Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

1. Don’t fumble the kickoff. On the recruiting playing field this is equivalent to the candidate asking about the compensation first, or telling you she’s not interested. It’s also forcing a candidate to apply for the job before she can talk to someone about it, to get a better idea if the job is even worthwhile considering. For better kickoff returns, add a chat feature today to your career website and let your candidates IM a recruiter. Or add a series of FAQs about each job. When calling a candidate on the phone for the first time, whether the person’s active or passive, you must not discuss compensation under any circumstances for at least the first 10-15 minutes! The goal of the first encounter is to switch the conversation to career opportunity and away from compensation, or any other form of “not interested.” (Here’s an article with more on this critical step.) Rather than sell the job, your goal is to sell the next step. In this case, it’s a 10- minute conversation just to figure out if the job is worth getting serious about. A good kickoff return will give you great field position, and this is just as critical in football as it is in recruiting.
2. Get lots of first downs. While you might have a big 30- or 40-yard play now and then, this should be the exception, not the rule. If you’re relying on big plays to score, you’ll lose a lot of candidates who need to move slowly to digest what you’re offering. Force-feeding information at hyper-speed won’t work. A career move requires time for the person to digest the information. Nurturing the candidate along, suggesting another interview or discussion is how this information is best presented in order to be absorbed properly. This is why selling the next step is so important, rather than forcing the candidate to consider the job, the comp, and the location during the first call.
3. Prevent turnovers. Once you begin a drive downfield, don’t do dumb things that cause the deal to instantly fall apart. Recruiters who don’t know the job and managers who over-talk and sell too soon are two examples of recruiting turnovers. Managers who expect top performers to be excited about the job before they know anything about it are the most turnover prone. Turnovers can also be caused when members of the hiring team ask superficial question or are equally clueless about real jobs needs. Lack of professionalism at any step in the hiring process can result in unnecessary turnovers and the loss of some great candidates.
4. Convert your third-downs. Once in awhile you’ll only have one shot to keep the deal alive. For example, if the candidate says she doesn’t like the manager or the job isn’t big enough and wants to withdraw her name from consideration, you’ll have to come up with a big third-down play. In this case, ask the candidate if she’d reconsider if you made the job bigger, or if you could demonstrate that the style the manager used during the interview isn’t the same as his on-the-job persona. Of course, you then have to prove it if the candidate agrees to go forward, but that’s how you convert third-downs and keep the drive alive.
5. Keep the defense honest. Don’t tip your hand too soon. Overselling the candidate, over-talking, and under-listening are equivalent to telling the defense you’re going to pass on every play. This is no way to win a ball game or hire a top performer. Keep the candidate guessing, mention other top candidates, question the candidate’s breadth of experience, and excite the candidate with projects bigger than he’s handled in the past. This is how you keep the person interested throughout the assessment and recruiting process.
6. Time of possession is key. Don’t rush to close. Not only does the candidate need time to evaluate what you’re offering, you’ll increase your close rate by getting the person to invest more time in evaluating your opportunity rather than the competition’s. I suggest more interviews spread over a few days or weeks, rather than pushing them all into one day. Also add a take-home case study and a Profiles International online evaluation for all your candidates once you get serious. (Email info@adlerconcepts.com for information about the Profiles International online evaluation.) The case study allows the candidate a day or two to evaluate a problem likely to be faced on the job with the results presented in a formal give-and-take panel interview. The Profiles is a one-hour cognitive and behavioral style assessment and provides invaluable insight into the candidate. Not only are the results useful, but when candidates agree to participate in these time-consuming tasks, they’re expressing serious interest and increasing their commitment to you.
7. Know your competition. One size doesn’t fit all. Some candidates are interested in security, others want challenging projects, and some want career growth. Customize your approach depending on the candidate’s needs. We suggest a multi-factor close where the candidate rank orders his job requirements. Some of the items to be considered include work content, job stretch, job challenges, growth opportunities, company culture, compensation, security, the hiring manager, and team. (Send us an email, info@adlerconcepts.com, if you’d like to see the whole list.) With this custom playbook you can change your play calling at the line of scrimmage to ensure your candidate gets the information required to make a well thought-out final decision. Of course, evaluate the candidate across multiple factors as well, so stop the traditional series of one-on-one interviews that are both duplicative and exhausting. Instead, consider tours with debriefing sessions, group interviews, some intense one-on-ones, a take-home project, and a business lunch. Then formally debrief using a broad-based selection criteria. (Here’s the 10-factor candidate assessment form we suggest for this.)
8. Maintain a competitive edge throughout the drive. The key to effective recruiting is applicant control. This means staying the buyer from first contact through offer acceptance and final close. As part of applicant control, your job is not only to advance downfield, but recognize that first downs are earned by getting the candidate to agree to something significant at each step in the process. For example, don’t arrange the first interview with the hiring manager unless you get agreement from the candidate that she’ll be looking at the job as a career move with a modest increase in salary. Use the second round of interviews to gain more concessions, like a possible start date and informal agreement on the benefits package. Set the final offer meeting with the candidate agreeing to formally accepting within 24 hours. This is applicant control, and it essential for closing the best entry-level candidates as well as senior executives.
9. Don’t fumble in the red zone. You must score when you’re within sight of the goal line. Make sure you know where you stand compared to the competition on all critical decision factors the candidate is likely to consider. Giving the candidate the multi-factor decision form mentioned above ensures the candidate is looking at the job broadly, and you’re not surprised by their order of importance. This way during the drive to close you can use each subsequent interview step to cover each of these factors. Caution: don’t present the offer too soon or reveal your hand. You haven’t scored yet.
10. Score. Everything has been a waste of time if a candidate says she’s not interested or accepts another offer or counter-offer. Scoring in the game of recruiting means the candidate has accepted your offer on fair terms and shows up on the start date. The best way to score more often is to test every aspect of the offer before you make it. While it’s important not to fumble the kickoff, it’s more important not to fumble on the one-yard line. Before making the offer formal, review the terms in detail and ask the candidate if she’ll accept it on these terms if it’s formally presented without hesitation. If you sense hesitation, side-step the forward progression and find out the concerns. Then ask the person if she’d accept the offer if the concerns were satisfactorily addressed. Uncovering the candidate’s concerns before you make the offer is essential if you want to make more placements. Of course you’ll need to address the concerns to close the deal, but rushing the offer without knowing if the person will accept is naïve at best, and one sure way to lose more candidates than necessary.

Slow down and make more placements. While you want to move as fast as possible, the best people will not move faster than they can absorb the information. They’ll opt-out otherwise. It’s just like being pushed into buying anything that requires some significant degree of comparison shopping and evaluation. Build this slow and steady process into every phase of your recruiting efforts and watch your placement rate soar.

Fumbles, turnovers, incomplete passes, sacks, and failed third-down conversions are all caused by going too fast. Don’t sell the job, sell the next step.

In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

Obviously, this state of bliss doesn’t come about without some important processes in place. Here are the big ones:

1. Getting enough high-quality prospects into the database. This is where aggressive consumer marketing concepts need to be implemented. Much of this involves Web 2.0; targeting behavioral marketing; proactive employee referral programs; highly networked recruiters; pushed advertising to blogs, social networks and niche sites; and the development of candidate personas. (Check out our free resource library if you’d like to understand these concepts in more detail.) If you don’t have good people to start with, JIT sourcing will just enable you to hire average people very quickly.
2. A CRM technology that automates the nurturing process. Most CRM (candidate or client relationship management) systems require heavy involvement by the recruiter to send out a series of compelling sourcing messages on a regular basis. Making matters more difficult is the need to send out targeted messages rather than all-purpose generic messages. So without the right nurturing technology the drip marketing program becomes difficult to manage. We’re now exploring automated CRM system that eliminate this burden. Email me (lou@adlerconcepts.com) if you’d like to participate in some beta evaluations of these systems and find out what types of compelling messages you need to use to maintain and attract your prospects’ attention.
3. A short- and long-term forecast of hiring needs. The idea of workforce planning still seems to be anathema to most recruiting departments, yet this is what drives the CRM/db engine. Knowing who you’re going to be hiring 6-12 months out allows you to implement the recruitment advertising programs necessary to fill the database. While rough estimates allow the process to work at a fundamental level, knowing who, when, and where provides the raw material to keep the process running smoothly on an ongoing basis.
4. Targeted and sophisticated messaging. If you want to fill your prospect database with top performers, don’t use traditional skills and experience-based job descriptions as the basis for your ads or drip marketing emails. Traditional job descriptions filled with generic boilerplate will preclude the best from even considering being a prospect. As important, the nurturing messages need to consider your target demographic. This requires some market research up-front to get the complete series of messages done right. For example, a job appealing to a college grad would not highlight the same things as a working parent, a committed up-and-comer, or a baby-boomer looking for a healthcare plan. For an example, here’s our outrageous ad contest winner for last year, which emphasizes the culture and type of work, rather than the skills required to do the work. (Make sure you enter this year’s contest for most effective ad to get some practice with this new form of advertising.)
5. Strong metrics and reporting. Just like any business process, JIT sourcing requires constant monitoring and updating. Ongoing monitoring of factors like quantity and quality by class of candidate, the effectiveness of different sourcing programs, the productivity of each recruiter, and candidate response rates to different messages, among others, are the drivers for ensuring the program quickly delivers the best candidates when needed.
6. Implement a “just looking” mentality and eliminate the idea of “buy now.” Forcing people to apply to even talk to someone requires too big a commitment for those on the margin or just starting their job-hunting process. This blockade-mentality precludes the best from even becoming a prospect. For example, most company career sites make it difficult to find a job, or chat with a recruiter to get more information. Worse, most hiring managers are equally unwilling to just talk with a prospect on an exploratory basis. They typically want the candidate highly committed and interested before the first interview. The problem here is that the best people are generally open to talk even if they’re not looking, and many are willing to become prospects if it doesn’t require too much of a commitment. To build a big hot prospect database of high performers, companies need to eliminate every possible barrier to entry.

Even if you don’t achieve a complete JIT demand-pull sourcing program right away, proactive recruitment advertising designed to fill your prospect database will provide a significant competitive advantage. Getting prospects into the database is a science in-and-of-itself, and a good place to start.

The best way to do this for high-volume jobs (developers, sales reps, customer service, engineers, etc.) is to develop a series of talent hubs by job class. These 2-3 page microsites offer prospects an introduction to the job class (e.g., power engineers) providing information about the company, the types of jobs available, typical projects, learning opportunities, and a means to connect with the company, all without applying for a specific job.

You can add Web 2.0 interactive features to this microsite, including chat, RSS feeds, video podcasts, and a means to be first to learn about upcoming opportunities. As part of the talent hub design, make sure it can be found first by those Googling for jobs or pushing the link to appropriate blogs, networks, and social sites.

This is where search engine marketing becomes critical. Jobs2Web and Shaker Recruitment Advertising are leading the effort on creating these prospect portals.

It’s difficult to imagine the idea of advanced consumer marketing combined with state-of-the-art supply chain management as being the foundation for the future of recruiting.

Despite the non-HR emphasis, the most progressive companies are already moving in this direction with great success. Who knows? We may be able to win the war for talent after all with some true cross-functional thinking.

Our part in this is developing a new method of assessing Managerial Fit when hiring from the outside. We all know that the development skills of the manager are critical in ensuring a new employee’s performance, so this might be something useful to consider whether you’re a recruiter or hiring manager.

In this same vein, using the concept of Managerial Fit and Situational Leadership might also be something to consider if your company is increasing its emphasis on internal mobility. It could help increase the number of top-performing current employees transferred into significantly different roles.

The concept behind Blanchard and Hershey’s leadership model is that the manager needs to adapt their style based on the current skills and developmental needs of the subordinate. The model categorizes management styles into these four levels:

• S1 – Directing: providing specific guidance for the task with direct and immediate follow-up. This is useful technique for a subordinate who has little skills in the area of need and lacks confidence.
• S2 – Coaching: providing an appropriate level of training and follow-up, but giving the subordinate some latitude in getting the job done. This is a very interactive two-way approach which is also useful where the subordinate needs external motivation to complete the task as well as some training.
• S3 – Participating: the manager assigns the tasks, provides some direction, but leaves how the task is done up to the subordinate. This technique is appropriate for a skilled person who might need some support and guidance in getting the job done.
• S4 – Delegating: in this case the manager assigns the tasks with the expectation that the subordinate will get it done with little follow-up. This is an appropriate technique to use when the person handling the tasks is fully competent and highly motivated.

The Situational Leadership model defines the developmental needs of subordinates into four broad categories based on competence, confidence, and motivation to do the work.

As you’ll see, these classifications are very-task oriented, so a person might vary in ability and motivation from strong to weak across all job needs. This requires a successful manager to adapt to the subordinate’s needs given the specific task.

This is critically important from a hiring perspective, since many candidates are hired without a clear understanding of real job needs.

Here’s a quick description of the four development levels of the subordinate:

• D1 – Low Competence, but High Motivation. The person wants to do the work, but requires significant direction and training. An S-1 Directing style of management is best for this type of person.
• D2 – Some Competence, but Lacks Motivation. The person can do the work, but needs external support to complete it successfully. An S-2 Coaching management style is appropriate here.
• D3 – High Competence, Variable Commitment. The person can do the work, and is highly motivated to do most of it. An S-3 Participating Style is best here, with the manager providing support for tasks the subordinate doesn’t find satisfying or where the person lacks confidence.
• D4 – High Competency, High Motivation. An S-4 Delegating is required here. The manager needs to provide minimal direction and follow-up. These people are the ideal hires for critical tasks where time is of the essence or where training is not available. However, too much direction and follow-up can be demotivating to the person, so the manager’s style is an important consideration when hiring someone at this level.

In some form, lack of Managerial Fit is often cited as the primary reason why new hires underperform. This is primarily due to the fact that most interviewers emphasize skills, behaviors, and generic competencies rather than motivation and specific competency to do the work. The Situational Leadership model offers a means to address this huge void.

Measuring manager fit can be relatively easy to assess if a performance profile is used when taking the assignment rather than a traditional skills and experience-based job description. A performance profile defines the top six to eight performance objectives required with the tasks classified into levels of importance.

For example, a critical task for a product manager might be to complete the product design spec with engineering and marketing within 90 days after starting. A less critical task might be to upgrade the product launch process within six to nine months. By categorizing tasks this way, candidates can then be assessed based on a competence, confidence, and motivation scale by task. Managers can then determine if their management style fits with the candidate’s development needs.

At the extremes an S-1 Directing style is a terrible fit if the candidate is an extremely competent and motivated D-4. Equally bad is the combination of an S-4 Delegating Style with a D-1 candidate who, while highly motivated, still needs lots of training and support.

Rather than describe each combination, here’s the 1-5 ranking scale we’re starting to use to better assess managerial fit:

• Level 1 – Bad Fit: on the critical tasks the candidate’s development needs are inconsistent with the manager’s situational leadership style or time needs are too pressing.
• Level 2 – Adequate Fit: the new employee is competent and motivated on some of the critical tasks and the manager is capable of supporting the new employee on the others.
• Level 3 – Good Fit: the new employee is competent and motivated on most of the critical tasks at a D-3 or D-4 level and the manager is capable of properly supporting the employee on all of the other and less critical tasks.
• Level 4 – Very Good Fit: there is a great match between the new employee’s developmental needs on all of the critical and non-critical tasks and the manager’s preferred situational leadership style.
• Level 5 – Perfect Fit: not only is there a great match between the new employee’s developmental needs and the manager’s situational leadership style, but the fit enhances the capabilities of both from a team standpoint.

Download our sample 10-Factor Candidate Assessment template as a starting point and incorporate Managerial Fit as one of the 10 factors. Here are a few ideas on how you might want to begin assessing managerial fit:

1. Complete a performance profile for the job and classify each objective as absolutely critical, somewhat critical, and less-critical.
2. Determine the manager’s preferred or dominant manager situational leadership style for each task and if there is time for much training or coaching. If not, you’ll need to hire someone who can deliver the results with limited management direction. This is a critical issue, so don’t minimize this point.
3. During the interview, get detailed examples of something comparable the candidate has accomplished for each critical task. This allows you to determine the developmental needs of the candidate for each task. Our two-question Performance-based Interview has been designed with this task focus in mind.
4. Be very careful about hiring someone to work for a manager who is heavy on the Directing and Coaching style. Highly competent and self-motivated people are turned-off when given too much direction.
5. Assess managerial fit using the above 1-5 ranking scale.

As a recruiter, I would expect my candidates to be a D3 or D4 on each critical task, unless the job allowed for sufficient training and coaching. In this case I would offset experience and high motivation with high potential and high motivation. I’d be OK recommending someone who was less motivated if the tasks were not critical to ultimate job success.

I’ve used this model in the past to walk away from certain assignments where I knew the lack of managerial fit was a recipe for failure. In this case it had to do with working with very dominant entrepreneurial leaders who were looking for top performers, but weren’t willing to give them the latitude to succeed. This is one of the reasons small companies never become big until the founder leaves.

Email me directly (lou@adlerconcepts.com) if you’d like to participate in a few trials on using Situational Leadership and Managerial Fit as the basis for better assessing competency. This is an important management development area that can be used not only for new hires, but also for increasing the success rate for employees transferred internally.

Surprisingly, most sales managers make the same bad decisions, regardless of the product or industry.

Here’s the list of where most sales managers go wrong. Start eliminating these error-producing behaviors and just about all of your sales hiring mistakes will go away.

• They think their job is unique. They’re not. There is a common sales process behind each one, that when understood can be used to benchmark any candidate’s past performance against.
• They overvalue first impressions. First impressions don’t predict performance. People with great first impressions are frequently incompetent and people with marginal first impression often have a track record of great success. It’s best to measure first impression at the end of the interview and then determine how the candidate’s first impression affected their performance in consistently achieving quota. From what I’ve seen, the best sales managers don’t worry about first impressions, they worry about the candidate having a track record of achieving good sales results selling similar products, to similar buyers, in similar situations.
• They overvalue their gut or instinct. This is only acceptable when the sales manager has a track record of hiring all top performers who all make quota in combination with very low department turnover. Emotions, intuition, or instinct are poor predictors of on-the-job success. A track record of past performance selling similar products or influencing similar buyers is a great predictor.
• They don’t know the job. Sales is a process that starts with lead generation and ends at closing. Certain aspects of the process are more critical than others. If a sales manager doesn’t know what these are, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to accurately assess them in the candidate. As a result, the sales manager shifts the decision criteria to first impressions and gut instinct.
• They assume they’re great managers. Most great sales people aren’t great managers, yet this is the person most likely to get promoted. It takes a great deal of work to build, develop, and manage an effective sales team. As part of the assessment process, the sales manager has to assess the fit between her style of management and how each person on the team needs to be managed. This directly relates to Hershey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model.

Flipping this over, here are some things you need to do to achieve better results hiring sales reps:

1. Know the sales process from beginning to end before ever interviewing another candidate.

Whether the sales cycle is 30 minutes long or months, there are some typical steps that ultimately determine how successful the sales rep will be. Breaking your company’s sales process into these steps enables the sales manager to identify the critical drivers and then assess the candidate’s past performance against these. At a broad level most sales processes can be categorized into these big segments:

• Prospecting and lead generation
• Qualifying the lead and conducting needs analysis
• Proving your product’s worth in comparison to the customer’s needs
• Preparing some type of offer or proposal
• Closing and negotiating the offer

Of course, there are multiple variations to this depending on customer need, the complexity of the offering, the type of buyer involved and how the buying decision is made, the dollars involved, budgets available, economic conditions and competitive positioning, to name just a few.

A performance profile summarizes these details in the form of a series of prioritized performance objectives including specific results and time frames. For example, a performance objective for a sales rep developing a new territory might have an objective like, “within 30 days prepare a detailed territory plan including target clients to meet.” A similar performance objective for a outbound telesales person might be, “within 30 days after completing the training convert 35% of all sales calls into minimum $100 orders.”

Once these performance objectives have been determined put them into priority order. The top two or three (out of 6-8) tend to become the critical success drivers. For example, conducting needs analysis with a decision-maker might be relatively easy, with the real key to success being the ability to get past a gate-keeper and arrange the meeting with the decision-maker. It is essential that the members of the hiring team understand these critical success drivers and then hone in on them during the interview. (Here’s more information on how to prepare performance profiles and interview for a wide variety of sales positions.) From what I’ve seen lack of understanding of real job needs is the primary cause of bad hiring decisions, not only in sales, but for all jobs.

2. Benchmark the candidate’s performance against the performance profile by asking about these issues:

• Get specific details about how the person managed the process and how well they did.
• Find out their track record of making quota and how they recovered when things went sour.
• Walk through the sales process at a few major successful accounts and compare this to yours.
• Walk through the sales process where the person was unsuccessful and compare this to yours.
• Find out how the person learned the product line and compare this to yours from a complexity standpoint and the amount of training provided.
• Go step-by-step through all of the team issues including managing and processing leads, orders, and pre- and post-delivery issues.
• Compare your typical buyer to the types of buyers the candidate successfully handled.
• Find out how successful the candidate was working for different sales managers, ask about their styles, then compare these to the hiring sales manager’s style.

3. Benchmark the candidate’s past performance to the performance profile, especially against the critical success drivers.

We use our 10-Factor Candidate Assessment template as a guide to evaluate the candidate against ten factors we’ve seen to be strong predictors of on-the-job success.

For sales, the primary keys to an accurate assessment include a comparison of the sales process, the types of buyers involved, the sales cycle, the complexity of the product and associated terms, and the degree of competition. Of course, the behavioral issues can’t be ignored including persistence, learning the product line, organizational skills, and team leadership, among others, but these are secondary to having a track record of sales success in a comparable situation.

4. Assess managerial fit.

This is probably the most important, yet it is almost always overlooked. A sales manager must be dedicated to training and developing his or her sales team. This requires significant direction, on-the-job training, constant follow-up, the ability to motivate others, and involved planning.

In situational leadership terms these are the classic Director and Coaching styles. A self-managing Delegating style rarely works in sales, especially for a new hire. A Participating style involving territory planning and target account tactics would be appropriate for an experienced sales person who can achieve his goals with limited direction and support.

From what I’ve seen too many sales managers aren’t as involved as necessary to keep their teams on track. If a sales manager isn’t willing to devote 100% of her time to developing and managing her team, even it’s comprised of good people, it will underperform. That’s why choosing the sales manager is the first step in getting the sales hiring process right.

As part of the sales hiring process, we also recommend the use of some type of cognitive and behavioral questionnaire for all finalists. While there are many of these tests around, we’ve been using Profiles International’s for over 20 years with great success.

Knowing that some type of formal test is being used keeps the interviewers more focused, increasing overall assessment accuracy.

Hiring sales people is relatively easy if you don’t get emotionally involved. This alone will eliminate many common hiring mistakes. Regardless of your underlying sales process, the process of hiring great sales people is exactly the same whether you’re selling ERP software or part-time vacation villas. That’s the real secret to hiring great reps.

On September 16, 2008, Carly Fiorina (the former CEO of HP and McCain supporter) made the statement that none of the president or VP candidates had the experience to be the CEO of a major corporation. The McCain team wasn’t too pleased with her remarks, and she’s been taken off the tour.

However, her dilemma raises an important question: Are the skills and abilities to run an international, multi-unit corporation comparable to those needed to run the U.S. government?

The answer to this becomes quite clear once you prepare a performance profile for each job.

For background, a performance profile is not a job description listing skills, abilities, and experience requirements. Instead, it describes the performance expectations for the job, describing what the person must do to be successful. It’s filled with action verbs like build, create, develop, initiate, solve, design, etc., not passive verbs and statements like “have” and “be responsible for.”

For example, a performance profile for a sales rep selling plumbing products in Peoria might state “achieve and sustain the monthly quota 90 days after successfully completing the sales training program.” The job description for this same job would state something like, “must have 3-5 years b-to-b plumbing parts industry experience.”

As I have ranted on these pages many times before, the continued use of traditional job descriptions is the primary reason companies can’t find enough top people to fill critical hiring needs. Everyone agrees that skills and experience don’t predict future performance. This is the core problem with job descriptions.

Past behavior doesn’t predict future performance, either, if the person is doing different work. This is the problem with behavioral interviewing. The use of behavioral interviewing in combination with traditional job descriptions only makes sense when the person is doing essentially the same work in the same culture with a similar supervisor.

A performance profile overcomes all of these impediments by emphasizing the performance expectations of the job and the environment, not the skills required to do it. The assessment involves comparing the candidate’s actual accomplishments to these requirements.

There are typically 6-8 key performance objectives for any job, whether it’s entry-level or executive management. Once completed, a performance profile can be turned into a compelling ad describing the projects, challenges, and opportunities.

As part of this, the requirements to apply are changed from having identical skills and experience to having achieved some type of comparable performance. This instantly opens up the candidate pool to more diverse candidates, more high-potential candidates, and more top performers who have achieved similar results in related industries and fields.

It takes about an hour discussion with a hiring manager to ferret out the key performance objectives for most jobs. To get a sense of this process, ask your hiring manager client the following questions when taking your next search assignment for a manager or executive position:

1. Why would a top person want this job? What makes it a good short- and long-term career move?
2. What are some of the big challenges the person taking this job is likely to face?
3. What are some of the specific projects the person will be working on?
4. What will success look like after six months? What about 12 months?
5. What are the big technical issues the person needs to address?
6. Describe the team and some of the challenges the person might face in dealing with the team or rebuilding it.
7. What are some of the critical problems the person will face right away that need to be resolved?
8. Are there any process issues that need to be improved or redesigned?
9. Are there any long-term strategic issues that need to be addressed?
10. Describe the culture and environment of the organization. Does this need to be changed or modified in some way to put the organization on a long-term path to success?

The idea here is to develop a list of 6-8 performance objectives put in some type of priority order that describe on-the-job success. Candidates are then interviewed and assessed against this benchmark by asking them to describe a series of comparable accomplishments. (Note: if you use my two-question performance-based interview you’ll be able to accurately assess any candidate’s ability to accomplish these tasks.)

Now let’s get back to Carly’s dilemma regarding the presidential candidates’ ability to run a corporation. Let’s start by examining the following pretty high-level view of a performance profile for a CEO for a large multi-national firm.

1. Evaluate the current operating plans for all units and ensure they’re on track and that the reporting systems are in place to ensure real-time visibility into business performance.
2. Establish programs to determine if the executive teams at all units, including corporate and group headquarters, are fully able to handle the company’s current business opportunities and overall growth plans.
3. Ensure that the overall strategic path of each group/division is appropriate and established.
4. Identify critical weaknesses in every unit that could affect short- and long-term operating performance and implement immediate corrective actions.
5. Fully understand the company’s financial strengths and weaknesses and lead the establishment of programs and controls to meet government, legal, and investor needs.
6. Lead the negotiation of big buy/sell global mega-deals that affect company strategy and direction.
7. Lead the integration of disparate business units to achieve economies of scale.
8. Deal with the conflict between the need to balance short-term financial performance with long-term growth.

There are probably a lot more, but you get an idea of the complexities needed to be the CEO of a large publicly traded company that’s operating on an international scale. (As a separate task, you might want to rank your current CEO on these measures.)

From my perspective, it’s pretty clear that the current crop of Presidential candidates are not qualified to be CEOs; the jobs are just too different. In my opinion, Carly was 100% right on this point, and should not have been chastised for it. The media clearly doesn’t understand these differences in roles, either, since they’re the ones who misunderstood both the comments and the underlying issues.

A U.S. President isn’t directly involved in understanding markets, products, distribution, manufacturing, accounting, IT, performance reporting, and running a business for profit. The president might be tangentially involved in the budgeting, financing, trade, organizational management, tax, compliance, and some of the diplomatic issues involved in operating on a world stage, but it’s a stretch to think they’re the same.

One could argue that there are some other overlaps, but it seems to me the differences between a corporate CEO and the U.S. President are far greater than the similarities. Of course, a person qualified to be a corporate CEO wouldn’t necessarily be qualified to be the President, either. While the intellectual, organizational and the complexities of the problems faced are comparable, how decisions are made and executed are fundamentally different. (Here’s a companion article describing a performance profile for the U.S. President. You can judge for yourself which candidate is most qualified, and even if your current CEO could handle the job.)

Despite all of this, the idea of putting a performance profile together before interviewing candidates is one sure way to make better hiring decisions. This is true whether you’re hiring a U.S. President, corporate CEO, or entry-level accountant.

Preparing a performance profile, however, requires the active involvement of the hiring manager, often the biggest stumbling block of them all.

For some illogical reason, most fight the idea of clarifying job expectations before hiring someone using the “I don’t have the time” excuse. Yet they’ll spend hours after a hire is made over-managing their newest staff member hoping for average performance. Once you overcome this hurdle, don’t be surprised that you’re finding and hiring more top performers than you thought possible.

The underlying purpose was to demonstrate the point that many important decisions, especially hiring decisions, are based on invalid assumptions, false impressions, personal beliefs, and lack of objective data. (Join this Ning Recruiters Roundtable network to submit your views.)

With this article as a starting point, let me offer some expert advice on how to make really bad hiring decisions:

1. Make emotional decisions and justify them with facts. Most interviewers make quick judgments about a candidate based on the four “A’s” – how attractive, articulate, assertive, and affable the candidate is. Candidates who pass the test are asked easier questions, with the interviewer looking for information to justify the positive impression. Contradictory and negative information is ignored. Candidates who don’t meet the appropriate first impression standard are assumed incompetent, with the interviewer asking tougher questions and seeking only information to prove their initial emotional judgment. Why waste your valuable time? Instead, just conduct a five-minute interview and forget collecting any facts. It won’t make any difference in your final decision, anyway.
2. Do not seek out objective data if it contradicts your beliefs or ignore it if you find some. I remember meeting a very attractive and seemingly quite competent candidate for a VP HR spot, who gave a superficial answer to an HR strategy question. I had to fight with myself about whether to ask a challenging follow-up question which would prove she was unqualified on this important job criteria. After some soul searching, I asked the question, which she flubbed, and she was not presented. The point of this is that it’s very tough to eliminate a candidate you like, and even tougher to seek out positive information for candidates you don’t initially think would fit. So rather than get to the truth, go the easy route, and trust your gut feelings and first impressions.
3. Make sure no one knows the real job. The purpose of the interview is to determine competency and motivation to do the actual work required. If you don’t know what work the candidate is actually going to be doing it’s impossible to assess motivation. Compentency, on the other hand, is pretty easy to figure out with just a rough understanding of job needs. Unfortunately, when you look at the underperformers in your company, you’ll discover most of them are quite competent to do the work, they just don’t find the work they’re doing very satisfying. These are the people that need to be over-managed and pushed to achieve average results. So to make sure you hire more of these people, go out of your way to not tell the person you’re hiring anything about the job until the day she starts. What a surprise that will be.
4. Use skills-based job descriptions to find, screen, and assess candidates. The best candidates tend to have a track record of achievement, comparable (but not identical) skills, and are quick-learners. This is how the best talent is promoted within an organization. Yet, when hiring from outside we use a criteria that eliminates these top performers from consideration, seeking only those candidates who have exactly the right skills doing exactly the same work. The only people who fit this criteria are average candidates. So keep up the average work. While you won’t get promoted, you will get hired.
5. Make sure your ads are hard to find. When top people begin the job-hunting process they tend to seek out former associates, Google for jobs (e.g., “software sales jobs Dallas”), use social networking sites, or conduct some top-down industry research looking for the best industries and companies that meet their needs. If your jobs can’t be easily found by candidates using these techniques, you’ll never see the best people. To continue not seeing any good people make sure you continue to post your ads on the major boards, where the best people look last.
6. Write boring ads that start with the req number. If your ads are found, make sure they’re so boring that they preclude a good person from even applying. You can do this by leading off with the req number, a dumb title, telling the person whether the job is full-time or not, and if you’ll pay for relocation. Then go into a boring description of the job. Then make sure you clearly state that the candidate must not apply unless the person possess a laundry list of skills and experiences that was lifted from some job description written a few years ago.
7. Make sure that interviewers are untrained and can ask any questions they want. Hiring mistakes are no big deal, so why not let anyone interview the candidate, ask any questions they want, and then ask them whether you should hire the person using whatever criteria they think appropriate. To make matters worse, only let untrained interviewers meet your candidates. This will certainly impress those top candidates you see regarding your company’s level of professionalism.
8. Add up the yes and no votes. Here’s a sure-fire way to get the hiring decision wrong…let each untrained, biased, emotional, and superficial interviewer have a full yes/no vote on who should get hired. Then to even out these errors, give a no vote more power than a yes vote, give unprepared interviewers the same voting rights as prepared interviewers, and then add up the votes. To make sure this process works as described, do not challenge anyone’s assessment, just in case the person might get offended. This is more important than the right answer.
9. Force candidates to formally apply before you can even chat with them. Top people, when they just enter into the job-hunting process, have lots of questions and are comparing different companies and situations. One good way to prevent seeing or hiring any of these people is to not let them just talk with a recruiter or hiring manager unless they formally apply first. Most won’t, but if you have some persistent person who still decides to apply anyway, make sure you have him complete a rigorous application process, submit a resume and a statement that everything stated is true. Of course, to make sure a good person doesn’t sneak through this bureaucratic blockade, be sure not to contact the person for a least a week. Collectively, this will show the person you mean business.
10. Focus on compensation and skills rather than career opportunities. Since the best people are more concerned with career growth, the opportunity to make an impact and want to know the broad details about the job before getting serious, we don’t want to give them any of this information. Who knows, somebody good might actually be interested in and qualified for one of our open jobs. Instead, to prevent this from happening, don’t discuss the job at all, first screen candidates only on their skills and then tell them what your comp range is. If there isn’t a fit here, don’t waste your time, just go on to another candidate. You certainly wouldn’t want to ask candidates about some of their major achievements first and see if any of your other openings better match their needs. They actually might be interested in one of these jobs, despite the comp range. Wouldn’t that mess things up?

You can see why these are my favorites rules for not hiring good people. What amazes me is that so many companies follow them and expect different results.

The idea here was to increase the likelihood the candidate would not overvalue compensation as the primary decision criteria when selecting one job over another. Since compensation was rarely ideal, broadening the selection criteria this way was a very effective recruiting and negotiating tactic. This week I learned how to make it even better – have candidates rank order the criteria when you first meet them.

As I began to consider this and try it out, I ran across a study prepared by WFD Consulting in a consortium with some major U.S. corporations. Their findings revealed that employees and candidates have varying needs that change over time depending on where they are in their career and family life-cycles. While many companies have addressed these issues in terms of retention, few have incorporated them directly into the recruiting process.

To test this process, give your candidates the following list consisting of these standard job satisfaction factors. After a quick review, have them rank-order the list in order of importance to them:

• Type of work being performed.
• Importance of work being performed, recognition, and impact on the company.
• Career growth and advancement opportunities.
• Hiring manager and ability to be mentored.
• Quality of associates and team members from a professional and personal standpoint.
• Current compensation.
• Benefits.
• Overall job security.
• Long-term compensation.
• Company and culture.
• Company-sponsored learning opportunities.
• Work/life balance, commute.

In the past, I tended to assume a ranking with growth opportunity, the chance to make an impact, the job match, and the hiring manager at the top of the list. For those on the fast track this seemed to hold true over the past 20-plus years, but as the population ages and employee needs differ, it seems important to customize this ranking based on each candidate’s specific needs.

Here are the steps I would follow in using this type of job satisfaction ranking system in the recruiting and closing process:

• Step 1: Once some level of interest is shown in the job, ask the candidate to self-rank the factors. Early-on, if the candidate wants to focus on compensation, suggest that she should look at job satisfaction from multiple perspectives. This is a good way to introduce this multi-factor decision form. Ask the candidate to evaluate her current job on this basis and then ask her to evaluate the best job she’s ever had the same way. This will typically show a striking difference. Then go on to say that she should evaluate your job in this same multi-factor fashion. This alone will allow you to get more candidates interested in what you have to offer. Discuss the order on the list with your candidate from two perspectives. First, make sure the candidate has correctly understood what you’re looking for and is satisfied with the ranking. Next, ask them to justify their rankings. This will help you understand what’s motivating them to look and if you even have a chance of hiring the candidate to fill one of your open positions.
• Step 2: During the interview process have the candidate rank your job on each of these factors. Using this rank-ordered list as guide, provide the candidate the appropriate information in each category. This way, the candidate will have all of the information needed to make a thorough evaluation of your job opening. You might also be able to modify some aspects of the job, if possible, to match your opening to the candidate’s motivating needs. This will go a long way to increase your close rate.
• Step 3: Ask the candidate to compare your job opening to others the candidate is considering using this same ranking scale. Include the candidate’s current job in this comparison. This will help you better understand why the candidate is leaving her current position and what needs to be done to increase the likelihood the person will accept your offer. This information will help you fend off the competition and minimize the chance of a counter-offer.
• Step 4: During the final offer process determine where your company stands in comparison to the competition. As part of the negotiating process, don’t just focus on compensation when putting an offer together. Make sure the candidate considers all aspects of the offer in balance. This type of rank-ordered selection criteria not only makes good sense from the candidate’s perspective when evaluating different job opportunities, it also gives you and your company a head-start by addressing these needs in proactive fashion.

Over the next several months, we’ll be putting together a survey of recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates to better understand how different demographics affect this selection criteria. This will not only help in improving the hiring decision, but it can also be used for onboarding, performance management, and retention.

If you’d like to be part of this, sign-up for my Recruiters Roundtable discussion group. Feel free to comment regarding any factors that have been omitted from the above list and what you’ve discovered as the primary criteria your candidates use when making their acceptance decisions.

While this is somewhat of an experiment, my sense is that it will uncover a new recruiting process that will allow you to better match your job requirements with the candidate’s true motivating needs. In the process, you’ll probably improve quality of hire and make the negotiation less about compensation and more about opportunity, career growth, and work/life balance.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

To make matters worse, when finalists are selected and offers are about to be made, recruiters and managers stumble through some clumsy closing process either paying too much or losing the candidate to a more professional and astute buyer. When viewed in this light, the idea of buying more raw materials or looking for more candidates makes no sense until the rest of the processes are fixed.

Here are 20 common non-sourcing problems (if you have more than 10, fix your sourcing scrap rate before you look for more raw materials):

• Job descriptions are boring.

• Managers over-specify skills, experience, academics and industry background.

• Application process is too long and top candidates opt-out.

• Managers don’t spend enough time clarifying real job needs.

• Managers refuse to see good candidates, because they don’t have exactly the right background.

• Managers exclude good candidates due to incorrect assessments.

• Managers don’t respond quickly enough when resumes are sent to them.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with our interviewing process.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with the hiring manager.

• Good candidates want to know the comp before talking.

• Passive candidates want to know the details of the job before even talking.

• Recruiters over-rely on skills and experience to screen candidates.

• ATS system is cumbersome to use.

• Candidates increasingly are rejecting offers or accepting other offers or better offers.

• We can’t attract the best people with our comp packages.

• Recruiters can’t smoothly handle most candidate concerns.

• Relocation is a problem.

• We can’t move fast enough to decide & make offers.

• Managers aren’t responsive or involved enough.

• We never have enough time to do it right.

Avoid Preventable Issues

How many unnecessary extra candidates do you need to find to overcome all of the good candidates who were lost for the above preventable reasons? Many of these non-sourcing problems are attributed to weak planning, lack of training, dumb policies, bad processes, and inadequate technology.

When viewed from this perspective, it’s apparent that there is a lot of non-sourcing stuff that can be done to help reduce the need to see more candidates.

But this is still only half of the problem. If you have more than 10 of the following sourcing-related problems, improving your scrap rate will help, but not enough to solve the problem completely.

Sourcing-Related Problems

• The quality and quantity of candidates from job boards is declining.

• We use the same sourcing methods every year.

• Our advertising is boring and out-dated.

• Our job ads are just cut-and-paste versions of our boring job descriptions.

• Ads are hard to find by top people who are casually looking.

• Ads are found, but top candidates don’t apply.

• Our ads don’t describe a compelling value proposition.

• Our ads are filled with disqualifiers and little about what’s in it for the candidate.

• Our ads are written to exclude bad people not attract good people.

• Our career website is difficult to navigate and search for jobs.

• We don’t use web analytics to track response by ad.

• We have not search engine optimized our site or our ads.

• Our ads don’t always come up first on the job boards we use.

• Good candidates say they’re “not interested” early in the process.

• We don’t get enough high-quality referrals.

• Too many voice-mails are needed to get callbacks.

• We make too many cold calls to passive candidates.

• High-potential candidates with slightly different skills would not naturally apply to our ads.

• Our CRM system and resume database is difficult to use and not very effective.

• Our employees don’t proactively seek out great people to refer.

Too many companies try to solve their hiring problems with a new sourcing-idea-of-the-month program. This is like applying a Band-Aid when major surgery is required.

Instead, think big and fix your scrap rate problems first and then start posting compelling ads in exactly the same places. Before you know it, your talent factory will be humming along.

After you complete a work-history review, ask the candidate to describe a significant major accomplishment. Then ask these follow-up questions to better understand the person’s actual role and the significance of the accomplishment:

1. When did it happen and how long did it take to finish?
2. What was your specific role and who was on the team? As part of this, please draw a work chart describing the people you worked for and those who worked for you. Also, describe those you worked with, inside and outside your department, or company.
3. Describe the environment and culture. I’d like to know how decisions were made, the systems you used, how your boss managed the team, and what you liked and didn’t like.
4. What was the actual impact you made? Please provide specific details and facts.
5. What were the two to three biggest challenges you faced on this project? Walk me though step-by-step how you handled the most difficult one.
6. Describe the technical skills you used and those you learned. Give me some examples of how you applied these.
7. Give me two to three examples of initiative, where you went the extra mile, or where you exceeded expectations.
8. What did you like most and least about this project?
9. Give me a specific example of the biggest problem you had to solve, whether it was handling something technical, a team issue, or meeting a tough schedule.
10. What recognition did you receive for this?

While these questions can take at least 15 minutes, they provide the interviewer great insight regarding the candidate’s abilities to handle significant accomplishments. Then ask the same questions for a few more accomplishments over different periods and connect the dots. By repeating the questions for different accomplishments, the interviewer can quickly observe the person’s consistency, performance, and growth over time.

To increase assessment accuracy, have other interviewers use the same questioning process, but have them focus on different job factors and time frames.

For example, one interviewer can focus on team accomplishments, while another focuses on technical accomplishments, while a third focuses on both from earlier jobs.

Organized properly, this segmenting process provides the hiring team a balance of detailed information to better predict the candidate’s competency and motivation to handle all job needs. (Here’s a formal debriefing form we use to gather and evaluate this information.)

Here are some other ways to re-phrase the “most significant accomplishment” question. Remember to follow up each accomplishment using the fact-finding techniques above.

1. (Review the candidate’s resume and pick a project that occurred before or after the one initially described.) Please tell me about your most significant accomplishment when you were at (company).
2. Please describe your most significant team accomplishment, where you were a key member of the team.
3. Please describe your most significant management accomplishment, where you built and managed the team to achieve a significant task.
4. Please tell me about the biggest project you’ve handled where you had the least amount of experience or skills. This will help me understand how you’ve handled projects that were way over your head.
5. Tell me about an accomplishment where you took on a major leadership role, defining the project, getting the resources, and successfully completing the task.

You can use this type of questioning to describe the job to the candidate by describing one of the critical performance objectives as an opening to the accomplishment questions. Here are some examples:

1. One of the major objectives for this position is to accomplish (describe the specific task). Could you please tell me about your most significant comparable accomplishment?
2. A typical problem you’d be expected to handle on this job is (describe a common but significant problem). Please describe something you’ve handled that best compares with this type of issue.
3. A specific challenge we’re now addressing on the job is (describe). Please tell me about something you’ve done that is most similar to this.

You can use this same type of questioning to look for gaps in the candidate’s background that your position fills. For example, if the person has not managed as big a team, ask something like this:

This position has a staff of 10 people through two supervisors. Since you’ve only managed six people directly, the job might be a bit of a stretch management-wise. To determine if the gap isn’t too wide, please tell me about how you built and developed your team and how you organized and tracked their activities and performance.

This technique is called the push-away, and if the candidate is strong, she’ll attempt to convince you why she’s competent. This is a powerful recruiting technique that can be used to demonstrate that the gaps represent growth opportunities.

As long as the gaps aren’t too big, it forces the candidate to sell you, and in the process sell herself on the merits of the job. This helps shift the decision to accept the offer based more on the opportunity it represents, rather than the compensation.

With the one-question interview, you now have the facts, details, and examples you’ll need to persuade a client to meet a top candidate who doesn’t quite fit the job description, but can meet the performance expectations of the job.

You also have the evidence you need to defend a fully qualified candidate from a client who is making a superficial assessment. To minimize both risks, prep your candidate to ask questions that enable her to respond with a summary of her accomplishments.

Video Overview

After you watch this quick video overview of how to prep a candidate, you can also read some articles on this topic.

If you use the one-question performance-based interview from now on, and prep your candidates properly, don’t be surprised if you make more placements with fewer candidates.

This would imply that during recessions there are fewer good people actively looking and it’s tougher to get the best passive consider to even discuss your career opportunity. If this is the case, one could conclude that the bulk of the people who are looking during economic downturns tend to be those who are unemployed or marginally employed.

Since this group does not represent the best-of-the-best, you’ll need to rethink your entire sourcing strategy to make sure it’s targeting the people you want to hire. Here’s a short video describing how good people enter the job market. Now here’s a quick test to determine how well you’re doing: if you’re seeing less good people than last year using the same sourcing techniques, stop using them!

However, if you do find a few good people, regardless of how you’re finding them, expect these candidates to have more objections and concerns than usual. And the better the candidate, the more objections the person has. So, if you can’t smoothly and professionally handle objections, you won’t be placing many top performers.

Here are some ideas on how to deal with some common objections. They’re more prevalent with the economy on shaky ground. The theme behind them all is to reveal very little information about your assignment until you have a complete understanding of the candidate’s background. By withholding information, you’ll gain candidate interest. This is the key to applicant control.

Handling Common Early Stage Objections

1. What’s the compensation? When someone asks, don’t tell! Say, “Before I tell you that, I’d like you to think about the best jobs you’ve ever held, those that gave you the most personal satisfaction. Were the reasons they were the best due to the amount of money you were making or due to the work you were doing?” (PAUSE and wait for an answer.) “Now, if the job I’m representing offered you a chance to maximize your personal satisfaction plus offered a competitive compensation, wouldn’t it make sense to at least discuss it for 5-10 minutes?” Most people will say yes.
2. First, tell me about the job. You must never tell the person about the job, even the actual title, until you have conducted a quick work history review. Start the conversation by asking your prospect if she’d be open to discuss an opportunity if it were clearly superior to what she’s doing now. Most people will say yes, then immediately say “Great. Could you please give me a quick overview of your background, and I’ll then give you a quick overview of the job. If it seems mutually interesting we can schedule some time to talk in-depth.” You have applicant control when the person says yes. You lose it if your job is less appealing than the one the person has now. By having the candidate talk first, you can look for potential areas where your job is bigger. If not, you’ll have developed a relationship with the candidate that will allow you to ask for referrals.
3. I’m not interested. If anyone says this, you’ve violated a fundamental law of recruiting – the candidate must tell you about their background before you tell them about the job (see Point 2). To recover from this faux pas, say, “That’s exactly why you should consider this job.” Just the fact that it’s illogical helps gain the person’s attention. Follow up by asking, “Are you aware that you just made a major career decision using minor information?” Describe a few strategic nuggets about your job that make it worthy of a short discussion. Something like your company has just invested in a start-up to exploit a new market opportunity, so growth should skyrocket over the next few years, would be a good example of how to get someone to talk a few minutes. Here’s a YouTube video podcast describing my “Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting” which will provide you some insight on how to better handle the “I’m not interested” objection.
4. I don’t like the company. If your company is struggling, or has received some bad press, you’ll need to conduct some preventive PR to offset the recruiting damage. Describe the impact the person could have in restoring the company’s image. It’s also possible the company’s reputation is based on old info, and a turn-around has begun. In this case, make sure you have some real evidence you can use to offset the negative beliefs. As you begin these damage-control efforts, make sure you understand the candidate’s concern and then ask, “If we can demonstrate that your concerns while true in the past have been rectified, would you be open to explore an opportunity with our company?” Of course, then you have to prove your case, but at least you’re moving the process forward.
5. I don’t have time to talk. Calmly say, “Let me rephrase my question then. If the job opportunity I’m representing is clearly superior to what you’re doing today, would you have some time later today to discuss it on a very exploratory basis?” (This is an example, of the “close upon a concern” solution selling technique.) If the person says “no” to your suggestion, something else is really the issue, not lack of time. It could be you gave away too much information when you initially described your reason for calling.
6. I’m happy where I am. When confronted with a happy camper, say something like, “That’s great. You’re the first person I spoke with this week who actually said that to me. Most people nowadays are just hanging around due to the bad economy. Is this really the situation for you?” Then dialogue with the person a bit to understand if she is really happy, or if it was just a brush-off. Then ask, “Under the possibility that if the situation I’m representing is clearly superior to your current job on (causes of happiness), would you at least be open to explore it for a 5-10 minutes.” Then conduct a mini-work history review as part of the phone screen.

You can’t afford to accept these negative responses without a formal rebuttal. This is the only way you’ll be able to find enough candidates to fill your requirements. All good candidates have concerns. It’s the recruiter’s job to ferret them out and address them properly.

While you won’t overcome them all, you’ll probably recover at least 50% of the candidates you would have formerly lost. And if the techniques are done properly you’ll probably wind up with some great candidates for future assignments and plenty of referrals for your current ones.

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the details and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

Six Steps for Hiring the Best People Every Time

1. Offer WOW! jobs. Traditional job descriptions listing skills, qualifications, and experience are not marketing tools or predictors of job success. These lists must be diminished in importance. In their place, job descriptions must emphasize what the person will do, learn, and become. As part of this, clearly describe the impact the person can make. From a marketing standpoint, don’t use internal, non-descriptive titles. “Not-for Profit CEO – Back to the Future” was a title we used to find the head of a major charity. In the ad, we described the five-year impact the person would have on the inner city. For bank tellers to fill a mid-day shift we added the tagline “Are You a Desperate Housewife?”
2. Make it about careers, not compensation. The ad copy must clearly emphasize the challenges in the job, the impact the person can make on the company, and some of the growth opportunities. For example, “Help us launch a new Blue Tooth line” is far more compelling than “Must have five years of product marketing experience.” When recruiters first contact candidates – whether they’re active or passive – the emphasis must clearly be on getting the candidate to evaluate your opportunities as career moves, not just as another job for more money or one closer to home. This will help ease the negotiating process and minimize the threat of counter-offers and competitive offers.
3. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. It’s a Web 2.0 world and this means a complete understanding of search engine marketing techniques. Part of this is writing compelling jobs ads that are easily found. From a more advanced perspective, recognize that top performers don’t enter the job-hunting market ready to hunt and peck for a job that matches their skills and experience. Instead, they tip-toe into the market, first contacting former associates and doing some top-down industry and company research. If this is fruitless, they then expand their search efforts through aggressive networking and Googling for jobs. Sourcing programs need to target these early entrants by positioning ads in the right places and proactively expanding employee referral programs to ensure that the best people contact your employees first.
4. Provide candidates multiple opportunities to “just look” rather than buy. Most company hiring processes and career websites are designed based on the premise that candidates are ready to apply for a specific job. This is a flawed premise. The best people, especially the early entrants, are just looking and comparing options. To accommodate these people, recruiters must not push the process too fast, managers must be willing to talk or meet with candidates on an exploratory basis, and career websites need to allow candidates to chat with a recruiter in real time and look at groups of jobs, rather than specific requisitions.
5. Make the interview your secret weapon. Here’s something that will shock you - the primary purpose of the interview is to recruit the candidate, not assess competency! However, done properly you’ll more accurately assess candidate competency and motivation than ever before, but this is a secondary effect. Part of this means using the interview to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background, with the expectation that your job will fulfill them. For example, if the candidate hasn’t managed as large a team, or handled a comparable project, or had the exposure your job provides, these voids become learning opportunities and more important than compensation as reasons to accept your position. Obviously, if the gaps are too big, the candidate is unqualified for the job, and if the gaps aren’t sufficient, the job isn’t a worthy move.
6. Use a multi-factor decision tool to negotiate the offer, fight off the competition and prevent counter-offers. Recruiting is not something done at the end of the interview, it starts with first contact. Part of this is suggesting to the candidate on first contact that she should evaluate your opportunity as a career move. During the interview this is reinforced by presenting voids in the candidate’s background as potential learning experiences. While it’s important for companies to judge candidates across multiple factors, it’s equally important for candidates to evaluate different job opportunities across multiple factors as well. Some of these include learning, growth opportunities, compensation, quality of the hiring manager and the team, job match, visibility, cultural fit and work/life balance. This can be formalized by sending the candidate a multi-factor decision form comparing your job with all others he’s considering, including his current position. As long as your job represents a positive long term career move, your job will often win out without compensation being the dominant criteria.

Of course, there are more steps to the process than what’s mentioned here. Regardless, the key to making the end-to-end process work is to step back and understand the unique needs of top performers. This high-level view also allows the integration between the steps to be designed into the process at the beginning rather than as after-thoughts.

While converting the hiring process into a scalable business process is no easy task, it’s not nearly as hard as implementing any major companywide business initiative. If hiring the best is a company’s number-one strategic objective, then nothing is more important.

When filling a job order, most recruiters search through virtual stacks of resumes hoping one stands out, matching most of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. When calling a person, the recruiter attempts to gain this same information by first describing the job and then asking the person to describe his or her background. If there’s a fit, the selling process begins.

If you want to hire more top performers, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing.

A little understanding of human nature and solution selling offers some guidance on how to approach passive candidates and quickly get them more interested in what you have to offer. If you follow the instructions closely, you’ll even be able to get two to three great referrals on each call. You’ll want these, especially if you decide you’re not interested in pursuing the candidate.

In the last sentence, pay notice to who decides to move forward or not. It should be the recruiter, not the candidate. If you’re letting your candidates decide if they’re interested in your opportunity, you’re not recruiting, you’re just box-checking and order-taking. Making this decision is the first part of the applicant control process essential to good recruiting.

For the sake of brevity and making a point, let me narrow the passive candidate recruiting process down to two small, but critical, first steps. The first relates to a candidate saying they’re not interested in considering your opportunity, even before you’ve told them anything about it.

The second relates to those who don’t say “no” right away, but instead ask about the comp, title, and location.

I’m sure you would agree that getting past these two pivotal points will dramatically increase the number of top candidates you put into your pipeline.

Being familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will give you some of the insight you’ll need to address these candidate roadblocks. Abraham Maslow was a mid-20th century psychologist who studied the behavior of high-performing individuals. In a 1943 paper, he suggested that people make fundamental and predictable decisions based on different behavioral needs. These needs range from primitive, e.g., requiring water or food, to being completely fulfilled. He separated these states into five distinct levels and referred to them collectively as a hierarchy of needs.

The first level had to do with satisfying basic human needs including biological, food, and shelter. The second level related to fulfilling security needs like a steady income and healthcare. The third level addressed social needs like friendship, intimacy, and family. The fourth level covered esteem needs including achievement, self-respect, and confidence. Maslow referred to the fifth and highest level as self-actualization, growing and becoming as well-developed as possible. According to Maslow, one could not move to a higher level until the lower-level needs were met.

While Maslow has his distracters, and this is certainly not a complete summary, knowing this basic “needs concept” can be useful when a candidate says “show me the money” or something equivalent. Instead of responding, you might ask the candidate directly where she is on her hierarchy of needs scale.

This probably won’t work in such a direct fashion, but these two comparable questions might:

“Considering your current and past few positions, which one gave you the most sense of personal satisfaction?”

Pause and let the person respond. Then ask whether this satisfaction was due to the type of work or the amount of salary. Phrased properly, this can only be answered with something about the quality of the work, not the money being earned.

Unless the person never had a great job or never did anything worthwhile, the candidate will select a situation that addressed a higher order or self-fulfillment needs. With this as the setup go on to ask:

“Under this basis, wouldn’t it then make sense to talk just five to 10 minutes to determine whether the job I’m working on provides both satisfying work coupled with a competitive compensation?”

Done properly, don’t be surprised if 90% of your candidates agree. Of course, you’ll then need to prove your case, but at least you’ve started conversing on a positive note.

I call this the Maslow advance. When confronted with a recruiter or any cold-call from a salesperson, a person’s normal reaction is to say no or ask questions that allow them to get out of the conversation as rapidly as possible. Good recruiters know this.

To overcome this roadblock you’ll need to use some type of decision-shifting question that allows you to engage with the person in a brief-but-meaningful dialogue. As you begin the discussion, don’t provide much information about the job other than a vague title. The key here is to get the person to tell you first about her background. If you describe the job first, you risk the chance the candidate will respond with a “not interested.”

The reason I call this an advance and not a close has to do with the concept of SPIN Selling. Knowing SPIN Selling will also allow you to overcome the “not interested” hurdle.

SPIN Selling is a sales technique developed by Neil Rackham and thoroughly described in his 1988 book of the same title. SPIN refers to a four-step sales process relating to first understanding the situation (S), determining whether there is a problem (P), figuring out the implication (I) of the problem and situation, and asking a need-payoff (N) question to engage the person in another step.

Rackham refers to this step forward as an advance, as opposed to a close. In larger sales or influencing someone into making an important decision (like changing jobs), obtaining more information in a logical series of steps is the key to ultimate success. Good candidates, especially the passive ones, tend to be reluctant to move quickly, so it’s important to engage with them in a series of conversations and interviews sharing more and more critical career and job information at each step.

Another aspect of SPIN Selling is to avoid asking questions that can be answered by a “no” or “not interested.” So for next time, don’t ask the person if he’s interested in a senior firmware job; instead, ask if he’d be interested in exploring opportunities on a new state-of-the-art project your firm is launching. Then get the person to tell you a little about himself (understand the Situation), find out if the person is fully satisfied in his current role (is there a Problem), find out if there is anything in the short term likely to change this (determine the Implication), and then ask the person if he’d be open to talk for 20-30 minutes to see if one of the opportunities you have open would be more satisfying. Of course, the last question combined the Maslow advance with Rackham’s Need-payoff question.

If you forget to do this, and the candidate says “not interested,” you might want to try the “deer in the highlight” advance and say something like “that’s exactly why we should talk.” (I heard this on one of Brian Tracy’s Nightingale-Conant audio selling programs.) This will get the candidate’s attention.

If he doesn’t hang up, but in the dead silence that follows, suggest to the candidate that he just made a long-term decision with short-term data. Continue by suggesting that if it could be demonstrated that your open position represented a great long-term career move, wouldn’t it make sense to discuss it for five to 10 minutes, even if the title isn’t exactly perfect? At least 50% of people will agree to proceed on this basis.

Now, while Maslow and Rackham can keep you in the game, you won’t make the sale unless your job truly offers a better career move than others the candidate is considering. For this you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of real job needs and future opportunities for the firm you’re representing. In addition, you’ll need to use subsequent phone screen and interviews to probe for gaps and voids in the candidate’s background. In this way, the interview can be seen as the SPI part of SPIN selling, with the N the recruiting part.

For example, at the end of the interview, convert a gap in experience into a test of interest by asking the candidate if she’d be open to meet the hiring manager if the job offered significant learning even if the comp increase was modest.

A series of methodical advances like this is how you can use SPIN Selling techniques and an understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to engage more top performers and make more hires. Recruiting is a form of highly sophisticated consultative selling. Unfortunately, too many recruiters try to use transactional selling techniques and wonder why their candidates aren’t interested.

This past week I spent time with a major recruitment advertising agency, a large direct marketing organization, and the top-performing office of one of the largest temp-to-perm employment agencies in the country.

These meetings revealed some trends that might help you develop your future recruiting strategies.

Trend One: The Merging of Sourcing and Consumer Marketing

The buzz in consumer advertising is narrowcasting. This basically means segmenting your customer base into narrow subsets (i.e., professional single women between 25 and 30 who live in the city) and pushing your advertising message to them using a variety of techniques.

Some of these include search engine optimization, organic search, behavioral marketing, the use of talent hubs and microsites, and pay-per-click. The key here is to make sure your advertising can be easily found by the right audience.

The implications of this for sourcing are pretty dramatic. On one level, it means that if a candidate uses a search engine to look for a job rather than a job board, your posting will appear in the first few postings. To pull this off you’ll need to be an expert at developing keywords. These are used as a part of the meta tags built into a web page.

However, in the race to the top of the listing the best keywords win and the best ones are not necessarily the obvious. This whole process is called search engine optimization and there’s more to it than just keywords, but its importance cannot be understated for the next evolution of recruitment advertising.

From what I can tell, the leaders here are Shaker Advertising from an advertising perspective, and Jobs2Web, from the technology side.

Regardless of how you go about it, if you want to hire top people in the future, expect to become an expert using search engines. Once you become an expert at figuring out how to get your boring ads found, you’ll be ready to convert all of these into compelling career messages.

These two steps will dramatically improve your ad results.

Next, combine all similar job postings into one common talent hub or microsite that’s easier to find, a lot less expensive, and even better, it will generate a larger pool of better candidates than all of the individual ads combined. (Email me if you’d like the marketing logic behind this).

Trend Two: Referrals Will Become the Primary Sourcing Channel for All Positions

In a recent Execunet survey, 70% of over 6,000 executives and executive recruiters indicated that networking would be the key to either finding a job or finding candidates, compared to 16% through online advertising.

While this would be expected at the executive level, our own 2007 survey of 800 corporate recruiters filling staff and mid-level positions indicated that networking and employee referrals represented about 35% to 40% of their hires.

This is about five points higher than last year, so not only is networking important, but the trend is up. LinkedIn has helped accelerate this trend, in combination with Facebook, MySpace, and some of the niche social networking sites.

At the employment agency referred to earlier, referrals were also a core part of their recruiting efforts. While this group was primarily placing hourly personnel in general laborer or office admin positions on temporary assignments, it seemed like at least 50% of their recruits were from referrals. More important, the emphasis was on getting even more referrals.

It’s a pretty safe bet to conclude that in the future, referrals and networking will be the primary means companies and third-party recruiters will use to find candidates at all levels. For recruiters and sourcers, this represents a critical shift.

Name generation is rapidly becoming the easy part, with the real skill being effectively cold calling candidates, recruiting them, and getting referrals. Since ZoomInfo is not an opt-in database of names, expect this to become a stronger basic resource tool for those who know how to pick up the phone, recruit, and network.

Trend Three: Increasing Reliance on Metrics, Forecasting, and Workforce Planning

I’ve seen more articles, webinars, and talks about workforce planning in the last few months than I’ve seen collectively over the past few years. This alone indicates interest and demand.

As narrowcasting becomes more prevalent, it will be even more important to plan a channel strategy and track the performance of each ad. Since this is how Internet advertising is priced, recruiting departments will soon be getting a real education on the impact and use of proper forecasting, performance tracking, and Web analytics.

The trend toward the increasing use of metrics and forecasting was clearly evident in ERE’s 2008 Leadership Award submittals. This year companies had to include metrics to prove their performance improvements. In fact, most of the winners and many of the proposals described the implementation of advanced process measurement and monitoring systems. This is a critical shift in approach and an important trend in converting recruiting activity from art to a predictable business process.

Trend Four: Recruiters Becoming Partners with Their Clients and Consultants to Their Candidates

Our 2008 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed two big problems. The first was pretty obvious: 76% of the 775 respondents said it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough top candidates.

The second problem was a bit unexpected: 59% of the respondents said their hiring manager clients were the real problem in recruiting top people. Some of the problems attributed to this nefarious group included lack of good assessment skills, over-reliance on skills and experiences to weed out people, lack of responsiveness, and an inability to recruit top performers.

Of course, these same managers feel that their recruiters don’t understand real job needs, they’re not presenting enough good people, and they’re not very good at assessing ability.

While this is a pretty big gap to bridge, our data suggests that this difference is narrowing. For example, I spoke with six recruiters at the temp agency and each one was top-notch. While each did things a bit differently, they had one thing in common: each was a true partner with all of the clients.

One told me her clients taught her how to weld and drive a forklift truck. Another told me about attending her client’s annual employee picnic. A third told me about visiting her client’s medical office just to find out what color scrubs were worn.

While being a partner means different things to different recruiters, one thing is certain, recruiters who are partners understand the job, the company, and the hiring manager’s real needs. They also send in fewer candidates per hire, have more influence in the decision, and get called to handle more search assignments.

Just based on the other recruiters I speak with every month, it appears that the idea of becoming a partner is becoming recognized as a critical aspect of becoming more productive.

As the demand for talent increases and the pool of traditional sourcing channels dry up, becoming a career consultant with your candidates becomes equally as important. Not only will you be a more effective recruiter and close more deals, you’ll also be rewarded with the best referrals.

Conclusion

While hiring top people is predicted to become even more challenging, those who alter their recruiting and sourcing practices based on these trends will be way ahead of the game. Start by using Web 2.0 and state-of-the-art advertising techniques to positi