Archive for Assessing Soft Skills
I’ve always found it odd – maybe even dumb – to hire people based on their skills and depth of experience without telling them much about the job until they start. Then to determine if they are good or not after they're hired, we assess them on their performance doing some job they weren’t assessed on.
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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:
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I was just talking to the director of engineering for a major consumer products company about new ways to improve the hiring decision for software developers. His first comment was profound and applicable to just about every technical role.
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I was a guest on Simon Fagg’s excellent After Dinner Leadership podcast last week. Simon brings an oldie with a newbie to discuss how business ideas of the past might still be useful today. Simon’s first question to me was to highlight some early leadership lessons that I felt were still relevant. Here’s what I came up with from the early 1970s.
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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.
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I think too many people including those in HR, OD experts, hiring managers and recruiters, believe being a good interviewer requires some remarkable insight into human behavior. I think they’re mistaken. There is an alternate path: being a good detective.
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It turns out hiring people who will be in the top half is pretty easy. You just have to stop making hiring mistakes.
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It turns out that anyone can be in the top 25% with the right job, the right company, and the right hiring manager. But this is a rare event despite having spent $400-500 billion in job postings and HR tech in the past 25 years in the hope of matching the perfect job with the perfect candidate.
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If you want to hire a great person, you need to offer a great job, not a laundry-list of skills, experiences and competencies that at best is no more than an ill-defined lateral transfer surrounded by some generic boilerplate. This is even more important today with candidates leaving within 90 days after starting if the new job turns out to be more promise than substance (Fortune, May 2022).
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While it’s hard to believe that a single hiring mistake could cost a company $400 thousand, it’s not so hard to believe when looking at this table showing the incremental profit contribution of employees at these well-known companies. The idea behind this table is that it shows the full financial and business impact a person has on a company, rather than just considering the person’s compensation package.
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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.
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LEADERS: The strongest people are easy to spot. They’re leaders. Leaders don’t just do their jobs reasonably well; they improve how they do their jobs. And whether they’re managing a team or not, they also help everyone they work with do their jobs better, too. You can use this Performance-based Interview to determine if your candidates are leaders, or not.
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It doesn’t take much research to figure out that for candidates who are hired primarily for their hard skills when they underperform it’s most often due either to their lack of soft skills, team skills or an inability to work with their hiring manager. These problems can be avoided by changing how candidates are assessed with more focus on the context of the job and the fit factors, not just their technical competency. The “how to do this properly” is fully covered in the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley & Sons, September 2021) but the theme of hiring for the anniversary date, rather than the start date, is the real purpose of the book. This is called Win-Win Hiring.
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This chapter is about controlling interviewer bias. It is the most important chapter in the book since more hiring mistakes are made due to bias than any other cause. In fact, if you read only this chapter before conducting another interview and use these techniques for overcoming bias, you'll reduce you're hiring mistakes by at least 50%. (See graphic below.)
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On September 22, 2021, the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head will be published by John Wiley & Sons. As part of the totally revised edition, I reviewed some of my favorite posts from the past few years and incorporated them in the new book. The following is a slight rewrite of one that appeared on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog a few years ago.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Lou Adler’s Fourth Edition Book
Hire with Your Head