Speaking of hiring and MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) (we weren’t, but we’re going to this week). A manager’s attitude towards hiring is, without question, the biggest single factor in hiring successfully, which, in turn, is the biggest factor in successful retention. (You can’t hire the wrong person today and still have her next year.)

In other words, it pays to hire wisely and well. Most managers I know agree with this statement, but the de facto performances I run into contradict their words. One director-level manager in a large high tech company privately told me that, “Interviewing is the biggest waste of my time. It consumes the most time for the least return of anything I do.” (I can’t repeat what I told him in a public blog.) Publicly, however, he extols the virtue of “quality hiring” and “staffing today for tomorrow.”

Headhunters and HR run directly into this contradictory public/private attitude all the time. Here’s on of my favorite examples. (Definitely no names!)

A controller needed to hire a financial analyst. The HR department kept running ads and forwarding resumes to him only to be told that none were a good fit. The HR manager finally went to the controller’s office personally to find out why none of more than 50 carefully prescreened resumes had been considered strong enough to bring in for an interview. She found all the resumes stacked on his desk, obviously untouched and unread. When she confronted him with this, he admitted that he had not looked at them but said that none fitted in order to have a constant stream of current candidates available “as soon as he got around to it.”

I love telling this story. No matter where, at least a dozen people stop to tell me that my example either (had) worked for them, was a peer, or was their boss, and that I must have changed the title from Controller to protect the anonymity—thus confirming my own view that this behavior is way too common!

Obviously, as with any MAP-related item, real change needs to be internally driven, but it can certainly be externally encouraged. And the best encourager is vested self-interest, which is easily activated by committing a viable percentage of the annual bonus to a combination of low turnover and filling openings with speed and accuracy (hiring the right person for the right position at the right time and for the right reasons).

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Compensation, Culture, Hiring, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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