Hiring for Remote Roles Starts by Clarifying Expectations
A client recently asked if we could update our performance-based interview to assess remote and hybrid workers for different professional staff roles.
Continue Reading →Archive for Advice
"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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Should I Stay or Should I Go
The other day someone asked me if she should quit her job. I handed her the graphic shown above and told her to rank the six factors on a 1-5 scale from terrible to outstanding.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →The NEW Most Important Interview Question of All Time
You might recall that this was formerly known as the most important interview question of all time.
Continue Reading →This 1 Metric Determines the Health of Your Entire Hiring Program
As an old manufacturing guy it’s pretty obvious that when a machine is producing scrap you stop the machine and fix the problem before turning it back on.
Continue Reading →Soft Skills are Too Important to Be Called Soft
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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Everyone Can Be in the Top 25%
It turns out hiring people who will be in the top half is pretty easy. You just have to stop making hiring mistakes.
Continue Reading →The Only Two Questions You Need to Ask to Assess Ability AND Potential
The other day a candidate asked me how to figure out if he was qualified for a new role given 15 years of experience with the same company.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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:
Continue Reading →“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.
Continue Reading →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).
Continue Reading →Do This First Before Ever Asking About Goals
The worst question about career goals is something like, “What’s your major career goal for the next five years?”
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →The Illusion of Pay Parity and the Glass Ceiling
The primary purpose of this post is to argue that compensation shouldn't be the primary measure of pay equity. The secondary purpose is..
Continue Reading →Leverage Your LinkedIn Network to Hire More Leaders
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.
Continue Reading →Hiring Leaders Requires New Thinking
As you've discovered if you'd tried to hire any senior level person, the process for hiring leaders for these critical spots is much different than hiring everyone else for this one simple reason:
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →HR's Misreading of the Labor Law is #1 Cause of Hiring Bias
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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.)
Continue Reading →This One Question Will Change Who You Hire
Simply put, if you describe work as a series of performance objectives rather than a list of skills, experiences and competencies you can attract a broader pool of more diverse and high potential talent.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →8 Clues You're Interviewing an Exceptional Person
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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Controlling Bias, Diversity Hiring
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Recruiting & Closing, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Top Labor Attorney Describes How to Attract Outstanding Diverse Talent
As part of the research for the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head I asked the #1 OFCCP/EEO legal authority in the U.S. to validate the entire Performance-based Hiring process.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Use Win-Win Hiring to Cut the Hidden Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions in Half
I was just finishing up the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, Q3 2021) when a call came in from a talent leader asking about the cost for training her 30-35 hiring managers to implement Performance-based Hiring at her company.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Controlling Bias, Diversity Hiring
Leave a Comment (0) →Don't Hire Anyone Who Can't Answer These 3 Questions
One of our clients asked if we could develop a short version of Performance-based Hiring that hiring managers would actually use. Three questions seemed to do the trick as long as the hiring manager first defined job success as five or six key performance objectives (KPOs).
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →The Best Answer for the Most Important Interview Question of All Time
One of my first posts on this LinkedIn Influencer site, The Most Important Interview Question of All Time, was read by more than 1.5 million people. It’s still worth checking out. Following is the quick summary with a helpful twist for job seekers.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →The future of hiring can become colorblind by reducing bias at its source
To expand your diversity hiring initiatives you need to start with these five action steps
Continue Reading →Posted in: Diversity Hiring, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →Eliminating Interviewer Bias Starts with a Simple Mind Game
Bias is insidious. Politics is the best example of bias at its worst. But it may be just as bad when it comes to hiring. It causes us to hire people we shouldn’t have and not hire those we should.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Diversity Hiring, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →The Lack of Soft Skills Puts a Lid on Career Growth
In a recent LinkedIn post describing the importance of “soft skills,” one person commented that people get hired for the depth of their hard skills but are fired for their lack of “soft skills.”
Continue Reading →Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills
Leave a Comment (0) →Soft Skills Are Too Important to Be Called Soft
A person’s “soft skills” can’t be measured by some simple test despite what some test seller might tell you. Snake oil has a better track record when you add false positives (passed the screen but failed the reality) and false negatives (failed the screen but passed the reality) into the mix.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills
Leave a Comment (0) →An Open Letter to Everyone Who Has Struggled Hiring Techies
I thought you’d be interested in a story about how one company figured out how to attract stronger and more diverse talent for some senior technical roles using an unusual approach.
Continue Reading →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
Continue Reading →Use Insight, Not Guesswork, to Hire the Top-Third – Part 2
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
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →This Fatal Flaw in Competency Models Prevents Hiring Success
At the beginning of a recent corporate recruiter workshop a hiring manager I had worked with previously at LinkedIn, asked if he could tell a Performance-based Hiring interviewing story.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Job Seekers Need to Control the Interview with These Questions
I tell hiring managers that if a candidate accepts an offer largely based on the title, compensation and location a Win-Win Hiring outcome is problematic. Job seekers need to be equally concerned.
Continue Reading →Using Metrics to Achieve Win-Win Hiring Outcomes
Win-Win Hiring means that after the first year both the hiring manager and the person hired still agree it was the right decision with no regrets.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →Use the BEST Test to Assess “Bias for Action”
A recent post on CNBC indicated that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ is “obsessed” with a bias for action decision-making style. To see if you, those you know and those you might hire possess this critical trait, answer these questions using this 1-5 scale before reading further.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Team Skills are Too Important to Be Called "Soft"
Despite its value, behavioral event interviewing (BEI) has some huge holes that can be quickly filled with help from the famed detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Continue Reading →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.”
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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:
Continue Reading →Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →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:
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →Stop Hiring the Wrong People
Gallup offers some after-the-fact fixes which, as far as I’m concerned, are too late to do much good. To me the cause of the problem is much more obvious: The wrong people were hired in the first place!
Continue Reading →Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →Why You Might Need to Reverse Your Hiring Strategy
Early in my career, I had the good fortune to work as a financial analyst for a Fortune 50 company. During a meeting where the president of a $2 billion group was presenting his business plan for the next year, he was lambasted by the corporate CEO with the following:
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →When Personality Tests are Useless for Hiring and When They're Mandatory
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.
Continue Reading →What You Need to Ask the Hiring Manager In Order to Source the Right Candidate
If a recruiter ever needs to present more than 3-4 candidates in order to make one great hire, there is something fundamentally wrong with the hiring process being used. And, if two of the remaining three aren’t aren’t strong backups, something is even bigger is wrong.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Controlling Bias
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here's How to Do It
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.
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →Assessing Motivation Can Make or Break Your Next Hire — Here's How to Do It
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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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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Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →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.
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Continue Reading →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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Leave a Comment (0) →Hiring Without These Critical “Soft Skills” is a Recipe for Disaster
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →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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Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →Diversity Hiring Doesn't Require Any Compromise
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring
Leave a Comment (0) →Salary Negotiations: 5 Things Every Recruiter Should Do
To maximize acceptance rates and prevent counter-offers, recruiters must never violate this rule when negotiating offers:
Never make a formal offer until the candidate accepts every term and condition first and verbally agrees to accept your offer without hesitation.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Recruiting & Closing
Leave a Comment (0) →Recruiting Lessons From the 80’s That Will Help You Improve Quality of Hire Now
With the birth of the Internet and job boards in the 1990s and the emergence of ATS around 2000, the high-touch, “quality is #1” approach was losing favor. Companies thought they could “win the war for talent” using technology to reduce the cost per hire.
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Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →This One Question Accurately Predicts On-the-Job Performance - Part 1
My first search assignment – more than 40 years ago – was for a plant manager for an automotive parts manufacturing company. There was no job description for the role, so when I met the company president, I asked this one question:
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing
Leave a Comment (0) →Raise the Talent Bar by Redefining the Bar
Raising the talent bar involves consistently hiring people who are in the top half of their peer group. If this is a strategic talent acquisition goal for your company, you need to consider these fundamental truths about hiring people who are already in the top half:
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →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.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts
Leave a Comment (0) →Time is Your Most Valuable Asset - Don’t Waste It
Long ago a candidate told me he was taking an offer from another company for a little more pay, a better title and a job closer to home.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →This 2-Step Process Virtually Eliminates Interviewer Bias
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Controlling Bias, Current Articles
Leave a Comment (0) →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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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts
Leave a Comment (0) →This Phone Screen Will Change the Quality of Every Person Hired at Your Company
While a professional phone screen won’t solve these problems, it will identify their root cause. That’s why every recruiter and hiring manager needs to master the phone screen before implementing any other hiring initiative.
Continue Reading →Posted in: Quality of Hire, Recruiting & Closing
Leave a Comment (0) →Podcast - Become Performance-based Hiring Certified
Performance-based Hiring Certification Overview
In this podcast we are introduced to the benefits of becoming Performance-based Hiring Certified.
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Continue Reading →10 Ways to Overcome Passive Candidate Concerns and Objections
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Continue Reading →How to Uncover the Four Best Predictors of Success in 30 Minutes
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →Use the 30% Solution to Turn Jobs into Careers
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Recruiting & Closing
Leave a Comment (0) →A 7-Step Plan for Measuring & Improving Quality of Hire
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Quality of Hire
Leave a Comment (0) →A Simple Idea to Revolutionize How We Hire People
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Continue Reading →Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Talent Strategy
Leave a Comment (0) →Change How Your Hiring Manager Uses Job Descriptions (and Get a Few Hugs)
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Continue Reading →The Complete 2-Question Interview
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Continue Reading →Maslow’s Hierarchy of Hiring Pyramid
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