Deja Vu – Why Hiring Keeps Failing (Part Two)

Why is it when you take aim in your hiring process, it’s so hard to hit the target on a consistent basis?

This client I referred in my last post which had a painful history of executive level hiring failure -  brought us in to assess and evaluate their hiring process.

Raise your hand if some of these issues are causing your company to make hiring mistakes.

Here are the top issues we identified, not in a particular ranked order:

• Hiring was the only process in the company that had NOT changed or been updated since the company started more than ten years ago.
• Hiring was the only process in the entire company that was NOT performed according to a documented process or methodology.
• They were using outdated sourcing, screening, and interviewing techniques that required NO training or expertise.
• There was NO uniform, specific process to assess candidates and evaluate them against each other.
• There was NO marketing plan to attract good candidates.
• The company concentrated mainly on applicants who applied after seeing an advertisement.
• There was NO accountability for bad hires (or good ones, for that matter).
• They had NO process for establishing goals for an open position before they hired the candidate.

These issues are common in the vast majority of companies – regardless of industry, geography, or size. After engaging with over 35,000 CEOs and executives in the last 25 years through our workshops and consulting, over 75% of the companies had at least 3 or more similar issues regarding their hiring process that were causing hiring mistakes and errors.

For their next (and hopefully last, at least for a long time) VP of Sales search, the CEO needed a methodology and process to help him determine how a candidate’s past achievements and accomplishments directly related to the results he expected.

And he needed a quantifiable way to rate candidates – both “in a vacuum” and against each other.

Prior to starting the search for a new Vice President of Sales, we conducted our Success Factor Methodology Workshop which carries the same title as our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, for the company’s senior leadership team (You can learn more about our most popular hiring workshop by clicking here).

As a direct result, the company revamped their hiring process using many of the techniques and tools we’ve been describing for the last two decades in our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, our HIRE and RETAIN blog right here, our FREE Internet Radio Show, and the numerous FREE templates, examples, and tools we provide on our website.

The results from this search were exceptional. The VP of Sales we helped the company locate and hire was still in the job three years later, and according to the CEO, doing an outstanding job.

Did we conduct an effective Executive Search – yes. Could another firm have done an equally good job – probably. What made a huge difference was the hiring process improvement the company implemented to be able to hire an outstanding executive for this role and then extend that process to every other position within the company.

Here’s a few questions to ponder about your hiring capability:

• How strong is your hiring process?
• Do you have capability to consistently hire top talent for every open role in your company?
• What’s the batting average on hires at your company – candidates hired who actually deliver against the expected results?
• Is it time you got a hiring check-up?
• Download a copy of our FREE Hiring Process Assessment by clicking here and start your hiring process improvement today.

Barry

P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent where the discussions range from finding great people to implementing best practices in hiring.

Deja Vu-Why Do You Keep Failing at Executive Hiring?

I thought you might enjoy one of the more popular stories in our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”.

This is part 1 of a two-part article. Let’s sub-title this blog post:

The Case-Study of Repeated Executive Failure

A couple of years ago, we worked with a $40 million Information Technology service company. The organization provided around-the-clock support services for large networks, telecommunications systems, and in-house IT systems.

At our first meeting with the CEO, he confessed, “We’ve experienced high growth over the past few years and predict we’ll sustain at least double-digit growth for the next few years. We’re under-performing when it comes to bringing good people into the organization. It’s frustrating. We know we need good leaders at the executive and senior manager level to take us where we want to go. We just can’t seem to find them…and we keep making the same mistakes over and over.”

Company Success is Directly Linked to Hiring

Growth plans depended on extending and expanding contracts for existing services to current clients, as well as gaining new clients. the firm wanted to become a sole provider for it’s client’s’ IT installation, support, and repair needs.

Unfortunately, the company not only had difficulty finding the right person for a critical position – the Vice President of Sales – but they had also made recent bad hires for that position. In fact, of the last five executive level hires, three had been replaced and one was on “probation”. Their upcoming search for a Vice President of
Sales looked like “Deja Vu all over again.”

We’ve written a few other blog articles on why this feeling of “Hiring Deja Vu” keeps occuring.You might be interested in reading these two articles:

How is Recruiting Like a High School Sport?

Hiring Frustration #4: No Hiring Process

The prior sales VPs did not deliver acceptable sales results. They had not brought in new contracts, opened new customers with new products, expanded existing contracts, or built the business. The CEO was increasingly frustrated because these previous VPs had come from larger companies that had grown rapidly. The CEO assumed this meant they were a perfect fit for his job. After all, they had “been there, done that.”

Unfortunately, they failed.

Why Do New Executives Fail to Achieve Results?

They failed for a number of reasons.

• The client company’s growth issues were significantly different from the challenges they had overcome in previous positions.
• Their past accomplishments were irrelevant – or at least NOT transferable – to the new position.
• They could not adapt to the new situation.
• They were not able to produce the required results, and the hiring process had failed to reveal this fact.

In Hindsight – Do You Have Similar Hiring Failures?

Here are a few questions and thoughts to consider when contemplating past hiring failure:

• Share with us an example of a comparable hiring failure?
• Is your hiring process focused on uncovering whether candidates can achieve your desired results?
• Do you even define outcomes, results, and deliverables prior to interviewing candidates?
• Is your process for finding candidates synchronized with the expectations of outcomes required?
• Do you have people on your team right now that should be replaced, but you doubt your ability to find someone better?
• If you don’t make changes right now in your hiring process, are you doomed to keep repeating the same hiring mistakes?

While the company’s lack of a strong VP of Sales was creating an immediate problem, it also contributed to a succession-planning dilemma. The company’s
bench strength” was weak. When critical employees left, went out on leave, or even just took a few weeks’ vacation, there was nobody waiting in the wings to fill in.

It was a precarious situation.

What is the number one thing you can do starting tomorrow to improve your success in hiring top talent – and in creating future “bench strength”?”

Barry

One of the major problems in hiring – as identified in this article – is NOT having an effective hiring process – STOP lowering your standards. Stop lowering your standards. Take our FREE Hiring Process Assessment and discover whether your hiring process is strong enough to hire to top talent.

The Motivation Behind the Book – You’re NOT the Person I Hired

Brad and I (along with our former Partner – Janet Boydell), undertook the writing of our book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” for a couple of reasons:

First, we enjoy making a difference in the lives of top talent and in the executives who hire top talent.

Secondly, we believe deeply and passionately that there is a better way to hire top talent than the traditional and tribal methods most executives and managers have used – those passed down through the generations.

We’ve spent 20 plus years working in the trenches of executive search before writing “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. We devoured almost every hiring study conducted over the last 4-5 decades. We conducted our own original research. We kept journals on the hiring mistakes and successes of our clients.

Over those two decades (and the subsequent 5 years since publishing our book, we’ve seen a consistent pattern of why hiring fails and why it succeeds. We set out to capture the essence of the major hiring mistakes and simple steps that can be implemented to overcome them.

In our workshops to CEOs and presidents, key executives, and managers, we’ll frequently lead with an ice-breaker asking a question about hiring success. Over the last 25 years, Brad and I have probably conducted over 1,000 workshops and trained well over 35,000 executives and managers in how to hire more effectively.

So, as you can imagine, we’ve asked the following question a few times:

If you look back over your entire managerial career and the hires you’ve made – how many lived up to or exceeded your initial expectations and how many failed to meet your expectations?

To this day, I am still shocked by the response. The vast majority (85% and up) tell us that if they were batting 50% on hiring, they would be doing great. Most executives and managers, when conducting an honest evaluation of their hiring success, would peg themselves somewhere in the sub 30% range.

Does this sound dysfunctional?

Why do you accept it?

How can you rationalize a success rate of at best 50% in hiring? Might as well throw darts or roll dice. Your gambling success rate would probably match or exceed your hiring hit rate.

Is there any other process in your company where you’ll except what is essentially random variability? How about the accuracy of the payroll checks you write, or perhaps the invoices you send to customers?

NO – you wouldn’t accept in for any other process in your company – so then why do you accept it when it comes to hiring?

What’s the most common excuse for NOT being more effective at hiring? The most common answer we’ve heard in every workshop is “We don’t know any better”.

Brad and I are on a passionate mission to achieve a “tipping point” in hiring. We believe there is a better method – we’ve been working on a simple best practice approach that can be implemented in any size company or organization. We teach it in our workshops, blog about incessantly, and discuss it over and over on our Internet Radio Program.

By implementing a few basic best practices in hiring, you can easily raise your accuracy from the 50% range into the 80% plus range. Hundreds of companies – if not thousands worldwide have made a few small changes in their hiring process and have been blown away by the immediate improvement in hiring accuracy and reduction of hiring mistakes.

What’s the number one thing you plan on doing to improve your hiring process – starting this coming Monday?

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Don’t forget to download our FREE Hiring Check-up Self-Assessment. This benchmarking scorecard will highlight if you’ve got the tools and methods in place to consistently hire top talent.

What Are the Primary Causes of Hiring Mistakes?

In our experience, hiring mistakes are not caused by willful ignorance or negligence.

Most often, new executive failure has several interrelated causes. The primary interrelated causes are:

Inadequate Preparation for Hiring

In our major research study of the Top Ten Mistakes Executives Make in Hiring, we discovered that companies rarely outline a detailed, measurable definition of “success” that could be used to source, evaluate, and select candidates.

Instead, the companies relied on outdated or insufficient job descriptions, focused around desired attributes, education attainment, and so on. DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOUR JOB DESCRIPTIONS? How much time does your company spend trying to really understand the success required from a given role and how that success ties directly back to department/function required outcomes and overall company results?

Lack of Information for Hiring

After our work implementing rigorous hiring practices with the surveyed companies from our research study, almost all noticed a significant improvement in the performance of new hires.

We draw the logical conclusion that at least one major cause of hiring mistakes was not widespread organizational dysfunction, but rather was a lack of information and training about how to hire more effectively.

How rigorous are your hiring practices? When was the last time you raised the bar on hiring processes? In the last few years, have you benchmarked your hiring process against those of comparable competitors? Are you in the top 20% or the bottom 20%? Do you even know where your company stands?

Human Nature in Hiring

Interpersonal situations like interviews, when conducted in a vacuum, are often guided primarily by gut feelings. Studies have been over the past few decades that show most hiring decisions have nothing to do with skills, competencies, or ability – instead they are based on rapport, likeability, and the ambiguous phrase “chemistry”.

Hiring team members who have not been trained to minimize these distractions are easily influenced by false perceptions, bias, emotions, and nonverbal cues.

Think back on your hiring decisions over the last few years. How many times did you jump at hiring someone because it “felt” right? How many times have you hired someone who couldn’t achieve your expectations – only to come to the realization (after 20/20 hindsight), that you should have been more “rigorous” in the hiring process?

When provided with a toolset designed to counterbalance bias, emotions, likeability, false rapport and chemistry, hiring is far more likely to overcome these “distractions” and result in hiring people who can deliver your desired outcomes.

Eliminate Hiring Mistakes

If you would like to discover whether your company has an effective hiring process – one that can overcome these deep fundamental causes of hiring mistakes -  take our 8-point Hiring Self-assessment and discover the core areas you need to improve upon to be able to hire top talent.

Imagine being able to eliminate hiring mistakes, bring better talent into your company, achieve your desired results, and reduce turnover for non-performance. Would that be worth taking 5 minutes to discover if your current hiring process is effective in hiring top talent.

We’ve seen thousands of companies from around the world improve just a few elements of their hiring process and raise hiring accuracy from typical levels in the 50% range well into the 80% plus range.

If you’re ready to start improving your hiring accuracy and you’re ready to begin eliminating all those frustrating hiring mistakes, download our FREE Hiring Process Assessment Scorecard by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Don’t forget to join our Hire and Retain Top Talent Discussion Group on LinkedIn where hiring process improvement, interview questions, and finding top talent are discussed in more depth.

Talent Plus Effort Equals Great Results

As you probably know by now – my favorite metaphors are sports related – especially basketball metaphors . For our new readers, a little background: In addition to a full schedule as a retained executive recruiter, speaker, author, and partner in a thriving Internet hiring business, I also coach high girls basketball and run a youth basketball organization with over 8 teams and 100 kids.

This summer I had the pleasure of coaching over 60 basketball games in two months. Through that experience, I’ve gained reinforcement on some basic thoughts around human performance that extends from 9 year olds all the way up to senior corporate executives. Exceptional human performance – obtaining great results is a combination of “Talent” and “Effort”.

Let’s define both “Talent” and “Effort” before going any further.

Talent is the mixture of knowledge, skills, and understanding of how to apply them. Raw intellectual horsepower or years of experience and skill development is not enough. Successful individuals need to also be able to apply their intellectual capability and skills in adapting to different problems and issues.

Talent on the basketball court is observed through dribbling and ball handling skills, the ability to execute a play, make a proper lay-up, and recognize appropriate court spacing on offense. How do you observe talent on your team? How do you measure it in an interview?

To be a top performer, you must possess talent. But there is a greater element which frequently trumps pure talent and acts as a multiplier to those who possess high talent. This greater element is “EFFORT”.

Effort is the energy someone brings to a task. It’s sustained intensity, hard work, going above and beyond the call of duty. It’s the ability to get through set-backs, disappointments, and failure. It’s a mental attitude that allows great performers to bounce back and keep operating at a peak level of performance. It’s easy to observe on the basketball court. It get’s exhibited through:

• being the first one back down the court on defense
• getting on the floor to scramble for loose balls
• going after rebounds instead of standing flat footed and praying your teammate will get it
• moving your feet on defense in the last few minutes of the game instead of reaching out and trying to smack the ball

Effort is simply outworking your teammates and adversaries. It’s easy to spot in sports. How do you spot it in the business world?

Effort is the great “X” factor. Effort is the multiplier that takes knowledge, skill, capacity and leverages it to a whole new level. Frequently, someone with extraordinary effort can outperform others with high talent levels but lower effort levels.

Have you ever seen this?

Does an example come to mind?

As you look around at your cubicle mates, team members, bosses, peers – can you see examples of how their effort is greater or weaker than your effort?

Have you ever seen someone apply themselves at a higher level – and surpass-beat-outperform their peers (who by the way went to better schools, had better job opportunities, and came from more wealthy backgrounds?

Could you share an example with our readers?

I’ll bet you’ve got hundreds of examples collected over 5, 10, or 25 years of managing and leading.

So, let’s bring this back to the hiring process.

Once you’ve determined the quality of a candidate’s talent level – which is very measurable (knowledge, skills, application, execution, how do you measure “effort?”. Here are a few examples of measuring “effort” in the interview:

• Ask for examples of accomplishments
• Find out where they had to overcome problems
• What’s their daily activity level look like
• Get examples of where they’ve outworked peers on projects and tasks
• Collect precise details on initiative and being proactive
• Keep probing for where they went above and beyond the call of duty
• Ask for illustrations where they did more than they were asked

The next time you’re  looking to hire top talent, remember to probe for both “talent” and “effort”. Finding candidates who bring both these elements to the table, will astound you.

Barry

P.S. If you liked this blog post on Talent and Effort in Getting Great Results, download our FREE “Hiring Methodology Assessment” so that you can determine if you’ve got a process in place to hire top talent.

We’re working on a new interview template for measuring EFFORT in the interview. If you download the Hiring Process Assessment, we’ll also send you the “Measuring EFFORT in the Interview Template” as soon as it’s ready.

Can Social Recruiting Help You Find Top Talent?

Social Recruiting – Everyone’s talking about it – no one’s doing it!

What is Social Recruiting?

Social Recruiting is using the various social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to improve the flow of top talent for current and future positions. This post is an introduction to some of the benefits and tactics of using Social Recruiting to find candidates, such as sales professionals, create an employer brand, and present your company in a positive light to attract candidates who already have a good job. Leveraging Social Recruiting also allows you to engage with potential candidates for future roles by engaging, nurturing, sustaining, and communicating over a period of time to create a Just-in-Time recruiting pipeline.

In subsequent blogs posts, we’ll delve into each of the various services, tools, and techniques you can leverage to begin attracting top talent.

Social Recruiting Benefits

What are some of the benefits of using Social Recruiting to find and engage with top talent at every level in your organization?

• The activities do not have to be centralized in HR. All Hiring Managers and Executives can participate
• Inexpensive or FREE
• Easy to learn the proper techniques and tactics
• Simple to implement
• Low time investment
• Branding, PR, and marketing side benefits
• Creates a powerful recruiting message (also known as employer branding)
• Ability to engage with future high potential candidates

Sounds almost too good to be true. You’re probably wondering “what’s the catch”. It cannot be that simple.

The good news is that using Social Recruiting to find, engage, develop, nurture, sustain conversations with top talent at every level is truly that easy. Of course there is a small learning curve. Of course there is an initial investment to get everything set up properly. Of course it requires the involvement and participation of your hiring managers and executives.

Another huge benefit is that you can STOP paying expensive recruiting fees when you can do much of this work on your own.

Most of you know that I make my living primarily through executive search. This might sound like I’m cutting off my future incoming stream by recommending you start using Social Recruiting instead of recruiters. I’m going to suggest that most companies waste a lot of money on recruiters for positions they could have easily filled through Social Recruiting.

How Can You Get Started with Social Recruiting?

These techniques are so powerful that my partner, Brad Remillard and I will begin in August offering a series of webinars on using Social Recruiting. Our first one will be “How to use LinkedIn to Find Great Sales Professionals.” We’re excited about this webinar series and we’ll be structuring a series of tools (FREE of course) to use in establishing and building your Social Recruiting capability.

Here are some questions to consider as you start to look at implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy:

• What are some of the tactics and best practices available to you for Social Recruiting?
• Blogging – especially having employees share their successes and joy at working in your company
• Forums and Discussion Groups – featuring stories about the contributions your employees are making to your company
• LinkedIn – Strong Branding through a profile, audio, powerpoint, case studies, Q&A, active participation in groups
• Linked and Facebook – searching for potential employees
• Twitter – Job Postings
• Industry Sites/Trade Association Social Networking
• Are you leading your industry/business segment in using these tools?
• What steps have you taken so far in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?
• Do you have any good success stories to share with other Vistage Members?
• Are you wondering where and how to get started?
• What’s the one thing you need to know to get started on implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?

Stay tuned as we tackle all the various best practices in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy.

Barry

P.S. Hold the date for our upcoming Webinar on Using LinkedIn to Find Sales Professionals – August 26

graphic by Robert Scoble

You’re Running Out of Time to Upgrade Your Team

Have you taken action yet to identify which roles should be upgraded?

In April, I put up a blog posting titled “Hiring 101 – Use the Recession to Upgrade” suggesting that you should be using the Job Market Recession to upgrade a few selected roles in your organization. I provided a few ideas and recommended paths to begin this process.

Have you started yet?

Probably NOT!

Why? What’s holding you back?

I have yet to come across a management team that didn’t have at least one or two under-performers.

Raise your hand right now if you’ve got someone on your team that is not living up to your full expectations of performance.

Why have you not yet moved on trying to find their replacement?

I’ll restate in this blog posting the idea I put forth a few months back:

You’ve got a unique window of opportunity to acquire talent in this recession that you may never again in your lifetime be able to capture at an affordable level. Force yourself to rank the members of your team, and start down the path of upgrading your weakest members.

Here’s a few other articles you might be interested in on this subject of whether or not to upgrade your team:

Forbes Interview of Me on Using the Recession to Upgrade

Internet Radio Show Broadcast talking about Upgrading Your Team

Food for thought:

Do you have the role you are going to upgrade identified?

Do you have a plan in place of how you’ll find this new person?

What is your precise timeframe for letting the current person go and having the new person start?

What is your contingency plan if your first few sourcing ideas don’t surface the caliber of candidate you desire?

Have you made this a major priority – or are you just crossing your fingers hoping things get better?

What is the first action item you’re going to take right now to begin upgrading a role or two on your team?

Don’t be left behind!

Don’t be the one who has the worst team because you didn’t take action when you had the opportunity.

Your window of opportunity to acquire better talent is very small. The window is closing. I give it another 4-6 months and you’ll have missed the upgrade train. Fewer candidates will be open to talking with, you will not have enough money to offer them a better opportunity, and you’ll be stuck with the same average performer dragging down the rest of your team.

What a depressing scenario I just painted. Don’t let this happen to you.

I would love to hear what your doing to upgrade your team with the best talent possible. Start thinking like a coach trying to maximize the success of the team. It’s all about the talent. You could be the world’s greatest manager/coach – but if you don’t have the talent that can deliver your expected outcomes – then you’ll never have a strong enough team.

Barry

PS – Your first step should be to define the expectations you need in the role – not a traditional job description – which is worthless from the perspective of managing and predicting success. Download a few of our FREE Success Factor Snapshots to see how this is done.

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

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