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 Performance-based Interview
"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 →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 →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 →“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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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.
The Complete 2-Question Interview
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