TOP EMPLOYEES...OR TOP CANDIDATES? WHICH DO
YOU SELECT?
BY TIM BRENNAN |
| Peter Drucker has said, "Executives spend more time
on managing people and people decisions than on anything
else, and they should. No other decisions are so
long-lasting in their consequences or so difficult to
unmake and yet, by and large, executives make poor
promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their
batting average is no better than .333. At most
one-third of such decisions turn out right; one-third
are minimally effective and one-third are outright
failures. In no other area of management would we put up
with such miserable performance.”
In a sampling of management workshop participants, we
asked, “Do you agree with Drucker?” We found that most
do agree and they provided an additional, important
insight: just because the hiring decision turned out to
be a mistake, that does not imply that the person hired
left the new job. Although in many cases, the new hire
falls short of expectations and should never have been
hired or he or she requires too much supervision — often
they remain on the job because (for managers) accepting
poor performance is easier than finding a replacement!
When we hire a new person to come into our business
we share the expectation they will be the “right one,”
or we would not have hired them. Why, then, are we so
often disappointed?
Our research suggests the answer may be a missed
point of focus. We are trying to find and hire top
candidates rather than top employees. They are not the
same!
In conversations with recruiters and employers across
Canada, we have compiled this list of the
characteristics of top candidates:
- Good Résumé
- Good Skills
- On time for interview
- Prepared for interview
- Good communicator
- Enthusiastic
- Great first impression
- Aggressive jobseeker
- Interested in you
- Interested in company
- Good follow up
- Poised and confident
Is anything missing on the list? Looks rather
attractive, doesn’t it?
Consider this: using this list, would all of your top
employees today be considered top candidates?
Our respondents gave us the following list of
characteristics of top employees:
- Highly motivated to work
- Competent
- Do more than required
- Do not make excuses
- Anticipate problems
- Solve problems
- Take initiative
- Learn quickly
- Committed
- Focused
- Consistent
- Strong team player
- Loyal
Did you notice there is not much overlap between the
two lists? To improve your odds of hiring right the
first time, give careful thought to the qualities of
your top employees then look for those qualities in
those you hire. A good assessment can help you measure
both, instead of guessing! |
|
| WORKPLACE ABSENCES HIT FIVE-YEAR HIGH
|
| According to Susan Ashworth, writing in the San Jose
Business Journal, the rate of unscheduled absences has
climbed to a five-year high reaching 2.4 percent in
2004. If you calculate the annual loss to the employer
of 50 people who average $30,000 per year in wages and
benefits, you get a number higher than the annual wage
for one whole worker! Worse still are the other costs of
absenteeism. One manufacturer calculated the increase in
warranty costs when someone must fill in for an absent,
highly skilled worker at 1,100 percent!
While Ashworth offers several worthwhile approaches
to curbing absence, one very cost-effective method is to
hire reliable people with good work ethic in the first
place. The manufacturer cited earlier introduced the
Step One Survey II™ to its hiring process and reduced
unscheduled absences by 33 percent, with a total ROI of
785 percent. |
|
| RECRUITING IN A COMPETITIVE
MARKET – GET AHEAD OF THE GAME |
| Recruiters, owners, hiring managers —
how often have you tried to explain away an unsuccessful
hire with “We had to fill the opening and we just didn’t
have enough good applicants?”
If the answer is, “More than once!” you owe it to
yourself and your company to get ahead of your hiring
curve and build an inventory of qualified applicants to
turn to when openings occur. If your application process
is designed to gather the right information in the first
place and then allows you to match the information to a
suddenly-open position, you will seldom find it
necessary to make a second-rate hire just to fill a seat
in your organization.
Hint: a stack of several hundred paper applications
will not get you there regardless of how many good
candidates are buried within. To accurately and quickly
identify potentially great hires, you will need a system
which can store the relevant information in a searchable
database and identify potential matches between jobs and
candidates in seconds. Whether the process begins with a
paper application and is entered into a database, or the
applicant enters their own information online or onsite,
effective searchability is the key. Your chosen system
should allow you to seamlessly integrate assessment
information into the whole. Then, your valuable time can
be spent in identifying, qualifying and contacting
qualified candidates and convincing them your job is the
right one for them! |
|
Obviously, it will not help you much if
you discover most of your qualified applicants are no
longer in the market for a job. Your system must include
an automated update feature, so you create a pool of
candidates who are actually looking for a new job, or at
least open to the possibility, when you have one that is
suitable. A system that allows you to match a new
applicant with your entire set of jobs is a great
benefit in this process. You may not have an opening for
a widget twister at the moment, but it is a job with
high turnover. If you have a candidate who is a great
match for the job, you may be able to keep their
interest until it opens. You may be able to provide a
temporary assignment until the inevitable opening
occurs.
Build an inventory of candidates based on good and
searchable information and you will find yourself ahead
of the hiring curve, consistently making better hires —
and apologizing a lot less! |
|
| CUTTING TIME-TO-HIRE—LIKE GETTING EXTRA
EMPLOYEES! |
| In many fields, the time interval between a job
opening, hiring and break-even productivity is long and
expensive. In capital-intensive industries like trucking
and manufacturing, equipment sitting idle while a job is
filled and a new hire is trained can be the difference
between profit and ruin.
According to Jason Shaw, a University of Kentucky
professor specializing in the trucking industry,
Southeastern Freight Lines faced precisely that
challenge. They responded by implementing an integrated
application, assessment and background check system,
already cutting time-to-hire by 40 percent! The
online-only process also increased the sheer numbers of
applications they received, by nearly 500 percent! They
discovered that Sundays, under the new system, became
the heaviest day of application traffic. Placement of
hiring kiosks in their service centers also helped boost
applications.
Reducing time-to-hire, especially when it also
produces new employees who are better suited to their
jobs, is like getting extra employees. For Southeastern
Freight, it meant less idle equipment, higher
productivity and improved profitability!
Local and regional hiring managers are enthusiastic
about the system, as they are able to focus their time
on high-payoff activities instead of paper-shuffling.
Executive level managers like having an effective tool
to evaluate the performance of the regional managers.
Finally, applicants must like the system, based on the
increased number of applications! |
|
| GETTING IT RIGHT—THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL
SUCCESS PATTERNS
|
| The process of identifying, hiring and coaching
people who are very similar to employees already
successful in a job has gained widespread acceptance
over the past decade. If we can successfully model “top
performers,” we are likely to improve our success as
people managers, compared to other common models for
improving selection and performance. A common pitfall
lies in the deeply imbedded belief that if someone is
successful in their field, they will be successful
wherever they are employed to pursue that field.
Probably nowhere is this philosophy more deeply
ingrained and destructive than in selection and
development of salespeople. After all, if someone knows
how to sell, they can sell anything, anywhere, right?
Unfortunately, this is wrong!
While certain characteristics, behaviors and
interests may be held in common across many successful
salespeople, the local selling environment is the key to
good job match. Management, product, client
characteristics, compensation and even the local culture
may be more important than those shared factors in
determining productivity and success.
Consider the two success patterns below from two
different companies in the RV industry. Each was
developed using the Profiles Sales Indicator™ (PSI),
each by identifying top producing salespeople with more
than one year in the top five percent of each company’s
sales force. Most of us might expect a great deal of
similarity in these two patterns and history shows these
two companies regularly raiding each other’s sales
forces, assuming success in the competition’s store
would predict success in their own. In fact, one of
these companies looked back over a five-year history of
sales reps recruited from the other store. Of eight
salespeople “stolen” from their competition, only one
had stayed on the job more than nine months, and that
one had remained a “middle of the pack” producer for
nearly two years before moving on.
A look at the two patterns sheds a great deal of
light on the reasons for the failure of the “raiding”
method of selection. While success at either company
requires persistence from midrange to very high and
self-reliance is only moderately different between the
two, competitiveness has no overlap at all! A highly
competitive salesperson who was “top performer” at
Company A would be very unlikely to succeed at Company
B. A greater discrepancy is found in the energy level
required for success at each operation!
As a side note, sales managers often think they would
like to hire people who are “all 10’s” on these scales.
While such a rare individual might succeed at Company A,
they would likely fail miserably at Company B!
 |
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"The trouble with using experience as a guide is that the
final exam often comes first, then the lesson."
~ Anonymous
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