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Leadership Lessons from the 1970s

Leadership Lessons from the 1970s

I was a guest on Simon Fagg’s excellent After Dinner Leadership podcast last week. Simon brings an oldie with a newbie to discuss how business ideas of the past might still be useful today. Simon’s first question to me was to highlight some early leadership lessons that I felt were still relevant. Here’s what I came up with from the early 1970s.

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

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Back to Hiring Basics: Benchmark How and Why the Top 25% Change Jobs

Back to Hiring Basics: Benchmark How and Why the Top 25% Change Jobs

It turns out that anyone can be in the top 25% with the right job, the right company, and the right hiring manager. But this is a rare event despite having spent $400-500 billion in job postings and HR tech in the past 25 years in the hope of matching the perfect job with the perfect candidate.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Recruiting & Closing, Talent Strategy

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Filling Generic Jobs with Generic People is a Recipe for Disappointment

Filling Generic Jobs with Generic People is a Recipe for Disappointment

It turns out that hiring outstanding talent on a consistent basis has little to do with your ATS, which job boards you use or the quality of your competency model. The process shown in the image below (PDF version) will give you consistent great results as long as you do these four things first:

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Rethinking the Job Description

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Avoid This Career Limiting Mistake When Changing Jobs

Avoid This Career Limiting Mistake When Changing Jobs

Make sure you read “15 Ways to Hack-a-Job” if you’re starting to think about changing jobs. Here are 107 other job posts for job seekers that will guide you step-by-step through ensuring you compare offers properly especially how to negotiate compensation. You’ll find the condensed version in The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Rethinking the Job Description

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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 questions. And when we feel negative right away, we ask more difficult questions. In other words, we look (often subconsciously) to confirm our first impression.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Diversity Hiring

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Creating a Win-Win Hiring Culture Starts with a Win-Win Hiring Strategy

Creating a Win-Win Hiring Culture Starts with a Win-Win Hiring Strategy

As part of the launch of the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, September 2021) we’ll be hosting a number of interactive webcasts where we work through active search projects using the principles of Performance-based Hiring as a foundation. We'll be demonstrating this idea at our next webcast with a focus on what recruiters need to do to connect with outstanding and diverse talent who are in high demand. The key to success here is to start with the right hiring strategy that maps to how these people look for new jobs.

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Posted in: Recruiting & Closing, Talent Strategy

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This One Change Opens the Talent Pool to More Outstanding Diverse Talent

This One Change Opens the Talent Pool to More Outstanding Diverse Talent

I contend that the biggest reason companies struggle to hire outstanding diverse, non-traditional and high potential talent is that they continue to use job descriptions that require a skill set that puts a lid on quality of hire since most of the best people have a different mix of skills and experiences. Just as bad, the best people with the required skill-set aren’t interested in what appears to be an ill-defined lateral transfer. In essence the use of these types of job descriptions guarantees the company will hire people exactly like those they’ve already hired and not improve the quality, or the diversity of the people hired.

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Posted in: Diversity Hiring, Performance-based Interview

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When Recruiting the Big Fish "No NOs!"​ Is the Rule

When Recruiting the Big Fish "No NOs!"​ Is the Rule

More than 40 years ago the #1 recruiter in the world told me that applicant control was the key to making 2-3X as many placements per month. It took me one full year to master the technique but my placement rate soared by over 3X during the next 18 months as a result. More importantly, 75% of these candidates who were subsequently placed over the next 25+ years (more than 600 people!) were either assigned to stretch projects or got promoted during the first year. Just as important, less than 10% left during the first year.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Quality of Hire

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Interviewing Gamesmanship Starts by Learning the Rules of the Game

Interviewing Gamesmanship Starts by Learning the Rules of the Game

Over the past 40+ years I've interviewed thousands of candidates for manager, director and VP level positions. Very few of these candidates actually applied for the job being filled at the time. Most were found via LinkedIn or a referral. Nonetheless, I was dumbfounded that many of these people weren’t great interviewees, yet most were all remarkable people doing their jobs.

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Posted in: Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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10 Ways to Reduce Interviewer Bias

10 Ways to Reduce Interviewer Bias

In my 45+ years as a recruiter, one of the many things I’ve learned is that strangers get a bad deal when it comes to being accurately assessed during interviews. While people who are known to the hiring manager are assessed on their past performance, strangers are judged on their motivation to get the job, a bunch of generic competencies, the depth of their technical knowledge and the quality of their presentation skills. Worse, all of these factors are viewed through a biased lens filled with misconceptions and flawed logic.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Diversity Hiring

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This 2-Question BEST Test Beats DiSC, MBTI and PI

This 2-Question BEST Test Beats DiSC, MBTI and PI

Back in the ‘80s I took my first DiSC personality assessment and its cousin, the Predictive Index (PI). Like the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI), these types of assessments involve a series of either/or questions like, “Would you rather attend a beer bust or do root cause analysis?” The DiSC and PI tests concluded I liked to persuade people with a hammer and that I was a weak analyst.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Talent Strategy

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Use the Whole-Brain Interview to Predict Quality of Hire

Use the Whole-Brain Interview to Predict Quality of Hire

After years of interviewing and tracking hundreds of people post-hire, it became obvious that most candidates get hired based on criteria that doesn’t predict success: typically, their individual contributor skills, depth of technical skills, an ability to interview well and their personality. The problem with this is that when they underperform it’s largely due to their lack of soft skills; poor decision making; weak organizational ability; inability to fit with the team, manager or company culture; and lack of motivation to do the actual work required.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Quality of Hire

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Interviewing is Not About Asking the Right Questions; It’s About Getting the Right Answers

Interviewing is Not About Asking the Right Questions; It’s About Getting the Right Answers

While asking a bunch of standard behavioral questions might help eliminate weak candidates, that approach will backfire when interviewing the strongest candidates. In fact, I’ll contend that with just two basic questions you can accurately predict ability, motivation, fit, performance and potential. One question involves digging into the candidate’s major accomplishments, the other how the person would figure out how to solve a realistic job-related problem.

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Posted in: Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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The Future of Recruiting Might Not Have Any Recruiters

The Future of Recruiting Might Not Have Any Recruiters

The past few months have been challenging for the staffing industry. LinkedIn has just announced its first layoff as companies reduce their Recruiter seat licenses, ATS vendors are reducing their teams and scaling back, HR tech vendors are cutting costs and rethinking their futures, live recruiting and sourcing conferences have been put on hold and staffing firms and RPOs are scrambling for more business as their PPE loans run dry.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Performance-based Interview

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4 Clues That You’re About to Make a Bad-Hiring Decision

4 Clues That You’re About to Make a Bad-Hiring Decision

The cost of your company’s bad hiring decisions can be staggering. To calculate this cost, I tell my clients to add the first-year turnover rate to the percentage of people who the company wouldn’t rehire. This number is your company’s Bad Hiring Rate (BHR). Next, I ask them to multiply the BHR with the total increase in payroll for new hires to calculate the cost of bad hiring decisions at your company.

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Posted in: Performance-based Interview, Talent Strategy

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Advice from Sherlock Holmes On How to Assess Technical and Team Skills

Advice from Sherlock Holmes On How to Assess Technical and Team Skills

Last week on my “Almost Daily Recruiting Show” one caller suggested competency-based interviewing was the solution to all interviewing problems. I begged to differ. I contended that competency or behavioral interviewing wasn’t effective unless it was tied to a good understanding of the performance objectives of the job and the underlying environment. The point made was that just about everyone can give examples of when they used a competency like results-oriented, effective communication skills or strong collaboration ability, but if these aren’t directly related to the actual requirements of the job itself, a proper assessment is not possible.

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Posted in: Passive Candidate Recruiting, Talent Strategy

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The Two Questions You Must Ask to Ensure a Win-Win Hiring Outcome

The Two Questions You Must Ask to Ensure a Win-Win Hiring Outcome

A Win-Win Hiring outcome means the hiring manager and the new hire both agree it was the right decision one year into the job. While defining hiring success at the one year anniversary date rather than the start date is a worthy goal, it requires some significant process reengineering efforts to achieve it on a consistent basis. The first is recognizing what works and what doesn’t and then asking two critical questions during the interview.

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Posted in: Performance-based Interview, Talent Strategy

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Lou Adler's Hiring Troubleshooting Guide

Here is Lou Adler's Hiring Troubleshooting Guide, a comprehensive listing which outlines the hiring problem and the solution.

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Posted in: Current Articles

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