In today’s business environment, there’s no room for bad hiring decisions. The cost is too great. The risk is too high.
Many HR professionals are quickly realizing how important it is to hire the right candidates, and that making the wrong hires is just more costly than they can bear. We had great turnout on May 4th, when we aired a live interview with Dr. David Jones, the author of Million Dollar Hire, discussing this topic specifically.
People were really engaged, and asked us some great questions, some of which we were not able to address in the interview itself. Dr. Jones did however, take the time to answer these questions for us, and we’ve listed them for you below.
If you missed the interview, you can watch it now to learn how with recruiting and hiring best practices, systems and technology you can drive your company’s bottom line and create a financial payoff.
Questions and Answers:
Q: For recruiting, what is the difference between a “buyer’s” and “seller’s” market?
A: In a “buyer’s” market (employer has the advantage) it’s possible to screen more closely and demand more information of candidates; and there’s no problem with setting tough (but fair) performance objectives for new hires. Here is where employers can dial in and draw the best payoff. Here is where the greatest impact on the future workforce is easiest to install through hiring. In a “seller’s” market (too few candidates), the focus is on sourcing, attracting, and holding candidates so that a decision can be made before a competitor grabs the best ones. It’s more complex, though some companies face one type of market for some jobs, and another type for other of its jobs. Tracking recruiting results like time-to-hire, candidate rejection rates, offer rejection rates, candidate abandonment etc., as is done by many technology platforms can inform a company about which positions can be treated one way, and which demand the other. The numbers are pretty much the same in North America for broad categories of jobs.
Q: Which particular social networks do you recommend using?
A: LinkedIn works quite well for professional positions and Facebook can help for lower level jobs. A better solution, though, is to bring technology to bear that scans all the social networks for information on a given candidate.
Q: Is there a specific job board that is proven to be more successful than others?
A: Unfortunately, no. Specific job boards often focus on specific kinds of candidates. Today’s technology solutions, though, let employers scrape many job boards simultaneously, avoiding the need to limit attention to just a few.
Q: What is your recommended avenue for finding good sales people? We need sales people in every state in the US.
A: Depending on the volume you need, one popular solution today is to link with a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm to generate, or even screen and assess, candidates nationwide. Yes, there is a cost, but many of the RPO providers bring the best technology platforms, candidate pools, and local delivery capabilities to the game. It’s a fast-growing segment of the recruiting marketplace, and one that saves any single company from needing to create, structure, and take on the costs of “doing it themselves.”
Q: What is the best way to “wade through” the large amount of applicants that we get for job roles right now?
A: Given what can be earned/saved by “doing it right,” I shy away from picking just one thing that should drive hiring decisions. With today’s technology, even small to mid-size companies can afford to set up an entire “hiring funnel,” that step by step narrows the initial candidate group by using different techniques (e.g., pre-screening checklists, tests, structured interviews, candidate profiles, references, etc.) to look at the competencies that underlie strong performance. Skipping over any of the job’s key competencies, or measuring it poorly amounts to the same mistake as not checking all the indicator readings before the plane takes off… mistakes will be made. When you think about the money invested with each hiring decision, and the relatively low cost added by “doing it right,” there’s no need to pick and choose how to approach candidate evaluation. Place the least expensive elements of the process first, screen out candidates at each step, and continue until there is a clear basis for accepting/rejecting each candidate.
Q: What screening tools do you recommend for specific roles?
A: All these questions deal with matching assessment tools to the knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality characteristics that come with a particular job. Chapters 8 and 9 in my book offer a good deal of information in this area, but the basic answer is that there needs to be a clear, rational linkage between what it takes to succeed in the job, and what assessment tools are used to screen candidates. There is a great deal of research literature summarized in Chapter 9 that links specific kinds of screening tools to payoff. In addition, Chapter 4 offers real world examples of the kinds of assessment and screening programs that have shown the very best payoff for specific kinds of jobs.
Q: We have under-employed (over-qualified candidates desparate for full time employment) many recent new hires. Any cutting edge recommendations for retaining these employees longer than one year?
A: Focus on internal promotion to fill higher-level jobs. Keep the new hires interested and hopeful of moving up; and show that it can happen. Also, spend much time with their supervisors showing them how to draw on the richer skills, experience, and expectations of this group by giving them latitude, stretch assignments, tough challenges. In other words, shape their work so that what you ask them to do is closer to the skills they’ve brought with them. The key here is their supervisors. If they fail in making this idea happen, you’ll loose the new hires as soon as they find other opportunities; and they’ll be a source of trouble in the meantime.
Q: How long on the average should it take to find the right candidate?
A: Tough question. It depends where you are, how you approach it, and what you offer the candidate. If you’re “in the market” in all these areas, there’s no reason today to spend more than 30-45 days filling a position. If it takes longer, then there’s a weakenss somewhere in the system that needs fixing.
Q: What are some good tools for assessing a candidates “dark side” characteristics?
A: A number of tools claim to assess dark side characteristics. In my experience the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) is one of the best. You can find more information about the tool at www.hoganassessments.com. This is not the same as “emotional intelligence,” as normally defined. Instead, the HDS taps constructs associated with personality dimensions typical of those who show poor management of their behavior when it comes to interacting with others. Chapter 10 of my book digs a good bit deeper into these ideas, and offers references to a good number of published research studies that show how the personality dimensions addressed by the HDS link with subordinate turnover, executive failure, and poor engagement on the part of those who must deal with who score high on these dark side tendencies. I use the HDS frequently in designing candidate screening programs. As noted during the webinar, I just completed a project were we found the HDS to be a very strong predictor of turnover among both sales and account management professionals.
Q: How much of the “done that” would you say is important when hiring a person for a role. And how does “can do/will do” combine with this?
A: How much emphasis you give assessing “can do” vs. “will do” vs. “able to” vs. “done that” really depends on the nature of the job, how much you need a person to bring technical competence with them, as opposed to learning it once on the job, and what tools you have at hand. Chapter 7 in my book opens this idea with a good many examples. In addition, though, the key concept that really can help you answer the question is to stick with the idea of “assessing the whole candidate,” as described in Chapter 9. The central idea is to avoid spending all your time in a single area of competence (can do), and missing really important information in another area (will do). If there’s a time or cost budget involved, then it’s best to tap each area to the degree possible, rather than spending all the budget in just one area.
Q: How do you attract Top Grade candidates with the compensation philosophy of total cash compensation targeted at 50th percentile of market?
A: It’s a little tougher, and if there are no good non-comp supplements, then it comes to “selling” the candidate on career progression, speed of movement, autonomy of action, and “resume value” of the position. It also helps to pull the manager into the process and call on them to be a key to “selling the candidate,” along with the opportunity to meet and talk about the company with other incumbents who will be supportive of the company’s mission, values, and work climate.
Q: How can you get the bottom performers to out perform the top performers?
A: The research is pretty clear; training and development helps, but far better payoff comes in hiring those with better basic aptitudes, better skills, and better workplace personality attributes. Start better… stay better. That’s very basic in the science of human skills and abilities. While research also shows that lower-skilled hires turnover more quickly, much is lost while they remain, and all the efforts invested to “make them better” fall far short of the returns gained in hiring the best at the outset. That’s the theme of the book – invest in identifying the best candidates, rather than in trying to cover your mistakes further down the road.
Q: Your concept of validity crucially depends on being able to measure the financial contribution of individual contributors. What methods are there for measuring individual contribution at the executive and middle management levels?
A: Many. Performance against objectives can be translated to financial terms; at least, pretty closely. Subordinate turnover costs, recruiting costs, lost time costs also capture the leader’s performance.
Many recruiters have already embraced social media as a channel to find talent. For those of you who haven’t…what are you waiting for? Some are choosing to ignore it by sticking their head in the sand. Trust me, it’s not going away. Not only will you lose out on a great source of talent, you will be at a disadvantage to your competitors. Consider the following quote from an article titled, Capitalising on social media: tomorrow’s challenge for talent seekers:
