Might be your fault—
I know that’s hard to read. With over thirty-nine years in the selection business working with hundreds of clients, the most difficult challenge I face is getting business owners and hiring managers to focus on outcomes.
If you would like to attract and hire great employees, here are six things. you can do today to improve your odds.
Be Prepared—
What typically happens is the business puts a job description on a job board possibly with some qualifying questions about education and/or experience or both with some “I” messages about the business and employment benefits. The result is a pile of resumes most of which are worthless. If the business is lucky, some resumes might be worth considering. The next step is an interview where the interviewer asks some skill and behavioral questions hoping for the right answers. In the end, a decision is made based on the “Gut Feeling” of the interviewer with the hope that things will work out. Unfortunately, they often don’t.
Focus on outcomes rather than qualifications. If your recruiting message stresses outcomes rather than qualifications, you will attract candidates you want to talk to and have those who can’t meet the position’s challenges self-select away.
Don’t rely on education and experience—
Herbert M. Greenberg and Jeanne Greenberg, two Harvard Professors did a huge study that looked at 300,000 sales positions across fourteen industries that was reported in Harvard Business Review, Vol. 58, No. 5. They found that it was not education or experience that determined success is was when people were ‘matched’ to outcomes they became successful.
Don’t let your biases control your decision making— This is a hard one to manage because it involves our emotions. If we like a candidate, we stop listening and start to think of how we can convince the candidate to take the job. If we don’t like a candidate, we stop listening and go through the motions so that we can get to the next candidate.
Winning Workforce can help you recognize your biases and help you learn to temporarily set them aside to give the candidate time to prove your biases one way or the other.
Let the candidate talk—
A well designed interview will be preplanned with a set of solid interview questions based upon outcomes needed for success. The skilled interviewer knows how to use a question to extract information with playback and probing techniques to verify facts and feelings.
Stop asking the wrong questions hoping for the right answers—
Skilled interviewers never ask an interview question and not know the correct answer. With good job analysis, you will know the outcomes needed for success. Use your job analysis to develop interview questions that specifically address outcomes. Each interview question should be tied to a specific outcome. Use playback and probing techniques to fully understand capabilities and create a score card to rate each candidate
The employment interview is probably the most used method to hire employees and the most unreliable. In a study reported in Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 96, No. 1. p90 researchers discovered that using interviewing as prime source for selection will only yield one quality employee for each seven hired. That is a fourteen percent success rate. What if you were only successful with fourteen percent of your customers how would that affect your business?
Hiring employees is the most expensive and time-consuming activity a business will endure—
The Society for Human Resource Management SHRM estimates that a new hire costs a business over $4000.00 whether the hire is successful or not. That means using SHIRM’s numbers it will cost you $28,000.00 to hire one good employee. Thus, it makes sense to look for outcomes rather than qualifications.
Ask for a free consultation to review your interview procedures—
John McHugh has been in the employee selection business for the last 39 years. He is the Founder and CEO of Winning Workforce. His passion is to train owners and executives how to do effective preparation and execution of employment interviews. He provides a free initial consultation and can be reached at 707-527-8580 or John@winningworkforce.net