisals are the way of formalising this yearly or quarterly, the way of enabling the conversations.

[Jafeth] Organisations not being clear has about their organisational goals may find it difficult to implement a performance management system. How do you deal with that?

[Peter] Yes. You are right. Often this is a broken process in organisations. Using discovery workshop helps you to come up with clear goals so you can do this process effectively. This is the hard part but it a very useful conversation for a company. This reflects in your values and in your brand. Without all this it is very difficult to have the right measurable behaviours that characterise a successful organisation.

[Jafeth] What makes Sonar6 stand out among its competitors?

[Peter] We wanted something dramatically different and we put enormous work into this. The key for us is visualisation. In Sonar6 you I see at a glance where I stand, where I am going, where my team stands, and I have the information to be able to make decisions to improve. Any performance management system is useful in terms of being able to have the right conversations about where we are and where we are going. Typical performance management systems, however, are complex and they tend to be put in a drawer somewhere. Our helicopter view allows us to have that analysis for discussion at all times. We try to keep it simple and this enables people to have this process at hand and use it on a continuous basis.

[Jafeth] From our perspective our World revolves around recruitment. How can we align recruitment and performance management?

[Peter] There are a number of things you can do. A performance management system should provide you with organisational strengths and weaknesses. You can have a look at the data you have and deal with your overall strengths and weaknesses in your organisation and then select the right person to fill the gaps.

The other very important aspect is to analyse and recognise your stars. Who are they and why? Then use that knowledge to improve your recruitment success. A performance management system is a repository of data you can pick trends from and translate back into the recruitment process. In other works, there is a strong linkage between performance management and recruitment. By having a performance management system you will be able to make better recruitment decisions.

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