Workstyles and Behaviors That Fit Your Culture

Dana Borowka, CEO of Lighthouse Consulting, explains the benefits of assessing  candidates before you hire them.  He explains how to use the assessment tools to get the most out of the person once they come on board. There are many assessments out there, but only a few ask enough questions to provide an in-depth analysis of the candidate. If you are considering hiring a key person in your organization you should  read Dana and Ellen Borowka’s new book, “Cracking the Personality Codes. “
You can dramatically increase your hiring accuracy with these assessments.

Our LinkedIn Leadership and Best Practice is an excellent discussion group for more issues around hiring. Click here.

Motivating Talent In De-Motivating Times

To retain your top talent it is absolutely critical to ensure they are motivated. In difficult times that is often not on many hiring managers or CEOs list of top ten things to accomplish. Most people are working long hours, doing the job of 2 people, stress is at an all time high, fear of lay offs is reality, salaries are frozen, pay cuts have been implemented and forget about any bonus. For many companies this is their current culture.

So how do you motivate your top talent to reach the company’s goals?

How do you keep them from contacting recruiters?

How do you keep them passionate about coming to work?

How do keep them engaged day after day?

The answer to all of these is “Culture.” Even in difficult times top talent, by definition, will always rise to the occasion. They will always strive to be the best. If they don’t, they aren’t top talent. However, even top talent can burn out, get frustrated, not see the light at the end of the tunnel or wonder if they are really contributing.

It is the role of all CEOs and hiring managers to ensure these don’t happen. As an executive recruiter I have recruited thousands of candidates over the last 30 years. There seems to be a consistent theme what great companies do in difficult times to hold on to and even attract top talent.

In our recent talk radio program we discussed four areas companies must focus on to ensure they keep their top talent motivated. You can download the audio for free. Just click here.

1) Companies must have a performance based culture. Even in difficult times there must be clearly defined goals for the company. These goals must cascade down to your top talent. They must have quantifiable objectives that motivate them, so when reached, they feel a sense of accomplishment.

2) Dysfunctional Culture. Probably the biggest reason top talent gets nervous and begins to think outside your company. Do you know your company’s culture? Can you define it? Will your executive staff define it the same way? Will the in-the-trench worker bees define it the same way? We developed a Culture Assessment Tool for you and all your employees to take. Once completed see if aligns with the culture you want? If not, this is the time to begin working on it.

3) Non-monetary rewards and recognition. The least expensive and least used method to retain top talent. How many times we’ve heard from candidates,”No matter how much I contributed, how many times I went above and beyond what was expected, or all the times I missed my kids activities, it always seemed just part of the job. Never even a thanks, appreciate the effort, even a small pat on the back.” Consider building a culture of rewards and recognition that makes your top talent feel appreciated. Top talent does not want to be taken for granted.

4) Consistent feedback. Similar to above but more formal. This includes regular and structured 1-on-1 feedback sessions. Not passing in the hallway. Actually sitting down and focusing on them. Giving them feedback, encouraging them, listening to what their needs are (even if you can’t meet them, just listening), taking an interest in their career and building a shared bond.

Consider these four things as a way to motivate your top talent. There are others and we encourage you to consider anything that will help you attract, hire and retain your top talent.

You can explore our audio library, download free examples of compelling marketing statements, download a summary of our research project that identifies the biggest hiring mistakes, and get our culture assessment tool by clicking the links. All these are free.

Motivating Top Talent In De-Motivating Times

Motivating top talent in de-motivating times is very difficult. Retaining your best talent requires special techniques not normally utilized even in good times. We give four absolute “musts” companies need to do to ensure their top talent stay motivated and stay with you. It isn’t about the money. In fact, many companies aren’t giving raises, paying bonuses or offering promotions. Many are doing the opposite. If you want to keep your top talent you must, create a culture of performance, maximize non-monetary rewards, eliminate a dysfunctional culture and provide feedback. This program will give you tips and solutions exactly how to do those four things.

Consider joining our LinkedIn Leadership and Best Practices Group Click Here

Featured in Forbes.Com Article on Hiring During the Recession

Forbes.com recently interviewed me about an article on hiring during the recession. You can read the full article at Forbes.com – The title of the article is “Hiring the best of the left-behind”.

The article reinforces a few key ideas – especially for small business owners and entrepreneurs:

Recession offers opportunity to hire top talent

First, The recession offers a wonderful opportunity to acquire top talent. Some outstanding candidates have been cast off for no fault of their own. Many companies in this recession have moved beyond getting rid of their deadwood and are now well into cutting right down to the bone – having to let go of some of their best talent for business survival.

However, these top 25% candidates are not desperate. They are very selective about which opportunities they will consider. These top talent candidates are well-networked, have multiple opportunities and “irons in the fire”, and don’t need your job. You still have to apply the right mix of marketing, relationship building, and  compelling opportunity to attract these great candidates.

Just because they are out of work doesn’t mean it will be easy to acquire them.

Top talent will take your recruiting call

Secondly, almost all individuals in the top talent ranks who are currently employed will take a phone call from a recruiter, friend, former co-worker, network contact about a new opportunity. Almost everyone is concerned about their company’s future success and whether the axe might fall next on their neck.

It’s a great time to reach out into your network and see if there are some outstanding currently employed candidates who might want to consider your compelling opportunity.

Short window to find great candidates

Third, I see the opportunity of the recession to acquire great talent lasting about another 12-18 months. After the recovery begins, we’ll be shifting back to a candidate’s market in which you may never be able to acquire the type of talent available right now.

What strategies and tactics are you employing right now to find and acquire great talent for your company? Have you done a top-to-bottom assessment of your entire organization and selectively identified a few key roles that could be upgraded?

Don’t procrastinate or you’ll be kicking yourself in 12 months that you didn’t act sooner.

Most Important – A Great Hiring Process

Fourth, and perhaps most important, you still need a great hiring process to separate the average performers from outstanding talent.

Our simple but effective Success Factor Methodology provides the tools, techniques, and strategies to allow you to train all your hiring managers to become great at the process of hiring top talent for their teams. Thousands of companies around the world have implemented the simple steps of the Success Factor Methodology and have dramatically improved their ability to find, assess, and hire top talent at every level in their organization.

Barry

Hiring Frustration #5: Poor Cultural Fit

You’re NOT the Person I Hired

How is it possible that a candidate who seems so perfect – they came from a competitor, they had the same job title and functional responsibility, and they actually achieved some strong comparable results in that role and other roles – could fall flat on their face shortly after arriving at your company?

You did a good job asking questions about accomplishments, achievements, skills, and likes/dislikes. You put them through personality testing, background checks, and reviewed their prior performance appraisals. Where did you fail in the interview?

Failure to Measure Adaptability

Most likely you did not measure cultural/environmental fit. We call this adaptability. It’s one of the 5 core interview questions that comprise the heart of our Success Factor Methodology. Is your culture a level 4 rapid where you navigate the rushing water in a kayak – or is your culture a relaxing sail around the lake in calm waters?

Not measuring Adaptability in precise, clear, specific terms leads to a significant reason for hiring failure. Your culture and environment is different that the environments the candidates has come through. Your environment/culture does not have to be the same as the candidate’s prior environments, but the gap cannot be too large – or the risk of making a hiring mistake starts to rise.

To learn more about the hiring frustration of poor cultural fit and how to overcome this common interviewing error, read more about Hiring Frustration #5.

Get the Book–You’re NOT the Person I Hired

This syndrome of thinking you’ve got the right person – only to later discover it was a hiring mistake – we call “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. We wrote a best-selling, award-winning book on this same subject. To master hiring success and understand how to ask the 5 core interview questions, take advantage of our 100% guarantee on our book. We’re so confident you’ll start making better hiring decisions, we’re putting a 100% “no questions asked” guarantee behind the book Get your copy of the book NOW!

We’ve taken 25 years of executive search experience, which includes 1,000 search assignments, 100,000 interviews, and 30,000 hiring managers and executives trained –  and we’ve developed a robust hiring process that will teach your hiring executives and managers who to ask the 5 core interview questions and probe by peeling back the layers of the onion.

Can you afford even one more hiring mistake?

Barry

Hiring Frustration #4: No Hiring Process

In most companies, there is no systematic and methodical approach to hiring. The approach falls somewhere between an environment akin to the wild west and random and arbitrary events based on the personal experience of each hiring executive or manager.

We’ve identified the frustration of not having a rigorous hiring process to be one of the top 8 frustrations hiring executives and managers encounter in their companies. Our research over the past two decades also indicates that it doesn’t matter whether your company has 60 employees or 60,000 employees, the frustration of not having a systematic hiring process is painful.

In most companies, the hiring process is predicated on how each individual executive or manager decides to apply it. Who knows what goes on behind the door as the hiring executive or manager starts their interview? A lack of a structured and systematic hiring process is one of the key reasons hiring fails over 50% of the time.

Once a company adopts a systematic and rigorous hiring process, comparable to our Success Factor Methodology, hiring accuracy soars and the hiring managers are now able to consistently hire and retain great candidates at every level in the company.

We’ve conducted extensive research into hiring frustrations, mistakes, and errors over the past two decades. You can read about our research into hiring frustrations on our website, download a copy of our formal research project of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes and Errors made by Hiring Executives and Managers.

Once you understand the classic hiring frustrations, mistakes, and errors, you can learn about our five simple steps called the Success Factor Methodology to overcome every problem in hiring and start becoming a great manager by finding, selecting, and hiring top talent.

The Success Factor Methodology is the only hiring system that has been extensively researched, implemented in thousands of companies worldwide, and validated over a long period of time across a wide range of hiring. And we’ve designed it so that you can simply, inexpensively, and quickly implement it in your company.

Barry

Interviewing Is A Quest For The Truth

Put Candidates Under “The Magnifying Glass”

While not every candidate is guilty of puffery, we know from experience that it happens. Candidates claim responsibility for accomplishments that really were not their accomplishments, but rather those of bosses, peers, or perhaps even subordinates.

There is a bulletproof solution to the problem of “accomplishment inflammation,” and that is to become a great detective. When you learn to probe every answer for relevant details, you’ll discover what we have: There hasn’t been a candidate born who can make up false answers quickly enough. They’ve either done what they say they’ve done and can describe it in infinite detail, or they will implode in the chair right in front of you (and it’s messy when it happens).

Every time you ask a candidate a question based on examples, expect to spend fifteen to thirty minutes exploring the details of each example. Put the candidate’s answer under a magnifying glass, and ask for multiple examples to make sure something wasn’t an anomaly.

Every interview will be different, but no matter what example is being discussed, your probes will generally follow the time-honored journalist’s “5 Ws”:

· Who?

· What?

· When?

· Where?

· Why?

· For good measure, throw in How? (Yes, even though it is not a W.)

Train yourself to have a knee-jerk reaction to high-level, nonspecific answers.  Usually, it’s not that the candidate is trying to deceive you; it’s that he or she simply hasn’t thought to give concrete, detailed answers. You can help the candidate along by following up assertions and blanket statements with one of the following Magnifying Glass questions:

· “Could you give me an example of that?”

· “Can you be more specific about that?”

· “Can you give me a bit more information about that?”

· “What were the most important details about that situation?”

· “What was your responsibility within the project team?’

· “What did you personally do to ensure that success?”

· “Who else was involved in that project?”

· “Why did you take that approach on the project?”

· “Why did you pick those individuals to be on the team?”

Get all the details. Dates, numbers, names of people, schedules. Both of you will be helping each other to get to the facts faster and with more relevance. For a complete interview with drill down questions our Desktop Hiring Guide is the quickest way to get started. CLICK HERE to view  our Desktop Hiring Guide.

Other good Magnifying Glass questions:

· What was your role in the project?

· What success was achieved?

· How did you decide what to do?

· Can you give me a few examples of your personal initiative on the project?

· When have you faced a comparable challenge?

· Where did the resources come from to get that accomplished?

· How were parameters for the project set?

· Would you consider that process a success? Why or why not? (Remember, even a failure has value)

· When have you failed to meet your boss’s expectations?

· How did the team make mid-course corrections?

· What did you learn specifically?

· With benefit of hindsight, what would you do differently next time?

Keep going until you know what you need to know (or until it becomes apparent the candidate is being elusive or downright lying. If this happens, it’s time to cut and run.) Whatever you do, don’t give in and assume it’ll work out. Some candidates are great about changing the subject and making you think you got enough information. Be sure to make a note of what happened and then move on.

When the pool of talent is narrowed down to the final two candidates, it’s time for the interview team to come up with homework assignments. An important predictor of how a candidate will adapt to your organization’s environment is to see an example of his or her thought processes, analytical skills, and problem-solving, up close and personal.

Effective homework assignments are projects of reasonable size and scope that involve one of the most critical Success Factors listed in your Success Factor Snapshot. The candidate should be given all the support he or she needs to adequately answer the question or complete the assignment. The candidate should then return to the interview panel and present results and conclusions, and lead a question and answer discussion based on the homework. No matter what functional area, homework should entail questioning, analysis, research, and a panel discussion with some form of presentation.

While homework assignments are “out there” in the hiring world, some candidates may object to doing what they perceive as unpaid work.

Most Top 5% Talent, because of their self-motivated nature, will be intrigued and embrace the challenge. But if they’ve had previous encounters with unscrupulous employers who actually do assign homework and go on to use candidate ideas (even though they did not hire the candidate) you’ll need to reassure them that you aren’t asking them to come up with the “right answer.” Instead, you are looking for a concrete example of their approach to problems, their analytical and presentation skills, and their ability to synthesize information.

The scope of homework should be appropriate; that is, you shouldn’t ask candidates to dedicate forty hours on nights and weekends to solving your most pressing problem as “homework.” Make it clear at the outset that the homework is not going to be as deep as the actual job, and that you aren’t looking so much for their answer as for deep insight into their thought and action processes.

For more in-depth understanding of the interviewing process consider our best selling book; “You’re NOT The Person I Hired” CLICK HERE to review the book.

If you are considering implementing this process in your company our Complete Success Factor Methodology Hiring System will give you a step-by-step process to help guide you. CLICK HERE to view the system.