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?
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:
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.
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.
You might recall that this was formerly known as the most important interview question of all time.
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.
The worst question about career goals is something like, “What’s your major career goal for the next five years?”
As you’ve discovered if you’d tried to hire any senior level person, the process for hiring leaders for these critical spots is much different than hiring everyone else for this one simple reason:
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.
Simply put, if you describe work as a series of performance objectives rather than a list of skills, experiences and competencies you can attract a broader pool of more diverse and high potential talent.