Cash bonuses. Management training and college tuition. Free knives and hotel stays. An appetizer for an application — or, better put, an app for an app.

As the economy in the United States begins...

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...

Employers and employees alike are curious about the post-pandemic workplace: What will the office look like? Will you need a proof of vaccine to enter? Who will line up eagerly to get into it an...

Lists of the most common interview questions—10, 20, 50, even 150 questions—are all over the Internet. Many of these lists are intended for conscientious job-seekers who want to ace their intervie...

The announcement that effective COVID-19 vaccines had been developed was cause for both celebration and relief. But with vaccine rollouts well underway, companies around the world are now facing...

When you go to the doctor, it’s natural to talk about the symptoms you’re experiencing. While medical tests will be critical to judging your health, a doctor can make a better assessment whe...

After the release of the latest U.S. jobs report, pundits, politicians, and journalists alike have been theorizing as to why the numbers were so disappointing. After all, across the country vacc...

First impression bias is the primary cause of most hiring mistakes. Why? Because when we feel good about someone right away, we tend to ask easier questions. And when we feel negative right away...

Building a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce is a top priority for many companies right now, and that starts with building a more inclusive and equitable hiring process. But figur...

In a 2017 report, researchers from Harvard Business School, Accenture, and Grads of Life discovered that in the United States alone, 6 million middle-skills jobs were at risk of “degree in...

As part of the launch of the 4th edition of Hire with Your Head (Wiley, September 2021) we’ll be hosting a number of interactive webcasts where we work through active search projects using the pri...

With hiring on the rise in many countries and vaccinations ramping up across the world, it feels as if the global economy is about to turn a corner.

What will the world look like when the pande...

Liz Johnson has a pretty good idea of just how much people with disabilities can do.

Liz has cerebral palsy, which has left her right side much weaker than her left. She’s won gold meda...

Recruiters monitor their InMail response rates closely, and for good reason.

They’re a good indicator of candidate engagement, but they also mean recruiters are getting more bang for their...

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...

Wild horses are often seen as a symbol of the American West, but in what could be a first in the corporate world, Tesla is showcasing the animals as a part of a recruiting effort. “Come wo...

Back in 2019, 72% of talent professionals said that work flexibility would be very important to the future of recruiting and HR. COVID-19 pushed that prediction to fruition much sooner than anyo...

The past year has been a difficult one for managers. Burnout is on the rise and managers have had to take on many new responsibilities outside of their normal job purview, especially as the pandemic h...

If the arc of history bends toward justice, the equal pay arc hasn’t been very flexible. When the Equal Pay Act became a federal law in 1963, women in the United States made 59 cents for every dolla...

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.

In addition to you...

More than 40 years ago the #1 recruiter in the world told me that applicant control was the key to making 2-3X as many placements per month. It took me one full year to master the technique but my p...

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 Perfo...

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...

In my 45+ years as a recruiter, one of the many things I’ve learned is that strangers get a bad deal when it comes to being accurately assessed during interviews. While people who are known...

One of our clients asked if we could develop a short version of Performance-based Hiring that hiring managers would actually use. Three questions seemed to do the trick as long as the hiring manager f...

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 ei...

After years of interviewing and tracking hundreds of people post-hire, it became obvious that most candidates get hired based on criteria that doesn’t predict success: typically, their individual co...

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 ju...

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 team...

The entire recruiting and staffing industry has been upended in the past few months. Live recruiting events and conferences have been canceled. Some recruiting teams are scaling back or putting projec...

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...

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 w...

Last week on my “Almost Daily Recruiting Show” one caller suggested competency-based interviewing was the solution to all interviewing problems. I begged to differ. I contended that competency or...

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 tha...

I don't need to tell you that we’re facing some really tough societal, business and health challenges that permeate everything we’re doing. We also know putting our heads in the sand or complainin...

If a candidate accepts an offer largely based on the title, compensation and location, a Win-Win Hiring outcome is unlikely. Win-Win Hiring means the hiring manager is happy with the person’s per...

Bias is insidious. Politics is the best example of bias at its worst. But it may be just as bad when it comes to hiring. It causes us to hire people we shouldn’t have and not hire those we should....

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 ski...

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...

Published: Mar 16, 2020

Hi (fill in your own name here),

I thought you’d be interested in a story about how one company figured out how to attract stronger and more diverse talent for some se...

Published: Mar 2, 2020

When it comes to finding that perfect candidate, I’m always looking for a “Win-Win Hiring” outcome. This means that both the hiring manager and the new hire both agree...

Published: Feb 28, 2020

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 quest...

Published: Feb 24, 2020

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 int...

Published: Feb 11, 2020

While writing my book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, I found it challenging to write the section about “Getting Hired” since my target audience wa...

Published: Jan 21, 2020

I tell hiring managers that if a candidate accepts an offer largely based on the title, compensation and location a Win-Win Hiring outcome is problematic. Job seekers need...

Published: Jan 4, 2020

I first heard about Red Scott’s “Hire Smart or Manage Tough” credo 30+ years ago at a Vistage (then TEC) resource presentation.

The modern-day version became the Per...

Long, long ago in a career now nearly forgotten, I had the opportunity to work in a number of different types of high-volume manufacturing organizations including consumer electronics and automotive....

In their landmark study — First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently — Gallup introduced their Q12 employee engagement survey. The Q12 describes in priority or...

A recent post on CNBC indicated that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ is “obsessed” with a bias for action decision-making style. To see if you, those you know and those you might hire possess this critic...

While inquiring about the status of a hiring manager interview training proposal, a client told me she would get back to me as soon as they got their budget approved for next year. As part of...

Despite its value, behavioral event interviewing (BEI) has some huge holes that can be quickly filled with help from the famed detective, Sherlock Holmes.

The biggest problem with BEI is the requir...

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 �...

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...

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’r...

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 othe...

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In order to hire extraordinary people, you need an extraordinary job and an extraordinary candidate experience (CX). Unfortunately, most companies think the CX starts when c...

One of the factors in our Recruiter Competency Model is the ability to be able to assess technical competency and intrinsic motivation in a one-hour interview. In an earlier post someone commented...

Gallup contends that excess turnover and low employee engagement are a $1 trillion U.S. problem.

Annually.

Gallup offers some after-the-fact fixes which, as far as I’m concerned, are too late...

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 a...

Before I make candidates an offer, I ask them if they would really want the job if it weren’t for the compensation. Most say yes, but few have a good answer when I ask, “Why?”

Getting the rig...

Early in my career, I had the good fortune to work as a financial analyst for a Fortune 50 company. During a meeting where the president of a $2 billion group was presenting his business plan fo...

Amazon takes great pride in its bar-raiser program which gives the right to an experienced interviewer to override a hiring manager’s yay/nay decision. In some cases, this makes sense, especially if...

I’ve been roundly criticized for saying that improving the candidate experience is a waste of time, money, and resources.

But while close, that’s not exactly what I said.

To set the record s...

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...

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 t...

When first published, some companies banned The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, considering it overly disruptive. Worse, they thought it was inappropriate for me to provide so many i...

First impression bias is the primary cause of most hiring mistakes. Why? Because when we feel good about someone right away, we tend to ask easier question. And, when we feel negative right way, we as...

On a recent podcast for LAXTechRecruit, the host tweeted I claimed that “AI for Hiring” was the cause of turnover. I didn’t actually say that. I said as it’s currently envisioned it woul...

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 (s...

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 (s...

Consider Hiring an Investment, Not an Expense

It seems the only companies successful at attracting great people on a consistent basis are those with the big brass employer brands. For everyone els...

With a recent Gallup report suggesting turnover in U.S. businesses is a $1 trillion problem, it’s no surprise that companies are increasingly focusing on employee retention. But where many companies...

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....

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Hiring great sales people can be tricky.  In this podcast Lou Adler and Bryan Johanson discuss the basis for hiring great sales people every time.  It requires a healthy d...

It’s important to remember that when it comes to changing jobs, it’s where you’re going that matters more than where you’ve been. 

In a recent post I contended that you don’t need a high...

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 a...

Having personally been involved in more than 2,000 different hiring situations over the past forty years and tracking the subsequent performance of many of those who were hired, it’s clear most hiri...

For the first 25 of the past 40 years, I was a full-time recruiter. Of the 500+ placements I made during that time (mostly mid- and senior management positions), only about a dozen were people who res...

In The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired I contend that one of the big reasons companies struggle to hire exceptional talent is by posting job descriptions that require a bunch of pre...

Over the past 40 years, I have reviewed at least 30,000 resumes and LinkedIn profiles and personally interviewed over 5,000 job candidates. After tracking the subsequent performance of hundreds of th...

At SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success 2019 recruiting conference in San Francisco last month someone suggested that too many people think diversity hiring requires the lowering of standards.

At an...

To maximize acceptance rates and prevent counter-offers, recruiters must never violate this rule when negotiating offers:

Never make a formal offer until the candidate accepts every term and condit...

When I started as a recruiter in the 1980s, these things were true:

 If you knew the actual job needs in detail and the hiring manager personally, you only needed to present 2-3 strong candidate...

Three weeks ago, I met with a bunch of CEOs who are members of Vistage, an organization helping small and mid-size companies grow and manage their businesses. One of their biggest challenges is findin...

My first search assignment – more than 40 years ago – was for a plant manager for an automotive parts manufacturing company. There was no job description for the role, so when I met the company pr...

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 m...

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...

The phone screen is the single most important tool in any manager’s or recruiter’s hiring toolbox. Here’s why:

The phone screen is the first time all of the decision-makers in the hiring pr...

Raising the talent bar involves consistently hiring people who are in the top half of their peer group. If this is a strategic talent acquisition goal for your company, you need to consider these fund...

 
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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...

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.

Among other things, I told him he was making a long-term de...

Over the years I’ve discovered that by obtaining the information shown in this phone screen checklist, a recruiter can confidently recommend a candidate to be interviewed onsite. More importantly, b...

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 assig...

There was an article last week in the WSJ describing how seasonal workers are being hired sight unseen. Well that’s not totally true since they are being heard via phone screen even if they ar...

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. Here’s the quick summary of the question and pro...

Whenever asked about the latest hiring buzz I always respond by saying that while the buzz is louder than ever, when it comes to hiring stronger people little progress has been made.

For example, ...

...

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...

Maximizing quality of hire and spending less money at the same time may seem impossible, but it isn’t. It all comes down to allocating a company’s recruiting budget based on the channels that prod...

This past month, I talked with a dozen companies about their hiring challenges. They were the exact same challenges a dozen different companies described to me last year. In fact, they were exactly th...

I find the conventional wisdom when it comes to properly using AI and implementing a positive candidate experience fundamentally flawed. My issue rests on the premise that talent leaders are solving t...

I find the conventional wisdom when it comes to properly using AI and implementing a positive candidate experience fundamentally flawed. My issue rests on the premise that talent leaders are s...

Two weeks ago, I posted the below image and message on LinkedIn:

“A new disease is on the horizon—and it's career threatening. As the economy heats up, people switch jobs for the wrong reason...

In a previous post on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog, I offered a semi-futuristic version of a recruiter competency model.

In a more recent post, I suggested there were some serious downsides to using AI...

Over the past several weeks I have spent serious time with several private equity investors, a few CEOs of companies ranging from $100mm to $1b and a number of their C-level executives. In these meeti...

Hiring better people starts by disrupting the hiring process as we know it, and disrupting the hiring process starts by eliminating certain tools.

It’s no secret that I consider psychological pse...

...

At a webcast last week I asked the recruiters who the primary decision maker is when it comes to the yes/no hiring decision. Selecting all that apply, the results looked something like this:

Th...

When talent is scarce, you need a talent strategy designed to attract people in not weed them out more efficiently. Given this, here are the five prerequisites for attracting and hiring the best peop...

...

Of late, there’s been a number of questions on my Quora account from high school seniors and their parents about what will happen to them if they don’t get into their dream school.

This was and...

Sherlock Holmes is a master of deduction: Using evidence to determine the crime and the criminal.

Surprisingly, this same objective evidence-based approach can be used to interview a candidate for...

In a recent study, we compared the performance of the best executive recruiters to their corporate, RPO and agency counterparts. The overall results are summarized in the graphic.

Here’s the sh...

In a recent post I made the case that PI, CI, DISC and similar style-based assessment tests are ill-advised for screening purposes. Despite their problems, they have value when used to assess the fin...

Hiring better people starts by disrupting the hiring process as we know it, and disrupting the hiring process starts by eliminating certain tools.

It’s no secret that I consider psychological pse...

Bias is insidious. Politics is the best example of bias at its worst. Long ago I learned how to overcome interviewing bias by accident by conducting a non-interview. The story went something like this...

In a talent scarcity situation where the demand for top talent exceeds the supply, I advocate a “small batch, high touch, high tech” hiring model. Done properly, you only need 15-20 prospects at t...

Imagine a job interview that achieves the following:

Accurately predicts on-the-job performance, motivation, cultural fit and potential.
Minimizes every type of interviewer bias, like race, ge...

Assess Ability Before You Assess Likability
Bias permeates everything we do. Politics is the best example of bias at its worst. The big problem with bias is that we ignore information that conflicts...

Most companies unknowingly violate this the 80/20 Talent Rule every day. The rule is:

Focus 80% of your hiring and recruiting efforts on the most important 20% of the talent market.

When compani...

The 80/20 Talent Rule: Invest 80% of your hiring and recruiting efforts on the most important 20% of the talent market.

Twenty years ago I had this cartoon drawn to reflect the then state-of-affair...

Before I became a recruiter, I worked in several different industries. I was a guidance and control system engineer, financial analysist, manager of capital budgeting, director of business planning, d...

Once you get an interview, the chance you'll be assessed properly is remote. You can improve your odds 5-10X by asking "forced-choice turn-around" questions. For example, if the manager is asking a ra...

Bias permeates everything we do. Politics in the news is the best example of bias at its worst. While this is just one area in which bias dominates our decision-making process, the bigger problem with...

An expert system is a business process that simulates the judgment and behavior of a human who has expert knowledge and experience in a particular field.

I've been around for a lot of years...

Most technical managers find the interviewing skills of their recruiters woefully inaccurate. They contend this is largely due to their inability to accurately assess technical competency.

Most rec...

Last week, I was talking with a senior technical director who handles major defense contracts for advanced weapon systems. He lamented that he could not find enough top hardware and software engineers...

I recently tweeted the image shown below. With no explanation whatsoever it got 320 thousand views in a few days but only 1,400 clicks to the details.

Given this reaction to the importance of chan...

I contend I’m the most objective person in the world despite the fact that I always use biased information to prove it.

The same holds true for just about everyone when interviewing candidates ...

It's pretty clear that people who write laws prohibiting discussions about salary history don't know anything about hiring. If they did, they would write a law preventing companies from box-checking s...

Skills-based job descriptions are the lazy person’s way to hire the wrong person. The right way to hire the right person is to define a job as a series of 5-6 performance objectives and screen can...

The Job Seeker’s Guide to the Universe and Related Matters
I recently tweeted the image shown below. With no explanation whatsoever it got 320 thousand views in a few days but only 1,400 click...

The phone screen provides remarkable insight into the quality of a company’s entire hiring process. Consider:

If the hiring manager refuses to phone screen all of the candidates a recruiter rec...

While some people are concerned about how the “No Salary History” law will affect hiring, the truth is that asking or not asking about salary really shouldn’t make a difference. It’s not goi...

I was talking with a very smart guy last week, who told me that weather prediction has gotten 50% better in the last 10 years. This involved a lot of modeling and AI in combination with hundreds of da...

If you understand real job needs, you only need to ask two questions to predict on-the-job success. It doesn't matter what you ask if you don't know job needs, you'll either be wrong, or lucky.

It...

You can't solve a three-dimensional problem with a one-dimensional solution.
Every year about this time I get interviewed by some magazine about what I think will happen in the upcoming year to impro...

In the last few years, we’ve run a survey asking how recently hired people found their jobs and how active or passive they were when they heard about the job. With the help of a curious Harvard unde...

You might recall that the first most important interview question of all time is, “Can you describe your most significant career accomplishment?” I suggest spending about 10-15 minutes on this...

A few weeks ago I was talking to the CEO of a $250 million business looking for a CFO. He started the meeting complaining that the recruiters he’s used in the past always try to talk him into compro...

If you're a job seeker, what would you do if you could only apply to 4-5 jobs in any given month?

I suspect you'd be a lot more focused and conduct a lot more due diligence before hitting the apply...

The other day a woman at a webcast I was leading asked why I didn’t think behavioral-based interviewing is effective for assessing competency, fit and motivation for a specific job. My two-minute r...

Digging deep into a candidate's track record of building and developing high performing diverse teams will avoid most managerial disasters. Conducting the due diligence is the first step.

A few yea...

Sourcing and recruiting may seem like two separate activities, but they’re not. If you’re not good at sourcing, you can’t be good at recruiting, and vice versa. Why? Because if sourcers can’t...

I make the contention that if you can’t measure quality of hire, you can’t improve it. As far as I’m concerned that’s the reason quality of hire hasn’t improved in the past 100 years. In fac...

Ability to do the work in relationship to fit is what drives motivation to do the work. Fit includes fit with the job, fit with the hiring manager and fit with the company culture and environment. Goo...

As far as I’m concerned too many companies are spending too much time, money and energy on improving the candidate experience after the person applies. In my opinion, a better approach is to rethi...

A few weeks ago I suggested you could predict quality of hire, on-the-job performance, job satisfaction and retention with just one interview question. This six-minute video lesson summarizes the ent...

No one disputes the idea that if you want to raise quality of hire, you need to hire more passive candidates. But hiring more passive candidates involves an entirely different process than hiring acti...

Applying directly is the worst way to get a better job. The best jobs are found via networking or getting recruiters to call you because they found your resume.

Over the past few years, I have...

In a talent scarcity situation, when the demand for talent exceeds the supply, you need to use an “attract the best” sourcing and recruiting process. This is represented by the left side of the su...

As part of our Quality of Hire initiative working with companies around the world on implementing Performance-based Hiring, I always ask hiring managers if they would hire someone who met the follo...

There are two talent markets. As shown in the graphic, one offers jobs, the other careers. In order to maximize your lifetime personal growth, you need to find jobs in the career market. Unfortunately...

Doing the wrong things more efficiently might seem like progress, but in the long run you wind up back where you started.

In Nashville last week at LinkedIn's Talent Connect 2017, their a...

If you’re a job seeker, what would you do if you could only apply to 4-5 jobs in any given month?

I suspect you’d be a lot more focused and conduct a lot more due diligence before hitting the a...

The other day, Elon Musk said the Tesla Model 3 is “'deep in production hell.”' He promised 1,500 cars for September 2017 but produced only a few hundred. If Musk was an HR guy he would have said,...

You can't assess team skills based on how likeable the person is, or how extroverted. Instead, find out what types of teams the person has been assigned to and observe the makeup of these teams over t...

I’ve been thinking about hiring when I first become a hiring manager 45 years ago and 1,500 hires later (as a recruiter). Mostly I’ve been thinking about why hiring processes are still as outdated...

Recruiters need to become advocates for improving quality of hire. Unfortunately your ATS vendor is holding you back.

Advocacy starts by recognizing that there are two talent markets. One targets c...

Based on reports from different applicant tracking systems, it took 20 million job applications to hire 200 thousand people. That’s one in one hundred or 1%. For those who applied directly it was...

When hiring managers, evaluate them on their track record of building outstanding teams and developing talent. Too many managers get hired for their individual contributor skills and then we're surpri...

A few weeks ago, the head of an investment group asked for my help to find a CEO for one of his new ventures. While I didn’t have time to conduct the search, I did say I would interview all the fin...

I remember a story from long ago about two cowboys who bet on who had the slowest horse. The race stopped before it started as both horse and cowboy stood motionless – neither cowboy wanted to lose...

You won’t hire more diversity candidates by “sensitivity” training. This is another outdated HR idea comparable to competency models, behavioral interviewing and the use of like/dislike personal...

At my Talent Connect 2017 talk in Nashville on October 5th, I’m going to prove that I can find top tier candidates within a few days for any job using proactive networking. But I need to have some...

Leadership begins with a vision, confidence and persistence. Confidence and persistence begins by stretching yourself and sometimes failing.

I was talking with some old fraternity brothers this pas...

When looking to fill a role, recruiters sometimes screen out candidates based on shorthand they have developed over the years. The trouble is that this shorthand can be wrong.

For example, in a re...

In a recent post I introduced the concept of Work Types, suggesting that all jobs were a mix of four different types of work. As shown in the graphic, these Work Types map directly to the standard pr...

Work Type analysis allows companies to use the product like cycle as a guide to divide work into four categories: Thinker, Builder, Improver, Producer. This approach breaks down the artificial barrier...

Most recruiters I know are guilty of at least one of the hiring mistakes below. It’s not their fault, either: these bad habits have become the norm in today’s recruiting world.

Nobody�...

One way to improve quality of hire is to define a job as a series of 5-6 performance objectives rather than a laundry list of skills, experience and “must have” competencies. On one level this i...

If you’re wondering just how effective (or ineffective) your hiring process is, finding out is actually pretty simple. All you need to do to evaluate the quality of your company’s hiring processes...

Too many managers are hired based on the quality of their individual contributor skills and personality. Managers should be hired on the quality of the people they've hired and developed.

If you kn...

This is a very unusual post. I decided to create a lesson to introduce the concept. This specific lesson is from my new online self-paced Performance-based Hiring training program. It covers the mo...

If you’ve ever been surprised when an offer is rejected, it’s usually because you rushed the process and didn’t test it properly. When this testing is done properly and you ask the candidate, �...

In a blog post last week I contended that Google for Jobs is Evil. Most people disagreed and most weren’t aware that one of Google’s early mission statements was “Do No Evil.” But I think th...

It's good to remember one of Google's original mission statements - Do No Evil. Google has just violated this credo in the announcement of their new service: Google for Jobs.

If you're not convin...

The strongest talent in any field often has a different mix of skills and experiences than listed on the traditional job description. Shifting to a performance qualified approach removes this artifici...

We all know that recruiting people who are looking for a new job requires a different strategy and different process than hiring people who are actively looking. The first big difference is that passi...

In a recent post, I made the contention that too many companies design their hiring processes around the needs of active candidates who have the skills and experiences listed on the job description. S...

Quality of hire is easy to predict. All you need to do is look at the quality of the company's hiring process.

Sometimes things are easier than they seem. Predicting job performance is one of those...

Applying directly turns out to be the worst way to get a job, even a bad one. 

I was on the You’re Hired radio show last week and had to argue that when only one in about 200 people who apply fo...

In a recent post, I provided an overview of the How Hiring Process Impacts Performance matrix shown below. It demonstrates the concept that the quality of the process a company uses to hire people is...

The first requirement for an exemplary user experience (UX) is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother.

This seems like a pretty good definition of UX to me. And w...

Too many people are hired based on the quality of their presentation skills. By scripting the first 30 minutes of the interview you can be sure to hire people based on their actual ability.

Based o...

Sometimes things are easier than they seem. Predicting job performance is one of those things. The 2X2 matrix shown below is proof. In just 50 words, it describes exactly what you need to do to make b...

Last week I met with more than 450 recruiters and talent leaders in Milwaukee, Portland and Chicago. Two weeks earlier I met with 400 recruiters and talent leaders in San Francisco. And last month, in...

First impression bias is the primary cause of most hiring mistakes. Why? Because when we feel good about someone right away, we tend to ask easier question. And, when we feel negative right way, we as...

I’ve been interviewing and placing job candidates for 40 years and tracking their subsequent performance for almost as long. Based on this and training more than twenty thousand recruiters and hirin...

Cultural fit is not only hard to define it's impossible to objectively assess. A better approach is to avoid hiring people who don't fit anywhere. The others will likely then fit perfectly in your com...

HAVE – GET – DO – BECOME.

When these words are viewed as a process from left to right, they put a limit on your company’s quality of hire. This is not good.

When viewed as a process from...

It's now too easy to change jobs. As a result companies focus too much on the tactics of managing high volumes of applicants rather than the strategy of attracting top people.

Over the past four we...

The case for using SI (smart intelligence) instead of AI (artificial intelligence) is demonstrated in the chart. It summarizes how people get jobs. The first thing that’s clear is that not many peop...

Over a 10-day period last month with three large companies in Europe and two Silicon Valley mid-majors, I relearned why so many companies make unnecessary hiring mistakes. They were each looking for s...

I was in Europe this past week and two major companies asked what I thought was the next big thing to impact the future of hiring.

I didn’t answer the question.

Instead I said since the birth...

The research is clear. The chance of getting a job by applying directly is less than 1 percent. But there are multiple ways to land the same job by understanding how companies decide whom to hire....

Many years ago, in the land of Spamalittle, King Rter lived in a castle surrounded by a moat filled with frogs, croaking day and night. In his quest to maintain rule over his kingdom, Rter needed more...

According to the Department of Labor 235 thousand more people got jobs last month. While impressive job growth, the quality of these jobs and how they got them is what should matter. To get a sense of...