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 surprised that they're not good managers.
I'm working with an investment group helping them hire a few C-level leaders for one of their major ventures. The head of the group believes in Performance-based Hiring, where people are hired based on their past performance doing comparable work, not their laundry list of skills and experiences. This approach opens up the talent pool to more diverse candidates with broader industry experiences. However, the most important performance-based criteria for him is having a track record of hiring stellar and diverse talent and building organizations that are focused on hiring outstanding people.
When he mentioned this requirement, I told him a personal story from long ago. His reaction wasn't unexpected.
My first lesson on the importance of hiring strong people came a few days after starting on my first management job - I was 26 at the time - the manager of capital budgeting at a "boring" multi-billion-dollar automotive manufacturing company. My boss - the Controller - called me at 10am and said he needed me 20 miles away at the University of Michigan to help him interview an overload of MBA students. We were competing with IBM, Ford and P&G for the best of the bunch. At the time these were considered the best companies to work for and ours didn't even make the top 100.
I told Chuck I had no time to do this and protested vehemently. I then told him about the important report due to the VP Finance and Group President at 8am the next morning that would require late hours that night to finish.
He didn't care. The words he didn't mince still ring in my ears. They ended with:
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
Well, I hustled over there and we each interviewed eight students, took seven to dinner in Ann Arbor that night and ultimately hired four outstanding people who over the years all became CEOs, CFOs or VPs with significant companies.
Chuck and I got back to the office around 10pm that night and worked until about 4am to finish the report. It was handwritten. The VP Finance and Group President asked why it wasn't done properly. Chuck told them we were doing something more important. They both agreed.
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
The most important part was during the interview finding out about the quality of the people the candidate has hired and then only working with those who were successful. The questioning involved asking candidates for manager-level positions to describe their hiring process, how they built their teams and how many of their people were ultimately promoted into bigger roles. When I asked candidates to describe this, those that clearly "own" the "talent is #1" concept got animated and excited, providing multiple and never-ending examples. While all managers profess the importance of hiring top talent, the responses of those who don't live the mantra are short and their examples are vague and general.
It's important to recognize that hiring managers have a huge responsibility for hiring great people. Unfortunately, most don't take it seriously enough. Instead they delegate it to a recruiter or to the HR department.
As far as I'm concerned, if hiring is really #1 at your company, hiring managers need to be judged on the quality of the people they hire, the performance results of the team, the job satisfaction of each person in the group, the overall department turnover and how many of these people get promoted into bigger roles. Collectively, this is how hiring manager success should be measured. Unfortunately, too many managers get hired because of their individual contributor skills, not their management ability.
Bottom line, if managers aren't good at hiring and developing people, they shouldn't be hiring managers. Or at a minimum they shouldn't be given the primary responsibility for hiring people.
If this seems like too much to do, this lesson from long ago might help:
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
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 know any hiring managers who haven't embraced the importance of hiring top talent, this post is for them. It's part of a new program on providing hiring managers the motivation and skills needed to hire strong candidates who have multiple opportunities.
A personal story from long ago will help set the stage.
I personally learned the importance of hiring strong people a few days after starting on my first management job - I was 26 at the time - the manager of capital budgeting at a "boring" multi-billion dollar automotive manufacturing company. My boss - the Controller - needed me 20 miles away at the University of Michigan to help interview MBA students. We were competing with IBM, Ford and P&G for the best of the bunch. At the time these supposedly were the best companies to work for and ours didn't even make the top 100.
I had no time to do this. I protested. Vehemently. I told Chuck I had way too much to do and an important report due to the VP Finance and Group President the next morning.
The words he didn't mince still ring in my ears. They ended with:
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
Well I hustled over there, we each interviewed 10 students, took seven to dinner in Ann Arbor and ultimately hired four outstanding people who over the years all became CEOs, CFOs or VPs with significant companies.
My boss and I got back to the office around 10pm that night and worked until about 4am to finish the report. It was handwritten. The VP Finance and Group President asked why it wasn't done properly. My boss told them we were doing something more important. After the short explanation, they both agreed.
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
I applied the same hiring is #1 talent lesson when I was recruiting people for management roles. In this case I'd quickly find out about the quality of the people these candidates hired and I'd only work with those who were successful.
It's important to recognize that hiring managers have a huge responsibility for hiring great people. Unfortunately, most don't take it seriously enough. Instead they delegate it to a recruiter or to the HR department. Maybe it's because they don't know how to attract and hire great talent. However, there's more to it than that.
As far as I'm concerned if hiring is really #1 at your company hiring managers need to be judged on the quality of the people they hire, the collective performance results of the team, the job satisfaction of each person in the group, the overall department turnover and how many of these people get promoted into bigger roles. Collectively this is how hiring manager success should be measured. Unfortunately, too many managers get hired because of their individual contributor skills, not their management ability.
Bottom line, if managers aren't good at hiring and developing people, they shouldn't be hiring managers. Or at a minimum they shouldn't be given the primary responsibility for hiring people.
Just as critical, hiring managers can't let their recruiters talk to candidates unless they know these same performance objectives and can make the legitimate case that the job represents a true career move. If the recruiter isn't capable of doing this, imagine how many great people you won't see (or haven't seen) because the recruiter couldn't convince the person the job was a career move.
Of course, hiring managers must be actively involved in the interviewing and recruiting process from before the beginning to after the end. This starts with the first exploratory call, multiple interviews before finalizing the offer and meeting at least once or twice after the person accepts the offer but before he/she starts on the job.
If all of this seems like too much to do, remember this lesson from long ago:10
Hiring the best talent is the most important thing you'll ever do. Everything else can wait.
Around mid-2015 I was contacted by Harvard professor Todd Rose who was writing (now published) The End of Average. In the book Rose scientifically proves that when it comes to exceptional performance the context of work matters as much as the ability to do the work. In this case context refers to the work itself, the culture of the company, the pace of the organization and the hiring manager's style of dealing with subordinates.
Here's a quick review of the findings, which upon review seem like commonsense. What's odd is that when it comes to hiring people we often disregard commonsense.
You need a great job to hire a great person. A great job is not a laundry list of skills, experiences and "must-have" personality traits. A great job is a series of tasks and challenges the person taking the jobs finds more satisfying than the compensation being earned.
The quality of the interview matters. The best people consider the quality of the interview as representative of the quality of the company, job and hiring manager. The Performance-based Interview I advocate focuses on the context of the job as much as the candidate's raw talent to ensure a match on ability, fit and motivation.
You need to provide the person a 30% increase. None of this is compensation, though. A career move consists of a bigger job with more impact, a job that offers the opportunity to grow faster and a richer mix of more satisfying work. These factors need to total about 30% to ensure you're hiring a person motivated to do the work, not just to get more money.
You can't negotiate the terms of an offer before the person knows about the job. When a job represents a true career move, the typical company name, job title, location and compensation factors don't matter as much. That's why you need to begin each contact with an exploratory warm-up. Filtering on skills, compensation, title and location prevents this type of conversation from even taking place.
The best people have different skills and experiences. That's what makes them the best people. Since we promote people we know based on their past performance, we should hire people from the outside the same way. It shouldn't come as a surprise that if the person can do the work and sees the work as a career move, the person will have all of the skills, experiences and motivation necessary to succeed.
You need a great recruiter to make the career case. Hiring the strongest talent is not a transaction, especially when it comes to passive candidates. It takes hours spread over weeks for a top person to fully understand all of the factors involved in a career move. Recruiters need to persist and not let a person say "no" until the information is fully understood.
Pre-screening assessments and traditional skills-laden job descriptions put a ceiling on the quality level of people hired. If the best people, including diverse candidates, have a different mix of skills and experiences and are looking for a career move, not a lateral transfer, a company won't be seeing the best people.
You need a strategy designed to maximize quality of hire. In the Catch-22 video above I contend that too many companies were more focused on filling seats with the best people who applied or responded to an email rather than hiring the best people available. When maximizing quality of hire is the strategy, all of the issues noted above become part of the fabric of every single hiring decision.
All you need to do to validate these ideas is to try a few out for yourself. You'll soon discover that when it comes to hiring, commonsense is not that common. More important hiring mangers will discover that being a great hiring manager starts by recruiting great people.
It’s easy to become 20% better at anything. Just be more efficient. But if you want to be 100% better you need to totally revamp whatever you’re doing. Since my company is involved with helping hiring managers to become 100% at hiring we start the revamping by defining what 100% better means. Specifically:
Eliminate 50% of all future hiring mistakes by controlling biases and emotions.
Instead of making these mistakes hire people who are fully competent to do the work, are highly motivated to do the work and fit extremely well with the team, the culture and the hiring manager’s style.
With this guideline, here’s how it’s done.
How Hiring Managers Can Become 100% Better at Hiring
Plan ahead. If you don’t know who you’ll be hiring three to six months from now it’s impossible to become 100% better. As part of every budgeting process managers put together an organization chart by position and by salary. Just add in some turnover figures to your new hiring needs and a rough prediction for internal promotions and you have a good enough workforce plan. If you share this with your recruiting team you’ll already be 25% better at hiring.
Define the job before you define the person. Traditional job descriptions are less about the job and more about the person. Flip-flopping this imbalance is essential to become 100% better. So rather than define the skills needed to do the work, start by defining the work that needs to be done as a prioritized list of 6-8 performance objectives. If the hiring manager refuses or can’t do this, he/she will never be 100% better since this has been scientifically proven to be the #1 characteristic of all top hiring managers.
Assess the quality of the person’s results, not the quality of the person. Rather than assess the personal characteristics of the candidate, first evaluate the candidate’s major accomplishments. The simplest way is to use the 1-question performance-based interview. Then compare the candidate’s accomplishments to what you need done. Not surprising but somewhat counterintuitive, if the person has accomplished something comparable in a similar environment, he or she will possess the exact skills and traits you’re seeking.
Emphasize team accomplishments over individual accomplishments. Top technical, strategic or creative people are often assigned to important cross-functional or project teams because of their individual contributor strengths. As you dig into the person’s team accomplishments these strengths will quickly be revealed.
Wait 30 minutes before making any yes/no decision. More hiring errors are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than any other time. Research has shown that we all look for facts to justify our instant judgment about a person. To counterbalance this, use the first 30 minutes of the interview to prove your instant evaluation is wrong. Winning this simple mind game will prevent many of your future mistakes.
Don’t negotiate the compensation (or anything else for that matter) before the candidate understands the job. When I talk with a candidate about a job I start off by saying, “Let’s ignore the compensation for a bit and explore the chance the job might represent a career move. If so, we can figure out if the final package makes sense.” The point: Changing jobs for a fully-employed and extraordinary person involves a detailed understanding of the job, the opportunity and the circumstances. Preventing this discussion by straining people through some arbitrary and highly negotiable filters is a surefire way to eliminate the best people before you even have a chance to talk to them.
Eliminate gladiator voting by implementing a “Wisdom of the Crowd” approach. Adding up yes/no votes based on a series of short or biased interviews is unlikely to result in an accurate prediction of on-the-job performance. Using a quality of hire talent scorecard where interviewers are assigned a subset of factors to assess will profoundly increase assessment accuracy.
Define quality of hire. Just by defining quality of hire as a series of performance objectives interviewing accuracy will be increased by 25-50%. This is a great way to prevent hiring less qualified candidates who have an abundance of skills and talk a good game, and replace them with people who can actually deliver the results you want.
To be 100% better you need to think differently. This out-of-the-box thinking starts by first recognizing you’re in one. This applies to anyone who wants to be 100% better at anything, including hiring.
