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

Can Social Recruiting Help You Find Top Talent?

Social Recruiting – Everyone’s talking about it – no one’s doing it!

What is Social Recruiting?

Social Recruiting is using the various social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to improve the flow of top talent for current and future positions. This post is an introduction to some of the benefits and tactics of using Social Recruiting to find candidates, such as sales professionals, create an employer brand, and present your company in a positive light to attract candidates who already have a good job. Leveraging Social Recruiting also allows you to engage with potential candidates for future roles by engaging, nurturing, sustaining, and communicating over a period of time to create a Just-in-Time recruiting pipeline.

In subsequent blogs posts, we’ll delve into each of the various services, tools, and techniques you can leverage to begin attracting top talent.

Social Recruiting Benefits

What are some of the benefits of using Social Recruiting to find and engage with top talent at every level in your organization?

• The activities do not have to be centralized in HR. All Hiring Managers and Executives can participate
• Inexpensive or FREE
• Easy to learn the proper techniques and tactics
• Simple to implement
• Low time investment
• Branding, PR, and marketing side benefits
• Creates a powerful recruiting message (also known as employer branding)
• Ability to engage with future high potential candidates

Sounds almost too good to be true. You’re probably wondering “what’s the catch”. It cannot be that simple.

The good news is that using Social Recruiting to find, engage, develop, nurture, sustain conversations with top talent at every level is truly that easy. Of course there is a small learning curve. Of course there is an initial investment to get everything set up properly. Of course it requires the involvement and participation of your hiring managers and executives.

Another huge benefit is that you can STOP paying expensive recruiting fees when you can do much of this work on your own.

Most of you know that I make my living primarily through executive search. This might sound like I’m cutting off my future incoming stream by recommending you start using Social Recruiting instead of recruiters. I’m going to suggest that most companies waste a lot of money on recruiters for positions they could have easily filled through Social Recruiting.

How Can You Get Started with Social Recruiting?

These techniques are so powerful that my partner, Brad Remillard and I will begin in August offering a series of webinars on using Social Recruiting. Our first one will be “How to use LinkedIn to Find Great Sales Professionals.” We’re excited about this webinar series and we’ll be structuring a series of tools (FREE of course) to use in establishing and building your Social Recruiting capability.

Here are some questions to consider as you start to look at implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy:

• What are some of the tactics and best practices available to you for Social Recruiting?
• Blogging – especially having employees share their successes and joy at working in your company
• Forums and Discussion Groups – featuring stories about the contributions your employees are making to your company
• LinkedIn – Strong Branding through a profile, audio, powerpoint, case studies, Q&A, active participation in groups
• Linked and Facebook – searching for potential employees
• Twitter – Job Postings
• Industry Sites/Trade Association Social Networking
• Are you leading your industry/business segment in using these tools?
• What steps have you taken so far in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?
• Do you have any good success stories to share with other Vistage Members?
• Are you wondering where and how to get started?
• What’s the one thing you need to know to get started on implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?

Stay tuned as we tackle all the various best practices in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy.

Barry

P.S. Hold the date for our upcoming Webinar on Using LinkedIn to Find Sales Professionals – August 26

graphic by Robert Scoble

A Baker’s Dozen Techniques to Find Top Talent on LinkedIn

If you’re looking to hire a top caliber employee at a professional level, LinkedIn is without question one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.

Here are my Top Baker’s Dozen techniques to quickly and easily find outstanding talent. Keep in mind, finding the person is the easy part – convincing them to talk with you is the hard part (hence the rationale behind using an executive search firm like IMPACT Hiring Solutions).

1. Complete your profile from a marketing perspective – otherwise know in certain farming circles as “putting some lipstick on the pig”
2. Build up your network with people at competitors, vendors, suppliers, customers within your industry, function, geography, and markets.
3. Conduct very precise searches, broadening the search criteria in expanding rings.
4. When you identify a specific candidate, search for their email address using Jigsaw or ZoomInfo. LinkedIn doesn’t give you enough Inmails to be effective. Having the email address is a good approach for direct contact.
5. Join the groups your target candidate is most likely to have joined.
6. Review the SlideShare Presentations of anyone who might know the person you want to hire
7. Review the potential blogs by those in your network – linked to their LinkedIn Profiles
8. Review the Twitter Stream of Candidates for whom you are searching. You’ll see their connections by whom they are twittering with on a regular basis.
9. Examine the recommendations people have made – many times these recommenders might be good candidates and they have strong networks
10. Who is your potential candidates recommending – these might be good candidates and once again, they also have strong networks.
11. Look at the network connections of the individuals with whom you have a first degree connection. They might know of the ideal candidate.
12. Search the Questions and Answers area on LinkedIn. Sometimes, the best candidates are freely sharing their advice and recommendations – and posting questions of their own
13. Click on the company name and look at other people from the same company as your target candidates. Are you connected to any of these people?

These Baker’s Dozen Techniques should keep you busy on your search for top talent. The upside is that outstanding future employees can be identified through these techniques. The Downside – it’s time-consuming. Going after passive candidates through social networking by using sites like LinkedIn or Facebook can take 80-120 hours of work for a mid-level management position – the searching, networking, asking for referrals, contacting candidates, follow-up, and phone interviewing.

In future posts, we’ll tackle each technique in more depth.

Are you using any of these techniques? What’s worked and what has not worked? Are you using any other tools of LinkedIn that I’ve not mentioned?

Barry

photo credit by Rachel From Cupcakes Take the Cake

Hiring Frustration #2: Not Enough Candidates

Most of the methods companies use to attract candidates bring those who are floating near the surface aggressively looking for a new job.

Traditional methods of sourcing bring average and mediocre candiates to your doorstep. The traditional methods also repel top talent.

If you desire to start attracting top talent you’ve got to fish deeply in the proper ponds.

Step 1 is changing the approach of advertising from  the job description advertisement approach to a Compelling Marketing Statement. Once this document is ready, you can then leverage it by making sure the 2 primary groups of top talent become aware of your opportunity through our Success Sourcing Strategies. Download the FREE Samples of Compelling Marketing Statements from our web site.

We’re also offering a FREE Sourcing Review for your company to determine if your current process and system is capable of hiring top talent at every level on a consistent basis. Read more about this unique FREE Sourcing Review.

Barry

Leveraging Social Networks

On our radio show heard Monday’s from 11 – noon PDT on LATalkRadio Barry and I discuss how to use social media to find customers, locate the best candidates and how to meet the people you need to meet so you can meet the person you want to meet. Social media such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook are becoming the new way to expand your network.

These are powerful tools that many companies are just beginning to understand their true value. Barry and I will help you unlock the mystery. We will show you how to start out and give some references to help you incorporate these into your marketing toolbox.

Leveraging Social Media Just click the link to listen.

Upgrading with Social Networking

Now is an excellent time to consider upgrading your team. Just a year ago one of the biggest issues facing companies was “finding qualified people.” Today that has changed for a lot of companies or industries. Taking a contrarian approach maybe the best strategy. Sooner or later the economy will turn and then many companies will be right back trying to find top talent. Most will find that talent already at their competitors.

Consider doing what recruiters do – build an inventory of people you want to keep in touch with. This is where social networking comes into play. You can use Linkedin to connect, or Twitter to keep in touch. The key is keeping in-touch. Communicating with these potential future employees will only help bond them to you.

Use these tools to find key people that you know when the economy turns you will want to bring on board. Once you locate them begin to build a relationship with them. Ask to meet for coffee, invite to conferences, look them up at a trade show and don’t forget to send the an invitation on Linkedin. Then when you are ready to seriously consider filling the role you know where they are and you are the first person to approach them. Many will be underemployed and just waiting out the economy.

The worst thing most employers can do now is think so short term that all the top talent ends up working for the competition.