At a recent Performance-based Hiring sneak peek a bunch of recruiters and hiring managers asked me for some advice on what it takes to see and hire stronger candidates. I sent them this video I prepared with LinkedIn last year for staffing firms. If you're not a recruiter you still might find some of the advice useful for raising the talent bar at your company or getting a better job. It starts by creating career moves for every new hire.
Here are the big points:
- If you want to hire great people you need a great job. And a great job is not a laundry list of skills, experiences and competencies. A great job starts with a clear description of what the person hired needs to do to be successful. But it's only a great job if the person hired finds this work intrinsically motivating and more important than the compensation he or she will earn.
- Sell the discussion not the job. Hiring a great person is not a transactional process like buying a car. It's a consultative process like rebuilding your house. This takes time, hours spread over weeks. Start with a discussion not a box-checking exercise.
- Offer a 30% non-monetary increase. A career move requires a combined 30% increase in job stretch (a bigger job with more impact), job satisfaction (doing more of the work the person enjoys most) and job growth (the rate of change in learning and getting a bigger job is faster than competing opportunities). When you achieve this you'll discover the compensation is less important.
- Use the most significant accomplishment question to determine if the job is a career move. As you dig into the candidate most significant accomplishments look for the differences in what your job offers in comparison to what the person is doing now.
- Get more referrals. Whether you're a recruiter, hiring manager or job seeker, networking is the key to finding better candidates and finding better jobs.
In The End of Average, Harvard Professor Todd Rose demonstrates that when it comes to hiring the context of the job represents the difference between hiring a great person for the wrong job or a great person for the right one. In his book Rose describes Performance-based Hiring as the appropriate solution for hiring in an age where individual performance has been sacrificed for speed and efficiency. Shifting the balance starts by knowing the job, going slower, asking appropriate questions and creating a career move.