Lou Adler Influencer

CEO, best-selling author, created Performance-based Hiring. Recent book: The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired

Does Your Company Use a Rube Goldberg Approach for Hiring?

For a long time, I’ve been puzzled as to why companies set up their hiring systems to prevent the best people from getting seen or hired. Since I do my best thinking when stuck in traffic, I decided to take a drive to downtown Los Angeles. Here’s what I came up with along the way.

How Companies Inadvertently Exclude the Best People from Consideration

They use people descriptions not job descriptions for advertising, screening and selection. Consider that a job description listing skills, experiences, academic requirements and competencies does not define a job, it defines a person. Since there’s no scientific basis behind the criteria listed, it’s problematic if a top person will be seen, hired and be motivated to do the actual work required. Worse, there are many great people who could do the actual work required who don’t have the exact skills and experiences listed. Unfortunately, the screening process automatically excludes these people. Solution: define the work before defining the person.
Top performers have less experience than average performers doing the same work. Managers don’t assign those with the most experience their most difficult projects, they assign them to those who can deliver the best results. These are also the people who get promoted more often, so they soon have far less experience, but many more accomplishments than their peers. Solution: screen people on what they’ve accomplished and how they learn, not what they have in terms of years of experience and the quantity or depth of their skills.
The best people typically find their jobs through networking. If 90% of the top 10-20% of people in most jobs find their jobs through networking, why do companies only spend 20-30% of their recruiting efforts in this area. The problem is that companies design their processes to fill their jobs as quickly as possible. The best people on-the-other-hand are more discriminating and need more time to learn about the career potential of the position before getting too interested. That’s why networking is their preferred option. Solution: expand the referral and networking efforts throughout the company, and implement a high-touch discussion step into the process led by the hiring manager.
Companies allow potential candidates to make long-term decisions using short-term information. When the best people have full information about a job opening, they decide to accept it based on the work they’ll be doing, the people they’ll be doing it with, the impact they can make and the upside potential. While compensation is part of the decision, it’s usually somewhere in the middle of the list. However, when these same people are contacted the first time, and with limited knowledge, they instantly opt-out if the compensation is too low, or they don't like the company, job title, or location. Solution: implement a slow dancing process to ensure people have a chance to discuss the long-term opportunity before become an applicant.
Hiring managers use a different criteria to hire someone they know versus someone they don’t know. We promote the best people we've worked with based on their past performance. However, when we don’t know the person, we change the criteria for hiring emphasizing depth of skills, length of experiences, and interviewing personality. Solution: assess people we don’t know using the same criteria for hiring and promoting people we do.
Companies design their hiring processes to maintain the status quo, not to raise the talent bar. It’s pretty obvious that if a company continues using skills and experience to advertise jobs, and combines technical screening with behavioral-based interviewing, the best it will be able to do is hire the same types of people it’s currently hiring. These processes are designed to prevent mistakes, not increase quality of hire. Solution: to raise the talent bar the emphasis needs to be on attracting the best, not weeding out the weakest.

Back in the management stone ages, a process called zero-based budgetingemerged as a means to better control costs. The idea was for managers to rethink how their department functioned at the process level, rather than increase their budgets based solely on changes in activity level. Similar rethinking should be implemented for hiring. In this case, the emphasis needs to be on reengineering hiring processes based on how the best people get their jobs and the criteria they use to make decisions. This seems like commonsense to me, unless Rube Goldberg somehow gets involved.

_____________________

Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He's also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine and BusinessInsider. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people. You can continue the conversation on LinkedIn's Essential Guide for Hiring Discussion Group.

Featured on: