Archive for Current Articles

The Best Interview Technique of All Time

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.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Performance-based Interview

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The 10 Best Predictors of Success that AI Can’t Find

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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Back to Hiring Basics: Benchmark How and Why the Top 25% Change Jobs

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.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Recruiting & Closing, Talent Strategy

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Filling Generic Jobs with Generic People is a Recipe for Disappointment

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:

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Rethinking the Job Description

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“Tell me about yourself” and other PBI interviewing tips

“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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Rethinking the Job Description, Talent Strategy

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Without an EVP a Job Is Just a Job

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).

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring

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How to Avoid the Staggering Cost of Turnover

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.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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The ROI of Most Job Postings is Below Zero!

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.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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Hiring More Leaders Starts by Changing Your Hiring Strategy

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire, Rethinking the Job Description, Talent Strategy

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Don’t Make Strategic Career Decisions Using Tactical Information

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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A 10-point Checklist for Hiring Leaders

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.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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HR's Misreading of the Labor Law is #1 Cause of Hiring Bias

HR

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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The Traditional Interview is a Terrible Predictor of Performance

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Diversity Hiring, Passive Candidate Recruiting

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Performance-based Hiring is Win-Win Hiring

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.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Diversity Hiring

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Stop Making Tactical Excuses for a Strategic Hiring Problem

Stop Making Tactical Excuses for a Strategic Hiring Problem

The fourth edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, September 2021) will soon be published. As part of the unique book club we’re putting together for those who pre-order the book program, I’ll be selecting different sections of the book to highlight. The opening of the book makes the case that most hiring problems are strategic in nature, so I’ll start there.

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8 Clues You're Interviewing an Exceptional Person

8 Clues You

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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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Controlling Bias, Current Articles

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Avoid This Career Limiting Mistake When Changing Jobs

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.

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Posted in: Controlling Bias, Current Articles, Rethinking the Job Description

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Dump Your Job Descriptions and Hire Stronger Talent

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.”

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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Recruiters Must Master These Critical High-Touch Skills to Stay Relevant

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.

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Posted in: Assessing Soft Skills, Current Articles

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How to Increase Quality of Hire by Only Sourcing Semi-finalists

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:

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire

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Double Your Productivity With These 6 Recruiting Tips

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Recruiting & Closing

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10 Ways to Avoid Making $100,000 Hiring Mistakes

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Quality of Hire

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Stop Turnover: Give Everyone a 20% Annual Increase

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy

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Amazon’s Talent Bar-raising Program Reveals Flaws in Hiring Practices

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Talent Strategy

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When Personality Tests are Useless for Hiring and When They're Mandatory

When Personality Tests are Useless for Hiring and When They

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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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire

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Headhunter Secrets for Acing the Interview

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview

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Eliminating Turnover Requires a Lot More Commonsense and a Lot Less A

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Rethinking the Job Description

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Candidates Must Answer Yes to These 10 Questions Before You Ever Make an Offer

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.

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Posted in: Current Articles, Performance-based Interview, Quality of Hire, Talent Strategy

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The Power of the Exploratory Phone Screen

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. 

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Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts

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Hiring for Performance Not Skills

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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Posted in: Advice, Current Articles, Podcasts

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Lou Adler's Hiring Troubleshooting Guide

Here is Lou Adler's Hiring Troubleshooting Guide, a comprehensive listing which outlines the hiring problem and the solution.

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Handling Compensation

Handling Compensation

In this podcast Lou Adler answers the common candidate question, "What's the compensation." Adler suggests a non-answer to understand what drives the person to excel. If your job matches this you need to pay the person whatever they need.

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