by Lou Adler | Jan 15, 2018 | Current Articles
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 improve quality of hire. This year is no different. And neither is my answer. There will be no difference.
The reason why is explained in the table showing the best and worst predictors of on-the-job performance. Too many interviewers focus on the wrong predictors of success and even worse, most interviewers fail to fully consider the fit factors. These are the essential predictors described in the bottom of the table - fit with the job, fit with the hiring manager and fit with the company culture.It took me 30 years to make this chart, observing hundreds of candidates after I interviewed them and tracking their subsequent performance for years. Part of this tracking included working with candidates who were not hired at one company but were hired at another one. Many became my hiring manager clients. This offered me a unique perspective on the entire sourcing, interviewing and recruiting process.
As a result of all of this, I can say with the utmost confidence that most interviewers are biased and few have a clue on how to interview properly.
Eliminating 150% of all hiring mistakes might seem a bit odd on the surface but there is a rational explanation. A third of the errors in hiring are attributed to not hiring the best person, either because the person didn’t find the job attractive, the person was improperly recruited or the person was box-checked out on factors that don’t predict success. Another third of the errors are due to the use of flawed interviewing practices. And the final third are caused by an inability to close the offer due to weak negotiating skills on the part of the recruiter and/or hiring manager.
In most cases these problems are caused by using job descriptions that emphasize skills, experiences and competencies. Few top people – whether they’re active or passive – find these jobs worth considering so they don’t even apply or return calls to recruiters reaching out directly to them.
To start attracting and hiring stronger talent throw away your traditional job descriptions and describe the work that needs to be done. Every job can be defined as a series of 5-6 performance objectives describing the task, the action required to complete the task and some measure of success. For example, “During the first year develop a non-destructive test to determine the maximum speed a big brick can be sucked through a 12-foot diameter tunnel before exploding.” This is much more accurate and more exciting a job requirement than saying the person must have 10+ years of experience understanding the quantum physics of turbulent airflow, a PhD from a top school and strong communication skills.
If you can prove the person can do this work and is passionate about doing it, he/she will have exactly the skills, experiences, motivation, competencies and academic credentials needed AND the compensation/location/title will be less important. As part of the performance-based interviewing process I advocate, I ask candidates to provide in-depth examples of accomplishments for each of the required performance objectives. This approach provides all the evidence needed to assess all of the strong and essential factors shown in the table.
It’s important to recognize that even if a person possesses all of the strong predictors of success, the person will underperform if the essential predictors (the Fit Factors) aren’t carefully considered. The person must be passionate about doing the actual work required and the person must be able to work closely with the hiring manager. Often these factors are only superficially considered. As part of the interviewing process, I ask how the person’s different managers impacted his/her performance and where the person naturally goes the extra mile. This provides great insight on these two fit factors. Assessing cultural fit is relatively simple as long as you recognize that company culture is driven largely by the growth rate of the company, its decision-making process, the politics and its financial performance. As you dig into the person’s accomplishments ask about these points to ensure a strong culture fit.
You need to appreciate the fact that top people will get counteroffers and they will get better offers from other companies. So if you can’t close the deal within your compensation range you’ll lose out on hiring the person even if you see the best people and conduct a very accurate interview. That’s why I urge talent leaders and business executives that they need to be 150% better to hire better people. This is a three-pronged problem and why piecemeal solutions are ineffective. It all boils down to the fact that you can't solve a three-dimensional problem with a one-dimensional solution.
by LouAdlerArticles | Jan 3, 2018 | Current Articles
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 compromising on the quality of candidates they present. I met this CEO through the head of a private equity firm where I’m now helping them interview CEO candidates for a major new company. The Chairman of the group also complained that the quality of the candidates they had been seeing from a major executive search firm were all over the map.
So when I read a post on this blog advising recruiters to discuss with hiring managers the trade offs between quality, speed, and cost in the candidate search process – I had to take a pause. I have been recruiting 40+ years and I am a firm believer that there don’t need to be any trade offs between these core metrics. It is possible for a good recruiter to achieve all three given the right strategy. Here is how it’s done:
Maximize quality of hire by redefining success
Of course, the root cause problem is that recruiting top tier candidates is not possible using traditional job descriptions. So you need to convince hiring managers to put these aside during the intake meeting. It’s common knowledge that skills, experiences and competencies have been shown to be weak predictors of on-the-job performance. If you know a top performer who has been promoted, you have all of the proof you need to agree on this point. The reason people are promoted has little to do with their skills and experiences and all to do with their successful performance and ability to learn. So rather than use a “pick two out of three” approach, it’s better to redefine how performance is measured.
For example, for the CFO project the CEO began our initial meeting showing me the traditional list of “must have” skills, required experience and perfect personality traits. I said this wasn’t a job description but a person description, so let’s parking lot this for a minute. He didn’t argue. Then I asked him what the person needs to do in the CFO role to be considered very successful during the first year. We came up with six performance objectives that focused on improving margins by 5-10 points, implementing a companywide planning and budgeting system and developing an ROI-based decision making process used at every level in the company.
He instantly agreed this was the right way to measure performance.
Minimize time-to-fill by implementing a “small batch, high touch” process
There’s no need to compromise on speed. The key is to only spend time with candidates who are a strong fit for your job rather than wasting your time weeding through skills-qualified people and hoping someone reasonably good will be interested. In this case a strong fit is defined as someone who is performance qualified (meaning he/she can do the work described above), possesses the Achiever Pattern (the person is consistently in the top 30-40% of his/her peer group) and the person would naturally see your opening as a career move.
Combined with “Clever Boolean” and an advanced recruiting technique called “Cherry Picking,” finding people like this is not difficult as long as you implement a 40-40-20 sourcing program. This means spending 40% of your time getting referrals, 40% direct sourcing and 20% writing compelling messages that are pushed to your target audience. Specialist recruiters have a distinct advantage since they’re constantly building talent-rich pools. This way finding a few hot prospects in a week or so is likely. Generalist recruiters who are proactive networkers and have a license to LinkedIn Recruiter can still deliver prospects in 5-10 days.
Reduce cost per hire by offering candidates a huge non-monetary increase
Of course, you still need to recruit and close these people but you do this by offering people a 30% non-monetary increase rather than saying you can’t afford to hire these people. This means the job must offer a combination of more stretch, more rapid growth, more impact and a mix of more satisfying work. This is a go-slow, high-touch relationship-based recruiting approach.
This has nothing to do with filtering prospects on compensation, title and location. It has all to do with making the case that your open job puts the person on a stronger long-term career trajectory. For example, for the CEO project the top candidate was willing to take a drastic reduction in compensation to lead a unique start-up. Early this year, I talked with an engineering manager who was willing to take a modest increase for the chance to lead the design efforts for a new AI-based marketing platform. And last year I got a senior HR director from a bigger company to relocate to a less desirable area in order to get a VP level title for a slightly smaller company.
So forget the two-thirds approach to recruiting. Instead redefine performance, find a few strong prospects who would see the opening as a career move and then close the deal based on what the person can become rather than what he or she receives on the start date.
by LouAdlerArticles | Jan 2, 2018 | Current Articles
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 button. I also suspect that recruiters would pay a lot more attention to you since they wouldn't need to pour through hundreds of resumes of people who just indiscriminately hit the apply button.
Now what would you do if you were a hiring manager and were told your new operating guideline was that you were only allowed to formally interview three candidates and you had to hire one of them? I suspect you wouldn't do what you're now doing.
In October 2017 at LinkedIn's Talent Connect 2017, four thousand people descended upon Nashville to discuss every possible hiring problem that exists and what to do about them. I pretty much told everyone it would be a great party, but unless they started completely over, things would be different but no better.
I then asked the following questions to demonstrate the point that when it comes to hiring, companies have forgotten that stools have three legs.
- Why do recruiters need to review 150 resumes to make one decent hire but only 3-4 referred candidates to make one great hire?
- Why do we hire people we know based on their past performance and potential but we hire strangers based on their past experience?
- Why do hiring managers want to hire candidates who can hit the ground running but the best people who can hit the ground running want to run on different tracks?
- While we all want to hire more diverse people, why do we expect them to have the same skills and experiences and look and sound like everyone we've already hired?
- Why do recruiters and tech vendors get excited about doing the wrong things faster?
I attribute all of these problems to the lack of the right hiring strategy, the focus on jobs instead of career moves and the use of duct tape rather than a business process to make hiring decisions.
As far as I'm concerned, a more effective and efficient solution for hiring revolves around the three-legged stool concept of integrating strategy, people and process that's designed from the perspective of the people companies actually want to hire. This seems like Business 101 to me but when it comes to hiring it seems like an idea from an alien world.
The Strategy Leg: Supply vs. Demand Determines the Talent Strategy
Too many companies design their hiring processes based on the assumption there's a surplus of top talent ready and willing to work for them. While a flawed assumption, the premise results in a "weed out the weak and avoid mistakes" mentality at each step, including how job descriptions are written, how candidates need to apply and how they're interviewed.
The strategic point in all of this is that you can't use a surplus of talent model when a surplus of talent doesn't exist. In a talent scarcity situation you need to attract the best in, not weed them out. This requires a high touch relationship approach offering true career growth rather than an impersonal transactional process offering people ill-defined lateral transfers.
The People Leg: Offer Career Moves, Not Lateral Transfers
Regardless of the job, the best people have no need or desire to consider ill-defined lateral transfers. Generic job postings that over-emphasize "must have" skills, experiences and competences are proof of this surplus of talent process design mindset.
Instead, jobs need to be customized to attract top talent based on the person's intrinsic motivators to excel, and the evaluation process must be slowed to demonstrate that these jobs offer true growth. This is comparable to the discovery step in solution selling where buyer and seller develop win-win solutions. As important, the decision criteria used to make an offer and the criteria used by the candidate to accept it must be aligned emphasizing long-term opportunity, not short-term convenience or compensation.
The Process Leg: Think System, Not Duct Tape
Too many hiring processes today are nothing more than a bunch of independent processes duct-taped together to form a so-called hiring process. The result is a hodgepodge of wasted activity rather than a well-tuned hiring machine. For example, at Nashville, I contended that the use of behavioral interviewing exacerbates the problem by focusing too much on avoiding hiring mistakes rather than attracting the best, which requires a mutual respect and discovery process.
I then demonstrated how Performance-based Hiring corrects for this fatal systemic flaw by designing every step in the hiring process based on how top people - both active and passive - look for and change jobs and how they make career hiring decisions.
Walking on All Three Legs: Walk the Talk
If talent is #1, then hiring managers need to be hired, measured and promoted on how well they do!
To get started walking this path, try to figure out what you'd do if you were a recruiter or hiring manager or business leader and were only given three shots at hiring someone. I suspect you'd work backwards building some type of three-legged stool. And even if it was a bit off kilter at first, you'd soon figure out what you need to do to eliminate the problem. To get started walking even faster, if the first candidate you meet is not hirable, stop everything and figure out why not, because you only have two attempts left.
by LouAdlerArticles | Oct 11, 2017 | Current Articles
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 button. I also suspect that recruiters would pay a lot more attention to you since they wouldn’t need to pour through hundreds of resumes of people who just indiscriminately hit the apply button.
Now what would you do if you were a recruiter or hiring manager and were told that your new operating guideline was that you were only allowed to formally interview three candidates and you had to hire one of them? I suspect that you would completely overhaul your entire hiring process, focusing on finding great people to hire rather than hoping the perfect person magically appears.
Last week at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2017, four thousand people descended upon Nashville to discuss every possible hiring problem that exists and what to do about them.
I pretty much told everyone it would be a great party, but a waste of time, no matter how good the feelings, unless they could answer the above two questions and implement the solution.
Then I proved it with the following opening comments to about 700 people in a breakout session. Surprisingly, no one left the room.
- Why do recruiters need to review 150 resumes to make one decent hire, but only 3-4 referred candidates to make one great hire?
- Why do we hire people we know based on their past performance and potential, but we hire strangers based on their past experience?
- Why do hiring managers want to hire candidates who can hit the ground running, but the best people who can hit the ground running want to run on different tracks?
- While we all want to hire more diverse people, why do we expect them to have the same skills and experiences and look and sound like everyone we’ve already hired?
- Why do recruiters and tech vendors get excited about doing the wrong things more efficiently?
With this rather controversial opening, I then went on to explain why these issues still exist and what to do about them. As you’ll discover, the long-term solution revolves around the three-legged stool concept of integrating strategy, people and process that’s designed from the perspective of how top people make job changes.
The Strategy Leg: Supply vs. Demand Determines the Talent Strategy
Too many companies design their hiring processes based on the assumption there’s a surplus of top talent ready and willing to work for them. While a flawed assumption, the premise results in a “weed out the weak and avoid mistakes” mentality at each step, including how job descriptions are written, how candidates need to apply and how they’re interviewed.
The strategic point in all of this is that you can’t use a surplus of talent model when a surplus of talent doesn’t exist. In a talent scarcity situation you need to attract the best in, not weed them out. This requires a high touch relationship approach offering true career growth rather than an impersonal transactional process offering people ill-defined lateral transfers.
The People Leg: Offer Career Moves, Not Lateral Transfers
Regardless of the job, the best people have no need or desire to consider ill-defined lateral transfers. Generic job postings that over-emphasize “must have” skills, experiences and competences are proof of this surplus of talent process design mindset. Employer branding helps little.
Instead jobs need to be customized to attract top talent based on the person’s intrinsic motivators to excel, and the evaluation process must be slowed to demonstrate that these jobs offer true growth. This is comparable to the discovery step in solution selling where buyer and seller develop win-win solutions. As important, the decision criteria used to make an offer and the criteria used by the candidate to accept it must be aligned emphasizing long-term opportunity, not short-term convenience or compensation.
The Process Leg: Think System, Not Steps
Too many hiring processes today are nothing more than a bunch of independent processes duct-taped together to form a so-called hiring process. Rather than thinking of hiring as a sequence of interlocking and interdependent components, the result is a competition for resources to optimize individual steps rather than the entire process. For example, at Nashville, I contended that the use of behavioral interviewing exacerbates the problem by focusing too much on avoiding hiring mistakes – which it does admirably well – rather than attracting the best, which requires a mutual respect and discovery process. Behavioral interviewing ignores this essential component of an attraction-based strategy.
Performance-based Hiring corrects for this fatal systemic flaw by designing every step in the hiring process based on how top people – both active and passive – look for and change jobs and how they make career hiring decisions.
Walking on All Three Legs: Walk the Talk
If talent is #1, then hiring managers need to be hired and measured and promoted on how well they do!
To get started walking this path, try to figure out what you’d do if you were a recruiter or hiring manager or business leader and were only given three shots at hiring someone. I suspect you’d work backwards building some type of three-legged stool. And even if it was a bit off kilter at first, you’d soon figure out what you’d need to do to eliminate the problem. To get started walking even faster, if the first candidate you meet is not hirable, stop everything and figure out why not, because you only have two attempts left.
by LouAdlerArticles | Aug 29, 2017 | Current Articles
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 finalists and begin a networking effort to find a few leads for him. To begin, I asked him the same questions I always ask whenever starting a new search project:
1. What does the person in the role need to do to be considered successful? For this job, the most important performance objective was building a team of outstanding leaders and a hiring process that would allow the company to scale quickly across the U.S. Second on the list was developing marketing partnerships with the Fortune 100 at the CEO and COO levels.
2. Why would a top person who’s already fully employed and highly satisfied want this job? In this job, building the company and achieving a remarkable societal mission was the big lure. This is called Job Branding.
3. Who knows the ideal candidate? As far as I’m concerned, the easiest way to source candidates is via aggressive networking. My term for this is PRP – using a Proactive Referral Program. LinkedIn Recruiter is the perfect tool for this.
I’m dumbfounded that so many recruiters and sourcers think LinkedIn is largely a database of 500 million names. It’s not. It’s a structured network of 500 million people who are connected in some way to everyone on the planet.
To me it’s a waste of time looking for skills-qualified people who are willing to take an ill-defined lateral transfer. These are the strangers in the blue circle. This is a surefire recipe for hiring competent but unspectacular people.
How to use your network to find the best candidate
The best way to hire someone who’s spectacular is to get a referral from one of your first degree connections. These second degree weak connections are “Recruiter’s Gold” since they call you back 100% of the time and they’re superbly qualified. You wouldn’t have called them otherwise. With these people as a starting point, all you have to do is recruit them.
The problem in most cases is getting the perfect first degree connection to get the spectacular referral. I call these people “network nodes.” Often these are vendors, customers, advisors or project team members. Let me use this CEO role as an example to describe the process I used to find some great nodes who were not yet first degree connections.
For this job I knew that the ideal candidate needed to have built and run a company of about $100-200 million or be a COO at a company with multiple locations. There are a number of business groups that cater to CEOs of these sized companies. I connected with the COO of one major business organization that I found on LinkedIn that has over 4,000 CEO members. The person returned my InMail within hours and gave me two names and some other networking ideas in the hospitality and entertainment industry.
I then looked up the names of big companies in these industries and headquartered in the same area as my client. This search resulted in two talent leaders whom I personally knew working in the right industries. Talent leaders for these types of companies are great nodes since they work with my “ideal candidate” every day. One way to get referrals from these nodes is to simply ask who’s the best they know.
Another way is to search on their connections and ask about some of the people you found that could be good prospects. The third way is to find other nodes by looking at the “People Also Viewed” section on their LinkedIn profile. Collectively, this PRP approach yielded three more names including one “Please don’t recruit her” response. That’s super gold!
Rethinking sourcing at the core
To me it’s a waste of time talking to strangers and offering them a lateral transfer for some ill-defined job. At best, you’ll hire a decent person for all the wrong reasons. I’d rather focus on finding some great people via networking. If I worked at a big company I’d start by finding co-workers whom I’m not connected to but who likely worked with my “ideal prospect.”
After connecting to them I’d then cherry-pick their connections to pan, aka search, for some ideal prospects and ask if they’d refer the person. I’d then expand the PRP to people outside the company and do the same thing. I found a great controller this way by talking with a senior manager at a Big 4 accounting firm, a bunch of HVAC engineers by connecting with the head of their professional group and a national accounts sales manager by talking with the buyer at the biggest hardware store in the U.S.
LinkedIn is a structured business network of professionals, not a flat database of 500 million people. When viewed this way, it’s easy to identify some great people and connect with them in a few days. To me this is a far better recruiting approach for improving quality of hire. Since you’re only dealing with a few spectacular people, you’ll also likely reduce time-to-fill and lower cost-per-hire as part of the process.
