I was recently facilitating our, You’re NOT The Person I Hired, workshop with CEOs and key executives. As is often the case, the subject of reference checking came up. Most in the audience tended to agree that checking references is a waste of time. After all, candidates only give references they are sure will say positive things about them. Don’t you agree?
Then a CFO sitting in the back raised his hand to disagree. He told the story of a controller he was about to hire near the border in Texas. This was a difficult position to fill as there were a lot of specific requirements. Finally, after an arduous search he found his person. She had all of the qualifications and most importantly he really like her. The final step was to conduct a few reference checks. She handed him a list of 30 references. WOW he thought, this person really has a lot of people willing to vouch for her. Then he picked 5 of them and started calling. The first call was to a former boss. He introduced himself and explained that he was calling to conduct a reference check on Mary. The line went silent. The pause was so long that he thought they were disconnected and asked if the reference was still on the line. The reference replied yes and then stated, “Mary gave me as reference? I can’t believe it. We fired her because she stole from us. She did pay us back but she stole from us.” Now there was silence from him. He didn’t know what to say or how to respond.
This is just one of many examples of what can happen on a reference check and why you should always perform your due diligence. Granted, this may only happen once in your career, but in this case the once may have saved the company thousands if she has stolen again.
I have conducted thousands of reference checks in my 30 year career as an executive recruiter. I have learned that more often than not someone will give me a reference they expect to be positive and it turns negative. It is for this reason that I always check references. Like the CFO in this example, it has saved me from making some big mistakes. It only takes one bad reference to realize that catching that one person was worth all the others.
If you have stories or experiences regarding strange things that have happened when you have conducted a reference check I would love to hear about them and share them with others. Please take a moment to tell others your story.
I conducted a poll on LinkedIn in which 54% replied that they have had people give them a negative reference. This goes to show that even though the person giving the reference expects a positive reference they often don’t get one
Join the other 10,000 CEOs, key executives and HR professionals and download a FREE copy of our best-selling book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired. Just CLICK HERE and under the FREE Hiring Resources section you can download our free eBook.
Retaining your best talent is always the best thing any company can do. Download our FREE Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognitions Matrix. It will help you retain your best people without additional compensation. CLICK HERE to download under the Free Resources section.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Brad
Most of the methods used to attract candidates bring forth candidates who are floating in the shallow end of the pond. They fall into what we call the “aggressive” candidate pond – those who typically have excessive turnover, are toxic, and cannot deliver the performance you desire. These are frequently NOT the best candidates (I think this is known as a classic understatement).
Over the last 25 years of leading hiring workshops and seminars, I hear in almost every presentation that finding enough good candidates is one of the greatest hiring frustrations of executives and managers. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the economy is going straight up, straight down, or sideways – it’s always tough to find good people. Filling seats is easy. Run an online advertisement on a job board (the most common tactic), get 300 responses – 298 of which you can’t figure out what keyword they clicked on to apply to your ad. 2 in the group looked good, but they went off the market in the blink of an eye. 3 weeks later you’re looking at everyone else’s retreads, rejects, and poor performers.
How to Get Depressed Over Finding Candidates
Depressing element #1: Most companies have a tendency to attract the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool. One of the key problems in hiring is that if all you are seeing is the bottom 1/3, then you are doomed to fail before you even start the hiring process. it doesn’t matter how great the job sounds, the stellar rep of your company, or your personal charisma in the interview – if all you’re seeing is the bottom 1/3, then that’s the group from which you’ll hire the next member of your team.
How you write your job ad and where you place it dictates who you get. When you run job advertisements geared to pull candidates who need jobs, that’s pretty much what you get – okay sometimes you get lucky and find a good one – but most of the time you get the bottom of the pile, the best of the worst, or as one of my clients called it the other day: the cream of the crap!
Depressing Element #2: Not only do your job ads attract candidates floating near the surface of the pond – you then consider that to be the entire candidate pool from which you can make your choice. This group of candidates who land on your doorstep through traditional job advertising (read: job descriptions masquerading as advertising) is at best 10-15% of the viable candidate pool. There’s a huge universe of potential candidates who are much better- and you’re letting them slip through your fingers by focusing on the wrong group – the aggressive candidate group seeking a new job.
You’re acting like the basketball coach of your local public high school – trapped in to taking whomever shows up that year. Unlike your local public high school, you have unlimited ability to attract better talent. Why do you keep pretending you’re the coach of a high school team adding people to your team just because they showed up?
Depressing Element #3: We start the entire hiring process by attracting the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pond. If that’s not bad enough, you compound this hiring mistake by turning off the very best performers. Top talent doesn’t care that you want someone with 2 years of X, and 4 years of Y, and knowledge of ABC systems. They want to know what’s in it for me? What am I going to learn, what impact will I have, and what will become for having been in this role. If you can’t answer those questions in specific detail, then top talent takes their hand and pulls it down. We want them to raise their hand. We want them to show excitement to learn about your very special opportunity.
When you tell the world about your job ad in the tone of a drill sergeant barking orders of what you deamnd, you REPEL, DISGUST, and TURN-OFF top talent. Top talent DOES NOT CARE what you want as an employer. 99.9% of all job ads fall into the category of either the entire job description or a modified version of the job description masquerading as a job ad. This is NOT a compelling description of an opportunity for a top performer. It’s basically a job description – and it’s worthless as a tool to attract great talent. Is it any wonder why most executives and managers are frustrated by the process of finding great employees?
Why Do You Keep Failing At Attracting Great Employees?
Why do we post job descriptions on job boards and let them masquerade as job ads? They’re boring, mundane, depressing, and lack anything top talent would be interested in exploring.
We do it because we’re programmed to do it. This is what the retired guy did 25 years ago, who trained my boss, who trained me. We call this tribal hiring. How many of the things that go on in your company are tribal – you have no idea why it’s done that way – yet that’s the way you’ve always done it. Like passive sheep, we follow blindly in the footsteps of our ancestors.
Why do we do this? Why do we fall victim to tribal hiring. Why are we using the same recruiting practices that have been in existence since Henry Ford started cranking out Model-Ts on the production line? Perhaps, that’s the subject for another blog post.
Was it Benjamin Franklin who said that doing the same thing over and over hoping for different results was the definition of insanity? Is your company the poster child for the Definition of Insanity when it comes to finding great employees?
Overcoming the Hiring Mistake of Fishing in Shallow Waters
First, if you want to attract better candidates, you’ve got to develop a Compelling Marketing Statement. A Compelling Marketing Statement is like the royal trumpeters announcing to the world something special. We take an entire chapter in our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, and focus in on this one subject. As you probably know, the digital version is available for downloading FREE from our website. You can also find FREE examples of Compelling Marketing Statements on our website by clicking here.
Secondly, you’ve got to use the three primary best practices in hunting for the best talent. The best are NOT going to simply show up on your doorstep begging for a job. They’ve got multiple offers, decline to interview regularly, and are choosy when it comes to deciding when they’ll raise their hand to express interest in a job opening. To effectively find great talent, you’ve to go to where they are “hanging out”. No longer does a “build it and they will come” approach work in attracting great employees.
The three primary best practices that could yield great candidates include:
- Raising the quantity and quality of employee, customer, client, vendor, and supplier referrals of great talent
- Using a Compelling Marketing Statement as a job ad, placing it in front of where your target candidate will most likely see it
- Moving from 6 degrees of separation to 1 degree of separation through effective networking, both off-line and on-line with social media
We’ve produced a ton of content related to finding great employees. Check out our videos, audio programs, and other content here on Vistage Village. Future blog posts will explore each of these best practices, including the writing of a Compelling Marketing Statement in more detail.
Share your story of falling victim to the hiring mistake of fishing in shallow waters, OR your story of how you overcame this very common hiring mistake.
If you would like to learn how to fish in deeper waters, download a free digital copy of our book, You’re NOT the Person I Hired, and read our most popular chapter, How to Attract the Bottom Third of the Candidate Pool.
I recently asked over one hundred CEOs and their key executives, “Is hiring top talent critical to the success of your organization?” Not surprising that everyone replied “Yes.” Not simply important, but critical. So then I asked,”If it is critical, then how many of you spend time each month focusing on hiring, excluding when you are actively looking to fill a position?” Not surprising, only three people raised their hand.
WOW, something that is critical to the success of the organization, gets virtually zero time unless there is a current need. Is that the way most critical issues are handled in your company? No strategic planning. No thought or action discussed or taken until the problem arises? Only once the problem arises is it dealt with it. Until then it is that famous management strategy, “Out of sight, out of mind?” or “We will cross that bridge when we get there.”
I believe this management style only happens with hiring. Most other critical issues are regularly discussed, on-going programs such as, cost reductions, product development, increasing sales or market share, customer service, improving operational efficiencies are all constantly discussed and often major components of the company’s strategic plan. In fact, I have seen many strategic plans that all have great plans for growth. Yet few ever include a strategy for hiring the people needed to execute the plan as the company grows. Strategic hiring is rarely part of a strategic plan.
I believe companies that truly want to hire top talent and do it on a consistent basis must avoid these four major land mines when hiring:
1) Untrained Managers – Discussed in part 1.
2) Poorly Defined Job – Discussed in part 1.
3) Finding candidates – This is one of the biggest problems faced by companies. This happens as a result of number two. Most companies search for the least qualified to start with. Then they complain that all they are seeing is unqualified candidates.
The other issue causing this problem is that most companies start the hiring process too late. They wait until they absolutely need someone. Then they expect that when they are ready to hire someone, at that moment in time, top talent will also magically appear on the market, find them, and be so compelled after reading the minimum job description to update their resume, and respond. YEAH and a multimillion dollar customer will also magically call too.
Reactive hiring is a thing of the past. Hiring top talent requires proactive hiring. This means your hiring managers must be in the market engaging people all the time. They should be connecting with people on LinkedIn, involved in professional associations, and commit at least an hour or two a month to hiring. Few managers spend any time engaging potential candidates when they aren’t actively hiring. In fact, many even discard resumes as they come in if they aren’t hiring. Finding top talent doesn’t take a lot of time each month, but it does take a consistent monthly effort of an hour or two.
4) Disrespecting the Candidates – Top talent, especially those candidates who are working and in no hurry to make a job change (referred to as passive candidates) will walk away from a manager or company if they aren’t respected in the interviewing process.
Some common complaints that left candidates feeling disrespected include:
- The hiring manager being late for the interview. Few managers would accept it if the candidate was late, so why should it be OK for the manager?
- Lack of preparation by the interviewer. Again, if the candidate came in unprepared would that be acceptable?
- Taking calls during the interview.
- Finally, telling the candidate that if they have any further questions to call them. Then ignoring the calls. If managers don’t respect the candidate during the hiring process, it isn’t going to get any better once they are hired.
The interview is a PR event. These candidates will make sure others know how they were treated. They may post it on a website or hear about a person they know is interviewing and ask them about their experience. Bad PR is never a good thing. This is an easy thing to fix. It only takes treating candidates the same way you would treat a customer.
Join the other 10,000 CEOs, key executives and HR professionals and download a FREE copy of our best-selling book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired. Just CLICK HERE and under the FREE Hiring Resources section you can download our free eBook.
Retaining your best talent is always the best thing any company can do. Download our FREE Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognitions Matrix. It will help you retain your best people without additional compensation. CLICK HERE to download under the Free Resources section.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Brad
Tags: candidate fit, Candidate Motivation, Communication, Communications, Company Culture, Culture Dysfunction, finding people, Finding people using social media, Hiring, hiring best practices, Hiring cost, Hiring Failure, Hiring Manager Training, hiring mistakes, hiring process improvement, hiring skills, Hiring Templates, Networking, Networking Mistakes, recruiting process | 
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Comments (0) I recently asked over one hundred CEOs and their key executives, “Is hiring top talent critical to the success of your organization?” Not surprising everyone replied “Yes.” Not simply important, but critical. So then I asked,”If it is critical, then how many of you spend time each month focusing on hiring, excluding when you are actively looking to fill a position?” Not surprising, only three people raised their hand.
WOW, something that is critical to the success of the organization, gets virtually zero time unless there is a current need. Is that the way most critical issues are handled in your company? No strategic planning. No thought or action discussed or taken until the problem arises? Only once the problem arises is it dealt with it. Until then it is that famous management strategy, “Out of sight, out of mind?” or “We will cross that bridge when we get there.”
I believe this management style only happens with hiring. Most other critical issues are regularly discussed, on-going programs such as, cost reductions, product development, increasing sales or market share, customer service, improving operational efficiencies are all constantly discussed and often major components of the company’s strategic plan. In fact, I have seen many strategic plans that all have great plans for growth. Yet few ever include a strategy for hiring the people needed to execute the plan as the company grows. Strategic hiring is rarely part of a strategic plan.
I believe companies that truly want to hire top talent and do it on a consistent basis must avoid these four major land mines when hiring:
1) Untrained Managers – Hands down the number one reason hiring fails. This is the biggest problem with hiring in most companies. Few managers are actually properly trained on how to hire. Most managers have never even attended one course or read a book on hiring. For the few that have had training, it is usually limited to interviewing training. Granted this is better than nothing, but interviewing is only one step in an effective hiring process. If you aren’t finding qualified candidates, all interviewing training will do is validate they aren’t qualified. If the job isn’t properly defined then where you look for candidates may not be the right place, resulting in unqualified candidates.
The fact is the vast majority of managers use the “Tribal Hiring Training” program. Too often a person learns to hire from the person that hired them. And the person that hired them learned from the person that hired then, and so it goes all the way back to Moses. All this really does is perpetuate hiring mistakes from one generation to another. It doesn’t resolve the problem.
If companies are serious about improving hiring, step one is to develop an effective hiring process and then training their managers in all aspects of the process.
2) Poorly Defined Job – This mistake results in the search going sideways before it even starts. Traditional job descriptions for the most part aren’t job descriptions at all. Most describe a person. Does this read like your job descriptions; Minimum 5 years experience, minimum BA degree, then a list of minimum skills/knowledge and certifications, and let’s not forget the endless list of behaviors the candidate must have, team player, high energy, self-starter, strategic thinker, good communicator, BLAH BLAH BLAH. Of course there is also the list of the basic duties, tasks and responsibilities. These are really important, but as a person with 5 years of experience, who doesn’t know these already? This traditional job description defines a minimally qualified person, not the job. So before the search starts it is all about finding the least qualified person. Any wonder why the least qualified person shows up at your door?
Instead of defining the least qualified person, start by defining superior performance in the role or the results expected to be achieved once the person is on board. For example, Improve customer service feedback scores from X to Y. Reduce turnover from X% to Y% within the next twelve months. Implement a sales forecasting process that includes a rolling six month forecast that is accurate within X% of actual sales. Now this is the real job. It defines expectations, not some vague terms or minimum requirements. For every job there are usually at least four of these results required. The job is being defined by performance. In order for the person to be able to achieve these results they must have the right experience. Maybe it is five years, maybe three or maybe ten, it doesn’t matter. If they can do these it is enough. Now go find a person that can explain how they will deliver these once on board and you have the right person.
3) Finding candidates – See part 2
4) Disrespecting the Candidates – See part 2
Join the other 10,000 CEOs, key executives and HR professionals and download a FREE copy of our best-selling book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired.” Just CLICK HERE and under the FREE Hiring Resources section you can download our free eBook.
Retaining your best talent is always the best thing any company can do. Download our FREE Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognitions Matrix. It will help you retain your best people without additional compensation. CLICK HERE to download under the Free Resources section.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Brad
Tags: Behavioral interviewing, finding people, Finding people using social media, hiring best practices, Hiring cost, Hiring Errors, Hiring Failure, Interview Mistakes, Interviewing, Job Boards, job description, Job Leads, Job Opportunity, Job Referrals, Job Search Mistakes, Jobs, Marketing, Marketing your company, sourcing process improvement, Sourcing Talent, Top talent |
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Be ANGRY that your employees are NOT performing at a higher level than expected. Be ANGRY that your executives and managers are NOT hiring outstanding talent at every level. Be ANGRY over hiring mistakes.
In a blog article published on the Chinnovate.com blog, Tim Yanglin quoted a McKinsey Study looking at the productivity difference between average and mediocre employees. This study was done with major corporations. My perception – although I’ve not quantifiably tested it – is that in small businesses and entrepreneurial companies, top talent is more productive than average talent – sometimes by a factor of 4X-10X. Here’s the study the author of the blog article quoted:
Global consulting firm McKinsey, for example, reports that top performing executives deliver more than twice the productivity of average performers.
The report continues to identify that it takes a mix of top performing executives and leaders to pursue and implement a variety of growth strategies, which will lead to consistently superior results. On the other hand, McKinsey found no measurable correlation between revenue growth and teams with solid but unexceptional leadership; mediocre or B-level players will deliver average performance.
If the gap is so large, why do you allow your executives and managers to continue to hire underperforming, average, and mediocre employees? Let’s take this one step further – why do you allow these individuals to remain on your team?
Get angry over this issue. Make hiring top performers a key initiative instead of falling victim to desperation hiring, making multiple mistakes in the hiring process, and taken anyone who basically shows up at your doorstep.
Everyone complains about their team, hiring, performance, and productivity. Next to talking about your ailments, this probably ranks up there for executives as their next biggest “whine”. Let’s stop whining and start doing something about it.
In 25 years of executive search, over 1000 search assignments, 250,000 candidates interviewed, and over 35,000 executives and managers who have seen our workshop program titled, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, most companies give the concept of hiring great employees lip service. Their actions don’t match up with their words.
Here’s a quick test to determine if your actions match up with your words:
- Do you set performance expectations for all employees?
- Are the performance expectations in place before searching for a new employee?
- Do you have a structured program of rewards and consequences for meeting or missing expectations?
- How many people on your team right now are NOT living up to your performance expectations? Do you written performance improvement plans for each one?
- Are all your executives and managers well-trained on how to use best practices in hiring to find, interview, and select top performers for their teams?
If you answered NO to more than 2 of these questions, perhaps it’s time for a “check-up” of your hiring practices. You can download our FREE hiring process self-assessment checklist to determine if your organization is capable of hiring top talent.
You should be angry over these issues – both at yourself and your executive team – for allowing it to happen. Stop just letting hiring “happen”. Drive better company results by being the visible and LOUD champion of hiring and retaining top performers.
Here’s the key: the quality of employees in your organization determines your “glass ceiling”. If you have average and mediocre people, then your results will be mediocre and average. If your not getting exceptional performance within your industry or market – beating your competitors every day and generating above average metrics in revenue, profit, and operational excellence, then perhaps it’s time to take a look at the quality of your team.
Barry Deutsch
Question: When do most companies start the hiring process? Answer: When they need someone. It can then take up to three months to hire someone. By this time, the hiring manager and their staff is overworked, projects are falling behind schedule, overtime is through the roof, work is backing up, short cuts are causing mistakes, and everyone is frustrated. At this point the hiring manager is desperate. We call this stage in the hiring process, desperation hiring. The only good news is that the hiring manager doesn’t reach the depression stage until 6 months.
Question: What kind of hire do you think the hiring manager will make? Answer: Poor. They are likely to take the next best person that comes along, or worse, settle for one of the previously interviewed good solid below average candidates.
Why does this happen? We believe it’s because most companies don’t start the hiring process until they need someone. They then cross their fingers and hope that the person with top talent that they want to hire just happens to be looking at the same time.
We refer to this as the “random luck” hiring methodology. Unfortunately, this is the hiring methodology for many companies.
Desperation hiring is one of the easiest mistakes to correct in the hiring process since most hiring managers know in advance of an opening. Granted not always, but most of the time good managers know.
Simple recommendations to avoid desperation hiring:
- Begin a soft launch. Don’t wait until the last minute to start the search. There are many things hiring managers can do prior to instigating a full blown job search. Start letting people know you will be looking to hire a person and ask for referrals. Let everyone in the company know the opening is coming.
- Consider attending local association meetings that these people attend. Start identifying and engaging people you believe have the right attitude to fit your culture.
- Use the social media sites to identify potential candidates. LinkedIn is one of the best tools for doing this. You can search LinkedIn for people in your geographic community. Start by requesting to be linked together. Then maybe meet one morning for coffee just to get to know each other. Don’t even mention you are considering hiring someone.
- If hiring sales people, start asking customers who they think are the best sales people calling on them. Your customers know it is in their best interests to have the best sales people calling on them.
- If you attend trade shows, when you meet people you think will be a good fit you should talk to them, get their business card, and follow-up once back in the office. A follow-up might be as simple as an email letting them know you enjoyed meeting them at the show. It could be some information on your company or anything that begins to engage this person. Eventually, ask to meet for coffee or for a short meeting when you are in their area.
- When unsolicited resumes come in don’t just throw them away because you aren’t looking now. Instead review them, and if the person looks like someone you would hire start to connect with them. Begin the rapport building process. Recruiters do this all the time. That is why we seem to always have candidates when companies call us. I have placed people 2 years after first receiving an unsolicited resume.
- Start building a queue of potential people. Most companies and hiring managers know those key positions that are hard to fill. These are the positions you should always be on the lookout for. Just start a file on who and where these people are. Don’t worry that they may not be on the market 6 months from now. If they are passive candidates chances are very good they will be available.
There are a lot of things that hiring managers can do proactively that will shorten the hiring process and bring better candidates to the table. Too often most managers only think about hiring when they need someone. Like most things, the time to do anything is when you don’t have to and aren’t under pressure.
Committing just a few hours a month can help your company or department avoid desperation hiring.
Join the other 10,000 CEOs, key executives and HR professionals and download a FREE copy of our best-selling book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired.” Just CLICK HERE and under the FREE Hiring Resources section you can download our free eBook.
Retaining your best talent is always the best thing any company can do. Download our FREE Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognitions Matrix. It will help you retain your best people without additional compensation. CLICK HERE to download under the Free Resources section.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Brad Remillard
We thought you might like the audio version of our Hiring Mistakes Series. This particular audio program is titled “Hiring Mistake #1 – Inadequate Job Descriptions“. The audio file is approximately 6 minutes in length and can also be downloaded through our iTunes listing of “IMPACT Hiring Solutions”.
Podcast (hiring-audio-hot-tips): Play in new window
This mistake is made more often than any other error in attempting to hire great employees. It is the primary cause of hiring failure that occurs over 50% of the time at executive and managerial levels. We’ve also created a video version of this hiring mistake which you can find by clicking here.
If you prefer to read about this common hiring mistake in a blog post, please click here.
If you’ve not yet taken our Hiring Assessment, click here to download this simple tool to discover if your organization is capable of hiring top talent and great employees.
Barry Deutsch
On a recent Harvard Business Review Blog Article, titled Good Managers Lead Through a Team, Linda Hill & Kent Lineback spoke about how the ability to manage teams is one of the key pillars of success for managers and executives. This an excellent and well-written article that all managers and executives should read.
I commented on the article since I felt the authors missed the key point about people and teams. It’s not as much the ability to manage them – as it is the issue of hiring and retaining them.
Here were my comments to the authors. What are your thoughts?
Excellent post about a key pillar of successful managers and leaders. I’ll go one step further. In our executive search practice, we’ve completed well over 1,000 projects and interviewed over 250,000 managerial and executive candidates over the last 25 years. We’ve identified that the NUMBER ONE element of success for managers and executives is hiring and retaining a top-notch team.
Even hiring managers and executives with technical weaknesses in their functional niche or specialty out-performed their more technically adept peers due to their stronger teams. It affects career progression, job opportunities, bonus and incentives, and job satisfaction.
Managers and Executives who hired middle-of-the-road minimally qualified candidates, and accepted mediocrity among their team members, had average and mediocre careers – passed over for promotions, denied new opportunities, and failed to earn their full bonus potential.
No other trait or ability appears to come close to the correlation of success for managers and executives and their ability to hire and retain top talent.
Unfortunately, most companies give the concept of hiring top talent and “our people are our most important asset” lip service. Rewards, incentives, goals, objectives, and consequences don’t match the propaganda most companies spew out about their people and teams. You can find isolated cases of companies that make hiring and retaining a top priority – but the list is very small. More likely, you’ll find a few managers and executives scattered through-out different companies who instinctively “GET IT.”
Why do you think there is such a gap between the generic words about the importance of people and team members vs. the practical application on a day-to-day basis?
Share your experience of what happens when managers and executives do a great job of hiring and retaining top talent vs. what happens when weak, average, and mediocre people are hired and “tolerated.”
If you would like to read the full article, click the link below:
Good Managers Lead Through A Team
Barry Deutsch
PS: Download a copy of our best-selling book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” and take our Hiring Process Assessment to determine if your organization is capable of hiring top talent.
Part One listed four of seven things companies can do to retain their top talent without spending a lot or giving increases in compensation.
The first four from Part One are:
1) Verbal Praise
2) Achievement Awards
3) Learning and Development
4) Fun and Recreation Events
Each of these can be done at the department or company level. Each demonstrates a culture that rewards people for outstanding effort, provides a positive culture, and a culture that signals respect for the employee.
The last three are:
5) Company Wide Attention This is a step up from department rewards and recognition. This is at the company level. It is great to be honored or recognized by one’s boss, however, when it is by the CEO or at a company level it is a completely different experience. Examples include, recognition in the company newsletter or on its Website, the up front parking space, a picture on the Wall of Fame, recognition at the annual staff meeting, a medal of distinction, any seemingly small thing for exceptional performance, for performing beyond the call of duty or an event that demonstrates extra effort.
It is often these small things that have the biggest and lasting impact.
6) Impactful and Meaningful Work This is one of the biggest reasons top talent contact executive recruiters. Top talent must be constantly challenged. They want to know what is expected of them. When clear direction is consistently lacking, they become frustrated and disengage. However, when top talent have a target to hit they will not only engage but strive to hit the bull’s eye.
Giving your best people additional challenges doesn’t mean you have to constantly be expanding their responsibilities. There is a lot of ground between saying, “That is your job and that is all there is.” to time-to-time challenging them with a special project, taking something off of your desk and giving it to them, allowing them to serve on an ad hoc project, stretching them with some strategic thinking, or involving them in an inter-department project. We find that all it takes is as little as 5% of top talent’s time to be focused on impactful and meaningful work to make a difference.
7) Feedback This seems so obvious but many managers fail to do it. This is not the “good job” feedback discussed earlier. This feedback is at a much higher level. This is feedback that all top talent want and few get. This is what we call, 1-2-1 time. These sessions can be as short as 20 minutes a month. These 1-2-1 sessions focus on their growth, on improvement, build rapport, show genuine interest by the manager, and give time to demonstrate a personal interest in that individual. In our experience, when a manager takes the opportunity to conduct a 1-2-1 on a regular basis, the employee feels a part of the organization. They have the opportunity to be involved in the department, they can give and get feedback, participate, and be heard by their supervisor.
The 1-2-1 can be one of the most powerful experiences for an employee and their supervisor and it can be done in just 20 minutes a month.
Doing one or all of these seven things can dramatically impact your department or organization. In these difficult times any one of these will cement the loyalty of those top performers to you and your company. They will stand by you in difficult times and excel in great times
Join the other 10,000 CEOs, key executives and HR professionals and download a FREE copy of our best-selling book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired.” Just CLICK HERE and under the FREE Hiring Resources section you can download our free eBook.
Retaining your best talent is always the best thing any company can do. Download our FREE Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognitions Matrix. It will help you retain your best people without additional compensation. CLICK HERE to download under the Free Resources section.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Brad Remillard
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Below is our video version of the Number One Hiring Mistake that leads to hiring failure. This 6 minute video highlights why NOT defining success before interviewing leads to frequently hiring the wrong candidate.
Hiring Hot Tips Video Series–Hiring Mistake #1–Inadequate Job Descriptions
We’ve also written an in-depth blog article on Hiring Mistake #1 – you can read it by clicking here. You might be interested in our series on the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes. Be sure to read our blog article giving an overview of these mistakes by clicking here, or you can view our in-depth 12 minute video stepping through each of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes most commonly made by executives and managers by clicking here.
What if you could use a Success-based job definition to ENSURE your next hire will achieve your desired results? Click here to take the first step down the path of defining success through our complimentary offer to review your Success Factor Snapshot for a critical role.
Have you ever made this hiring mistake?
Share with me an example of when you last hired a candidate – who said all the right things in the interview – but could not live up to your expectations.
Barry Deutsch
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