With AI, there’s a new math for hiring. It turns out everyone can now be in the top half of the top half. To get there candidates and hiring managers both need to be more discriminating and make wiser decisions. Getting to the top 10% takes a little more effort. For some it’s worth it.
According to ChatGPT everyone can now be in the top third despite the mathematical absurdity. These are people who are more motivated, more satisfied, more productive, stronger team players and more flexible. Here’s all you need to do to get started.
I uploaded this PDF describing the 12 factors in our Hiring Effectiveness Index (HEI) into ChatGPT. I then asked if the scoring system would help a company identify potential problems in its current hiring processes.
Spoiler alert. This could be scary. It represents the future of hiring.
I just used ChatGPT to fundamentally change how job candidates will be sourced, assessed, recruited and managed in the future. Here’s how to get started. If you dare.
I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I asked ChatGPT if our Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard could be used to improve hiring results. I was surprised it was so insightful interpreting relationships and ideas that were never written. You’ll see what I mean below.
Note: I asked ChatGPT to write this post in my style. It also came up with the title. It took less than one minute. It took me more time to cut and paste this into LinkedIn. What do you think?
It’s important to note that using behavioral interviewing #BEI without a detailed job analysis pretty much invalidates the entire interview. Without knowing how a skill, competency or behavior is actually used on the job, the assessment is left to the interviewer’s biases and perception of the job and how well the candidate presented their answer.
When creating a talent acquisition strategy it’s important to note that about 20-25% of those in the workforce are always actively looking for another job. This is the group companies need to target to fill open jobs as rapidly as possible. There’s another 20-25% who are always proactively passive. Don’t even attempt to contact these people unless you’ve worked with the person before. Given this, it’s obvious the candidates you’ll want to hire for your most important roles are in the other 50-60%. While this is the ideal talent market, these people won’t respond to your emails or calls unless you become an expert at passive candidate recruiting. This involves a number of critical skills, in particular:
If your tactics, techniques, and technologies don’t support your talent strategy, you won’t be seeing or hiring too many good people.
Long ago a CEO for a mid-sized company asked me how much experience a person needed to have to be the VP Operations for his company. My glib response then was, “Enough to do the job. It’s what people do with what they have, not what they have that matters. Some people need more experience to do the same job and others need less.”
In my mind, being more efficient hiring the same people you’re now hiring is a trivial use of ChatGPT.
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:
A client recently asked if we could update our performance-based interview to assess remote and hybrid workers for different professional staff roles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.