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• They were using outdated sourcing, screening, and interviewing techniques that required NO training or expertise.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

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.

Why Is It So Difficult to Find Outstanding Sales Professionals?

In my last blog post on hiring sales professionals, I introduced the concept of why it is difficult to hire great sales professionals and we drilled into defining success as the starting point of best practices in hiring.

In this blog post, let’s talk about why it’s so difficult to find great sales professionals.

You’re Doomed To Fail Before You Start

The vast majority of companies search for candidates in traditional approaches that might include a little bit of light networking to find out who knows someone looking for a job, attending local job fairs, and running an advertisement on a job board, such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com.

Most of the time these traditional methods bring the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool to your doorstep. If all you’re seeing is the bottom 1/3, then you’re doomed to fail before you start. It doesn’t matter how great the job is, how wonderful your company is, how much of a leader you are – You’re Doomed to Fail Before You Start the Hiring Process.

You get 300 responses to your networking, job fair, on-line ad — 298 of which you can’t figure out what keyword did the candidate click on that brought them to the conclusion they should apply to your job. Two in the group were excellent. Unfortunately, they were so good – they went on and off the market in the blink of an eye. Now you’re left with all the rejects, retreads, poor performers, toxic and dysfunctional (perhaps semi-psychotic), dregs, and bottom of the barrel candidates.

Then we choose from this group.

One of my clients the other day called this approach to finding candidates “picking from best of the worst”. Another one of my clients recently coined the phrase “picking from the cream of the crap”.

Does this sound dysfunctional? Why then do most companies use this approach to finding candidates?

I was speaking with a potential client toward the end of last week who told me he ran advertisements on a couple of job boards. He got hundreds of responses. He personally interviewed over 50 candidates. Over the course of 3 months, he hired 3 candidates for his sales team. One is very good and the other two he is considering firing. His track record is somewhat shy of 50% and he’s already invested over 80 hours of his personal time in the process.

Is there any other process in your company where that investment of time yields a result of less than 50% accuracy? Probably NOT! Why then do we accept this random variability as OKAY when it comes to hiring?

Speaker Presentation Responses

The responses I hear in my presentations to trade groups, associations, and management team meetings for our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” program include:

• We don’t know any better
• No one has shown us a more effective process
• That’s the way we’ve always done it
• Isn’t that what HR is supposed to do?
• Sometimes we hire good people this way

At the beginning of my speaker presentation, I’ll cycle one by one around the room asking the participants to share their greatest frustration in hiring. Finding candidates always comes up as one of the top 3 for the past decade. It doesn’t seem to matter if the economy is going straight up, straight down, or sideways – it’s always tough to find top talent, especially in hiring sales professionals. I just did a program a week ago in Vancouver and 7 out of 15 participants raised their hands that they were struggling to find candidates. Some of the members had been looking for 2 months, 4 months, and over 6 months to find someone to fill a critical role.

What a minute – are we not in one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression? Millions of candidates are aggressively looking for a job. Shouldn’t we be able to grab one of those candidates? NO – ABSOLUTELY NOT! You’re not trying to put bodies in chairs – you’re trying to hire an outstanding sales professional who can achieve your desired expectations and do so within the context of your company culture and values. The problem is that most of the methods traditionally used to find candidates bring warm bodies to your doorstep, not high performers.

Sometimes, you get lucky. You find a great candidate at a job fair, in your second networking call, off an advertisement. LUCK IS NOT AN EFFECTIVE HIRING STRATEGY. I would like to suggest that you can make finding top-notch candidates a process so that you can consistently bring great people to the table instead of depending on luck.

What’s Next – Improving Sales Hiring Step-by-Step

In my next few blog posts, I’ll break down in more depth “Why it’s so difficult to find Outstanding Sales Professionals”. We’ll talk about how hiring is a lot like recruiting for a public high school sports team, the 4 pools of candidates and which one should be your sweet spot, why using a job description masquerading as a job advertisement doesn’t work, and a few simple and inexpensive best practices to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of candidates into the top of your sales candidate funnel.

Between now and my next blog post, I’d love to hear in the comments section what your greatest frustrations are when it comes to finding outstanding sales professionals.

Barry

If you’re looking for a job – don’t apply here.

One of the things I’ve noticed when working with successful business owners and executive leaders in large corporations is that they know who to hire. They look for certain characteristics in the person they put on the team. One of the first things they try to determine (once the skills are out of the way) is whether or not the person is hunting for a job or a position of responsibility.

If the candidate is looking for a job, they don’t go any further with the interview. If the candidate indicates that what motivates them and gets them up every day is a position with responsibility for which they are held accountable, then the interview continues in earnest, with success factors and lots of questions. The open ended questions will focus on how to figure out if the candidate takes responsibility for the consequences of her/his decisions. “What was the single biggest failure you’ve experienced professionally and what did you learn?” “Can you provide an example of  how you made an uniformed decision and then went back to correct it to take the project down a new path?” “Give me an example of how you allowed hard data analysis to override your instinct when making a business decision.” The candidate had better be prepared to give substantial examples that can be verified.

As you might guess, the person asking these questions isn’t looking for someone who is simply wanting to come in, do what s/he is told, let others take responsibility and go home at five. Nor is the hiring manager looking for someone who always sees outside forces or internal bureaucracy as getting in the way or causing failure. No, this manager or executive is not hiring someone for a job. Instead, they are looking for a person who takes responsibility; one who analyzes situations and is willing to look at data with fresh eyes. This manager is likely building a team that isn’t afraid of admitting mistakes, pointing out areas for improvement, or being the bearer of “bad news.” They are looking for a professional.

Let’s look at the other side. If I am a candidate who thrives on being in a position of responsibility, believe in being held accountable, and believe in being “data driven,” then I would want an interview to proceed as outlined above. If the hiring manager isn’t asking questions that lead me to believe they are looking for a professional, then I might take the initiative to ask some of the questions myself. I’d be very tempted to ask, “How will you know that the candidate you hire is successful?” What would you expect to be accomplished in the first three months and how will you measure it?” “How would you describe the culture of accountability in your organization?” If the manager fumbles the answers to these questions, this is not a cultural match for me and I may want to move on. That’s a very difficult decision, especially in these times. However, to settle for a job when you are looking for responsibility and a career position is going to hurt you in the long run.

Readers of this blog will not find too much surprising in this post. Yet, I see hiring managers make the same mistakes over and over again. I also see senior executives taking jobs in a panic – they have bills to pay and a family to support. Here is where I see the problem manifest most often – hiring a salesperson or sales manager. Sales people have a built in aversion to accepting responsibility for failure. Now before you fill my in-basket with hate mail, let me admit that I have come up through the sales ranks and managed a multi-channel sales team at several companies. I found myself succumbing to the very mindset that I’m suggesting isn’t healthy. There’s a simple and understandable explanation for this stereotype of the salesperson (apologies for those of you who have figured this out and grown out of it). A salesperson always faces more rejection in the average day than many people face in a year. They have to build up a thick skin. They have to accept the rejection, BELIEVE that it isn’t personal, and move on to the next opportunity. That understandable need tends to create a habit of looking outside of our own actions for the reasons for failure. We have to guard against that eventuality and admit that while understandable, it is not acceptable to ALWAYS assume the failure is not ours. As the hiring manager for a high functioning sales team, I found it very challenging to dig down and get to the point of “when are you accountable for the failure of a sales initiative or forecast”; both for my sales team (including myself) and with prospective candidates for the team. It turns out getting there was crucial for a successful hire.

So back to the beginning statement. If you’re looking for a job (no responsibility, just put in the time, collect a paycheck and go home), don’t apply here – even if the position is for the assembly line. If you’re looking to take responsibility for your actions, hold yourself accountable and are willing to grow, then let’s get started on what it will take to be successful. Be ready to give examples of how you’ve made mistakes, accepted the responsibility for them and learned from them. Be ready to demonstrate how you are open to various views of and conclusions derived from the same data. If you’re successful, we will be building a highly functional and exciting team. In my book, that’s better than a job any day. Even in this horrible market.

Hiring sales people is difficult for everyone. We just launched our Sales Recruiting Division to help companies with this issue. As the economy turns, good sales people will be harder to find and even harder to identify. CLICK HERE to get a Free Success Factor Snapshot for your sales position.

For more information on hiring top talent, read our best-selling book (0ver 10,000) You’re NOT the Person I Hired. CLICK HERE to read reviews.

About the author

Dave Kinnear is a sought after business advisor and mentor. He works with highly successful executives through one-to-one mentoring and coaching meetings. Individuals who are presently running successful businesses and executives in transition work with Dave to ensure meeting corporate and/or career goals. Through his affiliation with Vistage International, Dave convenes and facilitates Advisory Boards comprising Business Owners, Company Presidents and Chief Executives dedicated to becoming better leaders who make better decisions and achieve better results.

Upgrading Your Team in the Recession

Back in July, I made the recommendation on this blog (and was interviewed by Forbes Magazine Online) to use the recession as a unique point in history to upgrade your team.

Have you selected one or two key roles and upgrade the positions yet?

If not, what’s holding you back? Don’t miss out on this wonderful special time in history to attract a level of talent to a couple of key roles that you might never again have the opportunity to acquire.

What’s holding you back from taking the first step?

Here are some of the “arguments” I hear against upgrading when I mention this idea in our workshops and to our CEO/President clients:

• This person has been with me a long time and is loyal
• The individual in that role might have a hard time finding a new job
• I’m embarrassed that the hire didn’t work out – I’m hoping it turns around
• I think the person will eventually get better
• I don’t have time to spend on hiring someone
• The person is okay – they do some things well – no rush to make a decision
• Not sure I won’t make a mistake the second time around again
• No idea where to start or find this person
• I can live with this person – I’ll do part of their job
• What if I screw up the hire – then I wouldn’t look good to my ____ (fill in the blank)

Does this sound dysfunctional? Sure it does.

The number ONE trait of success for managers and executives is the ability to hire and retain an outstanding team of people. Are you a great manager/executive or an average one?

• Do you have an exceptional team in place right now?
• Why are you tolerating average/mediocre performance?
• Are you doing part of the work your team should be doing?

Do you have some people on your team that are good at doing 70-75-80% of their job, but stink at the other 30-25-20% of their job. Who gets to do this piece your subordinate cannot do? You guessed it – you do.

Before you can blink, 50% of your workload is doing the work your team should be doing. You’re doing 8% of Mark’s job, 5% of Susan’s job, 20% of Kelly’s job. Now you can’t do your job because so much time is being consumed by doing the work of your team.

Why are you continuing to accept this less than stellar performance.

Take action now and upgrade a few key roles that are below your expectations. Emerge from the recession with a team that truly is a strategic advantage.

Recognize that right now is a unique historical time period for hiring. There are some exceptionally talented individuals who might consider your opportunity. As the job market recovers – you may never again be able to acquire and/or afford this talent.

Discover the simple steps to find, assess and acquire great talent.

Barry Deutsch

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retention Discussion Group to follow the conversation around upgrading your team and finding great talent.

Losing a Top Candidate – Perception is The Only Reality. Lessons learned from 20 years on the front lines of the talent wars.

You rarely lose a top candidate at the end of the hiring process. It’s usually in steps taken along the way. In this case the client made a series of seemingly small mistakes that resulted in the candidate declining to go forward. It started simply by the hiring manager keeping the candidate waiting 30 minutes, then, he compounded the problem by not being prepared for the interview. “He didn’t seem to remember much about my background”, the candidate later confided in me. Despite the rocky start, the candidate returned for a series of additional interviews with other members of the management team. All went well, but the last interview was to be with a senior manager who was on a sales trip in Europe. No problem, we would arrange a phone interview. Week one resulted in no interview being arranged. It wasn’t until week two that the senior executive could “make room on his calendar” to call the candidate. The executive was 30 minutes late making the call and it lasted only 30 minutes. (Eight or nine time zones difference and he couldn’t find 30 minutes on his calendar for two weeks?) Finally, the client told me that all of the executives were very excited about the candidate and they wanted to move forward with an offer. I was told to inform the candidate that an offer would be sent to him “in a week or so”, as soon as the hiring manager could get all of the required approvals. At this point the candidate declined to continue. “To me, a hiring process is a reflection of how a company operates and makes decisions. I didn’t like what I saw.” The candidate took a job with a much larger company which had moved faster and more efficiently than this client.

Lesson learned: The best window any candidate has into the culture of an organization is the way it goes about the hiring process. If your process isn’t tight, professional, organized and strategic, top quartile candidates will go elsewhere, and they may tell their friends about their experience. One bad hiring process can equal two problems, the loss of a top candidate and a bad public relations moment.

Check your culture by downloading our Cultural Assessment. CLICK HERE to download a free assessment.

Is your hiring process effective at attracting top talent? Our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your hiring process. CLICK HERE to download a free scorecard.

Mike is the founder of Hagerthy & Co, an executive search, training and consulting firm. For information on how to arrange for their complimentary Hiring Process Assessment go to: www.hagnco.com/page13.html#HiringProcess.