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The New Metrics for Assessing Hiring Effectiveness


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The New Metrics for Assessing Hiring Effectiveness

I uploaded this PDF describing the 12 factors in our Hiring Effectiveness Index (HEI) into ChatGPT. I then asked if the scoring system would help a company identify potential problems in its current hiring processes. 

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Posted in: Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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GAI's Tip of the Hiring Iceberg

GAI

Spoiler alert. This could be scary. It represents the future of hiring.

I just used ChatGPT to fundamentally change how job candidates will be sourced, assessed, recruited and managed in the future. Here's how to get started. If you dare.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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Anything you can do; AI can do better

Anything you can do; AI can do better

I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I asked ChatGPT if our Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard could be used to improve hiring results. I was surprised it was so insightful interpreting relationships and ideas that were never written. You'll see what I mean below.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Performance-based Interview, Rethinking the Job Description

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Using ChatGPT to Conduct Job Analysis

Using ChatGPT to Conduct Job Analysis

It's important to note that using behavioral interviewing #BEI without a detailed job analysis pretty much invalidates the entire interview. Without knowing how a skill, competency or behavior is actually used on the job, the assessment is left to the interviewer's biases and perception of the job and how well the candidate presented their answer.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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On Becoming a Super Recruiter

On Becoming a Super Recruiter

When creating a talent acquisition strategy it's important to note that about 20-25% of those in the workforce are always actively looking for another job. This is the group companies need to target to fill open jobs as rapidly as possible. There's another 20-25% who are always proactively passive. Don't even attempt to contact these people unless you've worked with the person before. Given this, it's obvious the candidates you'll want to hire for your most important roles are in the other 50-60%. While this is the ideal talent market, these people won't respond to your emails or calls unless you become an expert at passive candidate recruiting. This involves a number of critical skills, in particular:

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing

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Exposing the "Veneer of Superficiality" Interview

Exposing the "Veneer of Superficiality" Interview

As a recruiter I abhorred the idea that an outstanding candidate for an important job was being judged by a person who wasn’t a very good interviewer. Sadly, after having debriefed over one thousand different interviewers, I estimate that about two-thirds fell short. And too often the assessments of those who were valid were overridden or discredited by those who weren’t.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Talent Strategy

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Changing the Hiring Conversation: From Qualifications to Performance

Changing the Hiring Conversation: From Qualifications to Performance

I’ve always found it odd – maybe even dumb – to hire people based on their skills and depth of experience without telling them much about the job until they start. Then to determine if they are good or not after they're hired, we assess them on their performance doing some job they weren’t assessed on.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Quality of Hire

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Use ChatGPT to Convert Jobs into Career Moves

Use ChatGPT to Convert Jobs into Career Moves

Long ago a CEO for a mid-sized company asked me how much experience a person needed to have to be the VP Operations for his company. My glib response then was, “Enough to do the job. It’s what people do with what they have, not what they have that matters. Some people need more experience to do the same job and others need less.”

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Posted in: Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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"Everything Else"​ Is Why Your Techies Underperform

"Everything Else"​ Is Why Your Techies Underperform

I was just talking to the director of engineering for a major consumer products company about new ways to improve the hiring decision for software developers. His first comment was profound and applicable to just about every technical role.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Performance-based Interview

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Hiring Trends 2023 Based on Behavioral Science

Hiring Trends 2023 Based on Behavioral Science

I’ve just wrapped up recording a new course for LinkedIn Learning (available in Q2, 2023). The core theme of this new program is that by embedding post-hire success into the pre-hire sourcing and interviewing process it’s possible to attract and hire a different type of candidate. These are people who are more diverse, who have less traditional backgrounds, who are more focused on learning and development and who are more interested in long-term vs. gig employment. Achieving this goal requires a different process at every step from how jobs are defined to how candidates are onboarded and managed.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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The Best Interview Technique of All Time

The Best Interview Technique of All Time

I think too many people including those in HR, OD experts, hiring managers and recruiters, believe being a good interviewer requires some remarkable insight into human behavior. I think they’re mistaken. There is an alternate path: being a good detective.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Performance-based Interview

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The 10 Best Predictors of Success that AI Can’t Find

The 10 Best Predictors of Success that AI Can’t Find

Having tracked the performance of thousands of senior professional staff and managers over the past 50 years it turns out it’s not hard to predict who will be successful. All you need to do is ask candidates to describe their major accomplishments most comparable to the key performance objectives (KPOs) of the open job. As long as you dig deep enough the factors shown below will pop out. Consistency is what matters, though, not one-time occurrences. This preview of the Sherlock Holmes deductive interview describes the probing needed to gather this information.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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“Tell me about yourself” and other PBI interviewing tips

“Tell me about yourself” and other PBI interviewing tips

 The traditional interview process has been shown to be unreliable in predicting job performance, often due to bias, lack of training and a focus on surface-level characteristics. The Performance-based Interview (PBI) is a natural language approach that seeks to assess an individual's competency, fit and motivation by asking them to describe their past performance in specific situations. Studies have shown that the PBI is a more accurate predictor of job performance than other interview methods, making it a valuable tool for organizations seeking to hire the best candidates. Moreover, the PBI can be used to assess candidates at all levels of experience, making it an ideal method for career development and succession planning.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Rethinking the Job Description, Talent Strategy

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Without an EVP a Job Is Just a Job

Without an EVP a Job Is Just a Job

 If you want to hire a great person, you need to offer a great job, not a laundry-list of skills, experiences and competencies that at best is no more than an ill-defined lateral transfer surrounded by some generic boilerplate. This is even more important today with candidates leaving within 90 days after starting if the new job turns out to be more promise than substance (Fortune, May 2022).

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring

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How to Avoid the Staggering Cost of Turnover

How to Avoid the Staggering Cost of Turnover

While it’s hard to believe that a single hiring mistake could cost a company $400 thousand, it’s not so hard to believe when looking at this table showing the incremental profit contribution of employees at these well-known companies. The idea behind this table is that it shows the full financial and business impact a person has on a company, rather than just considering the person’s compensation package.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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The ROI of Most Job Postings is Below Zero!

The ROI of Most Job Postings is Below Zero!

Few companies calculate the ROI of the effectiveness of their different sourcing channels but those that do discover referrals are the best with job boards generating more mistakes. And the cost of these mistakes is staggering wiping away the benefits of lower cost and speedier hiring.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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Hiring More Leaders Starts by Changing Your Hiring Strategy

Hiring More Leaders Starts by Changing Your Hiring Strategy

Many years ago I worked with LinkedIn on preparing a video highlighting the importance of developing a hiring strategy based on attracting the best rather than one designed to filter out the weak. It turns out that without the right talent strategy it's not possible to hire more leaders on a consistent basis. Chance, hope, the latest technology or job boards won't help. While the message in the video is still true today, most people will have some Catch-22 excuse why it won't work.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire, Rethinking the Job Description, Talent Strategy

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Don’t Make Strategic Career Decisions Using Tactical Information

Don’t Make Strategic Career Decisions Using Tactical Information

In a post earlier this year I claimed that too many people change jobs for all the wrong reasons. Most often it's for the stuff at the bottom of the "Maslow's Hierarchy of Hiring Needs" graphic above, rather than the stuff at the top. Unless they're (very) lucky, the result is always disappointment, dissatisfaction and regret.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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A 10-point Checklist for Hiring Leaders

A 10-point Checklist for Hiring Leaders

LEADERS: The strongest people are easy to spot. They’re leaders. Leaders don’t just do their jobs reasonably well; they improve how they do their jobs. And whether they’re managing a team or not, they also help everyone they work with do their jobs better, too. You can use this Performance-based Interview to determine if your candidates are leaders, or not.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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HR's Misreading of the Labor Law is #1 Cause of Hiring Bias

HR

In my semi-retired state, I’ve decided to give away my best secrets for recruiting and hiring the top 25% with a new type of training program. Many of them are highlighted in the infographic above. You'll be able to learn and apply them all just by reading Hire with Your Head (4th ed, Wiley. September 2021) and becoming a participating member of our virtual book club.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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The Traditional Interview is a Terrible Predictor of Performance

The Traditional Interview is a Terrible Predictor of Performance

One of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind.” This is great advice whenever implementing any type of process improvement program especially changing how hiring is done at your company. “Think win-win” is another one of Covey's seven habits. When it comes to hiring, this habit is doubly important. It means ensuring the new hire and the hiring manager both recognize the importance of making the right decision and both have all of the information needed to make the right one. Due to its importance this habit has been adopted as the overriding goal and theme of the new edition of Hire with Your Head and rightly called “Win-Win Hiring.” It means hiring for the anniversary date rather than the start date.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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Managerial Fit is the Key to Achieving More Win-Win Hiring Outcomes

Managerial Fit is the Key to Achieving More Win-Win Hiring Outcomes

It doesn’t take much research to figure out that for candidates who are hired primarily for their hard skills when they underperform it’s most often due either to their lack of soft skills, team skills or an inability to work with their hiring manager. These problems can be avoided by changing how candidates are assessed with more focus on the context of the job and the fit factors, not just their technical competency. The “how to do this properly” is fully covered in the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley & Sons, September 2021) but the theme of hiring for the anniversary date, rather than the start date, is the real purpose of the book. This is called Win-Win Hiring.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias

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Chapter 4 - Developing a Bias-Free Hiring Process

Chapter 4 - Developing a Bias-Free Hiring Process

This chapter is about controlling interviewer bias. It is the most important chapter in the book since more hiring mistakes are made due to bias than any other cause. In fact, if you read only this chapter before conducting another interview and use these techniques for overcoming bias, you'll reduce you're hiring mistakes by at least 50%. (See graphic below.)

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias

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Performance-based Hiring is Win-Win Hiring

Performance-based Hiring is Win-Win Hiring

As part of the fourth edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, September 2021) we’re starting a unique book club for those who pre-order the book. Over the next several weeks I’ll be highlighting different themes from the book. This week focuses on the idea of hiring for the long-term rather than the start date in order to achieve consistent Win-Win Hiring outcomes.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring

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Stop Making Tactical Excuses for a Strategic Hiring Problem

Stop Making Tactical Excuses for a Strategic Hiring Problem

The fourth edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, September 2021) will soon be published. As part of the unique book club we’re putting together for those who pre-order the book program, I’ll be selecting different sections of the book to highlight. The opening of the book makes the case that most hiring problems are strategic in nature, so I’ll start there.

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8 Clues You're Interviewing an Exceptional Person

8 Clues You

On September 22, 2021, the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head will be published by John Wiley & Sons. As part of the totally revised edition, I reviewed some of my favorite posts from the past few years and incorporated them in the new book. The following is a slight rewrite of one that appeared on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog a few years ago. 

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias, Current Articles

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How Job Seekers Can Create Win-Win Hiring Outcomes

How Job Seekers Can Create Win-Win Hiring Outcomes

If a candidate accepts an offer largely based on the title, compensation and location, a Win-Win Hiring outcome is unlikely. Win-Win Hiring means the hiring manager is happy with the person’s performance on the one-year anniversary date and the new employee still finds the job motivating and satisfying. Achieving this positive outcome requires a lot of effort before, during and after the interview by everyone involved, especially the job seeker.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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Use This 3-step Win-Win Hiring Program to Ensure You Land the Right Candidate

Use This 3-step Win-Win Hiring Program to Ensure You Land the Right Candidate

In part 1 of this series, I suggested that in order to increase interviewing accuracy beyond the 65% standard of behavioral interviewing, you needed to first ask this question when opening up a new job requisition

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Rethinking the Job Description, Talent Strategy

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5 Interview Prep Tips to Help Ensure Your Good Candidates Aren’t Being Excluded for Bad Reasons

5 Interview Prep Tips to Help Ensure Your Good Candidates Aren’t Being Excluded for Bad Reasons

While writing my book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, I found it challenging to write the section about “Getting Hired” since my target audience was primarily hiring managers, interviewers, and recruiters. But I felt the “Getting Hired” part was important to add in order to give job seekers a chance to take control of the interview whenever they felt they weren’t being fairly assessed.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing, Talent Strategy

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How to Calculate the Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions — and Avoid Them in the Future

How to Calculate the Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions — and Avoid Them in the Future

While inquiring about the status of a hiring manager interview training proposal, a client told me she would get back to me as soon as they got their budget approved for next year. As part of our discussion, I asked how much they included in their budget for bad hires.

My client’s answer was that she hadn’t given this much thought, but she was intrigued by the idea. She also asked how she could figure out the cost of bad hires since it was an obvious and recurring cost, but one that was hard to put a number to. Some of the cost was taken by the legal department, but most of it was in lost performance and hard to even begin to calculate.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Quality of Hire

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Dump Your Job Descriptions and Hire Stronger Talent

Dump Your Job Descriptions and Hire Stronger Talent

In my supposed semi-retired state, I’ve been asked to help some PE and VC boards hire a number of C-level officers. Most of the job descriptions sent my way start with the classic laundry list of “must-have” experiences and competencies. As a result, they all get my classic response: “This is not a job description, it’s a person description. Let’s put the person description in the parking lot and first define the work the person needs to do to be considered successful.”

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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Recruiters Must Master These Critical High-Touch Skills to Stay Relevant

Recruiters Must Master These Critical High-Touch Skills to Stay Relevant

Recruiters can play a strategic role in any company, but too often their focus is filling jobs with a reasonably competent person at a reasonable cost in some reasonable timeframe. But as far as I’m concerned, this kind of hiring is an overhead function that can be automated with some combination of an ATS, a chat bot, and a robot. A more strategic recruiter, on the other hand, is someone who can consistently raise the talent bar when the right talent is hard to find. Let the robots fill the easy positions. The recruiter of tomorrow is someone who can fill the hard roles, and take my word for it — in the future, there will be more hard ones to fill. Here’s how to get started.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles

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How to Increase Quality of Hire by Only Sourcing Semi-finalists

How to Increase Quality of Hire by Only Sourcing Semi-finalists

Separating sourcing from recruiting never made a lot of sense to me. Many sourcers never even talk to candidates and just pass a list of names to a recruiter. But the best candidates, whether they’re active or passive job seekers, always have multiple opportunities and convincing them your opportunity is worth considering involves just as much recruiting as sourcing. So the key is to do both to keep the best people engaged throughout the hiring process — and if you do make an offer, it shouldn’t be tied to a big increase in compensation. Here’s how to get started:

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire

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Double Your Productivity With These 6 Recruiting Tips

Double Your Productivity With These 6 Recruiting Tips

When I first became a recruiter, one big frustration was having hiring managers reject good people for bad reasons. When this happened, the hiring manager would inevitably ask, “Do you have any other candidates?” and I would have to do the search all over again. For everyone involved — the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the candidate — this is a waste of time. And when it happens too often, it means the hiring process is broken.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Recruiting & Closing

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How to Determine Work Quality and Intrinsic Motivation in a First Interview

How to Determine Work Quality and Intrinsic Motivation in a First Interview

One of the factors in our Recruiter Competency Model is the ability to be able to assess technical competency and intrinsic motivation in a one-hour interview. In an earlier post someone commented that this was not possible. I begged to differ and offered this advice:

Here are some of the live and forward-looking metrics I’d use to achieve a Win-Win Hiring goal using SmartRecruiters’ Net Hiring Score as a target:

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Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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10 Ways to Avoid Making $100,000 Hiring Mistakes

10 Ways to Avoid Making $100,000 Hiring Mistakes

Take a moment to consider the following: If your company hires 100 people in the next 12 months, that’s an annual increase in compensation costs of at least $10 million if you factor in an average total compensation of $100,000 per person. Clearly, the total cost of hiring dwarfs the cost per hire, and no matter how you cut it, that’s a lot of money. Unfortunately, much of this spend will be wasted by hiring the wrong people.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire

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Stop Turnover: Give Everyone a 20% Annual Increase

Stop Turnover: Give Everyone a 20% Annual Increase

Ensuring the candidate has the right information to answer the, “Why do you want the job?” question, starts when I first talk with the person. During this call I suggest that no one should accept an offer for another job if it doesn’t provide at least a 30% non-monetary increase. More important, all offers, including not changing jobs or accepting a counteroffer should be compared using this same benchmark. This idea is shown in the graphic and referred to as the 30% Solution.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy

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Amazon’s Talent Bar-raising Program Reveals Flaws in Hiring Practices

Amazon’s Talent Bar-raising Program Reveals Flaws in Hiring Practices

The Six Sigma movement of the 1980s and 1990s was developed around the same concept of correcting problems as early as possible in the process to minimize costs and maximize final product quality.

The same idea can be applied to a company’s sourcing and selection process based on the idea that too many rejections at the end of the process, including good candidates opting-out or rejecting offers and bar-raisers saying no, means there’s a problem somewhere upstream. Eliminating these upstream problems will reduce costs, increase recruiter productivity, save time, and shorten time-to-fill while raising the quality of the people being seen and hired.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy

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Why Candidate Experience Should Start with the Job Description — and Continue Well After the Hire Date

Why Candidate Experience Should Start with the Job Description — and Continue Well After the Hire Date

To set the record straight, I believe that providing an extraordinary candidate experience for serious and well-qualified candidates is essential. After all, you’re affecting these people’s lives and it’s important for them to have all the information they need to make the right career decision.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire

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When Personality Tests are Useless for Hiring and When They're Mandatory

When Personality Tests are Useless for Hiring and When They

I’ve long contended that personality style tests like Predictive Index, DISC and Myers-Briggs are inappropriate for screening candidates in or out before they’re interviewed. The problem is that these tests measure preferences, not competencies. More important, most people can modify their preferred style to meet the needs of the situation, something not even considered by these types of questionnaires. As a result, there are just too many false positives and false negatives to make these types of tests good enough for filtering candidates early in the hiring process.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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Headhunter Secrets for Acing the Interview

Headhunter Secrets for Acing the Interview

From the company perspective, one of the biggest disruptors involved replacing generic and skills-heavy job descriptions with the answer to this question: “What does the person taking this job need to do over the course of the first year to be considered both successful and highly satisfied?”

The answer resulted in a list of 6-8 KPOs (key performance objectives) describing the work the person needed to do and its importance.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview

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5 Steps to Eliminate First Impression Bias and Hire the Right Candidate

5 Steps to Eliminate First Impression Bias and Hire the Right Candidate

First impression bias is the primary cause of most hiring mistakes. Why? Because when we feel good about someone right away, we tend to ask easier question. And, when we feel negative right way, we ask more difficult questions. In other words, we (often subconsciously) look to confirm our first impression.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias

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Eliminating Turnover Requires a Lot More Commonsense and a Lot Less A

Eliminating Turnover Requires a Lot More Commonsense and a Lot Less A

It doesn’t take a lot of insight to attribute the increase in turnover over the past 25 years to the idea that most people change jobs for the wrong reasons. For some proof, just consider this report from Gallup indicating that only 30% of the workforce is fully engaged. According to Gallup, this results in a $1 trillion problem. A more recent survey we conducted on how job satisfaction impacts job hunting status validates the Gallup study.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Rethinking the Job Description

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Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here's How to Do It

Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here

In my 40+ years of recruiting, I’ve learned that recruiters often make a critical mistake in assessing a candidate for a position. Simply put, they think a candidate’s motivation to get the job (such as being prepared and on-time for the interview) is the same as their drive to do the job once they’re hired.

To access this full article you must be a registered user/member of this site. Click the appropriate link below to continue.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire

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Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here's How to Do It

Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here

In my 40+ years of recruiting, I’ve learned that recruiters often make a critical mistake in assessing a candidate for a position. Simply put, they think a candidate’s motivation to get the job (such as being prepared and on-time for the interview) is the same as their drive to do the job once they’re hired. It isn’t. Since motivation is largely driven by what I call Fit Factors, measuring fit should be the focus of most interviews. This represents the difference between a good and a bad hiring decision.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills

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A Paradigm-Shifting Idea When It Comes to Hiring

A Paradigm-Shifting Idea When It Comes to Hiring

Consider Hiring an Investment, Not an Expense

It seems the only companies successful at attracting great people on a consistent basis are those with the big brass employer brands. For everyone else, even those using ZipRecruiter or Indeed, it’s hard to hire stronger people when the focus is on the speed and cost of hiring rather than the impact those being hired can make.

To access this article you must be a registered user/member of this site. Click the appropriate link below to continue.

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Posted in: Talent Strategy

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The One Rule Recruiters Should Follow to Prevent Employee Turnover Before It Starts

The One Rule Recruiters Should Follow to Prevent Employee Turnover Before It Starts

With a recent Gallup report suggesting turnover in U.S. businesses is a $1 trillion problem, it’s no surprise that companies are increasingly focusing on employee retention. But where many companies get things wrong is in assuming that turnover is a problem that can be solved by intervening after-the-fact.

Instead, recruiters can get ahead of the game by understanding what causes employee turnover and developing interview processes that screen for candidates who are unlikely to stick around for long.

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Posted in: Recruiting & Closing

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Candidates Must Answer Yes to These 10 Questions Before You Ever Make an Offer

Candidates Must Answer Yes to These 10 Questions Before You Ever Make an Offer

Whether a person will accept a job offer, reject it, or back out later should never come as a surprise. Any surprise factor can be avoided as long as you follow some fundamental recruiting techniques.

The most important: Never make an offer you’re not absolutely sure will be accepted.

Underlying this rule is the need to test every component of an offer to determine if the candidate will accept it before formalizing the offer in writing.

Testing can be as simple as asking the candidate if he/she would accept a fair offer and be able to start by a certain date. Any evasiveness is a clue the offer won’t be accepted.

A more formal approach to testing involves getting “yes” answers to the ten following questions. It’s important to note that getting a “no” is not a bad thing. Converting the “no” into a “yes” is called recruiting.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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Hiring High Performance Sales Reps

Hiring High Performance Sales Reps

Hiring great sales people can be tricky.  In this podcast Lou Adler and Bryan Johanson discuss the basis for hiring great sales people every time.  It requires a healthy dose of skepticism, deep fact finding and most of all a true understanding of what what it takes to be successful in your specific sales role.  When these three elements come together, you have a fighting chance to identify, attract and close top sales talent.

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Stop the Revolving Door of Dissatisfaction and Turnover with This Crazy Idea

Stop the Revolving Door of Dissatisfaction and Turnover with This Crazy Idea

It’s important to remember that when it comes to changing jobs, it’s where you’re going that matters more than where you’ve been. 

In a recent post I contended that you don’t need a high-tech solution to solve a high touch problem like turnover. The problems and solutions are just too obvious.

To access this full article you must be a registered user/member of this site. Click the appropriate link below to continue.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Recruiting & Closing

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Here’s a Common-Sense Approach to Predict and Eliminate Turnover

Here’s a Common-Sense Approach to Predict and Eliminate Turnover

A major tech company just made a big brouhaha over its “uncanny” ability to use AI to predict which employees will voluntarily leave a company within the next 12 months. But in my opinion, there are far easier techniques to stop turnover by simply understanding why people change jobs and accept offers in the first place.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills

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What Pre-Sourcing Is — and How It Will Make Hiring the Right Candidate Easier

What Pre-Sourcing Is — and How It Will Make Hiring the Right Candidate Easier

For the first 25 of the past 40 years, I was a full-time recruiter. Of the 500+ placements I made during that time (mostly mid- and senior management positions), only about a dozen were people who responded to a job posting. The others were referred or networked and most of them were passive candidates.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting

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Eliminate the #1 Cause of Employee Dissatisfaction with this One Change

Eliminate the #1 Cause of Employee Dissatisfaction with this One Change

In The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired I contend that one of the big reasons companies struggle to hire exceptional talent is by posting job descriptions that require a bunch of prerequisites that don’t predict on-the-job success.

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Posted in: Rethinking the Job Description

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8 Clues That a Candidate Will be an Exceptional Employee

8 Clues That a Candidate Will be an Exceptional Employee

Over the past 40 years, I have reviewed at least 30,000 resumes and LinkedIn profiles and personally interviewed over 5,000 job candidates. After tracking the subsequent performance of hundreds of these people, it became apparent that there were clues in the resume and work history that accurately predicted the likelihood the person would be successful even in roles that were promotions, different jobs, stretch assignments, or in different industries.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Talent Strategy

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Two Things Recruiters Can Do to Consistently Identify the Top Candidates

Two Things Recruiters Can Do to Consistently Identify the Top Candidates

Three weeks ago, I met with a bunch of CEOs who are members of Vistage, an organization helping small and mid-size companies grow and manage their businesses. One of their biggest challenges is finding and hiring the right people. At the meeting, they all complained that the recruiters they were using were inadequate. They said few understood the job requirements or the company and all presented too many average candidates.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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Use This Six-point System to Hire the Best Candidates

Use This Six-point System to Hire the Best Candidates

In the process of writing the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head, my publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., wanted to know what has changed from when the first edition was published in 1997.

Not much, I said. Despite the enormous investment in technology and process improvement, companies still struggle to find enough top-tier talent to fill high-demand positions just like they did 20 years ago; they just struggle differently now.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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This Company’s Phone Screens Were Useless Until They Tried This Method

This Company’s Phone Screens Were Useless Until They Tried This Method

My firm was involved in a project last year that started with a call from a talent leader trying to figure out why the company’s hiring managers needed to see so many candidates to make one decent hire. She was under a lot of pressure to get her team to perform since many of these hiring managers were starting to revolt and use external recruiters to get their positions filled.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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Use the Phone Interview to Convert Strangers into Acquaintances

Use the Phone Interview to Convert Strangers into Acquaintances

The reason hiring acquaintances is more predictable is that these people are hired based on their known performance doing comparable work in comparable situations. Strangers, on the other hand, don’t get this free pass. Instead, they’re first screened on their level of skills, experiences and academic background and then assessed in large measure on the quality of their presentation skills, first impression and personality.

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Posted in: Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing

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The Power of the Exploratory Phone Screen

The Power of the Exploratory Phone Screen

In this podcast Lou Adler goes step-by-step through what he contends is a barometer for a company’s entire hiring process. Using this process you will only need to phone screen 10-12 people to interview 3-4 people in-person to wind-up with one great hire. Whenever these metrics are exceeded the problem is either due to ineffective sourcing or weak recruiting or assessment skills. In this podcast you’ll learn how to identify outstanding talent who will not only raise the talent bar at your company but also will accept a fair offer. 

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Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts

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This Phone Screen Checklist is the Swiss Army Knife of Recruiting

This Phone Screen Checklist is the Swiss Army Knife of Recruiting

Over the years I’ve discovered that by obtaining the information shown in this phone screen checklist, a recruiter can confidently recommend a candidate to be interviewed onsite. More importantly, by getting a hiring manager to conduct a similar phone screen, the manager would only need to personally interview 3-4 people to make one great hire.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Recruiting & Closing

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Predicting Job Performance Starts with a Phone Call and These Two Questions

Predicting Job Performance Starts with a Phone Call and These Two Questions

As long as the work is reasonably comparable, a track record of preparing well-thought-out plans and successfully executing them time and again is the best evidence you can have for promoting or assigning a person to a bigger job. Getting this evidence is a little bit harder for someone you haven’t worked with before since bias, the use of unstructured interviews and lack of understanding of real job needs prevents an accurate assessment.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Quality of Hire

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Hiring for Performance Not Skills

Hiring for Performance Not Skills

Frequently hiring managers make the excuse that they don’t have enough time to spend with the recruiter to discuss a new job. Instead they want the job posted right away. In this podcast Lou Adler describes how this approach wastes more time than it saves and how to convert a 45-minute conversation into stronger hires.

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Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts

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Handling Compensation

Handling Compensation

In this podcast Lou Adler answers the common candidate question, "What's the compensation." Adler suggests a non-answer to understand what drives the person to excel. If your job matches this you need to pay the person whatever they need.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Podcasts

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Work Matters - SMARTe Podcast 1.3

Work Matters - SMARTe Podcast 1.3

How to Conduct a Pre-hire Performance Review being SMARTe
In this podcast Lou Adler introduces the concept of using a pre-hire performance review to assess candidates. Lou contends that we hire strangers using different criteria than hiring acquaintances and that the subsequent performance of acquaintances is more predictable. A pre-hire performance review allows everyone to be assessed the same way - on their past performance. As you'll discover using this process your interviewing accuracy will soar in addition to the quality of the people you hire.

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Posted in: Podcasts

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Work Matters - MSA Question Podcast 1.2

Work Matters - MSA Question Podcast 1.2

The Most Important Interview Question of All Time
In this podcast Lou Adler introduces the most important interview question of all time. This is a summary of his post on LinkedIn that had over 1 million reads. Try to answer the question Lou poses in the podcast and you’ll immediately see why it is the most important interview question of all time.

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Posted in: Podcasts

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