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.

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.

Hiring is Less Accurate Than Flipping a Coin

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

Case Study on Hiring Failure

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

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

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

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

The 56% Hiring Failure Rate Problem

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

Whoa!

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no, and no.

The Crux of the Problem in Hiring Failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Questions and Next Steps

What is your hiring process based on?

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

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

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

Barry Deutsch

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