According to ChatGPT everyone can now be in the top third despite the mathematical absurdity. These are people who are more motivated, more satisfied, more productive, stronger team players and more flexible. Here’s all you need to do to get started.
I asked ChatGPT to write a story based on this post and the image below. It seems quite relevant today given that fact that most people are unhappy with their jobs. The theme: Time is your most valuable, don’t waste it. Given that. I’d rank number five as the most important. – LA, August 21, 2023.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last month I was speaking to a senior director of software engineering for a major high-tech company. With over 200 developers in his department and years of experience hiring top performers this observation was earth-shattering:
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.
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.
The Hiring Formula for Success shown in the image above defines all of the factors that best predict on-the-job success. Soft skills top the list.
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.
It turns out hiring people who will be in the top half is pretty easy. You just have to stop making hiring mistakes.
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.
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).
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.
Leverage: Getting more output with less input.
Leaders are force multipliers who get more done with and through people using some type of magical leverage.
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.
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.
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.)
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.