How To Win When You Hire
by Miki Saxon
The winners of the future will be the companies that can fill their needs from the available labor pool, whatever the size, and the managers whose hiring skills allow them to confidently recognize talent, no matter the source.
It is neither the surplus of talent in a down market, nor the dearth of it in a tight market, that creates a staffing problem. Rather it is the attitude of many managers that if the person is not already working there must be something wrong.
In the Eighties the thought was “There must be something wrong; companies only lay off their deadwood.” In the late Nineties, it was, “There must be something wrong or this candidate would already have a job.”
Frequently the source of such attitudes is managers’ lack of confidence in the ability to make good hiring decisions.
By hiring currently employed people, managers unconsciously can validate a positive hiring decision (must be good or she wouldn’t be there) or excuse a hiring mistake (assumed he was good because he was at XYZ).
Why the prevalence of this rarely-discussed-almost-never-admitted lack of hiring confidence? Why is staffing, with all its associated pieces, one of the most disliked of all management tasks?
Simply stated, most people don’t like doing things when they don’t feel competent, and it is difficult to feel competent
- doing an intricate task,
- for which you’ve had little or no training,
- makes you uncomfortable, and
- do relatively infrequently.
Staffing involves many tasks
- developing detailed reqs,
- screening resumes,
- doing substantial, time-saving phone interviews,
- creating and mentoring an interviewing team,
- interviewing,
- crafting an offer,
- closing and landing the candidate,
- avoiding post-acceptance pitfalls, and
- a myriad of other details.
Above all is the need to hire correctly; in other words, to hire the right person at the right time and for the right reasons.
To do it well requires sophisticated, proactive, real-world based training geared specifically to line managers.
Instead, much of the available training is geared to having an HR department or using an outside recruiter; is too mechanical; or is comprised of general psychology information.
When there is an abundance of highly qualified candidates it’s a result of the economy, not of a surplus of people. Population demographics, baby bust to retiring Boomers, guarantee hard hiring times for a decade at least; the current situation hasn’t changed the basic global demographics.
To assure their ability to meet the staffing challenges of the twenty-first century companies and managers need to work together to
- create an efficient, proactive hiring process;
- build internal sourcing skills that work in any labor market;
- raise hiring skills to the level of core competency; and
- disseminate them throughout the organization.
Finally, never lose sight of the fact that the only managerial action that should have a higher priority than hiring is retaining a current employee.
Image credit: sxc.hu
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March 6th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I wrote in the past (http://digitalbrikes.com/onebrikeatatime/2008/06/18/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-right-person/) about the right person. Although there certainly is the wrong person and even more frequently the wrong reason or spec.
Thanks for your insights on why many managers are so bad at hiring.
I also think that really the last point, retention, requires a lot of the same skills as hiring: it involves appreciating what the person brings to your team, what are her strength, weaknesses and very importantly interests. In other words you have to have a real appreciation for the person you (would) work with to be successful…
March 6th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Hi Denis, I agree with what you said in your post (thanks for the link). Here are three posts to clarify what I meant by the ‘right person’; the term certainly wasn’t meant to indicate the perfect hire. As you said, there is no such thing.
As to retention, I’ve always considered it the flip side of hiring, since there is no way you can retain a bad “fit”—nor should you want to!