Prepare to Lose Some of Your Best People

After each recession, there is typically a wave of turnover representing pent-up demand for employee dissatisfaction as advertised jobs increase.

WHAT IF Some of Your Best People Walk Out the Door?

What are you doing right now to ensure your company is capable of retaining your best talent as the job market expands?

I can’t predict whether the job market will bounce back in 6 months, 12 months, or 18 months. However, it will bounce back.

You might say “Barry, we have very low turnover and I’m not concerned about losing some of our talent to competitors”.

I would contend that since there are very few jobs available, most candidates have hunkered down and are waiting out the job market depression. Of course you don’t have turnover issues now. Plan on having those issues within the next 12-18 months.

Job Market Trends Raise Your Risk

We need to recognize a few factors and trends at play in this job market.

First, the tools for candidates to find jobs has increased dramatically.

Secondly, the tools for companies to find candidates have increased, particularly through social media channels.

Third, employee satisfaction is at one of the lowest points since the Great Depression.

These combined factors are unique for the coming job market improvement.

I’m waving my hands in the air sounding the alarms of a dangerous combination of factors regarding your employee satisfaction and available jobs. Perhaps, you’ll write this off as the little boy who cried “wolf” too often. Perhaps, you’ll read this blog post, pull your management together, and start implementing programs to proactively raise your retention capability.

Procrastination, Denial, and Complacency

In my workshops and seminars to CEO groups and management teams, I’ve noticed that many companies might be at risk to lose some of their most critical and important talent over the next 18 months. As I jump back and forth across the country in my presentations, I am stunned at the lack of attention being given to structured retention programs. Perhaps, many company executives feel that since there are no jobs available, there is no need to invest in retention programs – as in “our employees are not going anywhere.”

What if 1 or 2 of your top performing engineers, sales reps, or pivotal executives suddenly walked into your office and resigned tomorrow? Do you have a back-up plan in place? Maybe you’ve been working on a succession plan? What if the 1 or 2 leaving triggered a brain drain or exodus of talent?

Review Retention Best Practices

I would like to suggest it might be time to review your current retention programs to update, improve, enhance, and implement changes to ensure your best talent does NOT leave as the job market rebounds.

Some best practice areas to focus on:

• Culture – is there dysfunction in your culture? Have you surveyed your employees for their satisfaction levels?

• Feedback – do you have a rigorous process for One-to-Ones for coaching, development, and success-based leadership?

• Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognition – top talent only performs to a standing ovation. Do you have a series of programs aimed at supervisory, team, and company-wide non-monetary recognition?

• Acceptance of Mediocrity – top talent wants to be in a success-based environment. Can you claim that you’ve embedded success-based management principles in the fabric of your business?

• Learning and Development – how aggressive are you pushing learning, training, and development throughout your organization? Your best people will stay in an organization that helps them grow at a high rate.

Here’s a great question that might keep you awake at night:

What are you doing right now to improve your ability to retain your best talent over the next 12-18 months?

Share in the comments your thoughts, ideas, strategies, and methods for keeping your best talent engaged, motivated, passionate, and committed to staying in your company.

Barry Deutsch

photo credit Flickr

Using One Degree Of Separation To Hire Sales People

One of the major failure points in hiring top talent is not being able to find enough qualified top talent candidates. Most companies use traditional methods to find great candidates. The result of using these traditional methods like advertising, light networking, and job fairs –  is that most companies bring the bottom third of the candidate pool to their doorstep. In this recording of our live show, we share a key element of our Success Factor Methodology in finding great talent – a networking technique we term “One Degree of Separation.”

Click here to listen live or download.

Why It Is So Hard To Hire Sales People

Hiring good sales professionals is one of the most difficult elements of hiring for many companies. Brad and Barry walk you through the fundamental reasons of why sales hiring fails in most companies and the specific steps and tactics you can implement to raise your hiring accuracy of sales professionals. Learn how to not make poor judgments based on first impressions, how to define success for a sales position, how to ask probing questions to validate a sales professional’s claims and interview answers. Finally, Brad and Barry provide a few key ideas to find and attract better sales candidates for your open position.

Click here to either listen live or download

The Top Ten Hiring Mistakes

In addition to writing on this blog and 4 other blog properties that IMPACT Hiring Solutions owns, we are also one of the key contributors to a blog/resource site known as Bizmore – an outstanding site for business resources for entrepreneurs and small businesses. We write a column called “The Talent Coach”.

We’ve begun a series on The Talent Coach on our Top Ten Hiring Mistakes – the tipping point that led Brad and I to publish our award-winning book on hiring. I’ll be re-posting the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes series on this blog.

Before we wrote our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired,” we commissioned a study to identify the most common mistakes and errors executives made in hiring.

Brad and I have made frequent reference to this study in our various blog postings.

You can download a copy of the executive summary for the research study from our site by clicking here. You will literally want to slap your forehead after reading about the most common hiring mistakes. Which of these are you guilty of making? Most executives are guilty of not just one mistake — but making 2 or 3 mistakes. Consolidated together, sometimes it’s a wonder we can even complete a hire for a key role.

In this post, I’ll list the top 10 hiring mistakes. In future blog posts, we’ll break down each of the top 10 in more detail and describe a few proactive steps you can take to overcome the most common hiring mistakes and errors.

1. Inadequate Job Descriptions
2. Superficial Interviewing
3. Inappropriate Prerequisities
4. Snap Judgements
5. Historical Bias
6. Performance Bias
7. Fishing in Shallow Waters
8. Lack of Probing Questions
9. Ignoring Candidate Needs
10. Desperate Hiring

Read the executive summary of the study before I file my next post on this. You’ll have a much better grasp of why hiring fails as we cycle together through the most common mistakes.

If you can overcome these common hiring mistakes and errors, you stand a very good chance of improving your hiring accuracy from roughly a 50/50 roll of the dice to a point well into the 80%-90% range. Imagine from this point forward, on every hire your company makes, your managers and executives will have an 80%-90% confidence level of hiring a candidate that can deliver the desired results?

Would that make a difference in the future success of your company?

Stupid question – Of course it would have a profound effect on your future success.

Here’s a question to think about until my next blog post: If the hiring mistakes and errors listed above are fairly common and well-known, and the solutions are easy, simple, and can be implemented quickly – why do most companies still struggle to hire top talent at every level?

Barry

PS – Have you joined our LinkedIn Discussion Group for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent? Click here to join the group.

Why Is It So Difficult to Find Outstanding Sales Professionals?

In my last blog post on hiring sales professionals, I introduced the concept of why it is difficult to hire great sales professionals and we drilled into defining success as the starting point of best practices in hiring.

In this blog post, let’s talk about why it’s so difficult to find great sales professionals.

You’re Doomed To Fail Before You Start

The vast majority of companies search for candidates in traditional approaches that might include a little bit of light networking to find out who knows someone looking for a job, attending local job fairs, and running an advertisement on a job board, such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com.

Most of the time these traditional methods bring the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool to your doorstep. If all you’re seeing is the bottom 1/3, then you’re doomed to fail before you start. It doesn’t matter how great the job is, how wonderful your company is, how much of a leader you are – You’re Doomed to Fail Before You Start the Hiring Process.

You get 300 responses to your networking, job fair, on-line ad — 298 of which you can’t figure out what keyword did the candidate click on that brought them to the conclusion they should apply to your job. Two in the group were excellent. Unfortunately, they were so good – they went on and off the market in the blink of an eye. Now you’re left with all the rejects, retreads, poor performers, toxic and dysfunctional (perhaps semi-psychotic), dregs, and bottom of the barrel candidates.

Then we choose from this group.

One of my clients the other day called this approach to finding candidates “picking from best of the worst”. Another one of my clients recently coined the phrase “picking from the cream of the crap”.

Does this sound dysfunctional? Why then do most companies use this approach to finding candidates?

I was speaking with a potential client toward the end of last week who told me he ran advertisements on a couple of job boards. He got hundreds of responses. He personally interviewed over 50 candidates. Over the course of 3 months, he hired 3 candidates for his sales team. One is very good and the other two he is considering firing. His track record is somewhat shy of 50% and he’s already invested over 80 hours of his personal time in the process.

Is there any other process in your company where that investment of time yields a result of less than 50% accuracy? Probably NOT! Why then do we accept this random variability as OKAY when it comes to hiring?

Speaker Presentation Responses

The responses I hear in my presentations to trade groups, associations, and management team meetings for our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” program include:

• We don’t know any better
• No one has shown us a more effective process
• That’s the way we’ve always done it
• Isn’t that what HR is supposed to do?
• Sometimes we hire good people this way

At the beginning of my speaker presentation, I’ll cycle one by one around the room asking the participants to share their greatest frustration in hiring. Finding candidates always comes up as one of the top 3 for the past decade. It doesn’t seem to matter if the economy is going straight up, straight down, or sideways – it’s always tough to find top talent, especially in hiring sales professionals. I just did a program a week ago in Vancouver and 7 out of 15 participants raised their hands that they were struggling to find candidates. Some of the members had been looking for 2 months, 4 months, and over 6 months to find someone to fill a critical role.

What a minute – are we not in one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression? Millions of candidates are aggressively looking for a job. Shouldn’t we be able to grab one of those candidates? NO – ABSOLUTELY NOT! You’re not trying to put bodies in chairs – you’re trying to hire an outstanding sales professional who can achieve your desired expectations and do so within the context of your company culture and values. The problem is that most of the methods traditionally used to find candidates bring warm bodies to your doorstep, not high performers.

Sometimes, you get lucky. You find a great candidate at a job fair, in your second networking call, off an advertisement. LUCK IS NOT AN EFFECTIVE HIRING STRATEGY. I would like to suggest that you can make finding top-notch candidates a process so that you can consistently bring great people to the table instead of depending on luck.

What’s Next – Improving Sales Hiring Step-by-Step

In my next few blog posts, I’ll break down in more depth “Why it’s so difficult to find Outstanding Sales Professionals”. We’ll talk about how hiring is a lot like recruiting for a public high school sports team, the 4 pools of candidates and which one should be your sweet spot, why using a job description masquerading as a job advertisement doesn’t work, and a few simple and inexpensive best practices to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of candidates into the top of your sales candidate funnel.

Between now and my next blog post, I’d love to hear in the comments section what your greatest frustrations are when it comes to finding outstanding sales professionals.

Barry

Six Things to Know When Hiring an Interim Executive

As the economy continues to climb out of this recession/depression, companies want to hedge their bets by hiring people on a temporary or “tryout” basis, even at the executive level. There are a lot of companies out there providing the “interim management solution” but the following are some things to know before you hire an executive or engage a firm to find one for you. (Note an interim executive as defined here is not an advisor or a temp. They are usually operating in a line management position for the company or doing a high level project.) Keep in mind the following:

1. No one ever has a “general problem”. A “generalist” is rarely the right fit for an interim assignment because companies don’t have “general problems.” Be wary of providers who have a “bench” of executives ready to jump into your company. They may require a steep learning curve to accomplish what you need. Industry experience does not always translate into the specific problem solving experience you need for your company. Hiring an interim executive is not the same as hiring a temporary A/P clerk.
2. It’s not the size of the “inventory”; it’s the caliber of the recruiting process. Interim executive search is just that, a search. An interim executive search firm should have a clearly defined process designed to find the interim candidates who will deliver results you need. A large database is meaningless without a defined recruiting process. Look for a process that will ensure you see candidates who have solved similar problems to the ones you face, not just have right key words in their resumes from a database search.
3. Be Prepared to over-hire: Many interim assignments are a result of a problem or an opportunity for a company that they don’t have the internal resources to handle. An interim executive will need to be able to quickly get their hands around the situation and start making decisions. A more senior executive is usually able to get up to speed faster.
4. Career consultants rarely are good interim executives. Interim management assignments require that executives make decisions and execute on those decisions. Most career consultants have spent their careers advising, but have not been held responsible for results. Line executives make better interim executives because they are “doers”, not advisors.
5. Don’t pay consulting rates for an interim line manager. You should be prepared to pay a premium for an interim executive, but it should still be closer to what the position would pay if it were a full time job, not an hourly consulting rate. Consultant rates are based on shorter increments of time and on only being billable an average of 50% or less. An interim executive will most likely be in a position full time for several months and an hourly rate could get cost prohibitive. Additionally, there is a good chance you may eventually hire the interim executive for the position. You don’t want to start off with the executive being paid way above the salary range and have to negotiate a substantial cut in salary.
6. It’s not a marriage, it’s a tryout. One mistake companies make is to put too much emphasis on an interim candidate’s “fit” in the organization. That should be a low priority. You are hiring this person to solve your problems over a short period of time. Whether they are a fit for your organization can be determined over the course of the assignment.
Hiring an Interim Executive to manage a company through a situation or complete a high level project can be a very effective strategy in these uncertain times, but knowing these tips can save you time and money in the process.

Mike Haggerty

Why is it So Difficult to Hire Great Sales Professionals?

In over a decade of presenting to CEO and Key Executive Groups our popular program, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired“, I’ve discovered that the most difficult hire in a entrepreneurial-middle market company is a professional sales role.

If I present to a group with 15-20 members, half the group will be struggling with hiring outstanding sales professionals.

What makes it so difficult to hire this type of employee?

There are a number of factors that contribute to making hiring mistakes when it comes to the sales function. Before my Partner and I wrote our book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, we commissioned a study examining hiring mistakes. This study is available in the our FREE Resource Library. You get the Executive Summary of our Research Project – The Top Ten Hiring Mistakes by clicking here.

The research study was primarily focused on hiring at the executive level. However, the problems that lead to hiring mistakes and errors at an executive level are more significant and present a greater risk in hiring sales professionals. Let’s tackle the first mistake that leads to hiring failure.

The first mistake made by the vast majority of hiring managers is not defining SUCCESS for a role.

NOT defining success is a recipe for disaster in hiring.

Those who have seen our speaker presentation know that we recommend defining success through a structured process called SOAR and the end product is a tool called a Success Factor Snapshot. This success definition has absolutely NOTHING to do with the traditional job description.

Most job descriptions are worthless as a tool for measuring and predicting future success through an interview. You can read more about defining success in the article on a previous blog posting, titled “When An “A” Candidate is NOT an “A” Employee.

It takes a few hours to define success for a particular position. The key steps include:

• Connecting sales outcomes to the company objectives.
• Listing all the obstacles involved in achieving the desired results.
• Developing a time-phased, quantifiable plan of action items.
• Defining a future expected result – such as increase sales by 12% for the home health care market.

Your investment of time in building a one-page Success Factor Snapshot will dramatically raise hiring accuracy by:

• Focusing your search in which ponds to fish for the best talent.
• Eliminating the embellishment and exaggeration common in sales interviews.
• Leveraging a success-based management tool to keep your new hire on track after they join your team.

Barry

Originally posted on the Vistage Buzz Blog