For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical.

The graphic provides a means to visualize this job fit problem. (Here’s a link to a short video for a more detailed explanation.) The key point: for every hire, you need to ensure alignment top to bottom with the company, the job, the hiring manager, and the person’s ability, motivation, personality, and management needs. Due to rapidly changing business conditions getting this vertical alignment correct is nearly impossible, so you need to select people who also have the ability to move laterally in a variety of different environments. It’s this lack of lateral ability that cause the fit problem and results in a bad attitude. Here’s why:

Company Culture and Rate of Change: This factor is largely dependent on the company’s rate of growth and where it is on the corporate life cycle, somewhere between a resource poor startup to a rule-bound bureaucracy, and both moving toward the center. Obviously few people can thrive in all of these types of environments; that’s why the person has to be assessed on this environmental and cultural measure.

Job Type and Degree of Structure: Jobs have a pace of their own that often collides with the needs of the company’s culture and pace. For example, creative jobs tend to be loose and free flowing, whereas operations and accounting tend to be highly structured. Marketing, sales, and design positions tend to fall somewhere between these extremes. Irrespective of the person in the role, there’s often a natural conflict between the company pace and culture and the job type itself. Adding the wrong person into the fray complicates matters even further. For examples, accountants don’t do too well in startups and independent salespeople fight process and detailed reporting.

Manager Style and Personality: While we’re at it, let’s throw the hiring manager’s style into the job fit mix. The graph shows the manager style extremes from controlling to hands-off and the in-betweens: supervising, training, delegating, and coaching. The best managers have the ability to flex across most of the styles based on the circumstances and the type of people they’re managing. Unfortunately, most managers have a narrower range of ability and get frustrated and prickly when dealing with staff members and issues that conflict with their natural style. Most people would agree that the manager-new hire relationship is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction. That’s why getting this part of the fit equation right is essential.

Subordinate Style and Personality: Fitting the employee to the job, the manager, and the company is no easy matter, but it’s made worse when generic competency models and behavioral interviewing are used without considering these fit issues. The fit with the hiring manager can be determined by finding out what types of managers the person has worked best with to see if the person can work equally well with all types of managers or if the range is narrower. The best hires are those who can work in all types of environments and with all styles of managers. Few meet this standard, but you should know ahead of time where lack of job fit will become unmanageable. (Watch the video to see a great example of how to address this.)

Since many people, me included, have been writing about this problem for years, including a Fortune cover story in the ’90s on the “bad attitude” problem, “radical” is too strong a term for the importance of assessing it. Essential is a better name for the need to access job and cultural fit before you hire the person. Regardless of what you call it, measuring fit across all job dimensions needs to part of any assessment process. Of course, don’t be surprised when ensuring that you directly assess job satisfaction and employee performance, that most of your bad attitude problems disappear. This is what always happens when you solve root causes rather than their effects. Some might call this concept radical. I call it commonsense.

We were talking about their need to upgrade their onboarding, and she was describing her concerns about the effects of a poorly executed process.

While she listed the typically cited negative costs of sloppy onboarding — increased turnover, longer time to productivity, etc. — she hit on one of the biggest prices employers pay for a shoddy, sink or swim, unwelcoming onboarding process:

You take someone who is initially excited and even starry-eyed about working for you, and rapidly turn them into a cynical, skeptical, eye-roller, who does not respect or trust management and their employer.

I experienced this harsh reality with the one and only corporate employer I worked for. I remember wondering why my new co-workers would roll their eyes whenever we got a directive from management and say “That’s insert name of insurance company here for yah.”

It didn’t take me too many weeks to realize where this cynical attitude came from.

I can still remember like it was yesterday — sitting in on the employee orientation program I was hired to overhaul. I watched with dismay as new call center reps were driven into a coma by an unrelenting data dump with not a single inspirational component that signaled:

“You just joined a great company and will be doing important work. Welcome aboard!”

The only respite came in the form of someone from human resources, safety, or some other department barging in unannounced to have the new hires fill out paperwork.

Then there was my own orientation, which included the obligatory sexual harassment video, along with the obligatory scenario of the HR person discovering that someone had taken the video player, making calls to track it down, while we waited … and waited.

I probably wasn’t the only one who wondered “Is this the norm for how this place runs? Is this what it’s going to be like working here?”

You’ve had your own version of this, I’m sure.

First Impressions Last

Remember the old saying “You don’t get a second chance at a first impression?”

Just as job applicants are admonished to remember this for good reason, so should employers.

First impressions matter because they shape how everything that you say or do after that impression is perceived. One of the many experiments showing how an initial impressions can color future impressions involved two speakers, both confederates of the experimenter.

Speaker A fumbled the beginning of his presentation, but finished off strong, while Speaker B demonstrated the reverse trajectory. His opening was fantastic, but the rest of his speech was downhill from there. The one who started out clumsily was judged worse than the one who started out great and got worse as his speech continued. No matter how good the rest of his presentation, the negative initial impression of Speaker A colored the respondent’s impression of everything that followed.

What Perception Will They Take Away From the Experience?

When it comes to your new hires, impressions made by their early onboarding experiences will create a mindset that will shape how they perceive future experiences. That’s why you need to pay close attention to what impressions you create with each onboarding moment of truth.

You do that by asking this question:

What perceptual takeaway are we creating in this moment of truth … and is it a good one?”

So for instance, when our call center reps spent their first day in a disorganized data dump that was techno-centric and administrivia-intensive, new employees probably took away from the experience these perceptions:

“That was boring … I wonder if my job is going to be this boring?”

“That was bogus. Are they this clueless in general?”

“If my job is going to be like this, this isn’t going to be a very fun ride.”

In New Situations People Tend to Leap to Conclusions and Overgeneralize

When we enter new territory, we look for clues that might give us greater understanding of what we’re dealing with.

Think of when you have been a new employee. Weren’t you on the lookout for clues about these things?

1. Organizational norms — codes of behaviors, how things are done, how to dress, etc.
2. Where on the mediocrity/excellence continuum employee performance was expected to be.
3. What your new boss was like.
4. Whether leadership valued and respected employees.
5. Whether this was going to be “just a job” or an exciting adventure.

Humans are hardwired with the need to make the unknown known. It makes us feel more secure, more in control. This need translates into a natural tendency to look for patterns — even when they’re not there. It also translates into the human tendency to jump to conclusions and overgeneralize when given even the smallest scrap of information in a new situation.

“The brain is incredibly adept at picking up subtle cues,” says Daryl Travis, Founder and CEO of Brandtrust, a firm that helps companies communicate their brand promise.

Because the human brain is a “pattern making machine,” notes Travis: “That first exposure (to a new employer) is huge, that’s when the first mental models (about one’s new employer) are created.”

Seemingly Little Things Take On Exaggerated Importance In New—and Important—Situations

For an example of a new employee’s pattern-making brain and meaning-making mind in action, consider the following commentary of a new manager, describing his first day working for his Fortune 500 employer. His comment describes his reaction to discovering on Day 1 that the event, which was supposed to be the highlight of his first day, wasn’t going to happen:

What did it mean to me? It meant they were unprepared; and if they’re not ready for me to come in on my first day, what else are they not ready for? This is something they knew about eight weeks in advance. I committed a career shift and went to a company that isn’t even sure about this minor detail? If that was uncertain on my first day, what else am I going to deal with here?

He then went on to say that his department had two welcome lunches for new team members, one for him and one for another team member.

He remembered wondering why they didn’t coordinate the two lunches and have one welcome lunch, rather than create this weird “Which new teammate do I welcome?” situation.

You have to look at it through the new hire’s eyes. They’re thinking: ‘I’m seeing inconsistency and confusion, here.’ One of my future direct reports didn’t sit at my table. That sends a signal. Why would they have created that environment? That doesn’t make sense …. As a new employee, you’re trying to piece things together and figure out the norm. You (the employer) have to pay attention to the signals you’re sending.

As he reflected on the various Day 1 experiences that created confusion, disappointment, and awkwardness, he captures perfectly why it’s important to design a great first impression:

It’s not that these are major things, but when you’re new, your senses are peaked. You are searching all these clues to define the norm. So negatives take on bigger weight.

Notice that “little things” made a huge difference. That speaks to the importance of putting your onboarding process under a microscope, and applying greater mindfulness to the new employee experiences you create. You want to develop greater mindfulness for the perceptual takeaway each onboarding moment of truth creates in your new employees. Doing so will prevent the common decline in morale and motivation new employees often experience when the reality of their new workplace sets in. Consciously creating positive perceptual takeaways will also increase the respect and trust your employees have in management and the decisions management makes… resulting in a workforce that is far more enjoyable to lead, and far more capable of greatness.

So Now What?

Show this article to the new employees you have hired in the last 6-9 months and ask them for feedback about your onboarding process.

Ask them about what perceptions your onboarding process created for them — and why. Ask specifically about impressions they had about:

1. How well your organization is run.
2. How competent management is.
3. How much management cares about employees.
4. Whether employees get the chance to do great things, a chance to matter.
5. How high your standards are.

Make sure you interview new hires from different timeframes, as it is easy for someone who has been on the job for nine months to forget important details that could help you upgrade the “First Day On The Job Experience,” the “First Week on The Job Experience,” etc.

As you redesign each step of each process in the onboarding experience, ask:

1. “What’s the perceptual takeaway here?”
2. “What perception would this leave the new employee with?”
3. “What perceptions would I live to create?”
4. “How could we create such a perceptual takeaway?”

In a future article, we will explore a powerful tool for answering these and other onboarding redesign questions with even greater precision.

This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work.

Note: I frequently call these agreements “secret” because that is a goal. But with the growth of social media, they are becoming a poorly kept secret.

Ways That These Agreements Can Hurt Your Firm

• A loss of trust among employees — because of the potential legal issues, almost every firm keeps these agreements secret. However, if your firm has corporate values that include honesty and transparency, when the fact that the company is keeping secrets from employees gets out, any built-up trust will be damaged or lost. Restricting an employee’s freedom without telling them can have many ugly repercussions.
• Poorer treatment of employees may lead to productivity/recruiting problems — if the goal of the pact is reached (dramatically reducing turnover), managers and HR professionals will not have to work as hard to keep the best. This may lead to degradation in the treatment of employees and the benefits offered to them. An unintended consequence of this poorer treatment may be a measurable decrease in employee productivity, engagement, and innovation. The resulting weakened and slower improving HR practices and benefits may also harm your employer brand image and whatever recruiting you do outside of the agreement.
• Limiting new ideas and best practices — “no-recruit” pacts restrict or prevent the hiring of new employees directly from your competitors. This can severely limit the infusion of new ideas and the best practices from your competitor’s employees. And if your firm is not  No. 1 in your industry, your chances of moving up may also be restricted.
• It may restrict rapid company growth — in order for a firm to grow rapidly, it may rapidly need a large amount of already trained talent to support new products or initiatives. Unfortunately, no-recruit agreements make it almost impossible to rapidly get large amounts of ready-to-go talent from the most logical sources: your competitors.
• You are forced to hire those who are less prepared — because most of the well-trained and experienced talent will be at large firms in your industry, the agreement may force your firm to hire employees from smaller firms, where the employees are likely to be less trained and prepared. Many firms are then forced to increase their percentage of college hires because most experienced talent is restricted.
• Fewer promotional opportunities may restrict leader development – if the goal of reduced turnover is reached, there will be fewer openings for your best employees to get promoted into. This stagnation will frustrate your best and brightest, and more importantly, it will slow their development. And because you can’t recruit fully developed leaders from your competitors, you may eventually face a leadership shortage. If you want to maintain an effective rate of employee and leadership development, you will have to devote extra resources to develop a powerful development function.
• Your bad employees will stay much longer — the agreement is designed to prevent the loss of your best employees but it will restrict your weak employees from leaving also. Instead of leaving, your weak employees will continue to generate lower productivity and frustrate your top performers. Unless you develop a “no-recruit-except-weak-performers” agreement, you may have inadvertently damaged your firm for years.
• Knowledge of your customers may also be reduced — one variation of these agreements narrows the recruiting restriction to a firm’s major industrial customers. Obviously regularly recruiting away a customer’s top employees won’t win you a popularity contest. Occasionally hiring a customer’s employees may strengthen bonds, communications, and it may help you better understand the customer’s needs.
• The realization among employees that they don’t come first — once the word gets out, employees will instantly realize that all the speeches about providing employees with freedom get neutralized, because in this case, clearly the company is consciously putting itself ahead of the needs of its employees.
• Employees feeling owned — preventing other firms from poaching “its” employees sends a clear message that the company feels that it “owns” its employees. No one likes feeling “owned” and diverse employees may have an even greater negative reaction.
• Damage to your external employer brand damage – once the word gets out to potential applicants and the public, the firm’s external brand image will tank. You may also permanently anger top applicants from restricted firms when they are rejected outright for no logical reason.
• Internal employer brand damage – once the word gets out among your own employees about this repugnant practice, your internal brand will be damaged, and that may negatively affect the way that your employees respond to your customers.
• Damage to employee referral programs — if you succeed in keeping the agreement secret, your employees will not know that they shouldn’t make referrals from competitor firms. Once high-quality employee referrals go nowhere, without explanation, employees will naturally slow down their referrals from all sources.
• The best recruiters won’t want to work for you – the very best recruiters know about these agreements and most of the best dislike the thought of recruiting with their “hands tied.” And with fewer top firms to target, you will likely need superior recruiters in order to bring in the best.
• Not being able to poach locally may increase relocation costs – another variation of these agreements restricts recruiting from major firms in the same community, even if they are in different industries. Obviously when “local poaching” is restricted, more often than not you will need to hire from outside the area. Requiring more candidates to relocate will make recruiting much more difficult and costly.
• Small firms may become more competitive in recruiting — employees may become frustrated when they find that they “can’t leave.” As result, they may jump at the first chance and go to a small or less desirable firm (that is not covered by an agreement). A firm that they normally would not have considered. And if they choose, they can later move directly to a formally restricted competitor of their former firm.
• It may negatively impact government contracts – should you be found to be breaking the law, it may impact your ability to get future government contracts.
• Enforcement can be time-consuming and expensive — some of the recruiters under the agreement may not “get the message” (which occurred in the Google-recruiting-from-Apple case). As a result, executives will be forced to spend the time and the expense of “lawyer letters” to fix the mistakes. And because the agreement itself is probably illegal, you likely can’t go to court to enforce it.
• It’s a contradiction — and finally, if you happen to be an advocate of free trade and open market capitalism, you will likely have difficulty explaining to your Republican friends the hypocrisy of your actions.

Reasons Why the Agreement May Not Even Work

• A cold-calling ban may be insufficient — some of the agreements only restrict “cold calling” or making the first contact (as opposed to an absolute no-hiring ban). And as a result, smart recruiters often find a way to ruse or convince employees at the target firm to make the first contact.
• Third-party recruiters can be used to go around it — most external third-party recruiters are not included in these corporate agreements, so competitors can still hire your employees; they just have to do it indirectly through a third-party. Some executive search firms have don’t-recruit agreements with customers, so finding a top firm to manage your go-around can be problematic.
• Employees will still find a way to work for your competitors, indirectly — rather than going directly to a competitor, your clever employees will find a way to get there indirectly. All they have to do is to make a short stop working at a consulting firm or they can simply take a long break and apply. Ex-employees are not normally covered by these agreements.
• Limited poaching will occur anyway — even though the agreement says no recruiting, in practice you can get away with hiring one to three people a year from a firm without getting a stop call or a “lawyer letter.” Recruiters love to stretch limits, and many managers will go along up until the point where someone complains.
• Even keeping the agreement secret is difficult – with the growth of social media, you can almost guarantee that your recruiters (especially contract recruiters) will informally spread the word about the restriction.
• Some competitor firms simply won’t go along – these agreements can only have their maximum impact if all of the major players in an industry or geographic region participate. With the recent U.S. Department of Justice and civil lawsuits and the publicity that surrounds them, fewer executives will even be willing to discuss these agreements. Already, most global firms simply refuse to participate.

Final Thoughts

I have written about this questionable practice on numerous occasions including my recent article called Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets. Although secret, this practice is quite common not just in high-tech but it is also not hard to find in healthcare, major accounting firms, and among consulting firms. There are arguably some potential benefits related to this practice. They include: it pleases your major customers; it may reduce salaries by restricting bidding on candidates; and you may have less turnover because fewer recruiters are targeting your very best. However, after extensive research on the potential problems, I have concluded that the ROI of these agreements is weak and it is getting lower by the day.

Yep, programmers are getting expensive. But my experience has been that most great programmers don’t really have salary as their No. 1 consideration when deciding where to work. They only worry about salary when the job is so awful that it has to pay well or they couldn’t imagine sticking around.

Here are 10 things that many programmers think about first, long before salary even comes into play:

1. How much do they believe in the company and identify with its goals? Are they excited about what the company makes? Do they love its products?
2. How do they feel about the team they work with? Are their coworkers the same people they would want to hang out with after work?
3. How cool is the technology that they’re using? Will they have a chance to learn powerful new programming languages and systems, or will they be using pedestrian, safe, corporate technologies?
4. How much of the work they’re doing is new code, and how much of it is bug-fixing and maintenance?
5. What is the work environment like? Are there plush private offices, nice espresso machines, and free gourmet lunches? Or does it look and feel exactly like a sitcom parody of a miserable office?
6. How smart is the team? Will they have a chance to learn and grow from their co-workers, or are they going to be carrying the load for a lot of deadweight?
7. How smart is the organization? Will the bureaucracy fight them every step of the way, or does it exist to enable brilliant work?
8. Where is the work? Is the commute convenient? Can their spouse find fulfilling work (probably in another field) nearby? Are the schools good?
9. How much control do they have over their work? Are they required to conform to obscure rules and capricious diktats or do they have the freedom to do great things?
10. What kind of computer hardware do they work? Are their systems upgraded every year with the latest and the greatest? Can they have three 30” monitors if they want?

You may think that some of these things are completely out of your control … and they may be. Sometimes people run job listings on Stack Overflow and get very few resumes. Then they ask me, “why didn’t we get any applicants for our job listing?” And I look at it and think, “baby Moses in a basket, why would anyone want to work there?”

I know, it’s hard to say, but it’s true: some jobs are just not that attractive, and it’s not a problem of “finding programmers,” it’s a problem of “making this a place where people want to work.”

The first thing to learn is that company founders and CEOs don’t care about the same things as programmers. Usually, if you’re doing what your founder/CEO thought would be nice, you’re not really optimizing for programmers. Founder/CEOs, for example, like to save money, and they like to know what’s going on, so they think having a big room where everyone can overhear everything is a terrific work environment. Programmers need to concentrate, so they would work in a brown cardboard box if it was quiet and free from interruptions.

If you’re scoring kind of low on the “desirable workplace” scale, all is not lost. There’s a lot you can do to fix these issues, even if you are a company that makes atom bombs run by a megalomaniac micromanager with an office on a platform in the Arctic Ocean.

Come to the ERE Expo in San Diego in March, and I’ll go into this in a lot more depth in my keynote. I’ll tell you what I know about how programmers work, what they like, what they care about, and I promise you’ll leave with a lot of ideas of how to make your workplace way more attractive and interesting to the average programmer.

What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything.

Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). They are used and relied on around the world for hiring, transfers, promotions, and for selecting leaders. After studying and researching interviews for over 40 years, I find it laughable when people think they can become interview experts simply by conducting a few of them.

Despite their many flaws, the purpose of this article is not to tell you to stop using interviews. Instead, the goal is to make you aware of the things that can negatively impact the results of an interview. My premise is that if you encounter these problems and you understand their causes, you can take steps to avoid or minimize them.

A Complete List of the Top 50 Most Common Interview Problems (split into five categories)

A) The 15 most critical problems that can occur with interviews

1. Some things should not be measured in an interview – few start an interview with a list of the things they want to assess. Many things just can’t be measured accurately during an interview including: many technical skills, team skills, intelligence, attitude, and physical skills. Giving them a work sample or test is often superior.
2. Using historical information to predict the future — interviews cover what happened in the past. Unfortunately, “the way you did something yesterday” simply wouldn’t work in today’s “new normal.”
3. Interview questions are not directly related to the needed skills – most questions and “solve-this-problem” scenarios are developed independently and are not tied to a specific “required” skill or knowledge. There is no script or plan to ensure the right things are covered so that interviewers don’t just make up whimsical questions.
4. Inconsistent questions – there is no interview question script prepared for most interviews, so that the same questions are not asked of each candidate, which causes serious comparison and reliability issues.
5. No weights – interview questions are frequently not “weighted” or prioritized, so minor questions receive the same weight in the final rating as the most important ones.
6. No scoring sheet — there is no scoring sheet to ensure that interviewees are rated consistently on the same factors. Many final decisions are made based solely on memory. Scoring sheets forces the interviewers to make their decision based solely on the factors on the scoring sheet.
7. No agreement on good answers — almost universally, interviewers asked questions without first determining what is a weak, good, and great answer. As a result, the exact same answer will get different “scores” from different interviewers.
8. Interviews are inherently misleading – the basic foundation of the interview is based on the premise that during the interview, candidates are acting normally and are telling the truth. This is unlikely because most candidates are scared to death before, during, and after interviews.  The interview situation is by definition “unreal” and words often should not be taken as proof. It is not “the job” and therefore what happens during the interview might not be representative of what one would actually do on the job. The goals of many interviews are unfortunately focused on finding faults in the candidates, as opposed to finding their positive aspects.
9. Saying what they want to hear — interviewees frequently provide the answers that they believe that the interviewer wants to hear, rather than the most accurate answer. Interviewees frequently lie or omit key facts; unfortunately, interviewers do the same.
10. Non-job related factors influence decisions – numerous subjective factors like body language, accent, height, handshake, dress, and coming late may distract from a focus on the answers provided. Because of stereotypes, demographic factors (race, sex, age, national origin) may also impact the results.
11. Practice makes perfect – preparation changes interview results. So if you think you are getting spontaneous answers, be aware of the thousands of Internet articles, sample questions, and videos that can super-prepare candidates for anything. Individuals who have not been in a job search for a long time might be rusty in their interview skills. While unemployed candidates that have recently gone through numerous interviews could benefit from their extensive practice and do better.
12. Your specific interview questions may be known in advance — in addition to generic questions, with the use of glassdoor.com, be aware that whatever specific questions your firm has asked in the past (and their answers) are likely to be posted.
13. Behavioral interviews have inherent weaknesses — behavior interviews rely 100% on candidate-provided (and possibly exaggerated) descriptions of how they handled a problem in the past. Also be aware that they may have acted that way because of cultural rules and constraints that would be completely different today, at your firm. Extrapolating forward on how they would act six months from now, even though they have long since changed, and in your unique culture/environment can be misleading. Asking candidates to describe how they “handled” a certain situation has some serious inherent problems. First: what the candidate is describing to you may have happened, but you can’t actually know the extent of their contribution to the described action. Second: if their verbal descriptions or their delivery happens to be clumsy, their accomplishments will likely be underrated (even though they actually did what they described). And third, in our current fast-changing world, you might not even want them to act the same way.
14. Lack of future view — most interviews and all behavioral interviews focus on the past but whoever is hired will be working in the present/future. Most interviewers fail to ask candidates to forecast the future and to provide an outline of the plans that they will use to identify and solve upcoming problems.
15. Not hiring for “this” and “the next job” — hiring managers can be shortsighted. They frequently interview and hire based 100% on their own short-term needs. Companies should hire individuals for both “this” and a future job but most interview questions are not designed to assess future competencies that will be needed in their next jobin the company.

B) Problems with the interviewer

1. The interviewer – the sex, age, and experience of the interviewer dramatically impacts their assessment of any candidate. If the person they are interviewing is different than them, the result will also be different. All too often, interviewers act like they are junior psychologists and may make snap but inaccurate judgments about candidates.
2. Bias and prejudice — some interviewers have biases or make stereotypes that eliminate individuals for nonbusiness reasons.
3. Interviewers are not trained – almost everyone assumes that interviews are easy and don’t require training. Managers only receive cursory training and don’t know the pitfalls that can lead to bad interviewing and hiring results. Because “mystery shoppers” are not used, HR has no direct way of knowing what might be happening during an individual manager’s interviews.
4. The interviewer has arbitrary knockout factors – many interviewers seem to arbitrarily make up subjective “knockout factors,” which prematurely and often unfairly screen out qualified candidates. Many of these knockout factors are based on personal prejudices.
5. Interviewer fatigue — after many interviews in a row, the interviewer is tired and their judgment weakens.

C) Common interview process errors –the actual design of the interview process can cause many problems.

1. No structure — the less structure, the less reliable are the results. Using the same structure around the globe may be a problem because local cultures and laws vary.
2. The timing – the time of day that the interview was held has an impact upon its results because the energy level of interviewers and interviewees changes. Someone that has gone through five back-to-back interviews will perform differently than someone who had a break. And because multiple candidates are involved at different times of the day or on different days, it makes accurately comparing interview results that occurred at different times or days difficult.
3. The length of interviews varies — interviews are often very short, making realistic assessment difficult. And due to time and business pressures, managers often eagerly make snap, first-impression decisions, which can be inaccurate. Comparing candidates who had interviews of significantly different lengths is also difficult.
4. The order of the interview — If you are the first among all candidates in the interview process, you’re less likely to be hired then if you are the last candidate. Unfortunately, where you appear in the order of interviews impacts your odds of success.
5. Consistent location – even the place where the interview is held (if it is not consistent for all candidates) can influence the candidate’s assessment (i.e. lunch interviews produce different results than conference room interviews).
6. Interviews are held in person — This makes them expensive, because of the use of an interviewer’s time. Also requiring an in-person interview means that many working people simply won’t show up. Advances in technology now make it possible to hold inexpensive live video interviews over the Internet. Live video interviews and telephone preliminary interviews can save both travel costs and candidate time without impacting quality.
7. Travel fatigue — often interviewees are flown in for the interview the night before and jet lag makes them underperform. Interviewers can suffer the same issues.
8. Selling is limited – not enough time is spent during the interview selling the candidate, so those with multiple choices might not accept.
9. Skills demonstrated in the interview are not required for this job – interview scores tend to vary based on the candidate’s interpersonal and communication skills, but this particular job might not require even average interpersonal skills. Thus some jobs (i.e. receptionist, salesperson, and recruiter) lend themselves to being assessed through interviews, while for some other jobs (like programmers, artists, and meter readers), interviews may be horrible predictors of the candidate’s on-the-job success because they work alone.
10. Panel interviews – panel or group interviews are often intimidating because of the number of people in the room hurling question after question at the single interviewee. Often an assumption is made that panel interviews reduce the chance of bias or prejudice, but that is not automatically true if the team leader is powerful and successfully encourages others to share their bias. Candidates can also become frustrated when “the wrong person” asks a question (for example, when an HR person asks a technical question and a technical manager asked a question that should have been asked by HR).

D) Psychological issues and problems –if you study the research on interviews, you will find that there are many psychology-related issues.

1. Looking for reasons to reject — often interviewers spend almost all of the time trying to find a reason to reject the candidate, and as a result, they miss the candidate’s positive aspects. In some cases, negative responses are given twice the weight, so a candidate can be mentally rejected after a single error.
2. Halo Effect issues — often the evaluator is overly impressed by one or more personal characteristics (i.e. great looks). And they mistakenly assume that everything about the candidate is positive because of that single exemplary factor.
3. Recency comparison (the contrast effect) – if an interviewer has several bad interviews in a row, the next person who performs much better may be inaccurately rated as outstanding, simply because they are so much better than the recent poor performers. The reverse effect is also possible.
4. Personalities come across differently — shy, nervous, and slow people can be assessed poorly even though the job does not require speaking up or boldness.
5. Fooled by enthusiasm — some interviewers are so smitten with candidate enthusiasm and passion that they fail to accurately assess other important job requirements.
6. “Fit” assessment — many managers use interviews to measure an individual’s fit with the team, job, or the corporate culture.  Unfortunately, there is little evidence that untrained managers can accurately assess “fit” in 60 minutes. In addition, if innovation is being sought, individuals who do not “fit” may instead be the correct hire. Often candidates who are “just like me” (the interviewer) are automatically given higher ratings even though the job does not require someone “just like you.”
7. One-way conversation – unfortunately, many interviewers spend more time talking then listening during interviews.  Most interviewers don’t leave equal time for the candidate to ask questions and to present information that they want to present, which can frustrate them, and then limited information is used to make the decision.
8. “Too perfect” performance — occasionally interviewees with a lot of experience interviewing (often from HR) get extremely high ratings but they are rejected because they are “too perfect” and the evaluator assumes that something is wrong (cheating).

E) Legal issues

1. No accuracy check – the validity or the predictive ability of interviews are not checked by later on comparing whether those who received high interview scores turn out to be top on-the-job performers and vice versa. Interviews are a test, according to the EEOC, but most firms do not formally validate interviews or individual questions. The reliability of interviews is also not assessed.
2. Illegal questions – it’s not unusual for illegal questions to “pop out.”  It’s also possible for candidates to inadvertently volunteer illegal information.
3. No written record – because most interviews are conducted without being taped or even with a written record, there is little evidence (should legal or EEOC issues arise) as to what actually occurred or didn’t occur during interviews. When notes are taken, the unfettered handwritten notes taken by interviewers can be embarrassing should they see the light of day in a court proceeding.
4. Language, cultural, and disability issues — interviewees who normally speak a different language may be slower and may provide less precise answers merely because of language or cultural issues. Disabilities that affect speaking may impact scores, even though accommodation may be required and speaking is not a major job requirement.
5. Icebreaker issues — the interviewer may offer an icebreaker story or joke that may be inappropriate or illegal. It may negatively impact the responses from the interviewee.

F) Candidate-experience related issues – most candidates either hate of fear them. Further angering or frustrating candidates may cause you to lose top candidates, hurt your employer brand, or even harm product sales.

1. Candidates are forced to lie to their boss — because most interviews are held during work hours, currently employed candidates coming to an interview are essentially forced to lie to their current boss as to why they are away from their current job.  This can cause them to prematurely drop out of the hiring process.
2. Uncertainty and being kept in the dark — abuse of candidates occurs when managers keep them in the dark about the interview process and what is expected during it. They are not told what will occur during the interview and what skills will be assessed. In addition, they are not told who will be there during the interview, the role of each interviewer, and who will make the final decision. Failing to educate the candidate may cause them to under-prepare in key areas. Candidates also get frustrated when they are left in the dark and not given feedback about where they stand after an individual interview or after the process is complete.
3. Candidates are given no input — the interview process and whom they will interview with is determined by the organization. However, top candidates should be asked for their input, who they need to talk to, and what information they need in order to make their decision. Because without this information, they may drop out or reject your offer.
4. The number of interviews for each job — “death by interview,” which is where an excessive number of interviews over many days wears out a candidate. There is also death by repetition, when candidates during multiple interviewers get frustrated when they are asked the same questions over and over because interviews by different managers are not coordinated.
5. Scheduling difficulties prolong the process — when multiple candidates are brought in for interviews, the time that it takes to schedule all of these interviews almost always stretches out the hiring process to the point where most top candidates will be lost because of the long time delay.
6. Managers act inappropriately during interviews – sometimes interviewers act inappropriately by taking phone calls during interviews, canceling and rescheduling interviews, appearing disorganized, or even asking illegal or silly questions. Such behavior is disrespectful but it may also scare away the top candidates. Candidates often say they rejected an offer because of the way that they were treated during the interview process.
7. Ghost interviews may frustrate — in order to meet legal requirements, external interviews are often held even though an internal candidate is already preselected. This wastes candidate time and adds to frustration.

In my experience, most interviewers have a cavalier attitude toward interviewing. That is partly because they will never know if a major mistake was made and a top candidate was never hired. However, if you 1) study and fully understand the potential problems; and 2) have some empathy for what the candidates are going through and how much they will suffer when rejected, the quality of interviews will automatically increase.

What’s the singsong experience?

It’s when a Gatekeeper starts offering information, in a continuous pattern, to your request.

Don’t misunderstand — I had spent several hours sourcing into a particular entertainment company with very little — almost none — success.

Several hours.

Admittedly, the customer said it was a challenge.

Then I got “lucky.”

It was 7 my time and 4 on the West Coast where my target was located.

I was frustrated.

I was slightly angry.

That’s how I get when I get frustrated.

Infantile — I know — you don’t have to tell me but sometimes it serves me. Other time I just try to stay away from other people, but last night what felt like an unproductive day motivated me.

I hate to go to bed feeling like a loser.

I kept dialing.

Finally, on one call I was transferred from the Gatekeeper’s console to an executive assistant (to one of the Executive VPs who reported to the CEO).

She answered!

Most at this company had not been answering throughout the day. I had been doing a lot of “stabbing in”* with few results.

I had been given a list of names inside the company and the request was to fill in the reporting structures under those names.

I needed the reports of the EVP she reported to. I had one of them from the customer. My gut was telling me there were several more.

‘Hi Judy — whatcha’ need?” she asked, all friendly-like.

I’m sorry, Marla, this is Maureen–”

(Before the receptionist/gatekeeper transferred me I asked her (quickly) whom she was transferring me to. She gave me the EA’s name (Marla) so that’s why I knew it. Marla didn’t say her name when she answered.)

She cut in before I could finish. Actually, I was finished. I say as little as possible when I’m calling.

“Oh, you’re coming in from the reception desk — no matter!” she chirped. “Whatcha’ need?”

Now, don’t ask me why she said “no matter” and then don’t ask me why she asked me what I needed. She just did. It happens, sooner or later. You just have to get to the later sometimes.

I told her what I needed:

“I was trying to reach Peter Boyle’s group — I understand you support him?”

“Yes,” she answered, pleasantly.

“I understand Matt Hogue’s title has changed (the receptionist/gatekeeper had given me that much).”

“Yes, he’s the CFO now. He was the VP,” she confirmed, still pleasant.

I could feel myself tensing. When you’re phone sourcing you reach a do-or-die moment when you can sense if the person on the other end is going to proceed (or not). I was at that moment and my neck and shoulder muscles were hurting from the day’s frustrations. I sensed she would go on.

“But I don’t have the other members of the group. Can you tell me who they are?” I dice-rolled.

Like I said, this do-or-die moment is fraught with emotion for many phone sourcers — the phone sourcers reading this know what I mean. Phone sourcing is a high-stress activity, admittedly. It’s a big part of why many people don’t like doing it.

She trilled off seven names.

I was tired so I misspelled a couple, tripping on the keys as she was trilling but I got them down best I could without interrupting her roll.

I knew once I had the names I could cipher out the titles somehow.

Maybe even with her.

The names are the most important thing.

I gambled further, knowing from experience if she told me this much she’d go further with me:

“And can you tell me, Marla, what Jerome’s title is?”

“Accounting Manager,” she shot back.

“I think I misspelled Ann’s last name. What is it?” I asked, all the while horrified at the indecipherable mess I had made of it.

“Schuster?” she asked. I recognized the incongruent letters I had typed and also recognized how the mess I was staring at could be Schuster.

“Yes; with a ‘c’ or no ‘c’?” I vollied.

“With a ‘c’: S-C-H-U-S-T-E-R,” she slowly spelled.

I said nothing, listening to the silence when she finished.

I felt she wasn’t (finished).

“And she spells her first name with an e,” she added, breaking the silence.

“Thanks. I had it without,” I told her, matter-of-factly.

I was fighting to control my voice.

“And Lisa? What’s Lisa’s title?” I went on, holding my breath.

“Reservations VP,” she said.

Here comes the singsong part — it’s always music to my ears.

“And Jan is Marketing Director, John is Director, Business Operations, Pam is Regional Director of Sales and Ken — Sr Director Product Development,” she sang trippingly off her tongue, getting the job done.

“And you have Matt — CFO,” she finished.

It’s almost like they go into some sort of trance.

“Yes, I do have him,” I admitted, with an emphasis on “him.”

That’s it?” I asked, doing a final check while still typing what she had just told me, the last part from memory. I’m lucky in that voice/sound seems to “implant” itself into my memory (I keep hearing like what it was said) for a few seconds after I hear something.

“That’s it,” she answered, convincingly.

Quickly, I then said, “Marla, you’ve been a great help — I do appreciate it. Thank you and Good-bye!”

She said “Good-bye” and I hung up.

I breathed a long sigh and sat back, arching and stretching my arms around my keyboard and adjusting my head on my shoulders. I heard cracking and felt relief.

Now, you’re wondering why she told me all that she did and why, finally, it got easy? I don’t know for sure but I have my suspicions. I’d like to hear yours first, though. Tell me what you think.

*stabbing in When you call in to a company’s internal dial system; willy-nilly with the expectation that someone will answer at their desk who will be able to give you information. It’s (usually) a very effective phone sourcing technique!

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to:

1. State which metrics you are correlating together, and challenge yourself to see if you are hoping for a causal relationship, or if a causal relationship actually exists.
2. Prove that the causal relationship has validity and can be repeated time and time again.
3. Go back to your executive presentations and record where you did indicate that correlations and causal relationships exist. Remember that those statements are now out there, and it is possibly expected that the causal relationship will sustain.
4. As you create or refine goals for your recruiting teams or the hiring managers, be aware of these causal and non-causal correlations, as it will help you declare and meet expectations in the marketplace.

Happy metric-ing, and see you at the Spring ERE!

According to a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. While this is a huge and important pool, most companies over-emphasize the 17% of candidates who are active. Then to make matters worse, when they do target passive candidates, they clumsily use their active candidate processes.

To assist talent leaders in understanding the differences between active and passive candidate recruiting, I’ve developed a recruiter competency model addressing the similarities, differences, and overlaps. Contact me directly if you’d like to learn more about this. It’s highlighted in the graphic showing the 12 most important competencies alongside a very rigorous 1-5 ranking system. For example, a 4-5 ranking requires outstanding performance, some type of significant recognition, and continuing accolades from the recruiter’s hiring manager clients.

“HR still struggles to become a ‘strategic partner’ with the business, engaging employees and aligning integrated talent management initiatives with overall organizational goals,” write the authors of an Aberdeen Analyst Insight about developing a “Talent First” culture.

Drawing  from an upcoming Aberdeen report, analysts Madeline Laurano and Mollie Lombardi say HR’s day-to-day work and the lack of support and buy-in from other business leaders and senior management stand in the way of developing the strategic approach that HR leaders say must be a part of their skill set.

Yet there’s some sort of disconnect here. The analysts note that in Aberdeen’s Quarterly Business Review, the 1,300+ business leaders in the survey named workforce and talent concerns in half of their top 10 business challenges. However, 35 percent of the HR leaders participating in the forthcoming HR Executives Agenda 2012 complained of a lack of buy-in from their senior management.

Integrated talent management will help with this, say Laurano and Lombardi. “An integrated approach to talent management can help organizations carry out key talent initiatives that will benefit the business,” they write, citing evidence from “Best-In-Class” companies. These are the top 20 percent of scorers on three Aberdeen metrics: Employee engagement, bench strength, and hiring manage satisfaction.

This Best-in-Class group reported improved retention, high employee engagement, and achievement of key performance indicators. Overall, 70 percent of the group credited their integrated approach to talent management with achieving organizational goals.

As the authors note, “integrated talent management is not a new phenomenon.” Fine-tuning recruiting methods to the performance of workers three months, six months, even a year after hire has been going on for years. Projecting worker and skill needs into the future, based on company growth, workforce demographics, competition, and so on, and then using that intelligence to plan recruiting, is much more recent, yet hardly brand new.

These examples are part of the drive toward developing a unified approach to talent within a company. Many, note the authors, have “succeeded in breaking down traditional HR silos.”

“Without integration,” they add, “HR operates in one department, rather than spanning the entire organization.”

In many ways technology can hasten the integration. Besides shifting paperwork to managers or to the employee themselves, and thus freeing HR for more strategic work, it brings to line managers information once available only in HR.

Integrated talent management technology isn’t the determinant of a “Talent First” culture, but it does make big-picture viewing easier, and sometimes even possible. “Analytics matter,” say Laurano and Lombardi. Technology makes it simpler to access the data that leads to business insights.

“Organizations that integrate talent data with business data are three-and-a-half times as likely to achieve Best-in-Class as those that do not integrate data,” they write.

How should HR move forward in its quest for integration putting talent first? By first eliminating the silos and integrating management processes, while focusing on improving employee engagement. As the company becomes more sophisticated about talent management as a critical business strategy, the authors say talent management must be tied to business goals, progress has to be measured and success defined.

To reach Best-in-Class status, analytics have to be a priority. “An HR professional today must keep analytics as the backbone of any talent management strategy,” conclude Laurano and Lombardi. “Analytics will help HR gain support for integrated talent management, and improve the reputation of HR throughout the organization.”

It’s a mistake you want to ask yourself if you’re making.

The story speaks to how often employers waste time, money, and creative horsepower when it comes to attracting and retaining talent because they put their attention in the wrong place.

So here’s the story … 

Years ago a friend of mine was telling me how much he loved his Audi. In the same “I love my Audi” story, he mentioned that he will never buy another one again … ever. Before I could ask how Statement A leads to Statement B, he told me that the one and only Audi dealer in the area was a nightmare to deal with. The car-buying experience felt sleazy and the service experience after the sale continued to be a horror show.

He then went on to tell me about another customer of he had met. That customer had brought his car to a dealership out of state for the very same reason my friend disliked this particular dealership.

I knew the name of the dealership, but never had an opinion of them prior to his story.

Fast forward two weeks.

I hear this dealership’s ad on the radio. It is incredibly creative and clever.

When it’s over, I think:

“Isn’t this classic. They spend all this money and creativity coming up with clever ways to get people through the door, only to drive them back out the door by the experience they deliver.”

Since I love analogies and tend to see them everywhere, I then found myself thinking:

“Isn’t this a perfect analogy for what employers do? They spend all kinds of time and money trying to get the best and brightest through their doors, only to drive them back out — or drive them crazy — by the frustrating, disrespectful, and spirit-crushing work experience they deliver.”

Wouldn’t it make sense to invest just as much time, money, and creative horsepower delivering the work experience you promise as you do making a compelling promise to job prospects?

Doesn’t it make sense to invest as much in making sure talent stays once they come through the door, rather than creating a revolving door experience?

Doesn’t it make sense to create a work experience that makes your employees not only happy to stay, but also want to tell their talented friends: “This is an awesome place to work. When there’s an opening, I’ll let you know”?

Think of how much money you could help your employer save in recruiting costs if you helped them create a work experience that turned your employees into a volunteer recruiting firm.

If all this makes sense to you, here’s what you can do about it.

Share this article with your leadership team and suggest that you, as a team, examine:

• Whether you truly deliver the work experience your recruiting campaign promises.
• Whether you really know what kind of work experience you deliver.
• Whether you truly understand the key components of an inspiring, commitment-generating work experience … and how to deliver them.
• Whether your managers know how to manage in ways that inspire loyalty, passion, and pride.
• How much you are investing in telling the world you are a great place to work, and how much you are investing in actually being a great place to work.
• If you are doing the things Todd described in the comment here that are the things that make a workplace a good workplace: appreciation, interesting work, the chance to make a difference, opportunities for new skills, work/life balance, recognition, flexibility, health and retirement benefits, nice co-workers, smart co-workers, good managers but not micromanagers, training, a good location, money, promotions, and raises.

Share this article with your employees as a conversation starter. Find out from them whether they would recommend you as an employer, and why … or why not. Don’t just do this as a survey. I have found over the years that interviews and focus groups provide much richer, more actionable information. I don’t recommend replacing surveys with them, but combining the two.

Invest in helping your managers learn:

• What key practices create an inspiring work experience where employees feel not only valued and respected, but they also have the resources, support, and training to do great work.
• What key human needs drive employee performance and engagement, and how to create a work experience that satisfies these human needs. Here are just a few: the need for meaning and purpose, the need to learn and grow, and the need to feel a sense of control over one’s experience.
• How to become more mindful of critical Managerial Moments of Truth that affect employee engagement and morale. Examples of such critical Managerial Moments of Truth include: 1) Onboarding a new employee, and whether it’s a “sink or swim” experience or new hires get the message: “We’re glad you’re here, here’s how we are going to help you succeed”; 2) Giving employees feedback and doing performance reviews; 3) Communicating to employees about major changes; 4) How you ask employees for input, and what you do with that input.
• The critical communication skills that make it comfortable for people with less power — i.e. their direct reports — to speak honestly and openly about difficult issues.
• The myriad of other skills and the managerial practices that bring out the best in employees.

If you are serious about not just getting talent “through the door,” but also keeping them and bringing out the best in them, forward this article to your management team and your direct reports, and get the process rolling.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue.

Think it’s not possible? Here is a quick example to demonstrate the possibilities.

It’s obvious that average salespeople produce revenue and good salespeople produce more. So in an attempt to hire better salespeople, this technology firm analyzed its current sales hiring process and reengineered it, so that it measurably identified and hired better salespeople.

If the new process hired salespeople that sold on average 10% more (than those hired under the previous recruiting process), you could (with the CFO’s blessing), publicly state that this HR action had improved sales revenue by X dollars (i.e. the actual amount would be the 10% improvement in the average salesperson’s yearly sales revenue, multiplied by the number of new salespeople who were hired under the improved process).

Still skeptical? Here is another quick example of how HR can increase revenue.

The recruiting function at this Midwest bank realized it was losing significant revenue every day that a loan officer position was vacant. Obviously, with no one in the position, you can’t make or close any revenue-generating loans. In order to reduce the number of days that loan officer positions were vacant, it called on recruiting to apply its speed-hiring techniques on these positions.

By speeding up the requisition process, placing the best recruiters on these positions and identifying and eliminating “deadtime” throughout the hiring process, it cut the number of vacancy days nearly in half. At $5,000 per eliminated vacancy day, over dozens of requisitions, it increased the bank’s revenue by millions. Everyone from the CFO on down agreed that HR had substantially increased revenue. If these two brief examples are not enough for you, the next section contains the top 15 HR actions that can lead to increased corporate revenue.

The Top 15 Talent Management Actions With the Highest Impact on Revenue

Even if you’re not ready to implement an HR-wide coordinated “revenue impact strategy,” realize that there are many independent actions that the functions within talent management can take in order to increase organizational revenue. If you’re looking for some “low-hanging fruit” actions to take, here are some to consider (those with the potential for producing the most revenue impact listed first).

1. Prioritize revenue-generating business units, jobs, and employees — the highest impact and the lowest cost action is prioritization. HR needs to work with executives, the CFO, and risk management to identify and then prioritize the specific business units that generate the most revenue. You should also identify the highest revenue-generating jobs and employees. Next, you must also identify revenue “impact” jobs, which are jobs that don’t directly generate revenue but the actions of the employees in the jobs directly “influence” the likelihood of subsequent revenue generation. You should also identify revenue “impact” functions (note that product development and customer service are often the highest revenue-impact functions). Finally, you should identify and prioritize jobs where a major error would significantly decrease revenues or increase costs. Obviously after setting your priorities, you need to develop processes that ensure that the most HR resources and the best HR personnel are allocated to those priorities.
2. Targeted recruiting from competitors — recruiting talent away from your direct competitors has a high ROI, because if you are successful, your revenues will go up and theirs will go down. Start by “mapping” the revenue-generating talent at your competitors. Next, recruit away the top sales manager or exceptional salespeople from your competitors. Once you land a “magnet” individual, others are likely to follow. Other high-impact targets for your recruiting from competitors might include innovators, game-changers, pioneers, and individuals with expertise in monetizing products and services.
3. Retain revenue producers — retention has a high ROI because most of the factors that cause top revenue generators to leave are not related to their pay. Interview the most successful revenue producers and those who significantly impact revenue. During the interview, identify the factors that currently frustrate them, as well at the factors that would make their job a dream job. Put together a personalized retention plan to minimize the negatives and to increase the positives.
4. Hire revenue producers — external hiring brings in individuals with a proven track record for generating revenue. External hires also bring with them revenue-generating ideas. Focus your employer branding and recruiting processes on revenue-generating jobs. Reengineer the process so that it leads the industry in its ability to identify, attract, and hire individuals with a superior revenue-generating track record. For example, a major mobile phone network provider found that by adding an online testing component to its hiring process , the resulting call center rep that were hired produced over 10% more revenue than the untested hires.
5. Training on how to increase revenue — revenue generation and the related skills that support it must become a key corporate competency. The T&D function must target its offerings so that they cover all aspects of revenue generation. The quality of the offerings must also be improved, so that individuals show at least a 10% improvement in revenue generation after returning to their jobs after completing the T&D programs. In addition to targeting revenue-generating employees, revenue impact learning modules need to be developed so that every employee (regardless of their position) can understand the concept and subsequently improve their support of revenue-generating employees and business units. In this light, Wal-Mart routinely makes it a part of pre-shift store meetings to make all employees aware of which specific products produce the highest margins and revenue. This awareness allows employees to focus their sales and customer service efforts.
6. Identify barriers — HR must proactively use surveys, interviews, and metrics to forecast upcoming revenue-generating problems and opportunities. HR must also have a process for rapidly identifying current problems and the barriers that restrict revenue generation.
7. Create a fast-reaction team — HR must put together a team of specialists that can respond rapidly to the identified revenue problems that occur anywhere in your organization. Team members should excel at discovering HR related “root causes” and have the skills and experience necessary to solve sudden revenue generation problems.
8. Leadership development and succession must focus on revenue-related competencies – revenue generators also need to be effectively led and managed. So as a result, the leadership function needs to make revenue generation a key competency and development area for leaders. The ability to increase the revenue impact of their team should also be added as a key criterion for promoting managers and leaders.
9. Proactive internal movement — employees and contingent workers need to be proactively placed into the “right jobs” where they can have the highest possible revenue impact. The initial placement of top revenue producers needs to be regularly re-assessed so that key individuals (and even teams) are redeployed to the needed business areas. Seasonal and business cycle rotations may also be required to ensure that there is no excessive idleness among revenue generators.
10. Identify those who support revenue producers — once a year, survey your top revenue producers and ask them which individuals or support positions have directly helped/contributed to their revenue production. Make sure that these impactful support personnel are rewarded and recognized.
11. Release poor performers quickly – the performance management process must be redesigned so that it focuses on rapidly identifying, fixing, and releasing employees who fail to meet their revenue or revenue impact goals. The recruiting function should also continuously be on the lookout for top-performing talent that can be “swapped” with these lower-performing current employees.
12. Implement revenue-impact metrics and rewards – work with the COO, the CFO, and performance management to develop a process and a set of metrics that accurately assess an individual’s revenue generation and revenue impact. Rewards and recognition programs must also be focused and reengineered to better encourage revenue generation.
13. Onboarding — even the onboarding process can impact revenue generation if a weak process means that new-hires get up to speed slowly. As a result, the onboarding process must be reengineered so that new-hires on the first day clearly understand the importance of revenue generation, no matter what job they have. They also need to be informed about how their revenue generation/impact will be measured and rewarded. And finally they need to be educated as to where they can go to get help in this area.
14. Contingent workers and vendors must be included — because a significant percentage of the “workforce” are not technically employees, HR must also work to ensure that contingent workers are hired and evaluated based on their ability to impact revenue. HR should work with purchasing to ensure that vendors, contractors, and consultants are also all capable of increasing revenues.
15. Generate a direct profit — the least ambiguous of any HR action is directly generating revenue from external activities. Firms like Disney, HealthEast, Southwest, and Wachovia have generated revenue as a result of offering their HR services externally in areas including training, temp services, building a culture, and executive recruiting.

The Benchmark Firm to Copy

In addition to the 15 examples that were provided above, you should also know that the HR function at Google is the world’s leader in operationalizing a business-impact strategic approach. HR leaders at Google consistently use metrics and mathematical algorithms to scientifically improve business performance from programs like hiring, retention, and leadership. HR leaders can tell you the revenue impact of people management offerings like 20% time, free food, workspace design, and collaboration practices. They can also easily show you which business units (i.e. Adwords) have the most impact on revenue.

Understanding the five key components of a “revenue focused” HR strategy.

If you decide to implement this revenue-focus strategy, be aware that there are five key components that make a “revenue-focused” HR strategy successful.

Collaboration with the CFO — the first component is collaboration with the CFO. HR leadership must work directly with the CFO’s office (who is the undisputed “king” of measuring revenue). Together they must develop a credible process for proving when an action has a revenue impact and what the value of that impact actually is. Next, HR can provide the CFO’s office with a list of its intended actions and then finance can help to sort out any on the list that simply wouldn’t be credible no matter what the data said (i.e. an example of an action that might be sorting out as not credible could be the premise that hiring and retaining better janitors would increase revenues).

Make it an HR goal — the second component of the strategy is goal setting by making “impacting revenue” a major HR and talent management goal. As a major HR goal, it would need to be part of every HR function’s execution plan. The importance of the goal would be reinforced by adding revenue impact to the HR reward and metric structure. Together these actions would help to get everyone in HR to focus on this goal.

Prioritization — the third component is prioritization. If you start with the assumption that there will be no additional budget at least initially for this strategy,focus and concentrate your current HR budget and your best HR people on the business units, the jobs, and the employees that have the most impact on increasing revenue. Instead of equal treatment or first-come first-serve, high-priority jobs and employees would be serviced first. Resources would also be channeled toward the HR programs and processes which proved to have the most success on increasing revenue (i.e. usually they are hiring, retention, training, metrics, and rewards).

A process for identifying problems and barriers — the fourth component of the strategy involves identifying barriers to prohibit revenue from increasing. By applying benchmarking, research, and analyzing metrics, HR can determine which “people management problems” or barriers are having the most impact on reducing revenues. (Examples of problems include extended position vacancies in revenue-generating jobs, high turnover among top salespeople, salespeople unwilling to attend sales training etc.). The same effort should be put into identifying “positive people management opportunities” that when taken advantage of, directly increase revenues.

Best-practice sharing – the final strategy component is best-practice identification and sharing. Under this component, HR uses research, benchmarking, and metrics to proactively identify and then rapidly spread the implementation of the most effective revenue improving “people management practices” to all managers throughout the organization.

Final Thoughts

If you are still skeptical about this strategy and approach, ask your CEO whether they would prefer that you hire great clerks versus great salespeople. Also ask them if they would prefer that HR excel at low hiring costs, hiring without fewer legal issues, or would they instead prefer you to hire innovators and individuals who can increase revenues by 10 to 20%?

Although the initial concept might seem daunting, a number of advanced HR departments have been using a piecemeal approach to increasing corporate revenue for years. If you’re HR department were to adopt “revenue impact” as a primary HR strategy, the net impact for even a medium-sized firm would literally be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you implemented the strategy, not only would you “have a seat at the table” but you would be listened to and respected because you successfully made the transformation from “overhead function” to a strategic contributor. Your work would be noted in the annual report, so even the shareholders would become aware of the major contribution that HR made.

And incidentally, if you like this strategy, you should also consider related HR strategies. Where instead of focusing on revenue, the strategy would focus on increasing quality, speed/agility, customer service or innovation throughout the organization as a result of HR actions.

And one final question … Did this article succeed in expanding your thinking?

In 2011 at Quintiles, however, an adventurous theme was implemented (one I hinted at a year ago).

In addition to the cash rewards, successful referrers would also be entered into a grand prize drawing for an exclusive trip of their choice with National Geographic Expeditions.

This adventurous approach heightened engagement. Employee referrals began to constantly rise. Three winners, in each of three regions, were randomly picked by Chairman Dr. Dennis Gillings at the close of the fourth quarter. The theme was well received and emphasizes our culture valuing adventure and experience, as well as encouraging world knowledge and culture sharing.

The employee referral program for 2012 holds more ambitious incentives. A mid-year winner will get to attend the 2012 Summer Olympics in London! This reinforces the concepts of value of competition, being the best, pushing the limits, global cultures all coming together for positive reasons, and valuing experiences and memories. We are looking for the world’s best talent — just like the Olympics attracts.

• Laura gets 30% of her hires from referrals, has used only one headhunter in the past six months, and has a 42-day average time to fill. She filled 11 jobs last month.
• Jerry gets 20% of his hires from referrals, uses headhunters regularly, and has a 65-day average time to fill. He filled eight jobs last month.

Is Laura better than Jerry? Does Jerry suck? 

Wait.

What if I told you Jerry has 300 more Twitter followers than Laura? Ha. Now who sucks, Laura!? :)

I love – love — to hear provocateurs speak at conferences. I love to hear opinionated people make a case for doing stuff better, pushing us to hire better, faster. But I get tired of the measuring sticks we use to decide if we’re nailing it.

I spent most of my career in corporate recruiting, as a recruiting director with Amazon and Expedia. And now as a consultant, I get to work with some great companies. As we work to help them with sourcing strategies, recruiting process and systems improvement, or even recruiter and hiring manager training, we learn a lot about how they do what they do. And what we find is that there are a bunch of recruiters out there that don’t suck, but who think they do suck. That’s a problem. People who think they suck don’t usually do great things. And we need as much “great” as we can get.

Our team gets asked, “How does our [time to fill, source of hires, recruiter productivity, employer brand, candidate experience] compare to other clients you work with?” And we can share averages and help them to see what they do better and not-as-well as others. I completely get why we all want to know this stuff. But can we really compare one company to another? One team of recruiters to another? Along some dimensions and some standards, sure, probably.

But as many before me have pointed out, comparing cost per hire, time to fill, recruiter productivity … it’s not silly to benchmark, but I’m not sure the results are really that helpful. Why?

Geez, just start to make a list of all the things that may be different between two companies or two recruiting teams. Here are several:

The type of people hired

• Entry level customer service vs. software engineers vs. outside sales people

The number of recruiters

• This usually drives req loads/recruiter, which can almost dictate what a recruiter can/can’t realistically do

Access to scheduling and sourcing support

• Some of you have teams supporting you, and some of you are one-person, ass-kickers with a phone, Outlook, Google, a free LinkedIn license, and Excel for your ATS

The role of the HR generalist

• Friend or foe? Manager (or maybe they think they’re your manager ☺) or peer partner?

The engagement level of the hiring managers

• Are they sourcing? Do they drive quick, quality hiring decisions? Do they help close?

Your brand

• Do you have a strong consumer brand? A strong employer brand? Or, do you have to spend 10 minutes of your sourcing calls just to explain what your company does?

Your location

• Do people want to work where you have jobs? (In the late 1990s, before everyone knew who Amazon was, 50% of our sales pitch to software engineers was focused on Seattle, since we ended up needing to relocate the majority of our hires — much harder for my recruiters to source people from sunny California than companies who hired locally.)
• Are you in Europe, with practices and laws that slow down your process, even though you’re ready to move fast?

Your compensation packages

• Do you pay 50% of market? Or, 70% percent of market? Do you offer equity?

Tools!

• Do you have — and use — Linkedin Recruiter, Avature CRM, Job posting distributors … even an ATS?

Even the basics of how things are measured vary wildly. Take time to fill …

• Does your clock start when the position was budgeted, when the incumbent quit, when the req was approved, when the req was posted, or when you led the strategy kickoff meeting? I’ve seen it so many ways.

It’s almost never apples to apples. Req loads in retail and healthcare are typically much higher than in tech and corporate functions, so comparing results across industries is hard. And even within the same industry — take retail — you may have a model with a lot of centralized sourcing support, or one with field HR generalists who own recruitment, or one with only foundational field support (where hiring managers are largely on their own, with support from their district managers and a three-ring binder from HR).

And I find the same to be true when I’ve interviewed recruiters, trying to compare them to each other. I’ve probably interviewed 50 recruiters from Microsoft in the past 15 years, for example, and it’s even hard to compare Microsoft recruiters to each other!

My point is that very few of us will get a lot of value from comparing our performance to other companies. We’d likely get more from comparing ourselves to our internal targets, to goals that make sense in our resource model, and to goals that come from our unique business and talent needs.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t benchmark externally. That can be key to making business cases, key to executive influence, and key to getting your raise. And don’t get me wrong — I want more from the folks at the Corporate Executive Board, Staffing.org, CareerXroads (great, transparent Source of Hire reports), not less. It’s very helpful. You just need to … Put. It. All. In. Context.

I want you to hear it from me first. You don’t suck.

• I’d love comments from those of you who have worked in multiple environments, to share with everyone what kind of differences really help — or hurt — you.
• I’d love to hear people share how they gather external benchmark data that really helps them.
• And I’d love to get a halleluiah from people who are kickin’ ass despite the fact that they have little budget, little support, unrealistic req loads, and systems that make their job harder, not easier.

Many in talent management have been hoping that this chaos is a short-term phenomenon, but it is a permanent condition that we must all learn how to manage under.

Because they were designed for more predictable times, almost all current HR, talent management, and workforce planning processes fail to perform in this chaotic environment. In a VUCA environment, there are more changes, a faster rate of change, and the size of the changes are so impactful that they must be labeled as “disruptive.” So the question for talent leadership becomes, “how do you effectively hire, develop, place, and retain individuals and leaders in the volatile environment where literally everything changes in months rather than years?”

V.U.C.A. (pronounced voo – ka) is an acronym for an environment that is dominated by:

Volatility – where things change fast but not in a predictable trend or repeatable pattern.

Uncertainty – where major “disruptive” changes occur frequently. In this environment, the past is not an accurate predictor of the future, and identifying and preparing for “what will come next” is extremely difficult.

Complexity — where there are numerous difficult-to-understand causes and mitigating factors involved in a problem.

Ambiguity – where the causes and the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” behind the things that are happening are unclear and hard to ascertain.

Talent Management Has Been Lagging in VUCA Preparation

The concept of operating in a chaotic environment is not new. Tom Peters has been talking about managing under chaos for years, and “decision-making under uncertainty” is a well-established academic field. What is new is that most economic, business, and political leaders have realized that the VUCA environment is a permanent condition.

Business executives have been preparing for the VUCA environment for years. Although most of the initial work was done by the military and in counterterrorism, VUCA planning has been part of business processes like supply chain and risk management for years. A few firms like GE, Unilever, and McDonald’s have even begun changing their leadership development model to fit the VUCA environment. But unfortunately, no one in recruiting, retention, skill development, compensation, performance management, onboarding, etc. has paid more than lip surface attention to this strategic problem. As a result, the time has come to face the fact that you can’t be strategic in talent management, HR, or recruiting unless you can manage and thrive in a VUCA environment.

Why Talent Managers and Workforce Planners Must Prepare for VUCA

Under the established 20th-century talent management model, the future was relatively predictable. As a result, firms hired, trained employees, and developed leaders in order to prepare for the “predictable” upcoming business environment. Most firms prepared their employees for the single-most likely future scenario (i.e. scenario A), which was usually a 5%-10% extrapolation from the current situation.

The more advanced firms prepared for not just the single-most-likely scenario but also for one or two alternative predictable scenarios (i.e. scenario A and B, C). But unfortunately, in a world of continuous disruption and VUCA, using this traditional model usually means that you end up hiring, training, and developing for business and talent management scenarios that will literally never occur. Planning, forecasting, and training simply cannot work if the environment that you are preparing for never appears!

A Quick Example to Illustrate Complexity and Volatility

For example, recruiting routinely plans for three distinct scenarios: no hiring, moderate hiring, and large-scale hiring. However, in a VUCA environment, talent acquisition must plan for each of those scenarios, but in addition, it must also plan for periods where the firm will do rapid hiring in some business units and regions, while simultaneously having a hiring freeze or even layoffs in other business units.

What Is Needed Is an Agile Talent Management Model

The 21st-century VUCA model that I am advocating requires talent management to have plans for handling numerous “disruptive events” that traditional narrow workforce planning simply can’t handle. Some of those disruptive events might include generational shifts that occur every six years, social media changing the way we communicate, and simultaneous talent surpluses and shortages.

One possible conclusion for talent management leaders could be that you should stop any planning process that never accurately forecasts the future. But that would be a major mistake. Instead, in a VUCA environment, talent management needs to develop an “agile model” that prepares for a wider range of options (i.e. scenario A-Z) but more importantly, it must also develop Talent Management processes/systems that can actually shift and handle any unpredicted upcoming event “just-in-time.” It might seem counterintuitive at first, but the military has proven that you make people more agile and successfully prepare them for handling unpredicted events that literally no one thought of in advance.

Things That Talent Management Must Start Doing to Meet the VUCA Environment

Talent management leaders must prepare for disruptive problems and opportunities that cannot be predicted. Some of the action steps that you should take to prepare for complete surprises and the VUCA environment include:

• Agile employees — Develop as a primary goal a focus on the hiring, training, and retaining of employees and managers who are agile, who thrive in a VUCA environment, and those who have the capability of acting effectively in unforeseen and unpredicted situations.
• Agile processes – Require agility, flexibility, and a rapid change capability as an essential component in all current and new talent management processes and programs.
• Self-obsolescence of processes — Require all talent management programs and processes to include a component that continually “self-obsoletes” its own current practices and replaces them with updated ones.
• Training to solve unanticipated problems — training and development must create the capability to prepare employees and managers to identify and effectively handle previously unknown problems. A high volume of scenario training and simulations can make an employee more comfortable and confident when they encounter a completely new situation. With repetition, employees can eventually develop skills and their own processes for handling “brand-new” volatile and complex situations that are full of uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Focus on innovation — Prioritize talent management so that it focuses on innovators, game-changers, and pioneers who are essential for success in a VUCA environment.
• Rapid learning — Develop systems to increase the speed of individual and organizational learning.
• More internal movement — Develop process to proactively speed up the movement of employees internally to where they can have a greater impact.
• Contingent labor — Use contingent labor as a significant percentage of the workforce, in order to increase your capability to meet sudden upturns, downturns, and new skill needs.
• Rapid increase in talent — Develop the capability for rapid hiring for sudden needs through poaching, with pre-identifying talent pools and by building professional communities.
• Rapid release of talent — Develop the capability for rapidly releasing surplus and inappropriately skilled workers.
• Fluid job descriptions — Develop continually evolving job descriptions and hiring standards that reflect the continually changing work.
• Outsourcing for flexibility — Use outsourcing to fill sudden needs and overflow work.
• Competitive advantage — Develop talent management processes and programs that provide a continual competitive advantage over other talent competitors.

Things That Talent Management Must Stop Doing to Meet the VUCA Environment

Leaders must dramatically modify or stop doing the following things to prepare for a VUCA environment.

• Stop seeking permanent solutions in talent management and HR
• Stop relying on the past and trends as an accurate predictor of the future
• Stop benchmarking best practices and solutions to most current problems
• Stop assuming that long-term employee retention is possible or even desirable
• Stop assuming that “one-size-fits-all” is a good approach to managing employees
• Eliminate “fit” as a desirable criterion in hiring and retention
• Stop assuming that the corporate culture and even corporate values should automatically remain fixed

You Must Also Prepare for Disruptive Changes That Can Be Predicted

Although these listed problems will likely appear unexpectedly, these dramatic changes in talent management can be anticipated, so they must be planned for.

• A continually changing set of required employee skills and job duties and a huge gap between the needed and the available skill sets
• A completely new set of leadership skills that will focus on agility, flexibility, and in developing a “just-in-time” solutions capability within the team
• Dramatic fluctuations in employee turnover
• Continually changing candidate expectations
• Dramatic shifts in the volume and quality of applications
• Frequent changes in offer acceptance rates
• Continuous development of new communications and learning tools
• Generational changes that occurs every 6 years instead of 20

Final Thoughts

The new talent management model that I am recommending is based on the assumption that for the foreseeable future, most problems and opportunities will simply not be predictable. The model however does take advantage of the fact that the skill and capability of handling completely new unforeseen situations can be developed. My challenge and question to talent management leaders is “What are you doing to ensure that every talent management process and employee can produce optimal results in a VUCA environment? The time is come to put together a planning session devoted to making the shift toward the new agile talent management model.

One of the parts I love about this movie is the scene where the squirrels can identify a good nut from a bad one. I was struck by how nice it would be if we, as HR professionals, could simply knock someone on the head and, depending on what we hear, know whether they were a good fit or not.

But alas, we don’t have that luxury; we have to ascertain whether a candidate is a good fit based on the information we have at the time. And, as most decisions go, the result is only as good as the data leading up to it.

Herein lies the foundation for the upcoming pre-conference workshop for the ERE Expo in San Diego. Recruiting Beyond the Job Description is a pre-conference workshop designed to help you take the data you have about a job, combined with the commitment you have as professionals, and build a recruitment and selection process that greatly increases the chances for a good organization and job fit.

So many of us have become complacent when it comes to recruiting and filling our vacancies. Employee “churn” has become a part of our lives and we think nothing of it when a new employee leaves before the honeymoon period is over! I have even heard some recruiters claim this churn is “job security” for them! Egads!

Recruiting Beyond the Job Description will help you understand that you don’t have to be limited by the inherent flaws of traditional job descriptions. During this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to extract “hidden data” about a job to identify what competencies you should be searching for and testing against to ensure the selected candidate is a great match.

I will walk you through a practical and effective job analysis process to identify both technical and behavioral competencies needed for success in the job. You are free to bring job descriptions you are currently working from or you can use the ones I provide. Either way, you will leave the workshop armed with knowledge and motivation to Recruit Beyond the Job Description and increase you chances of making a selection that will stick! It is certainly not as cute as trained squirrels, but I promise you the process is just as magical.

In a business world that is increasingly dominated by social media, it simply makes sense to hire individuals with extensive social networks and the ability to communicate with and influence others.

The major players include Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Empire Avenue. Klout and PeerIndex scores index to 100 while Kred scores reach 1,000. Empire Avenue is a stock-market simulation type game in which participants (stocks) earn virtual income based on social network activity and investments in others.

Using such measures as a screening tool helps identify talented people who have demonstrated skills relevant to a number of professional jobs. When you hire an individual who uses their network effectively, you have the potential to benefit from the collective knowledge and skills of the network, not just the individual.

Look Beyond the “Score” for Transferable Skills

“Buying influence” by recruiting someone based on their extensive contacts and their ability to influence others is not a new approach, but tools like those mentioned make it much easier to identify the level of influence that you are recruiting. Obviously, the use of social media analytics make the most sense when you are recruiting for jobs that are primarily focused on creating and managing a firm’s public-facing persona, but the skills involved in effective social networking extend much further into the professional landscape.

Individuals who are effective on social media become successful because they have a wide range of skills and capabilities that often lead to success in sales, customer service, communications, branding, and even analyst roles. Smart recruiters and hiring managers should look beyond the actual score that an individual has achieved and focus on identifying and assessing the skills the individual used to build or maintain their audience.

The 10 skill sets and capabilities that are generally required to effectively gain social media influence include:

1. Communications – they have shown that they are effective and frequent communicators
2. Relationship building — they are successful at attracting and building relationships with others
3. Influencing – they have the ability to influence others and to get others to read and spread their messages
4. Reputation — their reputation, credibility, recommendations, and ability to produce “Liked” content means that they will be listened to
5. Reach – their extensive contacts, friends, followers, and subscribers means that any messages they send will reach thousands
6. Branding – individuals with high social media scores have demonstrated they know how to build a personal brand and that knowledge may be transferable to product branding
7. Crowdsource solutions — their extensive network means that they will be able to quickly “crowdsource” answers to problems that they encounter
8. Writing ability — individuals who have a long blog history have demonstrated both their writing style and ability
9. Knowledge of technology — they have demonstrated that they are on the leading edge of social media technology
10. Adaptable – they are capable of continually adapting to the rapidly changing social media environment (if they have maintained their scores over a period of time)

Social Media Influence Assessment Is Not New

Although Klout/Kred scores may be new to you, using the Internet and social media to assess prospects is certainly not new. It is now quite common to find, assess, and do reference checks on candidates using Google searches, LinkedIn, and Facebook profiles, and the assessment of work samples that can be found online. In fact, a Microsoft-sponsored survey conducted by Cross-Tab found that 79% of HR and recruiting professionals responded that they currently use online reputation information as part of their hiring process.

Influence Scores Are Still in Their Infancy

Recruiters should be aware that while social media analytics are hot, the emerging “influence scores” are far from perfect. Each provider has weaknesses in their approach and all of them can be manipulated to some extent (just as search engine optimization can manipulate web page rankings). As a result, I recommend that they never be used as an elimination screen, but instead be used as one part of a multi-pronged assessment approach.

Recommended Action Steps

Before you select one to use, recruiters need to do their research so they understand the strengths and weaknesses of each provider’s approach compared to the needs of your firm. Obviously, the scores should be applied first to the jobs that require a high degree of social media savvy and where extensive contacts are essential to job success.

If the scores are to be passed along to hiring managers, the managers need to be provided with some information as to what conclusions can be fairly reached from these scores. And finally, if you have some time, identify the scores of your top- and bottom-performing current employees. Then use simple statistics to see if within your firm, there is a measurable positive correlation between social media scores and an employee’s on-the-job performance.

Final Thoughts

If you want to find your own individual score, it is easy and free to sign on to any of these services. If you are an applicant, adding your Kred or Klout score to your resume at the very least will let the recruiter know that you are aware that one’s online influence/exposure can be measured. If you are a corporate recruiter or recruiting leader, begin examining the pros and cons of these continually evolving tools. Although they still have many shortcomings and issues, some variation of them will become a standard assessment tool in the not-too-distant future.

To help here, I’m in the process of consolidating and summarizing all of the articles, webcasts, and recordings I’ve prepared in the past few years on passive candidate recruiting into some type of eBook format. Some of the stuff actually works, so this could be a pretty good handbook on how to use Performance-based Hiring to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates. To get started I figured I’d put the Table of Contents together with a short description. This is shown below.

You might find it useful as you compare this to your company’s approach to passive candidate recruiting.

Lou’s Rules for Finding, Recruiting, and Hiring Passive Candidates

1. Review your hiring process workflow. The process used to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates is fundamentally different than the one used for active candidates. Make sure you’re using the right one.
2. Engage your hiring manager. If your hiring manager is not totally committed to hiring outstanding people, don’t bother with recruiting passive candidates. You won’t hire any, so don’t waste your energy. Post an ad instead, and hope for the best.
3. Convert jobs into career opportunities. There is not one top passive candidate on the planet who is interested in a lateral transfer, so stop using job descriptions that list skills, duties, responsibilities, and competencies for recruiting or advertising purposes. Instead, define the big challenges of the job and the impact the person can make. We call these performance profiles.
4. Only use compelling ads and emails. Passive candidates will always check out the job posting once they decide to find out more. That’s why the job posting itself must address the career-oriented mentality of the passive candidate. Here’s an example of a position we recently posted on LinkedIn that meets all of the requisite standards. Notice how skills are presented.
5. Develop a workforce plan for all critical positions. It’s difficult enough to find, recruit, and hire passive candidates. It’s worse if you don’t have enough time to do it right. You should know today whom you need to hire over the next 3-6 months for every critical position in your company.
6. Prepare a sequenced sourcing plan. Before you begin looking, you need a plan outlining all of the likely sourcing channels sequenced to maximize quality of hire in the shortest time to fill and at the lowest cost. Start with a supply vs. demand analysis by geography in combination with a compensation analysis for top performers.
7. Create an ideal candidate persona. Define your target prospect from all perspectives including demographics, 360° connections, career and personal needs, decision criteria, job-hunting status, and the most likely companies to source from. If you don’t know who you’re looking for, you’ll waste a lot of time in all the wrong places.
8. PERP your ERP and create a VTC. Get your employees to proactively connect (the P in PERP) with all of the best people they’ve ever worked with in the past. Then when you start asking for employee referrals (the ERP) for a specific position you’ll already have the best lined up. Collectively, this network represents a Virtual Talent Community (VTC).
9. Only call people who are qualified and who will call you back. Getting pre-qualified referrals is the key to passive candidate recruiting. Getting someone credible, like a co-worker, to tell you about a great person with whom they’ve worked in the past is like gold. For one thing, they’ll call you back. For another, you already know they are perfectly qualified.
10. Network, network, network following the 80/20 rule. Great recruiters don’t see LinkedIn simply as a list of 140mm+ people. To them it’s a one-degree connection to every top person in the world. That’s why getting 2-3 pre-qualified people on every call is essential. Then spend 80% of your time only calling these pre-qualified referrals, and get 2-3 more people on each of these subsequent calls.
11. Bridge the gap on first contact. Whenever you call a passive prospect the person will always ask about “Day 1” criteria (salary, location, title, company) to see if it’s worth discussing. Yet when the person accepts an offer the “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria (career growth, team, cultural fit, total rewards, work/life balance, team) trounces the Day 1 stuff. Bridging this gap in the first five minutes is the key to successful passive candidate recruiting.
12. Maintain applicant control from first contact until the start date. You need to ensure full disclosure, but too often passive prospects opt-out too early for all the wrong reasons. Candidates need to see your job as a true career opportunity, and one that they have to fight to get. You achieve this through applicant control: staying the buyer, not the seller.
13. Formalize the final candidate decision-making process at the beginning. After you bridge the gap on first contact, the prospect must recognize that the process you suggest he/she uses to compare and select opportunities should be based on three sets of criteria: Day 1, Year 1, and Beyond. We’ll walk you through the form we use in our training, if you’re interested.
14. Don’t take “No” for an answer. Persistence is the hallmark of the passive candidate recruiter. No matter what you do, the best candidates will always have concerns and objections. The key: uncover the concern, validate it, and then address it. Sometimes you’ll lose for the right reasons. Losing for the wrong reasons is a shame.
15. Close on career opportunity, not compensation. Use the assessment to look for differences between what you need accomplished in comparison to what the person has achieved. The gap represents the career growth opportunity for the person. As long as this gap is big enough, compensation will become secondary.
16. It’s not over until it’s over. Don’t stop recruiting just because the candidate has accepted your offer. The person will get a counteroffer or an offer from someone who just discovered your great passive candidate is looking. Get the hiring manager and the hiring team involved during this time between the acceptance and start date. Idea: review the performance profile and get the person to start planning out the big projects.

From beginning to end, the process for finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates is fundamentally different from the one used for active candidates. If hiring great people is important to your company’s success, the process used to recruit passive candidates should become your company’s default method, not the exception. Imagine the difference this would make.

As hiring professionals, we need to be investing in both of our clients — hiring managers and candidates. We are technically in a sales role; we need to sell opportunities to candidates and candidates to hiring managers. Investing in any sales role is not necessarily about money, but more about time.

Challenge yourself to take a quick litmus test:

• Do I always call my candidates back?
• Do I always respond to my candidates’ emails?
• Do I prep my candidates for phone interviews?
• Do I prep my candidates for in-person interviews?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” it might be a good indication as to why you’ve had offers declined in the past. If you don’t prep every candidate, you are still going to have offers accepted. But the more time you invest, the more likely you will see a positive return. Recruiting has the same properties of financial investing. If we add $500 a month to our 401(k), we will see a lot more in 10 years than if we only add $250 a month.

Investing time in each candidate can have a much more significant payoff than just an accepted offer. Candidates who we place in a role and maintain a relationship with will often refer us to friends, family, and even former co-workers who could potentially become candidates themselves. Additionally, a placed candidate can offer us good insight into their department, their manager, and future openings they foresee even before a new requisition lands on our desk.

What about the candidates who don’t get the job? We still need to treat them as clients and know that there may be other opportunities to place them in the future. These candidates, if treated well, can also become a great source of future candidates. If you have invested the time with them and they don’t get the job, they often still appreciate the time you took to help them and will continue to reward you for many years to come.

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section.

Idea 1: Stop any branding activities and focus totally on referrals. If you are in a nationwide or global firm with a known reputation, branding is a secondary concern. You already attract people because of your product or service brand and most likely have a pipeline of good candidates. Whenever you have an opening, just let employees know and ask them to use their networks to bring in any additional people you might need.

Referrals are free, fast, and effective. Incentives are not really needed and may actually cause employees to reach out to less-than-optimal candidates in the chance of getting whatever reward your offer. Instead give the employees who refer the best candidates, whether they are hired or not, a title such as “Preferred Referrer” or “Trusted Referrer,” and give anyone they refer priority consideration. This will incentivize others to become a titled referrer and raise the bar on the type of candidates you get.

Idea 2: Use online assessments and reduce interviews. Forget screening interviews, meet and greets, and extensive resume reviews. Instead invest in developing one or two screening tests that can be given online, are scored instantly, and provide both you and the candidate with feedback.

These kinds of screening tools can reduce your workload, improve the candidate experience, and result in much better candidates. The challenge is to develop the right tests that actually screen for the characteristics that are important for the job or for the organization.

There may need to be several tests for different positions or levels, but none of this is more costly or time-consuming than endless phone screens and interviews. I would go so far as to say that recruiters should never interview anyone in person. By implementing online screening and eliminating face-to-face interviews, you could potentially expect a recruiter to handle 20-50% more open requisitions.

There are many firms who can do this for reasonable costs, and the online testing and screening business is growing rapidly. Charles Handler, one of the other writers on ERE, has just released a book cataloging and commenting on most testing services available today.

Idea 3: Use video interviews heavily. Video interviews are a powerful and effective way to do more with less and improve legal compliance.

Video interviews are no longer taboo, and many candidates find them much more effective and less stressful than face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews are expensive and time consuming and most of the time lead nowhere. Probably 75% of all interviews do not lead to an offer because of poor screening and poor candidate qualification. By conducting one live interview that is recorded, many people can view the same interview and evaluate the same responses. This leads to consistency, the lack of which is the greatest legal issue with multi-person, live interviews. By recoding the interview, there is proof that the interviews were done legally and that no discrimination occurred.

Idea 4: Train recruiters and hiring managers thoroughly on closing candidates. Make sure every recruiter and as many hiring managers as possible know how to identify potential acceptance issues and how to overcome objections.

Most acceptance failures are because someone — a recruiter or a hiring manager — did not pick up on signs that a candidate had reservations or issues that would be difficult to overcome: perhaps a reluctant spouse, a nagging doubt about the organization or the project, a desire to stay at their current employer, and so on.

It takes practice and training to notice these things and many recruiters are not well trained to not only notice the potential problem, but to deal with it. I often recommend that recruiters take a traditional sales training class where these skills are and the methods to overcome them are taught.

Idea 5: Communicate with mobile technology and via social media. Getting feedback to candidates regularly and fast is one of the ways to differentiate your organization from other and to get first-mover advantage with a candidate.

Most candidates today are more than willing to receive feedback and updates via their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other accounts. Email is fine, but experiment with other methods that cut down the time you spend and get the word out faster. Hiring managers should consider interviewing candidates using Skype or other tools. You could develop a mobile app to provide feedback or updates.

There are probably at least a dozen more ideas that you could try that would lower costs, improve speed, and provide higher quality candidates. But, then again, by doing it the way we always have, we ensure job security — for a while.