Smart Hiring

Why should we talk about hiring in an economic downturn when most people are thinking about layoffs?

That’s the right question (as Del Spooner, AKA Will Smith, was told in the movie I, Robot, 2004)

To do what other people don’t or won’t do, has the potential to open the door of opportunity. Only six short months ago we were complaining about a talent shortage for the foreseeable future. With this temporary economic glitch, a window of opportunity has opened in which we can attract hot talent at a reasonable price while others are letting them go.

Remember that this employment cycle will pass…

With new talent entering the market, why not consider revamping your recruitment strategy. While trawling through some of the latest blog posts and books on the subject of smart hiring, I found some interesting tips.

The One Question you should ask

Remember in December last year when aircraft Captain Sullenberger landed his passenger aircraft flawlessly into the Hudson River after losing power in the engines. Blogpost author Peter Bregman poses the interesting perspective about how you find such people who are so exemplary at what they do. He argues that one interview question is likely to get to the bottom of this puzzle:

What do you do in your spare time?

As it turns out, Captain Sullenberger‘s path to hero-status after his exceptional landing was leaving clues.

• The teenage Sullenberger obtained his pilot’s license while his friends sought their drivers licenses
• Flying glider planes was his hobby
• He held the post of accident investigator
• He developed methods for improving aircraft evacuation

An interesting albeit controversial interview question to ask once you have narrowed your pool of candidate to a shortlist. This question has generated a host of supporters as well as its share of adamant dissenters. If you want to read the whole story, you can find it on Harvard Business.

7 Steps to Smart Hiring

Master coach Marshall Goldsmith interviewed Geoff Smart and Randy Street (authors of the A Method for Hiring) who distilled research over 13 years into the following 7 steps that hiring managers can use to boost their hiring success rate from 50% to 90%.

1. Prepare a quantifiable interview "scorecard" with the outcomes you want someone to deliver
2. Highlight where cultural fit is most important.
3. Rely more on your network for sourcing new candidates than on the more traditional job advertising and recruiting methods
4. Seriously think about a spotters fee for employees who source successful new hires for you
5. Conduct at least one thorough interview and ask about: prior objectives, successes, failures, what their managers would say aobut them and why they left.
6. Pay special attention to warning signs like candidates who fail to take responsibility for their actions.
7. Don’t forget it’s a 2 way street and you are also attracting the right candidate. Inspire candidates with information about: their alignment with you; how you will support them and their family; the freedom they will have to make decisions; the potential rewards on offer for joining you; and the fun to be had.

For the full story, go to Harvard Business.

Verifying those traits which are difficult to detect

With the expense and drama of making the wrong hiring decision, it make sense to minimize your risk by working through an effective process in the first place – especially when it comes to your leaders. A big part of that process is your capacity to ask the right questions.

The right questions of your candidate and their referees, can uncover some of those elusive traits which have an extremely high correlation to leadership success like truthfulness, the capacity to hold others to account and personal responsibility. Understanding a candidate’s approach to these traits can then give you powerful insights into the candidate’s real approach under pressure and how it may be likely to impact your business.

Here is an example of a powerful question on the subject of truthfulness

Have you ever avoided telling the truth? What happened?

I find that skilful questions like these, go a long way to improving the hiring success for positions of significant responsibility or cultural influence.

My first choice in hiring for positions of responsibility is the Integrity & Values profiling tool. You can download a FREE white paper here.

Di Worrall