How Can We Improve Our Ability to Hire Right the First Time?

The two most common hiring traps are hiring in a hurry and hiring the resume rather than the person.

Companies that don’t have succession plans in place or that fail to practice cross-training often rush to relieve the pain of the empty chair. Businesses that ignore the hiring process in the interest of expediting it are far more susceptible to missing important clues that could otherwise prevent a poor hiring decision.

Articles from Harvard Business Review, Spherion, and Kenexa report that more than 65% of all candidates do not prepare their own resumes and more than 45% of job applicants misrepresent the credentials on their resumes with one or more “tall tales.”

A third and very common hiring trap is to hire based on a job description. These typically list a subjective interpretation of required job skills and experience. By highlighting only hard skills, they leave out the most critical elements such as key performance objectives, behaviors, values, character traits, and soft competencies — the defining criteria that lead to effective performance.

There is tremendous pressure on hiring managers to keep their organizations fully staffed and productive. But, how does one meet these demands without falling into hiring traps?

What is an Internal Hiring Process, and How Do We Create One?

If you hire someone you don’t really know, for a position you have not thoroughly defined — chances are neither the person, nor the position will deliver. Hiring the right people right from the start requires implementation of a comprehensive internal hiring process that selects the best and eliminates the rest.

Importantly, it all starts with benchmarking. Whether benchmarking the role, the top performers in that role, or benchmarking key traits of the best performers in the company as a whole, the first step is creating the model of what right looks like. Companies that take the time and effort to do so fully understand not only who they need, but why they need them. These are the companies that excel in the employee selection process and the capacity to build a “dream team.”

What “Right” Looks Like

Before you evaluate your immediate needs, evaluate the company and team. This is called the Internal Human Capital Inventory & Assessment, and involves:

Evaluating your core culture:

• Acknowledge your corporate values.
• Assess the character quotient of your company.
• Identify the non-negotiable character traits or core values for your company.

Evaluating your current team:

• Identify your key players and what innate abilities and traits make them successful.
• Identify what’s working on the team and what isn’t.
• Identify what elements are missing on the team that, if present, would make a positive difference.

Implementing a system for evaluating and selecting new hires and internal promotions:

• Establish a hiring protocol and train everyone on the hiring to use and follow it.
• Create companywide candidate-screening ground rules.
• Create a role-specific hiring benchmark for every role. Focus on the key performance indicators as they relate to the corporate strategy. Then isolate the core functions that the candidate would need to perform. Define the behaviors, values, habits, attitudes, and abilities of the ideal candidate. List the skills and experience required to limit ramp-up time.
• Validate and select the right assessment tools.
• Create behavioral-based interview models for each role in the company.
• Establish a decision-making matrix (a weighted chart with a point value for each part of the puzzle, experience = 5; behaviors =10; skills =7, habits =15, values/motivators =15).

What is a Difference Maker?

A difference maker is someone who is willing and able to fill all aspects of the role with confidence, one who consistently delivers on objectives, and who leads her team to peak performance. In many cases a difference maker shakes things up, brings forth change, demands results and at times, and is not the most popular person on the team. They hit their targets, and inspire their teams to do the same.

Difference makers are motivated. Difference makers tell the truth, they don’t cover up mistakes, and they are completely accountable for what works and what doesn’t. They take responsibility. Proactive, solution-oriented leaders, difference makers take action. Their values align with those of the organization, and these values drive day-to-day behaviors that pursue excellence.

How to Find — and Keep — a Difference Maker

In the war for talent, the challenges most organizations face are not limited simply to the unavailability of qualified people. In many cases, the hiring process is not set up to properly identify those who can truly make a difference. Focusing only on the skills and experience needed, hiring authorities often pay too little attention to values, motivations, habits, work styles, behaviors, and cognitive abilities. These are often left for the interview to uncover and interpret, and this is where the process breaks down.

What’s needed is a detailed approach to benchmarking the role and identifying the characteristics of likely top performers. Before you open that next job requisition, many questions must be answered, including:

1. What corporate objectives cannot be met without this difference maker?
2. What impact is this role expected to make on the organization in the next 3, 6, 9, and 12 months?
3. What values, motivations, skills, work styles, and learning abilities will position the incumbent for success?

Once these and many other questions are answered, employ a behavioral interviewing and selection process that helps you identify, engage, and develop difference makers with unprecedented success.

Unfortunately, here is a look into what I saw: typos and misspellings on resumes; zero mention of accountability; inconsistent information; absent information from previous jobs; half-completed resumes; and six out of seven resumes were from recruiter wannabes. The sad part is that some of the wannabes took more time to position themselves than some of the veterans.

If you are a serious player, and you want to separate your candidacy from the sea of competition, I suggest you take your job search seriously, even if it is for a contract recruiter role. Take your time. Who you are being in your job search is a reflection of who you will be on the job.

Read the ad or job posting in full. If asked, answer the questions concisely and accurately; in recruiting, time is money. If there are instructions to follow, don’t demonstrate what a rogue you are. These days recruiting has lots of processes, and the bigger the company, the more risk involved. If you cannot follow the application instructions, you are sending a message that you can’t assimilate to their ways of doing things.

On the other hand, if you follow the instructions verbatim and don’t do anything above and beyond — like using some creativity in your communication or application — you may be sending a message that you give just what is asked and nothing more.

If you are applying for a job with me, look me up, find me on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and talk to me in my language. Don’t address me by Dear Sirs when my name is Margaret. When I get resumes like that, I can them immediately. I have never met a ‘Sir’ named Margaret. And it tells me you don’t care.

Typically a person hiring a recruiter is someone who has done the job before, and done it well, so they are expecting you to blow them away with knowledge, pizazz, terminology, and technology. If you are applying with me and I am a recruiter and we both share a common recruiter language and use the same type of vernacular, I expect you to use that to your advantage. Recruiting is a form of sales; show you know that by positioning yourself in the right manner.

Do your homework. Find out what company you are applying with, go to your browser, type in the company’s site, and look at who is requesting your services. Tailor your application and response to the buyer.

Job searching is a sales process. You are selling me on why I should invest in you.  That takes positioning, discernment, listening, questioning/probing, and salesmanship.

Remember, who you are being in your own search process is indicative of how you will conduct your searches for your new client, or if you are a rookie, who you are being in your job search is an indicator of how you will function in this role for others. This seems easy enough to understand; however, sometimes when we are too close to something, we catch a case of running on automatic, or a case of entitlement. We forget the game we are playing. We also forget that in this game, it is always about winning. Winning the game means working. Losing the game means keep looking, or keep on trucking to the next gig, until that gig runs out.

A real recruiter in 2008 lists accomplishments, numbers of jobs filled, time-to-fill measurements, submittals, or interviews to hire. Great recruiters know their retention rates and their percentage of good hires. In third-party recruiting, a successful recruiter knows their billings, per month, per quarter, if not per week. They also know their sendout-to-placement ratio and their job order-to-fill ratio. A solid recruiter knows their fill ratios and their (fall off ratio) misery index.

As with every profession, people are evaluated by their performance; our performance in this industry is about quality of hires within a given time frame. There are a few other important metrics, yet none as important as whether this person filled the jobs with good people and whether the hiring manager/new employee was served within an acceptable time frame.

Another element of taking your search seriously is the level of effort you have put forth in personal competency development. What have you done to increase your awareness of the marketplace? What have you done to improve and expand your capacity to identify passive talent? If your biggest claim to fame is running an ad on CareerBuilder, scanning the resume and forwarding it to your client, you are in a bit of a pickle. While that sometimes might work, it is nothing to be all that proud of, unless you are spending a significant amount of time screening, assessing, and evaluating that talent, with considerably more tools than your gut instinct.

If you know how to and enjoy sourcing passive talent through using social networks and Internet mining tools, like Broadlook or Jigsaw, brag about it. Include your percentages of hires using passive candidate streams and social networks.

If you are a farmer of people and you use your personal and business community to continually generate passive candidate flow and you have your very own ‘affinity network,’ then brag about that as well. If you have a list, a database of candidates, live and usable candidates, hell that is something to brag about. You come armed and prepared to generate maximum results in a minimal amount of time.

Taking your job search and your career seriously means continually upping your level of service offering and depth of service. If your thing is sourcing, do it fabulously. Invest in your own development, learn the systems, learn the technology, and apply it. After all, you buy clothing, fine wine, and jewelry, so go buy a new way to source candidates, sign up for that $500 training, and then learn everything you can and apply it the second you get out of training. Brag about the results you produced.

If your bag is full-life-cycle recruiting, take that seriously and learn about the new wave of candidate selection tools that are being adopted into many company’s hiring processes. At the Onrec conference, a group of English business folks told me that 85% of all companies in their countries use behavioral interviewing, as well as competency and personality assessments to validate their hiring choices and create new employee development programs. I do not think the U.S. is there yet, but due to the financial and business strategy consequences of poor hiring practices, I believe many more are on that path.

If you are not getting better, you ought to get out, because before you know it you will be replaced by someone who is a lot more willing to do the same job for a lot, and I mean a lot less. If you like the business, live like you will be engaging in a job search, and stay ahead of the curve. Keep track of your results, operate with integrity, don’t make placements you know won’t work out, create solid contacts and networks, and learn everything you can. Always position yourself the way you want to be perceived.