Who Is Responsible For Hiring Top Talent In Your Company?

Was your answer HR or the hiring manager?

I typically ask this question in our hiring workshops, seminars and Vistage presentations to CEOs and key executives. The answers are generally either HR or the hiring manager. Both of which I disagree with.

I believe hiring top talent in any organization falls squarely on the CEO’s desk. The CEO is responsible for all activity that takes place in the company. Just ask those CEOs in jail who tried to claim ignorance, or the  “I just didn’t know it was happening” defense. Too bad for them as they should have known. That isn’t to say that CEOs can control every activity. They can’t. Every company has or has had a wild employee that says something stupid or does something stupid, however, the company is still often held accountable for the actions of this one employee.

Remember Management 101A, you can delegate authority but you can’t delegate responsibility. The buck still stops at the CEO’s desk.

This is why I’m rather surprised when CEOs answer this question HR or hiring manager. They may have the authority for the activity around hiring, but the CEO sets the tone, priorities, importance around hiring, and who will be hired. Like everything else in the company, when the CEO sets high standards of performance the employees tend to accept and even expect that level of performance. This includes hiring.

The CEO has the ability to determine the quality of people that are hired into the company. The CEO can define top talent for the company, departments, or positions. The CEO can make hiring top talent a priority in the company. The CEO sets the tone and importance for hiring in the company. It is the CEO that has the ability to get everyone focused on where hiring falls on the list of priorities. It is the CEO that has the megaphone to drive this point home. It is the CEO that has the ability to hold HR and hiring managers accountable for hiring top talent. It is the CEO that ultimately controls the training budget for hiring, enabling these employees to learn how to make great hires.

So what are some of the practical things a CEO can do to ensure hiring top talent?

1. First and foremost, build a culture that includes hiring top talent. Do this by re-enforcing it in the values of the company, discussing it at staff meetings, promoting it in the company newsletter, and on a regular basis emphasize how important hiring is to the success of the company. Few companies do all of these on a consistent basis. Many do it once or twice a year, mainly as an after thought. Hiring top talent should never be an after thought.
2. Train your people in hiring. Most employees, especially in small companies, have never had any training on hiring. They do their best to hire the best, but that doesn’t mean they are skilled at it. In fact, many are intimidated by the hiring process and just as many actually find the hiring process as painful as buying a new car.
3. Encourage your people to always be looking for top talent. Top talent isn’t always available when you need them. The CEO should encourage all employees to be on the look out for future talent, especially when there isn’t a need.
4. Incorporate referring and hiring top talent into the performance management system. Set goals for referrals and reward those managers that maintain a queue of potential employees that can be hired.
5. Build into your hiring manager’s schedule time to meet with potential employees, participation in trade or professional associations, and other community activities. This should be less than 10% of their time.
6. Build a website that speaks to future employees, the way your current website speaks to customers. The first place candidates go to research a company is the company’s website. Yet few websites really engage future talent. Most are not candidate friendly and less than 1% have any significant “WOW factor” for candidates coming to the company’s site. Add employee testimonials, have the CEO do a 2 minute video talking about the company’s vision, how the CEO values employees, promote your employee friendly culture, the importance of hiring only the very best and the CEO’s personal commitment to all of the employees.

Hiring top talent doesn’t have to be a time consuming effort. It is in most companies because they are only consumed with it when they need to hire someone. It does have to be a consistent effort though that consumes a small percentage of the hiring manager’s time each month.

If the CEO set raises the bar on hiring top talent, the employees will follow and most will jump over the bar.

You can determine if your company’s hiring process is effective at hiring top talent by taking our Hiring Methodology Assessment. It is FREE to download. CLICK HERE.

Want to make your company a candidate magnet with a great website? Read this short eight hundred word article with some great tips to building a  candidate friendly website. CLICK HERE.

Finally, download this culture assessment to determine whether or not your culture will attract top talent. CLICK HERE

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

 

Two Reasons Interviewing Fails So Often

Do you have other people in your organization interview candidates that will end up working directly for you? Just about everyone answers “Yes” to this question. The follow up question to that is, “Have you ever sat in the interviews with these co-workers and assessed whether or not they are competent interviewers?” I don’t mean co-interviewed with them. I mean assessed their interviewing abilities. Most answer “No” to this question.

You are relying on their opinion for someone that will play a role in your success, and many don’t even know if they conducted  a competent interview.

Two reasons interviewing fails:

1) Incompetent people interviewing. This is by no means a knock on those people. The fact is, some people are naturally good interviewers, just like some people are a natural at music, sports, or math. However, most are not good interviewers, just like most are not good at music, sports, or math.

Interviewing is a skill that needs to be developed. Since very few people ever actually receive any training on how to properly interview, most just aren’t good at it. We do a lot of interviewing training and most taking the course have either had no training or it was one short class years ago.  How can anyone expect these people to be competent at interviewing? Skills need to be practiced or at least kept up to date to be effective.

The one major flaw we have discovered that most poor interviewers make is not probing deeply into what the candidates tell them. The interviewer tends to just accept or reject what they are told. Few really probe for facts, time, data, outcomes, challenges, team issues, names, etc. They may ask one or two follow up questions, but most of the time these are pretty superficial. Teaching interviewers how to probe deeply is the biggest challenge we face in our workshops. Not that the person doesn’t want to probe, they just don’t know how or they are uncomfortable asking these level of questions.

2) Vague questions equal vague hires. This is often because those in the second or third round of interviews really don’t understand the position. They interview every candidate much the same way regardless of position. It is the one size fits all interview syndrome.

Since most don’t know the job, they ask vague, generic questions. The problem with this is that once the person comes on board the job expectations by the hiring authority are rarely vague and generic. At least in the hiring manager’s mind, which often is completely different than the candidate’s mind.

I have asked hundreds of hiring managers if they review in detail the job spec with the co-workers interviewing the candidates. Less than 10% say yes. So that means the other people interviewing just assume what is important, what specific issues need to be probed, and what questions they should ask to determine if the person is qualified for a job, they themselves don’t even understand. Is it any wonder interviewing fails?

Interviewing doesn’t have to be all that complicated. It doesn’t have to be so sophisticated that a person needs to go through extensive training every time they need to interview. In fact, interviewing should be simple, thorough, and easy for everyone to understand.

If we told you that you and everyone else in your company that interviews could conduct simple, thorough, and probing interviews with just five core questions and six simple follow up words would you believe us? Well, it is true. Good interviewers can get about 80% of the information they need to decide whether or not the person can do the job with just these. If they can’t pass these  five core questions, then all of the other questions may be irrelevant, so why ask them? For the five core questions CLICK HERE.

Once the interviewer has asked these five questions, then probing is required to fully understand the candidate’s specific role. You can do a very deep probe with just six simple words. That is it, six words. For details of these CLICK HERE.

We preach, teach, and train in our workshops to make interviewing simpler and have competent people doing the interviewing. Incompetent interviewers asking a bunch of different questions, with no real objective, or worse yet, the interviewers having different objectives leads to a bad hires.

When this happens the company ends up hiring the good or great interviewee, rather than a good or great employee.

For more information on conducting in-depth, probing interviews using the five core questions, see our book “You’re NOT The Person I Hired.” CLICK HERE to learn more.

Consider joining our How to Hire and Retain Top Talent LinkedIn group. It is free and provides a lot of resources for  hiring managers and companies. CLICK HERE to join.

Finally, our audio library is available for free downloads. This library contains over 20 audio recordings to help you attract,  hire and retain top talent. All these audio files are free. CLICK HERE to review the library.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Why Is Recruiting Sales People Like High School Sports?

In many companies, the recruitment process of trying to find top talent for their sales team resembles the process high school sports teams use to add players. They take whoever shows up at their doorstep and considers that the candidate pool. Discover in this audio program the key elements it takes to fish in deep waters to find the best talent. In this program, we describe the four primary pools that candidates come from. We’ll also identify which pool is the sweet spot for recruiting top sales talent and the techniques you can use to get those candidates to come forward and apply for your job opportunity.

To download this radio show CLICK HERE.

What Role Does Luck Play When Hiring Sales People?

If you’re praying that luck will help – you’re doomed to mediocre and average hires. Improve the probability of hiring top talent in your sales function. Barry and Brad discuss the elements of a rigorous hiring process for ensuring that you’ll hire top-notch sales professionals. Components discussed in this radio program include finding and recruiting great candidates, interviewing sales professionals, and validating-verifying-vetting their claims of accomplishments.

To download this radio show CLICK HERE.

Why Great Sales People Are So Hard To Hire

Hiring sales people seems to be one of the most difficult hires companies make. There are many reasons for this and during this show we discuss the two most common failures when hiring sales people. One is timing. Top sales people don’t look for a position on your timetable. In fact, they may never actually look for a position so you have to conduct a pre-search process to create a buzz around your search. Two, most companies do an exceptional job of fishing for top sales people in the bottom third of the candidate pool. This has to change. We discuss exactly why most top talent sales people actually walk away from traditional advertising methods. You need to change how you promote the position. We give you specific examples and resources to help  you start attracting the top third of the sales talent pool.
If  you are having problems hiring top sales people, this show will at least start you out on the right track.

To download this radio show CLICK HERE.

How To Eliminate Embellishment When Hiring Sales People

The vast majority of hiring executives and managers are frustrated that the candidates they interview – especially sales professionals –  embellish and exaggerate what they’ve done or what they can do. In this radio broadcast, Barry and Brad talk about the specific techniques of interviewing, assessment, and evaluation. Barry and Brad discuss the precise techniques of validation, verification, and vetting for which very few candidates could possibly fake,  embellish, or exaggerate their answers. You’ll discover the proven simple techniques for which the candidates will either tell the truth or self-implode within minutes after just a few questions.

To listen to the complete radio show CLICK HERE to download the file.

Why Is It So Hard To Find Great Sales People?

Most companies struggle to find and source great sales professionals. Using traditional techniques of job board postings with a job description masquerading as an advertisement, most end up attracting the bottom third of the candidate pool. Who is in the bottom third? Rejects, toxic, dysfunctional, average, mediocre, and poor performers. Occasionally you get lucky and find a good person. The focus of this radio broadcast is how to make finding and acquiring great talent a consistent process instead of a lucky hire. In this program, Brad and Barry talk about using a Compelling Marketing Statement to attract great sales professionals.

To download this radio show CLICK HERE.

Is Your Website a Magnet OR a Turn-off for Talent

Brad and I recently did a radio show on this subject. You can download the entire broadcast of the radio show from our weekly Internet Radio Show on LaTALKRadio.com.

By the way, did you know that you can access our ENTIRE Library of every radio show we’ve produced. At the end of every show, we take the audio file and post it to our website, where you are welcome to either stream it or download it. You can view the Library by clicking here.

In each show we take one element of hiring and retaining top talent – such as employer branding, leveraging LinkedIn to find candidates, or how to probe deeply in the interview – and we explore it from every angle possible.

Back to being an employer magnet.

One element of creating a powerful employer brand is a website that compels, motivates, and excites top talent when they land on your website.

Most companies get a big fat zero if a score could be given for making a website “candidate-friendly”. I’d give a high-five if I could find a company (beyond the large – well-known – classic stories like Microsoft, Zappos, and SouthWest Airlines that are paraded in front of us all the time as shining examples of employer branding) that had even a tiny bit of “candidate-attractiveness”.

What’s involved in putting a little “candidate-attractiveness” on your website?

Here are some ideas you might wish to consider:

• Vignettes or short stories of employee success
• A listing of your values
• Examples of how your employees are living your value statement
• Success stories of personal growth, promotion, or role expansion
• Stories of how your employees are active in the local community
• Human interest stories about your employees
• Testimonials from candidates and employees
• A link to social media/networking sites
• A closed Social Networking presence where candidates can follow the “people” stuff at your company
• A place to sign up for a newsletter/email about updates at the company
• Awards given out to employees
• Blogs written by your employees talking about how wonderful their job is
• Articles about your commitment to learning and personal development

This list of ideas is endless. There are so many ways to compel, engage, excite, and start a conversation with top talent.

How hard can this be?

Perhaps, it might take a few hours of your marketing department or a outsourced copywriting to put together a little web copy and a few graphics?

I don’t get it.

Why don’t most companies feel it’s important to have something on their website focused on attracting candidates as opposed to the approach that 99% take in putting their product brochure on the web?

The very first thing candidates do when they consider applying to a company is that they check the company’s website out – just like you conduct a Google search on candidates who apply for your open jobs.

Top talent wants to see that you’re a great environment, you care deeply about people, and your culture is compelling. They don’t want to see a company that couldn’t give a hoot about people. They don’t want to join a company where they’ll stagnate.

In the absence of actual information, candidates will gravitate toward imagining the worst case or they’ll become obsessed about the negative information some of your former employees are spreading about you.

By the way, are you monitoring the conversations happening in social media about your company – both positive and negative? If not, you might wish to think about implementing a few basic tools to start monitoring what others are saying about you.

What have you done to make your website “candidate-attractive”?

Any great testimonials where candidates have told  you “WOW – great website – I was compelled to apply because of what I saw on your site”?

I’d love to hear your success stories in employer branding – especially those stories about your website.

If you’ve got a website that you’re proud of as a “top talent magnet” and is “candidate-attractive”, please share the link so our other readers can use you as their role model.

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Stay tuned for our upcoming worksheet to determine if your employer branding is strong enough to attract and engage top talent.

P.P.S. Join our LinkedIn Hire and Retain Top Talent Discussion Group to continue the dialogue around employer branding and website candidate-attractiveness.

Hiring is Less Accurate Than Flipping a Coin

Hiring success, as it is traditionally done in most companies, is slightly worse than the flip of coin.

Case Study on Hiring Failure

Let’s continue down the path of our last two posts on executive hiring failure and explore this horrific statistic in a little more depth.

Over my last two blog posts, I presented a case study out of our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired.” on failed executive hiring. This is the third blog post in the series on Hiring Failure. You can read the first Blog Post, titled “Why Do You Keep Failing at Executive Hiring” and the second post titled “Deja Vu – Why Hiring Keeps Failing – Part Two”

By the way, this was case study #1 out of thousands of stories accumulated from clients over a 25 year period. We tried to pick just a couple to include in our book – otherwise the book would have been nothing but case studies and you would have been depressed reading it.

The failure rate our client experienced with their VP of Sales Position was pain for them, but not unusual. Here’s a blog article titled “Hiring Frustration #8 – You’re NOT the Person I Hired” we wrote that demonstrates the common frustration of hiring someone who cannot deliver your expected results or outcomes – in other words – hiring failure.

The 56% Hiring Failure Rate Problem

When companies hire a six-figure executive, they expect them to “hit the ground running” and produce results quickly. But according to our research and surveys of more than 20,000 hiring executives over the past 15 years, and a review of the published literature on the subject of executive failure, roughly 56% of newly hired executives fail within two years of starting new jobs.

Whoa!

Let’s digest this statistic for a moment. Sadly, 56% hiring failure is worse than the flip of a coin.

• If a comparable failure rate happened on the manufacturing floor, the plant would be shut down.
• If a company’s financial statements were only accurate 56% of the time it would be disastrous.
• If the invoices you sent to customers were only accurate 56% of the time, you would probably go out of business.
• If the payroll checks you issued to employees were only accurate 56% of the time, you would have a mutiny on your hands.

Year after year, companies experience this syndrome of 56% hiring failure, and yet they keep doing the same thing over and over hoping for better results (didn’t Benjamin Franklin call that the “definition of insanity?”).

It seems almost as if organizations are helpless to overcome this horrific hiring failure rate.

You will NOT accept this failure rate in any other area of your business – why do you accept it when it comes to hiring?

• Is the problem that these companies are not interviewing enough people?
• Is the problem the right questions are not being asked in the interview?
• Is the problem it’s impossible to predict from the interview whether someone can succeed in their new role?

No, no, and no.

The Crux of the Problem in Hiring Failure

Based on our extensive research and experience, we have determined that the most common root causes of most executive hiring failure are:

• Focusing on irrelevant past experience and skills
• Nebulous expectations
• Failure to clearly communicate expectations up front
• Flawed hiring processes

The crux of the problem is that every company wants to hire a “SUPERSTAR” who will “succeed”.”

If you ask a CEO or key executive what a SUPERSTAR looks like, or what “success” means in concrete terms like dollars, cents, percentages, time, headcount, and other hard numbers, you usually get a blank stare by way of a reply.

Is it any wonder that new hires frequently fail to meet expectations when those expectations are not clearly spelled out in the first place?

Under these circumstances, hiring essentially degrades into a process based on luck and hope – and we all know that luck and hope is not a particularly good strategy.

Hard Questions and Next Steps

What is your hiring process based on?

• Do you insist on clear, precise, and quantifiable definitions of success?
• Have you gone over your entire hiring process to ensure there is a high degree of rigor in assessing and evaluating candidates?
• Are you attracting the top 25% of the candidate pool for your open opportunity or the bottom 25%?

Is NOW the time to invest in upgrading, improving, and revamping your hiring process so that you can overcome the 56% problem?

Take our Hiring Process Self-Assessment to determine if NOW is the time for a booster shot in the arm to enable you to start hiring top talent at every level on a consistent basis. Download the Hiring Process Self-Assessment Scorecard by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Hiring and Retaining Top Talent where issues of hiring process improvement are discussed.