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The past year has been a difficult one for managers. Burnout is on the rise and managers have had to take on many new responsibilities outside of their normal job purview, especially as the pandemic has blurred the lines between employees’ work and personal lives.
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In a 2017 report, researchers from Harvard Business School, Accenture, and Grads of Life discovered that in the United States alone, 6 million middle-skills jobs were at risk of “degree inflation” — the practice of requiring or preferring a college degree for jobs previously held by people without one. This not only created unnecessary barriers to entry for countless skilled job seekers but also made it harder for companies to hire, with two-thirds of employers struggling to fill these roles.
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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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With hiring on the rise in many countries and vaccinations ramping up across the world, it feels as if the global economy is about to turn a corner.
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Liz Johnson has a pretty good idea of just how much people with disabilities can do.
Liz has cerebral palsy, which has left her right side much weaker than her left. She’s won gold medals in swimming at the Paralympics and the world and European championships and set world records i
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They’re a good indicator of candidate engagement, but they also mean recruiters are getting more bang for their buck from their InMail allotment. Recruiters earn an InMail credit back if their message receives a response within 90 days — so response rates reflect both candidate engagement and recruiter efficiency.
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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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Wild horses are often seen as a symbol of the American West, but in what could be a first in the corporate world, Tesla is showcasing the animals as a part of a recruiting effort. “Come work at the biggest [and] most advanced factory on Earth!” tweeted CEO Elon Musk when the company opened its new plant in a remote area of Nevada. “Located by a river near the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains with wild horses roaming free.”
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Back in 2019, 72% of talent professionals said that work flexibility would be very important to the future of recruiting and HR. COVID-19 pushed that prediction to fruition much sooner than anyone could have anticipated. Today, 73% of workers want flexible remote work options to continue after the immediate need has passed, and 70% of managers say they’re more open to flexible models for their teams than they were prepandemic. As Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, commented during LinkedIn’s recent Forward event on the future of work: “It would be the tragedy of our times if we didn’t reinvent the workplace in this moment.”
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The past year has been a difficult one for managers. Burnout is on the rise and managers have had to take on many new responsibilities outside of their normal job purview, especially as the pandemic has blurred the lines between employees’ work and personal lives.
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If the arc of history bends toward justice, the equal pay arc hasn’t been very flexible. When the Equal Pay Act became a federal law in 1963, women in the United States made 59 cents for every dollar men earned doing the same work. In 2000, it was 73 cents. Today, it stands at 82.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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).
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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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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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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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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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The entire recruiting and staffing industry has been upended in the past few months. Live recruiting events and conferences have been canceled. Some recruiting teams are scaling back or putting projects on hold, while others are focusing on reskilling or redeploying teammates to other business priorities. On top of this, we’re also seeing a trend towards a hiring manager do-it-yourself model that basically bypasses the recruiter and sourcer entirely. However, we are seeing one big area of opportunity: Recruiters who are true value-added partners to their hiring managers by sourcing, recruiting, and closing outstanding talent — especially diverse talent. These recruiters are in high-demand and this demand is increasing. But being successful in this new opportunity requires a different set of skills and competencies. By benchmarking best practices, we’ve been able to capture these skills in our new “Recruiter of the Future” competency model. Download it here and be sure to sign up for our ongoing series of webcasts. (The next one is July 29, 2020, but if you can’t make it, you’ll still be able to find the recording.) The metric of success in this competency model isn’t jobs filled on time and at the lowest cost, but quality of hire and job satisfaction on the candidate’s first-year anniversary date, not their start date. We refer to this idea as “Win-Win Hiring.” A successful Win-Win Hiring outcome occurs after one year when the hiring manager fully agrees the new hire is an outstanding performer and the new employee is
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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.
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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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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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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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To expand your diversity hiring initiatives you need to start with these five action steps
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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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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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In their landmark study — First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently — Gallup introduced their Q12 employee engagement survey. The Q12 describes in priority order what the best managers do and need to do to create high performing teams. Number one on the list? “Clarify Expectations Up Front.” Whether you’re a sourcer, recruiter, interviewer, or hiring manager, one way you can live up to this value of providing clear expectations from the get-go is to take the time to fully understand the job you’re trying to fill. And you can start this process before you even write a job description by creating a list of performance objectives for the role. I’ve been doing this throughout my 40+ year career as a recruiter and trainer, including in my very first search project for a plant manager many years ago. In that case, I walked the factory floor and identified the six things a potential hire would need to fix over their first 6-12 months, in order to be considered successful. Here’s how you can clarify expectations for your candidates, plus some examples of how to identify successful performance objectives for the jobs you’re looking to fill: Identify critical performance objectives before writing your job description More recently, in fact just two weeks ago, I worked with a Board consisting of investors and founders for a $150 million food manufacturer who were getting ready to hire a new CEO. After a few hours of wrangling, we
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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.
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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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Despite its value, behavioral event interviewing (BEI) has some huge holes that can be quickly filled with help from the famed detective, Sherlock Holmes.
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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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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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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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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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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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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!
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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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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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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:
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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:
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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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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.
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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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:
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 →Posted in: -, Current Articles, Recruiting & Closing
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Lou's new book/ebook/audio book
The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired
is available now.
Learn More