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.

Why is it So Difficult to Hire Great Sales Professionals?

In over a decade of presenting to CEO and Key Executive Groups our popular program, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired“, I’ve discovered that the most difficult hire in a entrepreneurial-middle market company is a professional sales role.

If I present to a group with 15-20 members, half the group will be struggling with hiring outstanding sales professionals.

What makes it so difficult to hire this type of employee?

There are a number of factors that contribute to making hiring mistakes when it comes to the sales function. Before my Partner and I wrote our book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, we commissioned a study examining hiring mistakes. This study is available in the our FREE Resource Library. You get the Executive Summary of our Research Project – The Top Ten Hiring Mistakes by clicking here.

The research study was primarily focused on hiring at the executive level. However, the problems that lead to hiring mistakes and errors at an executive level are more significant and present a greater risk in hiring sales professionals. Let’s tackle the first mistake that leads to hiring failure.

The first mistake made by the vast majority of hiring managers is not defining SUCCESS for a role.

NOT defining success is a recipe for disaster in hiring.

Those who have seen our speaker presentation know that we recommend defining success through a structured process called SOAR and the end product is a tool called a Success Factor Snapshot. This success definition has absolutely NOTHING to do with the traditional job description.

Most job descriptions are worthless as a tool for measuring and predicting future success through an interview. You can read more about defining success in the article on a previous blog posting, titled “When An “A” Candidate is NOT an “A” Employee.

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

• Connecting sales outcomes to the company objectives.
• Listing all the obstacles involved in achieving the desired results.
• Developing a time-phased, quantifiable plan of action items.
• Defining a future expected result – such as increase sales by 12% for the home health care market.

Your investment of time in building a one-page Success Factor Snapshot will dramatically raise hiring accuracy by:

• Focusing your search in which ponds to fish for the best talent.
• Eliminating the embellishment and exaggeration common in sales interviews.
• Leveraging a success-based management tool to keep your new hire on track after they join your team.

Barry

Originally posted on the Vistage Buzz Blog

What is Top Talent Ability in a Candidate?

We frequently get this question from CEOs, Key Executives, and Hiring Managers. Many Hiring Executives and Managers, Human Resource Professionals, and Recruiters consider the ability to measure top talent as an art form elevated to almost spiritual levels.

The reality is that the ability to measure and assess whether a candidate is top talented individual is simple and straightforward.

Let’s start with the very first step of determining whether you’re sitting in front of a candidate who could be considered top talent. This step takes place before you’ve looked at their resume. This is the first step of our Success Factor Methodology.

The first step to measuring and predicting top talent is defining your expectations and the level of performance you desire. Do you have set of expectations for your new customer service rep, inventory manager, or Vice President of Sales that puts them in the top 25%, top 10%, or top 5%?

You cannot predict future success by interviewing a candidate until you first define what level of success do you desire.

The #1 Hiring Mistake that gets made by most companies (whether you have 6 employees or 60,000) is that future success is not defined. We documented this hiring mistake in a major study before we wrote our book “You’re NOT the Person I Hired.” You can download a copy of the study from the FREE Resources Section of our Website.

Instead of defining expectations that are quantifiable and time-based, most companies use a traditional job description to evaluate a candidate’s ability to do the job. The traditional Job Description is worthless as a predictive tool for analyzing and projecting future performance and success.

Resources to Learn About Defining Success

Learn more about how to define success for top talent by visiting our website and taking advantage of the following Resources:

1. Our Internet Radio Show every Monday alternates between topics for hiring and for job search. We post all our Radio Broadcasts onto our website into the FREE Audio Library – either on the Hiring Manager side of our website or on the Candidate side.
2. Get a copy of our book “You’re NOT the person I Hired”. This book has hit best-seller levels with over 10,000 copies now in the hands of CEOs. Key Executives, and Hiring Managers.
3. We have posted examples of Success Factor Snapshots from various Executive Searches we’ve conducted. These Success Factor Snaphots replace the traditional job description in combining the expected/desired results for a specific position.
4. A couple times a month we will hold Hiring Manager Open Roundtable Discussions on a wide variety of topics, including defining success for top talent. You’re welcome to register and reserve a spot in these FREE programs. We cap the attendance at 50 participants and it usually fills up within hours our announcements.
5. Read about the Research Project we commissioned before we wrote our book on the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes. You’ll see how NOT defining expectations is a recipe for hiring failure.
6. Get our Complete Hiring System – a comprehensive Kit that allows you to implement the Success Factor Methodology, stuffed with every conceivable audio, video, worksheet, template, and content we’ve published on the subject of how to raise hiring accuracy. You can use this kit to train your hiring managers, raise hiring accuracy for every position, and begin to hire top talent in every department in your company. For a small investment, this could possibly yield a greater return in improving your hiring processes than anything else you ever seen. We’re so confident of the claim that you’ll raise hiring accuracy in your company – we’re willing to back it up with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If that’s not enough, we’ll let you “try it out” for $2.49 plus shipping.

Barry

Hiring Frustration #1: What Am I Measuring?

Most Job Descriptions are Worthless as a tool for predicting future success!

MINIMUM EXPECTATIONS

Most job descriptions define nothing more than minimum, average, and mediocre standards. If the goal is to hire top talent, then you must be able to define the expectations of top talent. Consider the fact that the vast majority of job descriptions define years of experience needed in the job, minimum educational requirements, skills and knowledge needed, generic and undefined attributes and behaviors. This is not a job description. It has nothing to do with the job. It’s a people description. And the worst news of all is that it defines minimum-average-mediocre expectations not top talent expectations.

RANDOM RESULTS

Not only is this the NUMBER ONE frustration among hiring managers and executives, it is also the NUMBER ONE reason hiring fails. In presenting to over 30,000 hiring executives and managers in the last two decades, most of those workshop participants have told us their track record in hiring is abou 50/50. Sometimes they hire good people and sometimes they don’t.

How can you have any decent level of business success when you’re results are basically random. You might as well be standing at the crap tables in Vegas throwing dice. Is there any other process in your business where you will accept that level of random variability – such as your payroll checks or the bills you send to customers? Probably not! Then why do most managers and executives accept random results from hiring.

There are a number of reasons, but topping the list is the frustration and mistake over not defining success. Most hiring executives and managers would contend that they do not understand how to define results, expectations, outcomes, and deliverables that can be used as a predictive approach to determining the success of a potential candidate. Since most do not have a method for determing/defining success, they fall back on the tribal approach of using a traditional job description – a document that has existed from the early days of human resource management.

A BETTER APPROACH TO DEFINING SUCCESS

A better approach is to define outcomes, deliverables, and expectations that link back to the team, group, department, and company/organizational goals and objectives. NOT defining the outcomes is an abdication of strong management and leadership.

We use an approach in our Success Factor Methodology called S.O.A.R, which provides a structured approach to defining success. After having “field-tested” this approach and methodology for the last two decades, we’ve seen thousands of companies dramatically improve their hiring accuracy and ability to hire candidates who deliver the results desired.

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU GET STARTED IN DEFINING SUCCESS

Our S.O.A.R. template can help guide you through the process of defining success for any role within your company.

There are multiple FREE examples of Success Factor Snapshots using the S.O.A.R. approach in our FREE Resources Library.

In our Internet Radio Programs for Hiring Managers, Tele-Conferences, and Webinars, Brad and are constantly sharing ideas, thoughts, and strategies around using Success-based Job Definitions to improve hiring and retention. Take a look at some of the FREE downloads in our Hiring Manager Audio Library.

DOES YOUR COMPANY HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO HIRE TOP TALENT?

Does your company define quantifiable and time-based outcomes, deliverables, and expectations before the first candidate is interviewed, let alone hired?

Common Frustrations in Hiring Top Talent

Over the last 20 plus years, Brad and I have presented our You’re NOT the Person I Hired workshop to over 30,000 managers and executives in well over 1500 presentations. We usually kick off the workshop by asking “What are your greatest frustrations in hiring?“

Interestingly enough, we’ve heard the same frustrations of two decades very time we present this workshop. It doesn’t seem to matter if the company has 60,000 employees globally or 60 in Los Angeles. It doesn’t matter if the company manufactures a product, imports components, provides a service – the frustrations are still the same when it comes to hiring top talent.

We’ve put a list together of these frustrations on our website and the solutions in how to overcome each one. In subsequent blog posts, we’ll examine each one of the most frustrations in more depth.

Here’s the list we’ll review in our future postings:

1. Common Frustration #1 – What am I measuring
2. Common Frustration #2 – Not enough candidates
3. Common Frustration #3 – Exaggeration and Lies
4. Common Frustration #4 – No Hiring Process
5. Common Frustration #5 – Poor Cultural Fit
6. Common Frustration #6 – Useless Evaluation
7. Common Frustration #7 – First Impression Victim
8. Common Frustration #8 – You’re Not the Person

Do you have any frustrations in hiring that are not on this list?

Why is there such a high degree of frustration by hiring managers regarding the hiring process?

Barry

Can Your Company Save Thousands Through HR Outsourcing?

Listen to our podcast from our Live Internet Radio Show on LATALKRADIO.com regarding HR Outsourcing.

Can your company save thousands by outsourcing HR.  Jeff Stinson, President of Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO), discusses all the reasons if you are a CEO you should consider this option. HR is becoming more and more complex. The legal fees companies are paying can often be eliminated with a littler prevention. Jeff  has been a VPHR for a Fortune 500 company and he brings that expertise and knowledge to this show. Investing 50 minutes to listen can save you thousands.

To hear our podcast on the advantages of HR Outsourcing by our Expert Guest, Jeff Stinson, you can either listen immediately to the radio show or download it from our FREE Hire and Retain Top Talent Audio Library.

Traditional Job Descriptions Don’t Attract Top Talent

Over the last 20 plus years of recruiting, we have reviewed hundreds of job descriptions from a wide variety of companies and for a wide variety of positions. The vast majority of these job descriptions have the same format. They list the responsibilities, duties and experience required. It is a one size-fits-all, generic job description. Traditional job descriptions are useful documents that meet legal requirements, but they should not be used for hiring purposes.

There are two reasons why these job descriptions are ineffective as a hiring tool. The first reason is traditional job descriptions describe the minimal qualifications required for the position, such as minimal education, minimal years of experience, and minimal skills. This often leads to hiring the least qualified from the pool of qualified candidates. The harsh reality is when you define a job in mediocre terms, odds are you will attract and hire mediocre candidates.

The second reason is traditional job descriptions fail to focus on what defines success in this role. Most people would agree that a person who just performs the duties and responsibilities outlined in traditional job descriptions would rarely be considered a success. In fact, most candidates would not last long in a company that is growing and outpacing the competition. Just because the person has the experience listed doesn’t mean they can deliver the desired results. Here’s the misnomer, past experiences are a good indicator of future performance. Past experience is actually a poor indicator of performance. Past performance is a better indicator, but the best indicator is their ability to deliver results in your company. After all, you are hiring for your company, not for what they did at a past company. Of all the traditional job descriptions reviewed over the years, few if any mention future expectations.

For example, how many times have you heard someone say: “We’re looking for a VP Operations” The reply is “What are you looking for.” The typical answer is usually, “We need a person with 10 years experience, 5 years in our industry, team leader, strategic thinker, good communications and an MBA is preferred.” This is all about the person and nothing about what defines success in the role or what the person is expected to deliver once they come on board. It is naturally assumed if the person has the experience mentioned, they can deliver the expected results. It is our contention that experience has nothing to do with delivering results. Just because the person was a great VP of Operations at their last company, doesn’t mean they are the right VP of Operations for your company.

Instead of using the traditional job description, we recommend using our Success Factor Snapshot (SFS.) This snapshot is a list of Success Factors. Success Factors are simply the results you want this person to deliver, in order for you, the hiring manager, to consider this person a successful hire.

Taking our example of a VP Operations, our Success Factor Snapshot would define the Success Factors the VP needs to deliver – usually within the next 12 to 18 months. For example, the SFS would read:

Within the first 30 days develop a plan of action that will improve on time deliveries from 85% to 96% and present the plan to the CEO.

Within 6 months, develop and begin implementing a vendor qualifications program that will insure zero defects and 100% on-time deliveries from vendors.
Within 9 months consolidate the operations of two plants and produce a cost savings of at least 15%.
We would continue developing these Success Factors until we have 5 or 6 that clearly define what is expected of the candidate once they come on board.

Now when asked the question “What are you looking for.” The answer is “ we need someone who can improve on time deliveries to 96%, can implement a vendor qualifications program and consolidate operations with at least a 15% cost savings.” Instead of defining experience, you are defining success in this role.

We believe that if you find a person that can accomplish these Success Factors, you’ve found the person with the right experience.

Using the Success Factor Snapshot as a hiring guide sets the stage for a successful hire. Instead of the traditional job description, the Success Factor Snapshot clearly states expectations and lets the candidate know what is expected of them once they come on board. The SFS defines success in the role, not minimum qualifications. After all isn’t that what you really want to hire.

For more examples on this go to IMPACT Hiring Solutions