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• They were using outdated sourcing, screening, and interviewing techniques that required NO training or expertise.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.

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

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.

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

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