Hiring Mistake #3 – Inappropriate Prerequisites

Hiring top talent is not the same as ordering in the drive-through line at your favorite fast food restaurant.

In many companies, the hiring process is a comprised of picking items off a short list. “I’ll take a cheeseburger, no onions, fries, and a medium vanilla shake.” What does this sound like outside of our fast-food metaphor: “I’ll take a CPA with an MBA, 12 years of experience, previous supervision of at least 14 accountants, and good international accounting experience.”

Once you fall victim to using this fast food approach of defining work, checking boxes, ordering off the menu – then your entire hiring process of how you write the ad, where you place the ad, the interview questions you ask, how you measure a candidate’s real motivation, and what you do with the person after you hire them – is focused on attracting candidates who best fit the tribal box-checking approach. Most job ads contain a long list of prerequisites, such as 12 years of industry experience, an MBA, a CPA, or this skill or that certification. As the resumes come in and hiring managers begin the screening process, they check off those boxes one by one as if they were ordering items from a fast-food menu.

If this is the heart of your hiring process, you have just committed hiring mistake #3 — placing too much emphasis on specific education, technical skills and industry experience as necessary requirements for the job.

The problem with this approach is that it excludes a lot of good candidates early in the process because they don’t get checks in all the boxes. With competition for top talent getting tougher than ever, you can’t afford to screen out the best candidates before they even show up at your door.

Why do most CEOs, Key Executives, and Managers use inappropriate prerequisites for hiring.

Most executives and managers don’t know how to define the outcomes, deliverables and expectations for a specific job, so they fall back on the old tribal and traditional standbys of knowledge, skills and experience. Plus, relying on standard prerequisites allows them to practice the “CYA” method of hiring.

Suppose I hire someone, they fall flat on their face, and the boss tells me I’m a bad manager because I made a hiring mistake. I can say to the boss that I did not make a mistake because we agreed on the prerequisites for the job and I checked them all off. If the person failed on the job, it wasn’t my fault.

False Predictors of Success

Why don’t knowledge, skills and experience lead to good hiring decisions? Because they are not proven predictors of job success.

Just because someone has a certain skill doesn’t mean they can apply that skill in the way you need it. For example, suppose your ad lists ‘strong computer skills’ as a requirement. You get a resume that indicates the applicant has experience using Microsoft Office tools, so you check off the box because you want someone with good computer skills.

But what you’re really looking for is someone who can use Microsoft Access to enter data about clients and then create complex merge Word files for a bi-weekly newsletter. You need a specific application of a skill versus the more generic ‘good computer skills.’ Unless you ask, you have no way of knowing whether the applicant can deliver that specific application.

The same concept applies to experience.

Typically, hiring managers will say something like, ‘I need someone with 12 years’ experience”. However, what is experience? Does it mean the candidate has done the same thing for 12 years? Or have they developed new and higher-level skills on the job? Does it mean the applicant achieved certain results? Or did they just show up and punch the clock every day for the past 12 years?

For all you know, the applicant could have 12 years of producing lousy results, and a person with six years of producing good results could be a much better candidate. When your hiring criteria depend on elements that have nothing to do with success, all you can do is guess.

How do you overcome the innate tendency to look at the wrong criteria? You overcome it by focusing on outcomes and results rather than knowledge, skills and experience.

The first step in hiring top talent is to get very clear about the outcomes and deliverables you need from the job, so that you can measure someone’s ability to get results. The effort of defining the outcomes and deliverables needs to happen before you start screening resumes, doing phone interviews or meeting people for the first time. If you don’t first define success, you eliminate a lot of good candidates who don’t have checks in all the boxes but know how to get the job done.

 

Inappropriate Prerequisites Screen Out Top Talent

The quickest and most impactful way to improve your hiring process is to teach your managers how to define success on the job. That involves going beyond the traditional job description and creating a Success Factor Snapshot, which breaks down a position in terms of specific, measurable deliverables, benchmarks and timetables. Once you define the job in terms of outcomes and results, it doesn’t matter whether someone has two years of experience or 20. All you care about is whether they can deliver the outcomes you need.

To avoid eliminating top talent in the finding or sourcing phase of the hiring process, stop using job descriptions full of inappropriate prerequisites that are masquerading as advertisements. Most companies post the entire job description (or an abbreviated version of it) in their online ads. We refer to this silly and useless approach as “drill sergeant” advertising, because it barks at the candidate. It says, “You must have this knowledge, skill or experience or don’t bother applying!”

Drill sergeant advertising not only reinforces the wrong criteria, it actually drives away the best candidates. When top talent sees job ads full of inappropriate prerequisites, they get turned off by the description of the job and screen themselves out before you even get a chance to talk with them.

A better approach to attract top talent is to create a Compelling Marketing Statement which describes the outcomes and results you’re looking for, along with some of the challenges inherent in the job. Position the job as an opportunity to achieve at a high level and make a real difference in your company. You’ll get more candidates from the top 25 percent of the talent pool, and because you’re looking for outcomes rather than experience, you won’t screen them out them before learning whether they can produce the results you need.

Is the heart of your hiring process – writing ads, defining work, asking interview questions – based on using inappropriate prerequisites?

Should you be training all your managers how to define real outcomes and deliverables rather than relying on outdated and tribal approaches to hiring?

Share in a comment to this blog post your experience of hiring using inappropriate prerequisites.

Have you visited our website to download a free copy of our e-book to overcome the mistake of using inappropriate prerequisites? Click this link to explore the many free tools, tips, and templates we provide on our website.

Barry Deutsch

Are You Using Best Practices or Worst Practices in Hiring?

In many of my Vistage and TEC presentations with our popular You’re NOT the Person I Hired speaker program, members consistently slap themselves in the forehead, start sweating, hairs go up on the back of their neck, and they frequently challenge me on why I am creating so much pain around hiring. I’m convinced this collective suffering is due to an epiphany at some point during the presentation when the members recognize they are using the WORST practices to hire the “best of the worst”, or as a Member so eloquently put a few weeks ago in one of my presentations – “the cream of the crap.”

What are you using to hire people in your organization? Are your methods based on an antiquated tribal approach of “this is what the really old guy (30 years ago) taught the slightly younger guy (15 years ago) who taught me how to hire?”

In most companies, hiring is not really a process. It’s a set of random and arbitrary events predicted on how each manager does it. There is NO consistency between managers and executives on how to hire. Everyone does it according to their prior life experiences. I’ll bet there are a few folks in your organization who are really good at hiring, judging others, measuring and predicting future performance – perhaps you’re one of these chosen few. And the rest of the team basically sucks at hiring because no one has ever shown them a different approach than the traditional tribal methods that have been in use since Henry Ford started cranking Model Ts.

Hiring is one of the few things in most companies that is not “processified (is that even a word?)” Everything else is a process – order entry, quality, customer complaints – but not hiring. Who knows what goes on in the minds of your managers and executives when they start to look to hire someone for their teams? Hiring in many companies borders on something akin to the wild west. It’s loose, no order, no structure, everyone looking out for themselves. It almost reinforces a Darwinian culture in many companies. The hiring managers who instinctively do hiring well always build the best teams. The ones who have never been trained, never coached, and lack a replicable process are the ones that get the “cream of the crap” unless luck intervenes. If this doesn’t sound dysfunctional, I’m not sure what might qualify. Are you willing to leave hiring to luck, chance, and a few people who do it right?

What if you could implement a process by which every single hiring manager, right down the lowest level, could make great, consistent hires? What would that be worth? Would it be worth investing the time to implement a process of best practices?

Allow me share a funny (yet fundamentally sad) example. In my presentations, I will ask the following question of the CEOs and Key Executives: “Where did you learn what interview questions to ask in an interview”. The response is almost like a chorus as almost everyone indicates they learned what questions to ask when they were interviewed 22, 17, or 9 years ago – they’re still asking the same questions today. These questions have circulated on a “list” for the last century called the “top 20 interview questions.” What do these sound like? Do the following questions sound familiar and make you cringe when you remember the last time you used them:

 

• Tell me a little about yourself
• Why are you here today?
• What can you do for us?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• We like people who like teams. How you do you feel about teams?

 

Then it starts going downhill as we play closet psychologist, take questions published in books by so-called experts who have never interviewed a candidate themselves, and we lock in on a few favorites -  perhaps for no reason other than the question appears to be “cute”. These fall into the category of questions such as “When you come back in some form of animal life, what will you be?” Who cares? What does this reveal? What does it have to do with performance on the job and fitting in from a cultural perspective?

I call these questions the 20 standard, stupid, inane, canned interview questions that force the candidate to give standard, stupid, inane, canned answers.

More on interviewing in another post.

Let’s tackle a different issue related to using either the worst practices or best practices to FIND candidates.

I just had a conversation with a Vistage Member that illustrates the WORST practices in hiring – relying solely on a traditional advertisement that is either the full job description or a modified version of it. He had run an ad for a sales rep. He used the job description as the ad. The job board let him leave it up for 60 days. At the end of 60 days, after reviewing over 300 resumes and interviewing 15 candidates, he had no one who could achieve his expectations. He then re-ran the ad and got the same candidates who responded the first time. Let’s be honest – this is not an advertisement – it’s a job description masquerading as an ad. It disgusts and turns off all top candidates and tends to attract those desperate for work. You wonder why you get 300 plus responses to your on-line advertisement and then 3 weeks later have no one worth interviewing. This process of using job descriptions to attract to talent and then praying a great person falls into your lap is the epitome of hiring dysfunction. First, you’ve got to use multiple channels to attract the best candidates, leveraging referrals, off-line networking, and on-line networking. Secondly, you’ve got to describe your opportunity in more compelling terms than a job description to get the best – as you may know we call this a Compelling Marketing Statement. Finally, you’ve got to have some tools/process to engage the top candidates and compel them to evaluate your opportunity. Picking from the “Cream of the Crap” is not an effective approach to obtaining talent. If you’re starting your hiring process by only looking at the worst candidates, what does it matter what you do from that point forward. Bringing the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool forward through traditional job description advertising guarantees failure before you’ve even met the first candidate.

Here’s the bottom line: When are you going to implement a real hiring process based on best practices? Are you going to wait until you have to hire 2 more people or 20 more people. Are you going to wait until you want to build your business by $30K a month or $7 million over the next 3 years? As you know, we have a process to do this that we teach in our Vistage and TEC presentations called the Success Factor Methodology. You’ve probably already downloaded a free copy of the book we wrote on this subject. However, it doesn’t matter what the process is called – whether it’s the Success Factor Methodology, Performance Based Hiring, or Top Grading – the fundamental elements of best practices in hiring are the core of every rigorous hiring process. What are these best practices?

• You must define success and be able to use as a tool to predict future success
• You must fish in deep waters to find and attract the best candidates
• You must ask the “right” interview questions that provide you with enough information to predict future success
• You must have a feedback mechanism which forces all hiring managers to probe deeply in the interview and structures their candidate assessments.
• You must utilize a wide range of “other information” to validate, vet, and verify what you heard in the interview is really the truth.

Those five components of best practices will allow you to move hiring accuracy up from the commonly accepted range of 50% well into the 80-90% range.

Imagine this: What if for every single hire from this day forward you could have an 80-90% confidence level that the person would achieve your expected outcomes and results, and they would do it with a set of behaviors that’s consistent with your values and culture? Would that make a difference?

Why Hiring Fails: Hiring Mistake #2 – Superficial Interviewing

Next to not defining success, superficial interviewing is the second most common mistake made in the hiring process that leads to hiring failure.

There are two key elements to effective interviewing: Asking the right questions and validating the truth in the candidate answers.

 

Asking The Right Questions

Where do most CEOs, Executives, and Managers learn what interview questions to ask in an interview?

After having presented our program to over 30,000 CEOs, Executives, and Managers in the last 20 years, the vast majority tell us that they learned what interview questions to ask when they were originally interviewed 8-12-22 years ago. These questions form a collective group I like to call the 20 standard, stupid, inane, canned, silly interview questions based on tribal hiring. They are tribal in the sense that we blindly follow the questions the generations before us have asked, assuming that if they asked those questions, perhaps you should also ask those questions. What do these questions sound like?

• Tell us about yourself
• Why are you here today?
• What do you know about us?
• What do you want to be in 5 years?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• Would you like to do this kind of work?
• How strong are your computer skills?
• We like team players – how do you feel about working in a team?

What we get as answers from these questions are the practiced, rehearsed, canned responses that are a complete waste of time. These questions do not reveal any insight regarding someone’s performance ability, past success, ability to deliver your success expectations, character, values, and typical behavior?

Why bother?

Instead, let’s just pick people off resumes and hope for the best – we’ll probably have as much luck. Let’s talk about luck for a minute. The entire process of asking the 20 standard, stupid, and canned interview questions focus on picking candidates who are the best at answering these questions. These questions have NOTHING to do with real work. They are an artificial set of questions designed to measure how well someone interviews – NOT how well someone will do in your open position. If we get a great employee – I’ll suggest it’s more a function of luck than any effective interviewing process or methodology.

Have you ever selected a candidate that said all the right things in the interview and then quickly fell apart after being hired? Of course you have – that’s where we got the title of our book and popular Vistage and TEC Speaker Program, You’re NOT the Person I Hired. How about this scenario: Have you ever hired a candidate that was not a good interviewee – quite, reserved, shy, introverted – you took a risk and hired the person. They turned out to be one of your better hires. Their on-the-job performance level was outstanding. Of course this has happened to you.

How is it possible that sometimes the best interviewees are not the best performers and sometimes the worst interviewees are the best performers?

It happens because the traditional and tribal process of asking the 20 standard, stupid, inane, canned, and silly questions force us to judge candidates on how well they can interview, NOT how well can they do the job. Layer on top of that the fact that we accept superficial responses to these questions and you’ve got the likely probability your candidate will fail to achieve your expectations.

The first step in overcoming superficial interviewing is to ask the right questions. We’ve designed a simple system for interviewing based on 5 Core Interview Questions. The first three questions are based on the most important traits of success. The second two questions are based on whether the person can meet your expectations and achieve them in your unique culture or environment.

We’ll get into the 5 Core Interview questions and the rationale for asking them in a later blog post. To whet your appetite and not leave you hanging, here are the 5 Core Interview Questions. These are based on a collective 75 years of executive search with my partners, over a 1000 search assignments, 250,000 candidates interviewed, and 30,000 hiring managers and executives that have been through our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” program. In addition, we’ve conducted surveys, research projects, and tracked successful candidates over a 25 year period. All of those measures and activities have brought us to these 5 core interview questions:

1. Initiative: Can you give me an example of where you’ve demonstrated high initiative in your last position – going above and beyond the call of duty?
2. Flawless Execution: Could you share with me a task or assignment – – and you had to overcome significant obstacles and hurdles?
3. Leadership: Could you illustrate your leadership by telling us about an example – where you either were part of the team or led the team? What did you do specifically to help the team achieve their goals or results?
4. Success Factors: One of our most critical success factors for this role is X. What have you done that is most similar, comparable, like that expectation?
5. Adaptability: How would achieving this success factor in our environment differ from attempting to achieve it in your previous company?

 

Superficial Interviewing

Superficial interviewing is the process of taking whatever the candidate tells us and accepting it as the truth.

Let’s think about truth in interviewing for a moment. Think back on all the candidates you’ve ever met in the hiring process. What is the percentage of candidates who have lied, embellished, or exaggerated what they have done or what they thought they could do for you. If I think back over my last 200 presentations to Vistage and TEC groups, almost everyone thinks the number is 100%. I’ll suggest it’s somewhere between 120% and 140%. You might wonder – how could Barry come up with a number like this? It’s because candidates lie, embellish, and exaggerate more than once – 17 times on their resume, 26 times in the phone interview, 38 times in the face-to-face interview.

Many candidates feel comfortable lying, embellishing, and exaggerating because they know you’ll never probe, validate, verify, vet, check-out, confirm, cross-reference, or triangulate their responses. They feel it is okay to claim accomplishments their peers or bosses achieved, give themselves inflated titles, make up their education, and completely misrepresent their responsibilities.

Layer that on top of our usual level of desperation to get the job filled, and now you’ve got hiring executives and managers who don’t want to know the truth. You meet a candidate that you have a great rapport with immediately, and you’ll stop asking questions and start selling the job. If you keep probing, you might discover the candidate’s warts – you don’t want to know their warts – you’re already in love and you want them to get the job.

Our methodology of getting to the truth in interviewing and moving beyond asking silly questions that generate superficial responses is called the “Magnifying Glass Approach.” It encompasses asking for examples, peeling the onion on every claim, and obtaining precise details on the examples, such as starting points, quantification, budget, resources, names of those involved, costs reduced, metrics improved, goals hit, difficulties overcome, and solutions generated. It’s done by asking the candidate WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN, and HOW?

It involves DOCUMENTING the details from their examples. It’s a form of interviewing that is rigorous and objective. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a candidate to make it up fast enough. They can either immediately substantiate their claims of achievements, results, and accomplishments with great detail and depth, OR they will self-implode before your very eyes within seconds.

Most hiring executives and manager ask the candidate a question, hear the response, then think to themselves “good answer”, and then move on to a different line of questioning. We glaze across the top of the interview thinking we’re doing a good job of collecting information. Instead of asking 15-20 different superficial interview questions that generate canned responses, let’s ask very few – but dig deeply into each one.

One of the most significant reasons behind hiring failure is the lack of time invested in conducting a rigorous and probing interview.

When should you STOP asking the 20 standard tribal interview questions, and STOP accepting superficial responses?

Why Hiring Fails: Hiring Mistake #1 – Inadequate Job Descriptions

In one of my last blog posts, I mentioned that I would take the Study we did within the Vistage/TEC Community on Hiring Failure before we wrote our book, and explore the Top Ten Reasons Why Hiring Fails in most companies in greater depth. This blog article explores the first and most critical hiring mistake.

 

The number one mistake made by the vast majority of hiring managers is not defining SUCCESS for a role – before beginning the recruiting and hiring process.

 

When you don’t define success up-front, you’re setting yourself up for missing your desired outcomes, success, results, and plans.

 

NOT defining success is a recipe for disaster in hiring – not to mention company performance.

 

This number one mistake is the primary cause of hiring failure that occurs in over 50% of all executive and management hires.

 

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 one-page simple success definition called a Success Factor Snapshot. This success definition has absolutely NOTHING to do with the traditional job description.

 

The traditional job description is worthless as a tool for measuring and predicting future success through an interview. Let’s consider for a moment what is on a typical job description:

 

• Minimum years of experience
• Minimum educational expectations
• Minimum listing of duties, responsibilities, activities and tasks
• Minimum skills and knowledge
• Ambiguous definitions of behaviors and personality traits

 

When we look at this list, are we defining top talent or high performance? NO! Instead, we’re defining minimum, average, and mediocre. I’d like to suggest that most companies hiring processes (if we could even call them a process) are geared to hire MINIMUM – AVERAGE – MEDIOCRE employees.

When the listing of minimums are used – as they are in most traditional job descriptions – everything you do in hiring is geared to attract and select a minimum, average, and mediocre employee. The traditional job description of minimums drives how you write the ad, where you place the ad, what ponds you fish in, how deeply you fish, what questions you ask the candidate, how you measure their motivation, and what you do with them after you make a hire.

 

The traditional job description forces you into tribal hiring practices that have been perpetuated for centuries that focus on trying to hire minimally qualified candidates.

 

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

 

• Connecting 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.

 

Why do most companies not invest the time and energy to develop success-based definitions of work – because it’s hard work and takes time. However, if you’re not willing to invest the time and energy in defining success – are you prepared to accept minimal, average, and mediocre results from your team or company?

 

I compare the process of developing job descriptions/definitions around success instead of minimums to the old FRAM Filter commercials – remember the famous tagline: You can pay now and pay me later.

 

If you could raise hiring accuracy by a factor of 4-10X over your current level (I’m assuming you measure whether the people you hire achieve your desired results), would you be willing to invest a little time up-front to create better job descriptions that are success-based?

 

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.

 

When are you going to change your hiring process from using traditional job descriptions listing minimums to a process that is success-based?

 

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Bonus Tip: You can use our SOAR Approach to creating Success Factor Snapshots for your existing team in addition to using it in the hiring process. Top talent wants to know clearly and precisely what you expect of their performance. This is one way to improve retention and raise employee satisfaction and engagement.

Do you measure call reluctance when hiring sales professionals?

Do you dig deeply like a detective to measure call reluctance in a potential sales candidate?

Why do so many “previously” successful sales professionals fall victim to call reluctance when they come to work for you?

I hear this complaint put forth by many CEOs in the workshops I teach on how to hire top talent titled “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. They said all the right things in the interview – they seemed to be successful in their last company – why then wouldn’t they do the work (making the calls) when they got here?

I’m not talking about making cold calls to complete strangers. I’m talking about following up on referrals, leads, meetings, events, where they’ve got a name and a reason to be calling that potential customer or client?

Could it be that they were “coasting” in their last job – living off the income from existing accounts vs. developing new business?

Could their daily/weekly activity of making follow-up calls in their previous role be at a lower level than what is needed in your role?

Do you measure activity levels in addition to outcomes, such as closed sales. Activity levels can be a great forward looking indicator of what’s going to happen next week or next month?

Have you built an entire framework of metrics around activity levels on calls? I saw a post the other day on a sales blog quoting a study that had been done of leads and the success rate of closing those leads. The study indicated that there was a significant difference when leads were followed up within 7 hours. How quickly does your sales team follow-up on leads and referrals? Do you track it?

My experience of both personally hiring recruiters, sales professionals, and in working with clients over 25 years in hiring top sales professionals and sales management is that most sales professionals resist and fight the process of being measured and held accountable. My experience is that when sales professionals fight measurements, it’s because they don’t have the metrics to support the expectations. When this battle begins, it’s probably better to just make them available to industry.

I didn’t heed my own advice in a recent hire of a recruiter. I liked the individual so much, that I allowed them to not be held accountable and measured. In the end, I discovered they were not doing the work required to be successful – rather they did a great job layering on the BS about their work effort. Personal lesson learned. I give this advice to my clients who engage me to find top sales talent and I should have known better.

Are you making this same mistake? Are you letting some of your sales professionals “off the hook” because they whine about the time it takes to fill out the reports or document their activity levels? Are you buying into this nightmare scenario because you’re hoping they’ll close deals or because you like them as a person?

How do you measure call reluctance in the interview for top sales talent?

How do you ensure you’ll not fall victim to a sales person who doesn’t do the work necessary for success in your sales team?

Barry Deutsch

Can You Avoid the Most Common Hiring Errors?

Over the last 6 months I’ve noticed an interesting trend occurring in the 25-30 CEO groups, such as Vistage and TEC,  in which I’ve presented our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” Speaker Program. Prior to 6 months ago, the key issue was “How do I retain my best people.” Now the primary issue is “How do I avoid making a hiring mistake.”

 

It almost seems like many companies have forgotten best practices in hiring top talent through the recession, where they didn’t get to “practice” the techniques of proper hiring. Like any other business process, we sometimes get “out of sync” when we do not use and practice the disciplines of best practices on a regular basis.

Historical Context

Before jumping into the the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes, I’d like to provide a little historical context.

 

My partner, Brad Remillard, and I have been conducting executive search for over 25 years together. In the first 10 years of our firm, we noticed that a very strange thing happened in most hiring decisions. Frequently, the candidate who got the job was typically the best interviewee, but many times was not the best employee. They were successful at “winning” the interview, but unsuccessful in achieving the desired results.

 

Conversely, many of the candidates who were horrific in the interview: quiet, reserved, introverted, nervous, and shy – did not get a chance to prove themselves, yet their on the job performance was stellar in their previous roles and the next job they took.

 

Here’s a couple of questions to ponder:

 

Have you ever hired someone that you thought was the perfect candidate, but they didn’t work out?

 

Have you ever taken a risk on hiring someone that didn’t interview perfectly, yet they turned out to be one of your best hires?

 

We stepped back, scratched our heads, and wondered what was going on in the hiring process that led most executives and managers to make mistakes on many of the candidates they met? How could there be such a dichotomy between interviewing performance and on-the-job performance?

 

How could the best interviewees not always be the best performers? How could the worst interviewees sometimes be the best performers? After 25 years of executive search and over 1,000 search assignments, we cannot find one single shred of evidence linking how well candidates do in the interview with their on-the-job performance (as interviews are normally conducted in most companies)!

Is there hope to improve this depressing and dysfunctional hiring state?

 

Of course you can improve it. The key is to overcome the most common hiring mistakes with a structured and rigorous hiring process.

Our Landmark Study on Hiring Mistakes

Prior to writing our best selling book titled “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” (same title as our Vistage/TEC Speaker Program), we commissioned a formal research study among CEOs within and outside of the the Vistage/TEC community trying to discern what are the Top Ten Mistakes CEOs and Senior Executives Make in Hiring. The Executive Summary of this Study can be found in the Vistage Village Library, on our website, and in the appendix of the book.

 

We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in hiring success among companies that have implemented a more structured and rigorous hiring process. Many times in the past, these companies would commit multiple mistakes and repeat them over and over. Most studies of hiring accuracy over the past 50 years show that hiring as it is traditionally done is not much more accurate than flipping a coin.

Frightening to think that the future success of your company could hinge on “luck.”

 

If you can overcome the most common hiring mistakes – what we call “The TOP TEN Hiring Mistakes”, you can improve your hiring accuracy well into the 80% plus range. Imagine from this point forward, every hire you make in your organization, you’ve got a 80% plus accuracy in hiring employees who not only achieve your expectations of performance, but they also do it with set of behaviors that is consistent with your values and culture.

 

Would that make a difference?

 

I would love to hear from you about the before/after comparison of hiring success in your company. What was the accuracy, problems, issues prior to improving your hiring process – and what happened after you implemented a more structured and rigorous process?

 

I’m going to take each of the hiring mistakes identified in our original research project and blog about each one separately, including the key steps you can take to overcome and prevent that mistake from ever occurring again!

Booster Shot to Find Top Talent Through Social Recruiting

Are you ready for a booster shot in the arm to finding top talent?

In delivering our brand new program on Social Recruiting to a Vistage Group, I was struck by how comfortable everyone was with social media, but had not yet started using these common sites and tools, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, for recruiting.

In 3 short hours, we covered the key elements of establishing an infrastructure to recruit top talent on the Internet, how to turn social recruiting into a process, and how to apply off-line techniques to the on-line world. Social Recruiting could turn out to be the virtual “booster shot in arm.” There are so many opportunities to connect with high potential candidates through on-line identification, acquisition, engagement, and nurturing – it’s almost overwhelming.

Does your company have a specific plan to leverage social media to find top talent, OR is more along the lines of who has time to post a job ad on Monster.com and hope for the best. You know how those efforts typically pan out.

Imagine having a specific plan of attack for every opening in your company – for this level job, here are the immediate 8 social media tactics we’ll use when we open up the position. I’ll bet with just a few simple techniques, you could dramatically boost the number of top talent candidates flowing into the top of your funnel.

Are you currently using social recruiting as one of your primary finding and sourcing tools?

Have you sent any of your managers/executives to training on how to find great candidates for their teams?

What research/benchmarking have you conducted with comparable companies to see what they are doing with social recruiting?

Are the best comparable companies winning the war for talent because they’re effectively using social recruiting?

Barry Deutsch

Employee Selection: What A Dum Dum I’ve Been!

I recently was invited to present to a national trade association of 150 CEOs running businesses between roughly $5-$50 million in a particular B2B niche. At the end of my talk, one of the CEOs came up to me and said “Now I realize what a Dum Dum I’ve been. I now understand why so many of our hires have failed to live up to our expectations.”

All I did was walk the group through our Success Factor Methodology – which essentially when stripped down to the basic elements is a common model for best practices in hiring wrapped in our words, terms, and “sticky phrases.” (You might not remember me talking about the three techniques of sourcing great talent in our well-known hiring top talent workshop – but you will remember my terms such as hiring the tallest pygmy, fishing in the shallow end of the candidate pool, and taking whomever lands on your doorstep).

Do you feel like a Dum-dum?

Would you admit that your hiring success is less than stellar? Have you had that special “aha” moment when you realize your hiring process for employee selection, interviewing, assessment, and evaluation could probably use a major overhaul?

Is your hiring process so weak that a significant portion of your hires fail to live up to your expectations (I’m going way out on a limb here assuming your defining expectations of quantifiable results, outcomes, and deliverables)?

How do you know if your hires are even living up to your expectations of performance or success? If one of the key elements in your employee selection process is NOT to define performance or success before interviewing, it’s got to be a little tough to quantitatively measure success or failure.

When was the last time you sat down with your executive team and stepped through how the selection of top talent employees works at your company. I’ll bet in many cases you’ll either start to laugh or cry. In most cases (based on comments and feedback we hear everyday from candidates in our executive search practice and from hiring executives, you’re hiring process may resemble a Dilbert comic strip or as I mentioned in a previous blog – a Rodney Dangerfield Comedy Routine.

In most companies, employee selection, finding employees, and hiring top talent is not a process. This is one of the Top Ten Mistakes in Hiring. Even in large companies, hiring managers do whatever they desire when the door closes and the interview begins. Hiring in most companies is a random, arbitrary set of events predicated on how Tom, Sally, or Mark does it. There is NO consistency, structure, standards in hiring.

I’ve consulted with numerous sales teams in which 3-6 sales managers across the country are hiring the same type of sales professionals. These are typically divisions of large Fortune 500 companies. In almost every instance, every manager had a different approach, criteria, questions, and style to interviewing, selecting, and hiring the SAME candidate. When this lack of integrated hiring process occurs, selecting employees is a process built upon LUCK as opposed to a consistent, reliable, common, replicable methodology.

Here’s my thought-provoking question of the day: When is the right time for you to begin implementing a rigorous hiring process that improves your probability of hiring top talent at every level in the organization? Should it be when you have 1 more hire to make in the next 12 months or 22? Should it be when you when to grow your sales by $300k over the next 12 months, or $7 million?

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Take our popular 8 Point Self-Assessment to determine if your hiring and employee selection process is capable of finding, interviewing, and evaluating top talent.

Is Experience Overrated in Selection?

Anthony Young posed the question in a posting on the Ad Age Blog whether experience was overrated in selecting advertising agencies. Here’s a short excerpt of what he said:

In new business, agencies frequently like to speak to their experience, but do clients place the same importance on it? In a recent new-business meeting we had with a prospect, I insisted that we not present any credentials or client case-studies. The pitch team was unsure but agreed to go with it. The clients’ feedback: Of all the agencies they met, we impressed them the most.

We can extend this idea of “is experience overrated” to hiring and a variety of other selection issues. Here was my response to this comment about using experience as “selection” criteria”:

You make a very good point asking the question of whether experience allows you to predict future performance. This is the tribal methodology employed by most companies, whether it’s in the hiring process or the selection of vendors, suppliers, consultants, coaches, and service firms.

We’ve written an entire book on this subject,  based on 25 years of research, why hiring at a managerial and executive level fails over 50% of the time. One of the primary culprits in this failure is an over-reliance on past experience.

PAST EXPERIENCE IS NOT A PREDICTOR OF FUTURE SUCCESS

instead

PAST SUCCESS IS THE BEST PREDICTOR OF FUTURE SUCCESS

One of the key problems in “selection” is that the “client” does not know what they want in terms of outcomes or results. Without a specific quantifiable definition of success, it becomes very difficult to select on past successes and draw the comparisons to whether or not your candidate/vendor can deliver your expected outcomes in the future. Without a definition of what success looks like in the future, most executives and managers fall back on the tribal approach of making selections based on prior experience.

Using prior experience fails often, but it’s safe. It’s comfortable. It’s what we’ve always done. And it’s CYA. If the candidate, vendor, or agency fails, everyone can point at the fact that they had the “right” prior experience – therefore the executive responsible for making the decision should not be held accountable for the failure. NOT defining future success for selection decision-making and NOT using it in the selection process is a wonderful technique of absolving yourself of accountability.

Using past success or performance is scary for most executives since they are uncomfortable putting their necks on the line to define future outcomes (and possibly being held accountable for communicating what they plan to do), and they’ve never been formally trained in how to validate past successes and use it to predict future success.

You state this eloquently when mentioning that companies are very slow to adopt to change because the entire “system” gives too much value to past experience – which is very conservative, cautious, and the antithesis of change.

 

If you would like to read the full article, please click the link below:

Is Experience in Media and Advertising Overrated?

What are your thoughts about changing your company culture from an over-reliance on past experience in selection criteria to focusing more on past success or performance?

Do you believe that the tribal approach of an over-reliance on past experience is inherently conservative, stifling, and cautious? Do you believe it limits or hampers creativity, imagination, and innovation?

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Download a copy of our 8-point Hiring Self-Assessment to determine if your hiring “selection” process (and you can use this as an extension to other decision making about suppliers, vendors, consultants, coaches, service firms) is capable of finding and engaging with top talent.

What Have You Done to Develop Your Team?

Lack of training, development, and growth is one of the primary reasons your best talent might walk out the door on you sooner than you think!

Last week I presented to a group of CEOs who were shocked that I was suggesting they spend any time with their direct reports talking about development, training, engagement, satisfaction, intellectual stimulation, desires, hopes, and dreams. They considered that “HR Talk” and felt it would be “below” them to have to engage in a “career aspiration-type” dialogue.

I can guarantee that these CEOs are in for a rude surprise in the near future when some of the talent they depend on most – start to leave. Once a few start to leave, the rest fall like dominos, and word gets out on the street that your company (YOU)  does not develop, groom, and prepare people for bigger challenges.

 

What Does Top Talent Expect?

Are you focused on developing your team – is this idea constantly bubbling up into your thoughts, OR are you praying that since everyone shows up for work everyday, they must enjoy their job? Don’t be lulled to sleep by false impressions.

Contrary to popular opinion, just showing up does not mean contented cows, engaged employees, and satisfaction levels that are the envy of your competitors.

Top talent expects to be continuously trained. They expect to be given challenging assignments that stretch them to the next level. They want to come to work to be stimulated, intellectually turned on, pushed to excel, and forced to do their very best work to high standards.

When they are not being trained, developed, and given projects that add to their skill and knowledge level, they’ll start taking calls about other job opportunities from their friends, former business associates, and recruiters. Worst case, they’ll proactively go on-line to the major job boards and start seeking out opportunities.

 

The LIB Curve of Employee Motivation

My partner, Brad Remillard, wrote a job post, which you might title “Those Darn Recruiters”. Many companies try to impose elaborate schemes and security measures to prevent recruiters from talking to their employees. Unfortunately, Brad and I have never been able to recruit a candidate who was happy and content in their current job.

You know that a large part of being happy and content is being trained, developed, and challenged with higher level work. This is really basic Abraham Maslow concepts from decades ago. What’s surprising to me – is that most companies and executives VIOLATE on a daily basis the basic concepts of employee satisfaction, engagement, and happiness (Maslow termed a big part of that satisfaction: Self-Actualization).

If you’ve seen Brad or I present our workshop titled either “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” or “You’re the Person I want to KEEP”, then you know we use a model of employee satisfaction called the LIB Curve – which is a variation of Maslow’s Self-Actualization. Feel free to check out some of our previous articles on the LIB Curve of Employee Motivation.

Basic Common Sense in Generating Smiles

Do You Inspire Others to Self-Motivate?

Why You Should Measure Self-Motivation

Here’s the key question: Do you know where every single one of your direct reports sits on the LIB curve? Are they at +8, –12, or flat-lined? If you don’t know where each one sits and where they want to be, perhaps it’s time to put your “career mentor” hat on and have a serious heart-to-heart with your direct report about their current and desired level of learning, impact, and becoming something better (LIB).

OR would it be better to wait until they come into your office and tell you they are planning on giving their 2 week notice?

When you walk in the office tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’ll start doing to develop your team?

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Download our Internet Radio Show Podcast on Non-Monetary Reward and Recognition where we discuss the internal processes required to inspire your staff to self-motivate, to engage and stimulate your top talent, and to retain your best performers.