A Candidate’s Background & Experience Are Irrelevant

Just to clarify, I said “irrelevant.” I didn’t say “not important.”

Since most people have been taught interviewing is about the candidate’s background and experience, the interviewer tends to ask a lot of questions about the past. For example, “What have  you done in this area?”  or ” Have you ever done _____?”  Those trained in behavioral interviewing will just simply take those same questions and convert them into an example. For example, “Give me an example of where you have done X” or “Tell me about a time when you had X as an issue?”

All of this may be good stuff to know, but the fact is you really don’t care about any of this. The fact is when a candidate shows up on Monday morning, you no longer care about all of the things they have done. You only care about one thing, whether or not they can do the job you are hiring them to do. That is all you really care about. Nothing else matters anymore. They may have the best background and all the right experience, but if they can’t do your job, then you really don’t care about their background and experience.

Have you ever hired a person that had all the right experience, interviewed well, had all the right answers, their resume read like the job description, and when you hired them they fell flat on their face? This has happened to just about everyone.

Why does this happen? I contend it is because the person’s background and experience are not primary indicators of their ability to do your job. These are at best secondary and more often than not misleading indicators. Yet, these are the indicators that most hiring managers rely on.

Instead, let’s focus the interview on the primary reason for interviewing, “Can they do your job?” This is the focus behind the Success Factor Hiring Methodology.  The key to a successful hire is having a process that puts the candidate in the job BEFORE you hire the candidate. It is not about determining if the candidate’s background and experience fit.

This is why we believe behavioral interviewing falls short. It was once a quantum leap forward in how interviewing was performed. However, in our opinion, it too has run its course. Great interviewing is more than getting examples of the past. It is about doing your job. The tag line for behavioral interviewing, “past performance is an indicator of future performance” isn’t always the case.

In our hiring methodology training workshops, we teach how to change the focus from the person’s background and experience, to how will they adapt those to your job. If they can’t adapt to your company and your position, then they may be a great X but they aren’t the right X. That is generally what goes wrong when we hire a person with all of the right background and experience and then they fall flat on their face. The candidate wasn’t able to adapt their background and experience to your company and your position.

So how do you put the candidate in the job BEFORE you hire the person?

1. Stop asking questions that start with “have, what, have you, tell me about a time when, etc.” These are all fine to know but they should be used for probing after the example and not for the example. That is a huge difference. The famous, Who, What, When, Where and Why questions are for probing deep and not for opening questions.
2. How questions should be used for the opening question. One of the biggest issues we face when working with hiring managers is getting them to shift to asking “How” questions. After that you can then begin probing with the five W’s. For example, “How would you decrease costs by 10%?” “How would you increase gross margins by X%?” “How would you go about implementing a complete systems upgrade of our ERP system?” “How would you increase market share in your territory?” Then probe deeply with the five W’s.
3. Now the interviewer is shifting the interview from background and experience to having the candidate explain how they would apply these to do the job. If the candidate can’t apply their background and experience to the new job, then one has to question whether or not they are the right person regardless of background and experience.

The reason most interviewing fails is because it is easy for a candidate to talk about their experience. Some might even embellish in this area. It is significantly different  to explain how they would apply those experiences.

You can evaluate your hiring process for free. Just download our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. This will  help you to identify the strengths and weaknesses in your hiring process. CLICK HERE to download.

Are you committing one of the “10 Biggest Hiring Mistakes?” This research study is available to download for free. If you are committing one of these ten, it is not hard to fix so that it doesn’t happen again. CLICK HERE to download the summary.

For more information on workshops that will ensure you put candidates in the job BEFORE you hire them CLICK HERE.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Most Company’s Hiring Process Is Not A Process

We find that this occurs because the hiring process really isn’t a process in many companies. Many hiring processes tend to be random and with incompetent, untrained people. This is not a knock on the people, it is just a fact. So why do companies expect hiring to be accurate and to attract top talent with a random or unstructured  process?

I know this sounds so obvious. Come on, who in their right mind would expect any business process to be reliable if it  produced expected results only 56% of the time.  A company wouldn’t allow it. They would fix the process or shut it down. Would any company have incompetent or untrained people processing incoming checks with unstructured procedures? Lose just one check and everything stops, procedures and controls are assessed, people are retrained or fired, and the CFO personally oversees that it never happens again.

This is true with most processes except hiring. Most companies accept a high failure rate. Why any company accepts this is beyond me when this can be improved with some relatively easy fixes.

The fact is that most hiring managers have little or no training on interviewing and hiring. Many only do it once or twice a year. So even if they have some training, by the time they hire someone they have forgotten most of the training. There are no college level courses focused on hiring. Most people learn on-the-job. One day they are an individual contributor and the next day they are promoted to a manager and told to hire their replacement. So how did this person become competent at hiring overnight?

This new hiring manager is going to hire the way they were hired. This new manager will follow the same methodology whether it is good or bad. Where do you think this person will get the interviewing questions  to ask the candidates? Generally, from the people who hired them. And where do you think the person who hired them got their interviewing questions? And so on, until we finally hit Moses.  Many hiring processes have not really changed with the times. We call this “tribal hiring.”  It is just passed down from generation to generation.

The fact is that this new hiring manager is not prepared for hiring.  Another fact is that people often assume that because someone has hired a lot of people, that  makes them good at hiring even though no one has validated the performance of those hires.

For any process to work it has to repeatable, be structured, have competent people, and have some measurement of accountability so when things go wrong (and they always will) one can identify the problem and fix it. In my thirty years as a recruiter and 15 years helping companies implement a structured process I have yet to find a company that does this.

In fact, I have seen only a few companies that include hiring top talent as part of their performance management system. Why not hold managers accountable for poor hires the same way companies do for other poor performance? At least this would begin to establish a process where a company can identify those  managers that need training, so they can become better at  hiring.

There are at least five distinct steps to an effective hiring process. These steps have to be repeatable,  with competent people and accountability to correct and improve the process. For many companies this falls to HR. However, since the vast majority of companies don’t have an HR department, then it has to fall where everything else in an organization should fall, with the CEO.

The five critical steps are:

1. A job description that  defines the expected standards of top performance for the position. Not the standard job description that defines a person’s background and lists the basic duties, tasks and responsibilities. The candidate should already know all of these. Maybe companies should ask the candidate to prepare a job description just to see if the candidate knows the job.
2. A sophisticated sourcing plan that will attract top performers that are not actively looking for a position, but are open to a compelling opportunity.
3. Probing interviews with competent people doing the interviewing that tests the candidate’s ability to the job BEFORE you hire them. This means that the candidate must be able to explain exactly how they will deliver the performances standards defined in the job. They must detail how they will do these in your company, with your resources, within your culture and your budget, with your management style, with your customers, and with all of the the things that make your company different.
4. There must be proper feedback or discussion of the candidate’s ability to do the job  immediately after the candidate interviews. Not two days later standing in a Starbucks line while  you wait for your coffee. Not just asking the question, “What did you think of the candidate?”
5. There must other tests, presentations,  and assessments to validate that what the candidates said they did, they actually did do and did it at the level and with the results they claimed.

These five steps are absolutely critical in every effective hiring process. Just having them isn’t enough. There must be some metric that determines if the process is working and where improvement needs to occur.

If you want a more in-depth discussion on these five steps you can receive a copy of our best-selling book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired.” This book goes into great depth to help you implement an effective hiring process. CLICK HERE to learn more.

Assess your hiring process with our free 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. This will help you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your process so you can  then work to improve your process. CLICK HERE for your free download.

Finally, you can download for free our research project on the ten biggest hiring mistakes companies make. This will help you to identify whether or not your company is making any of the mistakes. CLICK HERE to get your free download.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

“She Seemed Perfect For The Position.” What Went Wrong?

These are the exact words of a CEO I was recently talking with about a search to replace a candidate they had hired six months earlier and wasn’t performing.  The CEO explained how they had spent a lot of time with the candidate, she had multiple interviews, she completed a DISC assessment, and simply put, “We all loved her for the position.” Yet, after all of this effort the person wasn’t able to perform.  It all seemed very perplexing.

My partner, Barry Deutsch, and I have heard this same story many times in our  collective 50 years+ as recruiters and in our hiring best practices workshops. One thing we can all agree on is that something went wrong. Although no hiring process in the world will get 100% results, it is possible to raise the hiring accuracy to  the 80% level.  That is pretty good considering studies have shown that traditional hiring methods produce candidates that meet or exceed the hiring manager’s expectations around 56% of the time. This shows that something is going wrong with hiring in many companies.

I started by asking two questions to better understand how they went about hiring this “perfect” candidate.

1. I asked if she would email me the job description. It was very traditional. It was mostly focused on the candidate’s background and experience, not the job. In reality it was a people description, not a job description. It had great detail about all of the experience they wanted the person to have, education, years of experience, all the behavioral traits, a very comprehensive list of duties, tasks, and responsibilities, and requirements for management and leadership. Over all it was well thought out and I know they spent a lot of time developing it.
2. The next thing I asked her was, “Have you audited, not co-interviewed, but audited whether the people in the hiring process are even competent interviewers?” She said, “No.” So another classic problem reared its ugly head. What if just one wasn’t competent at interviewing? Interviewing is only as good as the worst interviewer on the hiring team. People often assume that just because a person has hired in the past they must be good interviewers. This is just not true.

It was easy now to identify why this person, that everybody loved, may not have worked out.

1. The job description didn’t really define the real job. It defined a person everyone expected  or thought could do the job, because they had done it before. Not true. Just because someone has done the job before it may make them a great X, but it doesn’t make them the right X for your position. This is positively the number one biggest hiring mistake.
2. The people doing the interviews were not trained and since the job description didn’t describe the real job, most just conducted a generic interview. They asked the same questions they were asked in interviews. They assumed what the real job was and asked if the person had ever done these tasks before. Which of course they had, as it was obvious from the resume.  Add to that the likability factor and is it any wonder why this hire went wrong?

If she wants to hire a successful person, the first step is defining success in the role. Few job descriptions actually do this. Most define a person’s background and experience along with the very basic duties and tasks. Neither of which define success. If the person only performed the listed duties and tasks most would not consider this a top talent hire. She had to define outcomes. What level of performance is this person going to be held accountable to? Even the basic duties have an expected level of high performance. For example, process X number of invoices per hour, make X number of sales call per week, receive a score of X or higher on customer feedback forms, respond to all customers within 24 hours, and so on. Now this defines performance and success.

Then she had to develop interviewing questions that determine the person’s ability to deliver this level of success. Now the people interviewing are actually interviewing with a purpose. Not just a free for all. Everyone understands what  the goals are and what questions to ask. It is not random. The people interviewing are now focused on determining the candidate’s ability to deliver these results.

Finally, the candidate also knows what will be expected of them when they come on board. In some cases this will scare off those good solid below average performers. Once they know what is expected of them they may not want the job. This is a good thing.

You can evaluate your hiring process before this happens to you. Download our Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. Find the weak points in your hiring system and focus on fixing them. CLICK HERE to download yours.

If you would like some examples of job descriptions that define success we have those available for you. CLICK HERE to download some examples.

Finally, consider joining our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Group. This group has a wealth of great discussions and topics to help you. CLICK HERE to join.

I welcome you thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Why Are So Few Hiring Managers Responsible For Hiring?

Seems like such an obvious question. Of course hiring mangers are responsible for hiring, that is why they are called hiring managers. Isn’t it?

The truth is that most hiring managers do not think of hiring as part of their job.  They know they must perform the function every now and then, but few actually consider it as a critical job function. I have reviewed thousands of job descriptions ranging from CEOs to managers in my 30 years as a recruiter, and I can’t think of one that included hiring as one of the job functions. NOT ONE.

Here is a classic example. I was recently speaking to a group of executives on how to develop an effective hiring process.  One of the executives complained that with all of the other work he has, he doesn’t have the time it takes to continually be working on hiring. I was amazed. With all of the other work he has? Isn’t hiring just as much a part of his job as any other function? He certainly didn’t think so. Would a VP of Sales accept from one of his sales managers, “With all the other work I have to do, I don’t have time to complete the weekly sales reports.” Should a CEO accept from their CFO, ” With all the other work I  have, I don’t have time to know what is in all the accounts.”  Aren’t these functions just as much a part of their job as hiring?

What they are really saying in my opinion is, “Hiring just isn’t a priority for me this month.” Time is just a function of priority. Since it isn’t important at this moment in time, it isn’t a priority, therefore I don’t have time. Yet, when an opening occurs this becomes a priority. Then the hiring manager hopes that the best person for the job will be on the market and looking at the exact same time. In a slow market that might be true, but think back a couple of years to when unemployment was under 5%. That rarely happened.

Here are some suggestions to make hiring top talent the priority it should be in your company:

1) Consider linking some level of hiring activity to your performance management system. This doesn’t have to involve a great deal of time. Just something that demonstrates that hiring top talent is a priority not only for the department head but for the company.

2) Have all of your managers participate in different professional groups, alumni associations, and professional networking groups. Participation should be at a minimum of attending the monthly meetings or even serving on a committee. This is where they will meet potential top talent or people connected to that top talent. Most of these meetings take place after working hours and only involve an hour or two a month.

3) Identify key positions where any turn over will be damaging, potential future openings  in the next six months, and high turnover positions, then each month allocate just 10% of your time working to build a  queue of  names, people, and contacts that might be potential candidates. Just 10% of your time.

4) For each key position in the company maintain a list of at least three people to speak with if a position opens. This will not be a stagnant list.  These people’s situations will change over time so you will have to make sure it is current.

5) At least quarterly, engage every person in the queue. Send them an email, a newsletter, an article, give them an update of some kind, connect with them via LinkedIn, meet for coffee,  or just small things that don’t involve a lot of time that will keep them connected with you.

Just doing these 5 simple things can dramatically change how you prioritize hiring the best people in your company. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, it just has to take some time.

If  your managers aren’t doing these simple things, isn’t it time to put hiring back into the job of your hiring managers?

For more information on hiring top talent, join our LinkedIn group – How To Hire And Retain Top Talent. CLICK HERE to join the group and participate in the discussions.

Would you like to assess the effectiveness of your hiring process? Download our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard to do an evaluation. CLICK HERE to download this. It is FREE.

Is Hiring Included In Your Performance Management?

All successful companies agree that hiring top talent is one of the keys to their success. In many cases, the reverse is also true, not hiring top talent was one of the key reasons for not succeeding.

I have asked hundreds and possibly thousands of key executives, “By show of hands, who believes hiring  top talent is important in your personal success?” Just about all hands go up. I follow-up with, “How many of you that raised your hand make this one of your top priorities as a manager?” Some hands go down but most will still be up. Now the real demonstration if this is true, “How many of you spend at least 10% of your time a month networking to ensure top talent will be available when you want to hire them, versus waiting until you need to hire someone and hope they are available?” Just about all hands go down.

Even though most hiring managers agree this is critical, few demonstrate it with behavior.

CEOs are not much different. I have asked hundreds of CEOs if they included growth as part of their strategic plan. All hands go up. Then I ask how many have included a section on how to find the top talent needed to meet this plan, and most hands go down. They plan for the growth, but not where the talent will come from as they expand. Many haven’t even defined what top talent is for these needed positions. In many ways, it is we will cross our fingers and hope the right top talent is available when we need them.

One way to begin to ensure your company is focused on hiring top talent is to consider integrating it into your performance management system.   Some of the best companies I have worked with do just this. Each hiring manager’s bonus is in some way linked to their ability to identify,  attract, hire and retain top talent.

Does your performance management system hold your hiring managers accountable for these?

Here are few things to consider:

1. Your hiring managers should have replacements identified for key positions within their departments. This is just good succession planning.
2. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for all hires in their department. If they fail at hiring top talent or have high turnover, should they be rewarded as a “hiring” manager?
3. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for retaining top talent.
4. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for helping other departments identify top talent. Hiring top talent benefits everyone in the company, simply because the company’s performance benefits everyone.
5. Your performance management system should reward those that refer top talent.
6. X percent of your hiring manager’s bonus should be linked to turnover. High turnover is often a result of desperation hiring.

As with most things, we tend to reward the areas we want to focus our attention. Bringing accountability for hiring top talent into to the performance management system sends a signal that hiring is critical. It demonstrates that as the CEO, hiring is important and not just something everybody agrees is important, but that it is practiced by all.

Hiring top talent is something that many companies can improve. Adding it to your performance management is a positive way to re-enforce it as a priority in your company.

You can validate whether or not your hiring system encourages hiring top talent by downloading our free, 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE to download your scorecard.

Retaining top talent is also critical to a successful company. Our 8-Point Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognition Matrix will help you identify if your company is taking advantage of the these non-monetary issues to retain your best talent. CLICK HERE to download  your matrix.

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Group. There are excellent discussions and articles to help you build a team of top talent. CLICK HERE to join the group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Not All Reference Checks Say Good Things – 54% Have Received Bad References

I was recently facilitating our, You’re NOT The Person I Hired, workshop with CEOs and key executives. As is often the case, the subject of reference checking came up. Most in the audience tended to agree that checking references is a waste of time. After all, candidates only give references they are sure will say positive things about them. Don’t you agree?

Then a CFO sitting in the back raised his hand to disagree. He told the story of a controller he was about to hire near the border in Texas. This was a difficult position to fill as there were a lot of specific requirements. Finally, after an arduous search he found his person. She had all of the qualifications and most importantly he really like her. The final step was to conduct a few reference checks. She handed him a list of 30 references. WOW he thought, this person really has a lot of people willing to vouch for her.  Then he picked 5 of them and started calling. The first call was to a former boss. He introduced himself and explained that he was calling to conduct a reference check on Mary. The line went silent. The pause was so long that he thought they were disconnected and asked if the reference was still on the line. The reference replied yes and then stated, “Mary gave me as reference? I can’t believe it. We fired her because she stole from us. She did pay us back but she stole from us.” Now there was silence from him. He didn’t know what to say or how to respond.

This is just one of many examples of what can happen on a reference check and why you should always perform your due diligence. Granted, this may only happen once in your career, but in this case the once may have saved the company thousands if she has stolen again.

I have conducted thousands of reference checks in my 30 year career as an executive recruiter. I have learned that more often than not someone will give me a reference they expect to be positive and it turns negative. It is for this reason that I always check references. Like the CFO in this example, it has saved me from making some big mistakes. It only takes one bad reference to realize that catching that one person was worth all the others.

If you have stories or experiences regarding strange things that have happened when you have conducted a reference check I would love to hear about them and share them with others. Please take a moment to tell others your story.

I conducted a poll on LinkedIn in which 54% replied that they have had people give them a negative reference. This goes to show that even though the person giving the reference expects a positive reference they often don’t get one.

If you would like to stay up on current hiring best practices please join our LinkedIn group on Hiring and Retaining Top Talent. There are a lot of resources in this group to tap into. CLICK HERE to join.

You can also download a free Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognition Matrix to retain top talent. CLICK HERE to download.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Using One Degree Of Separation To Hire Sales People

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

Click here to listen live or download.

Why It Is So Hard To Hire Sales People

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

Click here to either listen live or download

Only You Can Prevent Desperation Hiring

Question: When do most companies start the hiring process? Answer: When they need someone. It can then take up to three months to hire someone. By this time, the hiring manager and their staff is overworked, projects are falling behind schedule, overtime is through the roof, work is backing up, short cuts are causing mistakes, and everyone is frustrated. At this point the hiring manager is desperate. We call this stage in the hiring process, desperation hiring. The only good news is that the hiring manager doesn’t reach the depression stage until 6 months.

Question: What kind of hire do you think the hiring manager will make? Answer: Poor. They are likely to take the next best person that comes along, or worse, settle for one of the previously interviewed good solid below average candidates.

Why does this happen? We believe it’s because most companies don’t start the hiring process until they need someone. They then cross their fingers and hope that the person with top talent that they want to hire just happens to be looking at the same time.

We refer to this as the “random luck” hiring methodology. Unfortunately, this is the hiring methodology for many companies.

Desperation hiring is one of the easiest mistakes to correct in the hiring process since most hiring managers know in advance of an opening. Granted not always, but most of the time good managers know.

Simple recommendations to avoid desperation hiring:

1. Begin a soft launch. Don’t wait until the last minute to start the search. There are many things hiring managers can do prior to instigating a full blown job search. Start letting people know you will be looking to hire a person and ask for referrals. Let everyone in the company know the opening is coming.
2. Consider attending local association meetings that these people attend. Start identifying and engaging people you believe have the right attitude to fit your culture.
3. Use the social media sites to identify potential candidates. LinkedIn is one of the best tools for doing this. You can search LinkedIn for people in your geographic community. Start by requesting to be linked together. Then maybe meet one morning for coffee just to get to know each other. Don’t even mention you are considering hiring someone.
4. If hiring sales people, start asking customers who they think are the best sales people calling on them. Your customers know it is in their best interests to have the best sales people calling on them.
5. If you attend trade shows, when you meet people you think will be a good fit you should talk to them, get their business card, and follow-up once back in the office. A follow-up might be as simple as an email letting them know you enjoyed meeting them at the show. It could be some information on your company or anything that begins to engage this person. Eventually, ask to meet for coffee or for a short meeting when you are in their area.
6. When unsolicited resumes come in don’t just throw them away because you aren’t looking now. Instead review them, and if the person looks like someone you would hire start to connect with them. Begin the rapport building process. Recruiters do this all the time. That is why we seem to always have candidates when companies call us. I have placed people 2 years after first receiving an unsolicited resume.
7. Start building a queue of potential people. Most companies and hiring managers know those key positions that are hard to fill. These are the positions you should always be on the lookout for. Just start a file on who and where these people are. Don’t worry that they may not be on the market 6 months from now. If they are passive candidates chances are very good they will be available.

There are a lot of things that hiring managers can do proactively that will shorten the hiring process and bring better candidates to the table. Too often most managers only think about hiring when they need someone. Like most things, the time to do anything is when you don’t have to and aren’t under pressure.

Committing just a few hours a month can help your company or department avoid desperation hiring.

You can take a quick evaluation of your hiring methodology with our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. Download this free tool and see if your hiring process will avoid desperation hiring. CLICK HERE to download your assessment.

The chapter on sourcing top talent from our best selling book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired, is also available to download for free. CLICK HERE to download your free chapter.

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Group. It has many discussions and articles to help you. CLICK HERE to join the group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Why You Should Measure Self- Motivation

In 25 years of Executive Search, Barry Deutsch and Brad Remillard, hosts of this radio show podcast, have interviewed over 250,000 candidates for more than 1000 search assignments. They’ve discovered a few core traits of success that high performers possess and poor performers lack. One of those core success traits is high levels of self-motivation and initiative. Learn why self-motivation is so important to success and how you can validate in an interview whether or not your candidate exhibits the critical trait of self-motivation and initiative.

To listen to or download the recording CLICK HERE and then scroll down.