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

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.

“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.

The Top Ten Hiring Mistakes

In addition to writing on this blog and 4 other blog properties that IMPACT Hiring Solutions owns, we are also one of the key contributors to a blog/resource site known as Bizmore – an outstanding site for business resources for entrepreneurs and small businesses. We write a column called “The Talent Coach”.

We’ve begun a series on The Talent Coach on our Top Ten Hiring Mistakes – the tipping point that led Brad and I to publish our award-winning book on hiring. I’ll be re-posting the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes series on this blog.

Before we wrote our book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired,” we commissioned a study to identify the most common mistakes and errors executives made in hiring.

Brad and I have made frequent reference to this study in our various blog postings.

You can download a copy of the executive summary for the research study from our site by clicking here. You will literally want to slap your forehead after reading about the most common hiring mistakes. Which of these are you guilty of making? Most executives are guilty of not just one mistake — but making 2 or 3 mistakes. Consolidated together, sometimes it’s a wonder we can even complete a hire for a key role.

In this post, I’ll list the top 10 hiring mistakes. In future blog posts, we’ll break down each of the top 10 in more detail and describe a few proactive steps you can take to overcome the most common hiring mistakes and errors.

1. Inadequate Job Descriptions
2. Superficial Interviewing
3. Inappropriate Prerequisities
4. Snap Judgements
5. Historical Bias
6. Performance Bias
7. Fishing in Shallow Waters
8. Lack of Probing Questions
9. Ignoring Candidate Needs
10. Desperate Hiring

Read the executive summary of the study before I file my next post on this. You’ll have a much better grasp of why hiring fails as we cycle together through the most common mistakes.

If you can overcome these common hiring mistakes and errors, you stand a very good chance of improving your hiring accuracy from roughly a 50/50 roll of the dice to a point well into the 80%-90% range. Imagine from this point forward, on every hire your company makes, your managers and executives will have an 80%-90% confidence level of hiring a candidate that can deliver the desired results?

Would that make a difference in the future success of your company?

Stupid question – Of course it would have a profound effect on your future success.

Here’s a question to think about until my next blog post: If the hiring mistakes and errors listed above are fairly common and well-known, and the solutions are easy, simple, and can be implemented quickly – why do most companies still struggle to hire top talent at every level?

Barry

PS – Have you joined our LinkedIn Discussion Group for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent? Click here to join the group.

Six Things to Know When Hiring an Interim Executive

As the economy continues to climb out of this recession/depression, companies want to hedge their bets by hiring people on a temporary or “tryout” basis, even at the executive level. There are a lot of companies out there providing the “interim management solution” but the following are some things to know before you hire an executive or engage a firm to find one for you. (Note an interim executive as defined here is not an advisor or a temp. They are usually operating in a line management position for the company or doing a high level project.) Keep in mind the following:

1. No one ever has a “general problem”. A “generalist” is rarely the right fit for an interim assignment because companies don’t have “general problems.” Be wary of providers who have a “bench” of executives ready to jump into your company. They may require a steep learning curve to accomplish what you need. Industry experience does not always translate into the specific problem solving experience you need for your company. Hiring an interim executive is not the same as hiring a temporary A/P clerk.
2. It’s not the size of the “inventory”; it’s the caliber of the recruiting process. Interim executive search is just that, a search. An interim executive search firm should have a clearly defined process designed to find the interim candidates who will deliver results you need. A large database is meaningless without a defined recruiting process. Look for a process that will ensure you see candidates who have solved similar problems to the ones you face, not just have right key words in their resumes from a database search.
3. Be Prepared to over-hire: Many interim assignments are a result of a problem or an opportunity for a company that they don’t have the internal resources to handle. An interim executive will need to be able to quickly get their hands around the situation and start making decisions. A more senior executive is usually able to get up to speed faster.
4. Career consultants rarely are good interim executives. Interim management assignments require that executives make decisions and execute on those decisions. Most career consultants have spent their careers advising, but have not been held responsible for results. Line executives make better interim executives because they are “doers”, not advisors.
5. Don’t pay consulting rates for an interim line manager. You should be prepared to pay a premium for an interim executive, but it should still be closer to what the position would pay if it were a full time job, not an hourly consulting rate. Consultant rates are based on shorter increments of time and on only being billable an average of 50% or less. An interim executive will most likely be in a position full time for several months and an hourly rate could get cost prohibitive. Additionally, there is a good chance you may eventually hire the interim executive for the position. You don’t want to start off with the executive being paid way above the salary range and have to negotiate a substantial cut in salary.
6. It’s not a marriage, it’s a tryout. One mistake companies make is to put too much emphasis on an interim candidate’s “fit” in the organization. That should be a low priority. You are hiring this person to solve your problems over a short period of time. Whether they are a fit for your organization can be determined over the course of the assignment.
Hiring an Interim Executive to manage a company through a situation or complete a high level project can be a very effective strategy in these uncertain times, but knowing these tips can save you time and money in the process.

Mike Haggerty

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

Recruiters Don’t Steal People, Managers Lose People

So often recruiters are accused of  “stealing your best employee.”  While it is true that we do present opportunities to your employees, the fact is, we don’t steal them. To the amazement of most recruiters, the vast majority of the time the employee already has a resume prepared and ready to go.

All we do is ask them if they would be open to discussing a potential career opportunity. Virtually 95% of the time the employee replies, “Yes.” Why would anyone not want to know what is going on in the market, have a discussion around their career or just get a feel for current compensation ranges? Even if they are completely happy in their current position, this is good stuff to know.

The important, and I believe the most relevant question is,” Why, out of the 95% that are open to discussing career opportunities, do roughly 10% indicate that they are happy with their job, and although it sounds like a good opportunity, they aren’t interested in pursuing it further?”

What do these 10% have that the other 90% don’t? That is something a recruiter has nothing to do with. They generally have four things, 1) they are learning in their current position, 2) they feel they are having some impact on the company, 3) they are growing, and 4) they respect their boss. When these four things are part of a person’s job, the best recruiter can’t get them to move.

An example of this recently happened. I was jointly interviewing candidates with one of my clients.  At dinner one night, my client started asking me about the job market, “Is it picking up?” and  “Are any particular industries hiring?”  He mentioned that he thought the market was getting better because in the last couple of months he had been contacted a couple of times by recruiters for potential opportunities.  Like most, he listened to what they had to say, but in both instances he thanked the recruiter for the call and flatly turn them down.

Why, I asked?

Like most, his answer had nothing to do with compensation. He commented, “I enjoy what I’m doing. I have a great boss and most of all I’m challenged.” Then he added, “When I stop being challenged it is time to move on.” In fact, prior to being promoted to his current position he was looking. If his current position had not come open he would have left the company.

As he explained it, “My last boss treated me like a step child (I used step child. His word did start with an S). The position had lost its challenges, the job was the job, and that was all there was to it.” His boss was rarely around to support him and he was doing the same thing this year as he had done the last three years. Boredom and lack of respect for his boss had set in. The good news was that he worked for an excellent company. BTW, he has been with this company for 12  years and in his current position for 4 years.

This is a classic example of how one employee went from engaging recruiters to telling them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

We realize that not every company has the ability to promote someone or move them to another position in order to retain them. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of things a company can do to help their best talent feel challenged, feel that they are learning, and be respected by their boss. This can happen in just about any sized company.

The best recruiter couldn’t “steal” this person.  It all had to do with the job and the person’s boss.  The vast majority of people leave because they lose respect for their boss.  The best selling book, First Break All The Rules, validates this. This book should be required reading for all managers, regardless of how many years they’ve been a manager. As recruiters for the last 30 years, my partner Barry Deutsch and I, can also validate this is clearly the number one reason candidates tell us they are open to talking about a new position.

To help companies and hiring managers identify some of the things that managers can do to retain their best talent we have put together for you to download our 8 Level Retention Matrix. This matrix will help you identify whether or not your managers are doing what it takes to retain your best talent.

If your managers do some, or most of these, you won’t lose your talent to a recruiter. Your competition will.

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

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard