There may never be a better point in the history of your company to upgrade your talent through improving your hiring process. You’ve got a small window of time to pick one or two under-performing roles and upgrade with talent that you might not be able to acquire once the economy comes roaring back.
These top talent employees in your competitors are open to talking with you right now. Once the job market rebounds, they might not be open to talking with you for another decade.
Are you taking the proactive steps to find, engage, communicate with top talent right now – even though you might not have an immediate opening. Are you using Step Two of the Success Factor Methodology to attract great talent? You can learn more about Step Two in our 5-Step Process by going to this page on our website: http://impacthiringsolutions.com/blog/Step-Two.
Before embarking on this path to upgrade, you might consider a FREE Sourcing Assessment to determine if you’ve got the right tools to find and attract top 25% talent. You can request your FREE Sourcing Assessment by going to this page on our website: http://impacthiringsolutions.com/blog/FREE-Sourcing-Assessment.
For those too young to know who Aretha Franklin is, she was one of the top recording artists in the 60′s and 70′s. One of her all time best selling records (i.e. CD, iTunes, digital recording, etc. in today’s world) was a song called, “RESPECT.”
All Aretha wanted was, ” to give me just a little, just a little, R. E. S. P. E. C. T. when I come home.” (Author’s comment, I think it was this song that taught most kids in the 60′s how to spell “respect.”)
All most candidates want is, “to give me just a little, just a little, R. E .S. P. E.C. T. when I come in for an interview.”
Not a big request, considering it’s “just a little” respect, not a lot.
Here is one simple example of, “just a little” respect.
I have asked thousands of candidates in over 25 years of recruiting, ‘How long did you wait in the lobby before the hiring manager came to greet you?” The average is between 10 and 15 minutes late. That is not respect.
Think about it for just a minute. The candidate leaves work early, drives for sometimes up to an hour, often in snow or rain, fights traffic, gets all dressed up and makes sure they arrive on-time. After all, what happens if the candidate is even a minute late? Now that is RESPECT for the hiring manager and their time.
But the hiring manager can’t even walk down a clear hallway, in a perfectly air conditioned building, in casual business attire to meet the candidate on-time. This is NOT respect for all the candidate went through.
Simple question, “How long would you keep a multi-million dollar customer waiting in the lobby?” I bet they would get your respect.
Candidate’s desire your respect as much as you desire theirs. If you want to hire top talent, respecting them from the first impression is absolutely critical.
Is your culture one that respects everyone? Is this respect practiced by everyone? Does everyone know, “how to” show the proper respect for anyone visiting your facilities? Does everyone treat candidates the way they want to be treated if they were the candidate? (CLICK HERE to get a free cultural assessment)
Granted, in today’s market conditions, the candidates are more flexible. However, when the market changes to what it was two years ago candidates will walk out.
Respect should not be related to the economy. Consider bringing, “just a little, just a little R.E.S.P.E.C.T” to all candidates when they come in.
Retention of top talent is a critical issue for most companies. Top talent only have two choices, they either work for your company or your competitor’s. (CLICK HERE if you would like a free retention check-up)
If you are a manager or executive, you might be interested in two of the programs Brad and I are hosting this week
Brad I will be hosting our weekly Internet Radio Talk Show today for Hiring Managers and Executives titled “Upgrading Your Team During the Recession” at 11-noon PDT on LA Talk Radio. You can listen in and also pose questions live during the broadcast.
We’ll be taking your emails and live calls to discuss the steps you should be taking right now to upgrade your team so that when you emerge from the recession, you’ll have a powerful team capable of propelling your business or team forward as a strategic advantage.
On Friday, we will be putting on our popular one hour webinar presentation based on our half and full day training program titled “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. You can register for this webinar by clicking here.
We’ll provide an overview of our award-winning workshop that teaches the Success Factor Methodology. This hiring process has been implemented in thousands of companies around the world with validated success in dramatically raising hiring accuracy and improving the ability to hire top talent at every level.
We hope you’ll join us for one of these programs this week.
Why do most employee referral programs fail to achieve success?
Your employees are your greatest source of outstanding talent!
Why are they not whispering in the ears of their former co-workers, associates, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who can deliver the results you need?
In over 25 years of executive search, hiring and sourcing consulting, and implementing hiring process improvements in thousands of companies, we’ve discovered a few key differences in why some programs work and others fail miserably. Here’s a list of the key reasons employee referral programs fail to live up to their potential:
Financial incentives don’t work
Most companies do a terrible job communicating about an opening
Employees don’t trust their referrals will be handled in a professional manner
Classic networking methods are not usually applied to employees
Let’s take each one of these in turn and dissect it over our next 4 blog posts.
However, before we jump into how to improve your employee referral program, let’s talk about metrics of success in employee referral programs. Most companies we’ve encountered achieve somewhere between 5% and 20% as a target range on number of candidates hired who came through an employee referral. I’m going to suggest that your target should be 50%.
Over the next 12 months, 50% of all hires should come from employee (modify this to be stakeholder) referrals. Some of my clients that I’ve worked with over the last quarter of century have continually refined their employee/stakeholder referral program to the point where 75% or more of all hires come from a referral.
We’ve even created a FREE Assessment to judge the effectiveness of your sourcing methods, including employee referrals. If you would like to take the FREE Assessment, please complete the application form on our website and we’’ll show you how to quickly and inexpensively improve your referral program.
Once you really focus on implementing best practices in employee referrals, you’ll see that your quality of hires goes up, employee satisfaction goes up, employee performance goes up, recruiting costs go down, the costs of bad hires goes down, time to find and select a top performer goes down.
When should be the best time for you to implement best practices in an employee referral program?
What would you consider to be the primary best practice in your company that generates an abundance of employee/stakeholder referrals?
As many of you know I also coach high school girls basketball. I love to use metaphors of basketball to describe hiring, motivation, and performance. High School Basketball season is about to begin again in few weeks and it brings back a painful memory of the last game of our last season.
My team had a great season – however, they are disintegrating before my very eyes in the last season game. It’s almost as if the entire team has forgotten how to play. I’m using every motivation technique I’ve learned in 25 years as a recruiter and performance consultant I can think of to get my girls to play better. Nothing is working.
Then it hits me like a lightening bolt. I sit down on the bench and realize that the team members I have cannot deliver against my expectations. I don’t have the talent to do what needs to be done. What could I have done about my frustration: NOTHING! It’s high school basketball. In most high school districts you cannot recruit. Whoever shows up at your doorstep that year is who you’ve got to work with on your team.
Here’s the hiring manager irony: Why do most companies and hiring managers treat recruiting like it’s a high school sport? They take whoever shows up on their doorstep after a few simple basic tactics of finding candidates (a little bit of networking and an ad posting on one of the major job boards). These tactics fall into the worst of the primary pools of possible candidates. You can read more about the four pools of candidates under our Strategic Sourcing Plan Service.
As a hiring manager, recruiting top talent is not a high school sport. Don’t expect to ever build a top notch team by taking this approach to finding candidates.
If you would like to get our FREE Assessment of your sourcing, jump to our FREE Sourcing Assessment Page and we’ll be glad to walk you through how to determine if your hiring process is strong enough to attract outstanding talent at every level in the company.
You can read more about how this tribal hiring process of treating recruiting like it’s a high school sport impacts your overall hiring success by viewing our study, The Top Hiring Mistakes – of which poor sourcing and finding of candidates is a major factor.
Traditional job descriptions fail in hiring top talent!
In trainings, speeches, and engagements with clients, we start by shattering common assumptions about hiring. One of those assumptions is that job descriptions are useful documents in the hiring process. We contend that job descriptions are completely worthless.
“What do you mean, worthless? How can anybody hire with no job description? You’re crazy.”
Allow us to clarify.
We don’t mean that job descriptions have no value as legal or archival documents. Traditional job descriptions are worthless for hiring Top Talent.
Traditional job descriptions do not help you:
· align organizational goals with departmental goals or individual position goals
· create a roadmap for the hiring process
· clarify expectations
· generate a compelling marketing statement that will attract Top 5% Talent
· determine the best Sourcing Strategy to find and attract Top Talent
· assess and verify the quality and depth of candidate’s track record
· manage ongoing performance of a new hire
Traditional job descriptions simply lump together an amalgam of skills, knowledge, abilities, attributes, responsibilities, years of “qualifications” are static traits in isolation; they describe bits and pieces of the athlete, this is not to say they aren’t important skills, but they do not predict whether he will be able to effectively use those traits in the game situation to put the pigskin between the uprights, the puck in the net, or a ball over the outfield wall.
What counts most, in both sports and business, is not what traits you bring to the game, but what you can accomplish by using those traits. The coach cares whether an athlete can deliver results and help the team to win.
That is why coaches rely on scouts. The scout observes the athlete in the game, focusing solely on his or her ability to perform on the job with the rest of the team.
The Success Factor Methodology takes a coach’s perspective on hiring. It moves hiring out of the realm of static traits and into the realm of action and results.
Our research led to the development of the Success Factor Snapshot (SFS), which is the cornerstone of our methodology. This document, which replaces the traditional job description, is a tool that breaks down a position’s requirements in terms of specific, measurable deliverables, benchmarks, and timetables. We have examples, illustrations, FREE audio programs that describe the Success Factor Methodology, specifically building a Success Factor Snapshot in the FREE Resources Section of our Website.
Learn more how a Success Factor Snapshot compares and benchmarks to your current process of using job descriptions by taking advantage of our FREE Hiring Check-up.
1) Turnover often starts with a bad hire. Often a bad hire results from a poor hiring process. In many companies the hiring process is random, unstructured and riddled with incompetent people. Hiring managers usually wait until they need someone before starting the hiring process. After two or three months of interviewing they have one or two good solid below average candidates, but won’t make a decision until they at least three good solid below candidates. By this time they are desperate and we all know what kind of decisions we make when desperate.
Couple that with most hiring managers are not really competent or comfortable with interviewing and is it any wonder why hiring often fails? A few hiring managers are really good at hiring, but most simply ask the same questions they were asked when they interviewed. Few probe deeply into the candidate’s ability to deliver the performance the hiring manager expects. So the candidate’s expectations once on board do not align with the hiring manager’s. Leaving the hiring manager to think, “You’re NOT the person I hired.” (A great name for a book).
There are many more reasons for the hiring process to fail but these are two big contributors.
If your company wants to reduce turnover the first step is developing a structured, repeatable process with trained competent people. To see a list of steps in an effective hiring process CLICK HERE.
2) Lack of effectively training new employees. This is not an orientation program. It is formal training program to ensure the person is well trained in the tools, resources, industry jargon, processes or regulations, and systems necessary to deliver the performance standards the hiring manager expects.
Too often hiring managers can’t find the right person so they hire a lighter person and “will train them once on board.” YEA RIGHT. Even entry level employees need some structured training program to come up to speed. If the company doesn’t provide effective training the highest potential employee will become frustrated and eventually quit. Nobody wants to come to work every day frustrated because they were not properly trained.
3) A boss they can respect. We often hear how candidates put on their best face during the interview. Candidates are on their best behavior so it is hard to get to the real person. This is also true of hiring managers. Once on board candidates often think, “You’re NOT the person that hired me?”
If the hiring manager is not respected by the employee turnover is only a matter of time.
If you have a hiring manager with constant turnover it may be time to focus on the hiring manager. Are they possibly the problem. Training them to be an effective hiring manager maybe necessary. We recommend that all companies should require all their managers and any future manager to read the book, “First Break All The Rules.” The subtitle tells the real reason, “What the world’s greatest managers do different.” If you want to know what the world’s greatest do to become a world’s greatest managers this is the book to read.
Most studies show this is the biggest reason people leave. There is a saying, “People don’t leave the company, they leave their boss.”
4) Culture of non-performance. Top talent want three things in a position to stay motivated. Since your top talent usually leave before the below performing person that has been on your staff for years, top talent should be the focus. The bottom 10 to 20% never leave (another blog article for later). To retain top talent your company must provide top talent; 1) an opportunity to learn, 2)the opportunity to make an impact, and 3) the opportunity for them to become something better or grow. When any one of these three is eliminated top talent starts the job search.
By having monthly or at least quarterly private and regularly scheduled one-to-one’s with your best people you will find out if any one of the three is diminishing or been eliminated. At least then you can address the issue. Without the one-to-one few managers ever realize their top talent is lacking one or all three of these.
Turnover is one of biggest hidden costs that most companies never address. It is one of those things that we know is costly, but so hard to measure, so let’s ignore it. You can download for free our, “Cost Of Turnover Worksheet.” It lists the categories of turnover, direct and indirect. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD. You can input the cost for your organization. CAUTION, don’t do this unless you are ready for really bad news about the cost of turnover.
Once most companies realize the real cost of turnover then these four won’t seem like such a burden.
We offer a wealth of free resources for companies to improve their hiring process. This include an audio library from our talk radio show, numerous templates, free services and our hiring managers blog. To view the resources that will best benefit your company CLICK HERE.
We frequently get this question from CEOs, Key Executives, and Hiring Managers. Many Hiring Executives and Managers, Human Resource Professionals, and Recruiters consider the ability to measure top talent as an art form elevated to almost spiritual levels.
The reality is that the ability to measure and assess whether a candidate is top talented individual is simple and straightforward.
Let’s start with the very first step of determining whether you’re sitting in front of a candidate who could be considered top talent. This step takes place before you’ve looked at their resume. This is the first step of our Success Factor Methodology.
The first step to measuring and predicting top talent is defining your expectations and the level of performance you desire. Do you have set of expectations for your new customer service rep, inventory manager, or Vice President of Sales that puts them in the top 25%, top 10%, or top 5%?
You cannot predict future success by interviewing a candidate until you first define what level of success do you desire.
The #1 Hiring Mistake that gets made by most companies (whether you have 6 employees or 60,000) is that future success is not defined. We documented this hiring mistake in a major study before we wrote our book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired.” You can download a copy of the study from the FREE Resources Section of our Website.
Learn more about how to define success for top talent by visiting our website and taking advantage of the following Resources:
Our Internet Radio Show every Monday alternates between topics for hiring and for job search. We post all our Radio Broadcasts onto our website into the FREE Audio Library – either on the Hiring Manager side of our website or on the Candidate side.
Get a copy of our book “You’re NOT the person I Hired”. This book has hit best-seller levels with over 10,000 copies now in the hands of CEOs. Key Executives, and Hiring Managers.
We have posted examples of Success Factor Snapshots from various Executive Searches we’ve conducted. These Success Factor Snaphots replace the traditional job description in combining the expected/desired results for a specific position.
A couple times a month we will hold Hiring Manager Open Roundtable Discussions on a wide variety of topics, including defining success for top talent. You’re welcome to register and reserve a spot in these FREE programs. We cap the attendance at 50 participants and it usually fills up within hours our announcements.
Read about the Research Project we commissioned before we wrote our book on the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes. You’ll see how NOT defining expectations is a recipe for hiring failure.
Get our Complete Hiring System – a comprehensive Kit that allows you to implement the Success Factor Methodology, stuffed with every conceivable audio, video, worksheet, template, and content we’ve published on the subject of how to raise hiring accuracy. You can use this kit to train your hiring managers, raise hiring accuracy for every position, and begin to hire top talent in every department in your company. For a small investment, this could possibly yield a greater return in improving your hiring processes than anything else you ever seen. We’re so confident of the claim that you’ll raise hiring accuracy in your company – we’re willing to back it up with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If that’s not enough, we’ll let you “try it out” for $2.49 plus shipping.
That blog title pretty much sums up the state of hiring for the vast majority of companies. If that’s not dysfunctional for hiring, I’m sure what would be. You can learn more about this classic frustration and the 7 others on our website under the section on Hiring Frustrations.
How can good companies, sophisticated managers and executives, decent HR processes still fail to make consistent successful hires of top talent at every level in their organization?
A few years ago when we were asking our clients what should we title the book we were writing – one of the most common frustrations we heard was “We think we did a good job in the interview process, but the person failed shortly after hiring (30-60-90 days).”
By failure we are not talking about the outright firing of a candidate – but rather a candidate who fails to achieve your desired results.
One of the most popular questions we ask in our CEO/Senior Executive Workshops on Hiring, Trade Conferences, Management Team Meetings (Brad and I conduct over 100 of these training programs for hiring managers each year), of all the people you’ve hired, what percentage have lived up to or exceeded your expectations. Most CEOs and Senior Executives would be overjoyed if there success rate was close to 50%. Most admit their hiring success is far below that level.
Brad and I have also tackled some of the most common frustrations in our Internet Radio Talk Show. You can download these episodes through our FREE Audio Library.
Is your company plagued by hiring decisions that focus on hiring people who are better actors in the interview than employees who perform their job effectively?
Do your hiring managers have a tendency to fall in love with candidates when they look like you, talk like you, and have a similar background to you?
When you meet someone in the interview that you immediately like, do you find yourself quickly starting to sell the job?
How long does it take to make a first impression in an interview? Our research indicates that it can take anywhere from 1 second to 10 seconds for most hiring managers. Once that first impression gets set, basically the rest of the interview is used to reinforce the hiring manager’s initial first impression.
Studies show that over 80% of most hiring decisions are based on rapport, personal chemistry, and likability. Notice that over 80% of the hiring decision had nothing to do with competency, skills, accomplishments, and future potential. This problem of falling victim to first impressions in the interview is one of the 8 major hiring manager frustrations that we’ve identified.
If you desire to make better hiring decisions, you’ve got to have a process designed to force objectivity, rational thinking, and validation/verification of the information candidate’s provide. Our Success Factor Methodology overcomes the frustration of falling victim to a first impression by using a structured approach to interviewing that not only puts everyone on the same page, but also validates, verifies, and vets all the candidate information so that you can get to the truth in every interview.
Finding Candidates, Hiring Mistakes | Barry Deutsch and Brad Remillard August 24, 2009 | 
Comments (0) 
