Challenges to CW (Common Wisdom)

Maria Dweggah, FICSA

The following may be of interest to those of you working in Personnel (I refrain from using the term Human Resources as most staff don’t relate to this term, for them it is still the Personnel Department, the Personnel Officer, the Personnel Assistant); to those in top, middle or lower management positions; or to the general staff who are in the process of applying for posts or just thinking about it.

One goal of the human resources management reform which is undergoing review in our organizations is to arrive at a recruitment/selection process which results in attracting and retaining staff of the highest quality, and highest standards of efficiency, competence and integrity. How is our recruitment system working? A few of the organizations now have on line recruitment access. What kind of talent are they attracting? Are they getting the best? How successful is this method? Another goal of the reform is the move toward performance and competence as key factors to promotion. Remember, it used to be experience and tenure that determined whether you got the job or not. How are the organizations addressing inside mobility— identifying, training and promoting top performing staff?

The text below gives another perspective of the recruitment selection arena and challenges what some have come to accept as truths; that is, how people should be recruited, interviewed and hired. It is taken from an article written by Lou Adler, president of The Adler Group, a training and consulting firm that develops leading-edge recruiting strategies. Adler is a veteran recruiter and founder of CJA Executive Search.

ﾀ Job boards are somewhat useful. The reality: they are useless for hiring top people, and maybe somewhat useful for hiring average people. While there are some very fine candidates who use job boards to find jobs, the process is so inefficient that it's not worth the effort. It's better to spend your time and resources on other, more productive sourcing channels.

ﾀ Top candidates and top employees are the same. They're not, but everyone must assume they are, since most hiring activities involve finding and hiring top candidates. Top employees work hard; they're motivated to do the work required; they consistently meet objectives; they're technically sound; they work well with others; and they solve problems, among other similar traits. Top candidates, on the other hand, have good resumes; they're prepared, on- time, and answer questions well ; they're enthusiastic, assertive, and make great first impressions. It's obvious that top candidates and top employees are different. Yet we build our hiring processes to find top candidates and are quickly disappointed when they are not top employees. What percent of staff hired this past year who you thought would be great, but weren't. Now double that percent, since this is the same percent of top employees you inadvertently didn't hire because they weren't top candidates. If the statistic is over 30%, you need to design your hiring systems to meet the needs of top employees, not top candidates. (By the way, job boards process candidates, not top employees.)

ﾀ Behavioral interviewing is the best interviewing system. The reality: it works better than an unstructured interview, but not too much better. The problem is that past behavior is not the best predictor of future performance, past performance is. So look at what the person you're interviewing has accomplished in the past, and then compare this to what you need to accomplish in the future. The key is to look for the behaviors in the accomplishments, not the accomplishments in the behaviors. Good candidates are thoroughly trained to give you examples of initiative, team work, problem solving, objectivity, etc., but only top employees have accomplished comparable things to what you need accomplished. Just ask six of your recent candidates if they feel the person interviewing them really learned what the candidate accomplished. You'll quickly discover why traditional behavioral interviewing doesn't get any STARS for focusing on the wrong stuff.

ﾀ Branding is important. It is, and it isn't. Being an employer of choice is a good thing. You'll be able to attract an unusually high number of good people who want to work at your firm, even in lousy jobs. If you're an employer of choice and have some money, branding is also quite easy to do — have a great website, offer candidates your strategic vision, tie your expensive collateral material together, and put on compelling events with free pens, maybe a mug, a carrying bag to hold the collateral pen and possible mug, and, of course, individually packaged snacks. (Note : For the event- challenged, it's not good to put out large bowls of chips with common dipping bowls.) If you're not an employer of choice, branding won't help much. In this case, you must brand each job if you want to attract a better class of employee. Start by writing long, compelling, highly visible, and audacious job titles to get people interested.

Make sure the job description focuses on the opportunities and doesn't just list requirements. Describe what the person will do, learn, and become in the ad copy. Tie this to the company strategy, which is clearly spelled out on the company website. If you're not seeing enough top people, it's probably because you haven't branded the job properly. How many good people respond to your ads. Indirect statistics are optout ratios at each step, number of page views per viewer, and total time on the site. Your job branding is working when these trends improve. (Note : this is how you manage job boards to yield optimum results.)

Hiring top people is the most important thing an organization does! The reality — it is, but most companies just talk about it. If you can answer yes to 60% of the following questions, your organization walks the talk.

ﾀ Do your managers get directly rewarded for hiring top people?

ﾀ Do managers schedule their time around the needs of candidates or are interviews reluctantly squeezed in?

ﾀ Is the recruiting department given the appropriate resources to hire the best people, and do the best people want to work in the recruiting department?

ﾀ Do your senior executives formally commit a large percentage of their time and attention to ensuring that top people get hired at your company?

ﾀ Is hiring top people an integral part of the operating plan, vision statement, and company culture?

These are five simple yes/no questions. If don't get at least three yeses, hiring top talent is really not a company objective.