How bench strength is calculated

Bench strength measures the depth of your internal succession bench for a job. It helps answer the question: Do we have enough qualified and available people who could realistically step into this role if needed? Bench strength appears in the Pipelines table and Pipeline details. If you’re new to the Pipelines workflow, see Manage pipelines first.

What does the score mean?

Bench strength is displayed as a whole-number score from 0 to 10, with higher scores representing greater internal succession coverage. A score of:

• 0 means there is currently no qualifying bench for the job.

• 10 represents the maximum score and indicates very strong succession coverage relative to the number of positions associated with the job.

The score measures more than the number of people shown in the pipeline. It also considers whether those people meet the organization’s matching and readiness requirements, whether they’re potential successors for other jobs, and how many positions may need to be filled.

Who can contribute to bench strength?

Being shown in a pipeline doesn’t necessarily mean a person contributes to its bench strength.

To qualify, a person must meet the minimum job match configured by your organization.

Quinto also excludes:

• Current incumbents in the job

• People whose current job is at a higher level than the pipeline job

• People assigned a readiness level configured to exclude them from bench strength

A person who doesn’t yet have a readiness level is included by default, provided they meet the other requirements. This means an employee may appear relevant to succession planning but intentionally not contribute to the calculation. For example, your organization might configure Not interested or Unavailable as excluded readiness levels. Administrators can manage these settings under Admin > Pipelines. See Configure pipelines for more information.

Why isn’t bench strength simply a headcount?

Simply counting everyone who qualifies as a successor could make your organization’s succession coverage look stronger than it really is.

Consider an employee who is a strong potential successor for five different jobs. That person can’t ultimately fill all five jobs at once.

Quinto accounts for this by reducing how much the person contributes to each individual bench when they’re also a qualifying successor for other jobs.

Someone who is primarily a successor for one job contributes their full weight to that job. Someone who is spread across several succession opportunities contributes less to each one.

A broadly qualified employee still represents meaningful succession coverage, so their contribution never falls below half the value of someone who is only a successor for one qualifying job.

How is the score determined?

At a high level, Quinto:

1. Identifies people who meet the organization’s minimum job match and other eligibility requirements.

2. Removes people whose readiness level excludes them from bench strength.

3. Adjusts each remaining person’s contribution based on the other qualifying jobs for which they’re also a potential successor.

4. Adds those contributions together to create a weighted bench.

5. Compares the weighted bench with the number of positions associated with the job.

6. Rounds the result to a whole-number score from 0 to 10.

The score is capped at 10. Once the weighted bench is sufficiently large compared with the number of positions, additional depth doesn’t increase the displayed score.

Example

Consider a job with one position and three potential successors:

• One employee primarily qualifies for this job and contributes fully to its bench.

• A second employee also qualifies for two other jobs, so their contribution is reduced.

• A third employee qualifies for several other jobs, so their contribution is reduced further.

Instead of treating the job as having three fully available successors, Quinto recognizes that two of those employees are also potential successors elsewhere. The resulting weighted bench is compared with the number of positions for the job to determine its bench-strength score.

This prevents the same employees from making several different jobs appear to have fully independent succession coverage.

What can change a bench-strength score?

A job’s bench strength can change when:

• Someone’s job match moves above or below the organization’s minimum match.

• A person’s readiness changes to a level that is included or excluded.

• A person becomes a potential successor for additional jobs.

• A person no longer qualifies as a successor for another job.

• The number of positions associated with the job changes.

• The organization’s minimum job match changes.

• The readiness configuration changes.

Bench strength therefore represents your organization’s current succession coverage, rather than a permanent rating assigned to a job. To review changes made to readiness or job criticality, open the pipeline’s History panel. See Manage pipelines for instructions.

How is bench strength used?

Bench strength is useful on its own, but it is also an input into succession risk.

For succession-risk calculations, Quinto groups bench strength into four categories:

Quinto then combines this category with the job’s criticality to determine succession risk. See How succession risk is calculated for the complete risk matrix and examples.