This is the first in a multi-part series on smart hiring. This article takes a look at some best practices to help companies find and retain the kind of people whose talents and drive will help build a stronger organization.
It’s not at all easy to find, hire and hang onto great employees. But these are the people who help you build your dream, so it’s an important process to get right. Here are four tips for creating a smarter hiring process.
1. Learn to Hire Proactively
It’s easy for companies — especially smaller companies — to fall into a habit of hiring reactively, only when a need arises for someone to fill a specific role. This approach to hiring has a couple of big downsides.
First, reactive hiring puts tight time constraints on your hiring process. What are the odds that the right candidate is looking for a job at the same time you’re looking to fill a position?
In fact, Lou Adler, veteran headhunter and author of the book Hire With Your Head, argues at Inc. that you shouldn’t assume a surplus of talent exists at any time. “Most companies have hiring processes based on weeding out the weak rather than attracting the best,” he writes. “Designing your hiring processes around the assumption that there’s a scarcity of top people is the first step in hiring more top people.”
Second, reactive hiring can then force companies to settle for a new hire who might not be a true fit in terms of skills, experience or personality.
Proactive hiring, on the other hand, gives your company more time to identify and recruit the very best people (we will explore how to identify these people in a moment). When you give yourself time to thoroughly vet candidates, you put yourself in a position not to simply fill a role but to bring onboard valuable, talented people who can help your company achieve its goals.
“Hire in the direction you want to go with the business,” David Neagle writes at HR.com. “Your business should have a direction, and your new hires need to be merging with that path.”
Neagle recommends hiring at least six months before you plan to grow the company. He continues: “Hiring in the direction of your company’s future means that you’re not only avoiding layoffs or firings in the future, but it also signals that you’re doing what you can to make your business run more smoothly.”
Proactive Hiring Sounds Time-Consuming, But On Balance It Isn’t
Employee-retention specialist Roy Barker frames proactive hiring as a process in which a company markets for talent and builds relationships with potential hires over time. Doing this gives your company the flexibility to really gauge a person’s qualifications, attitude and cultural fit.
It also puts you in a position to have ready-to-hire candidates on deck for whenever a specific and immediate need arrives. Barker recommends having one or two such candidates at all times.
This approach to hiring talented people requires an upfront time commitment, but this is not time you necessarily would be losing. “When I suggest that hiring managers and recruiters be more proactive … they immediately tell me how they don’t have enough time,” Barker says. “Really? Because you do seem to have enough time to dig through hundreds if not thousands of applications, interview 10 individuals who are not good fits for your company, and even hire for the same position three or four times in as many years.”
2. Incorporate Personality Assessments into Candidate Screening
A candidate’s experience and past performance are important to explore during the hiring process, but they don’t tell the whole story. Companies should hire for culture fit, and personality assessments are great tools for getting a more holistic understanding of how potential employees fit into the cultural fabric of a company.
The team at Gild, which helps enterprise-level clients recruit and hire, notes that many companies and recruiters already test applicants, but typically only for cognitive skills. “Certain roles require teamwork, and that’s not something that can easily be measured through cognitive tests,” they write.
“Personality assessments, on the other hand, will give you a better idea of a candidate’s social skills. For example, a more upbeat person may have be better at handling clients, while quieter people may need to be placed in behind-the-scenes roles.”
Chad Harrington at recruitment platform Relode — itself an advocate of using personality tests when hiring — suggests hiring managers take a look at these options for assessing a candidate’s personality:
Personality Tests Even Work for Executive-Level Hires
Personality tests might carry greater weight when vetting candidates for an executive position because those roles often come with such visibility.
Lucy Leske at Witt/Kiefer, an executive search and staffing company in the Chicago area, spoke with Kellie Woodhouse at Inside Higher Ed back in August about why her company vets university presidents with personality tests.
“The skills and competencies that they’re required to bring to the table have to be so well developed to handle today’s jobs,” Leske said. “All boards are concerned about risk when hiring a chief executive and this is an additional way to assess the risk in an environment where the landscape is changing so rapidly that you’ve got to rely on competencies now, not just experience.”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, CEO of Hogan Assessments, which has helped companies assess candidates’ personal qualities since 1980, lays out four personality traits companies should look for when hiring for leadership positions:
- Emotional stability helps leaders stay cool under pressure so they can calm down their subordinates and keep everyone on track when things get tough.
- Ambition helps leaders set challenging goals their teams need to reach for. That’s especially important considering the reciprocal effects between engagement and performance. In other words, engaged employees perform better, but high-performing individuals will also be more engaged. It’s either a virtuous circle or a vicious cycle depending on how well a leader leads.
- Sociability helps leaders communicate with their teams, develop good networks, and put in the time it takes to nurture those relationships.
- Interpersonal sensitivity causes leaders to focus more on others than on themselves. They’re more altruistic and better attuned to their subordinates’ feelings.
3. Put Job Objectives in Your Listing
When listing an open position, frame it as a series of objectives rather than a role that requires a specific skillset or experience. Again, this comes straight from the Lou Adler playbook, which says to remove the “Skills” and “Experience” sections from any job ad.
His argument: Thinking in terms of skills and experience unnecessarily filters out potentially great hires because you are holding these candidates to an arbitrary standard. You don’t hire people to demonstrate skills; you hire people to achieve very specific objectives. So put those objectives right in the listing.
Adler tells a story on his blog about being hired as an executive recruiter years ago to find a VP of Marketing for an industrial products company. In his presentation, he crumpled up the paper the HR team prepared about the job description and asked a simple question: “What does the person in the VP Marketing role need to accomplish in the first 6-12 months in order for everyone in this room to agree you’ve hired an outstanding person?” From within that frame, the team was able to come up with six performance objectives, and the company hired an all-star VP within six weeks.
Further, objectives-based hiring puts your new hire in a position to succeed because you can turn those performance objectives into measurable job objectives once the person is hired.
4. Find New Hires a Mentor to Help With Onboarding
A smart recruiting process doesn’t end the moment a good candidate is hired. There is still the matter of onboarding a new hire, which requires more than just a day of orientation and a few explanatory emails. The best onboarding processes pair new hires with mentors who help them get acclimated over the course of their first six, maybe nine months.
This is a big obligation for the employer. Finding the right mentor is the key to delivering on-the-job training and facilitating in-house knowledge transfer, WorkForce Software’s Direction of Communications Jonathan Corke writes. “Companies must take the lead — through scheduling — to ensure that the two parties work side by side, facilitating the knowledge transfer that will transform those new hires into productive, long-term employees.
Naomi Thalenberg at employee-retention platform TINYpulse has a few tips for identifying good mentors for your new hires:
- A mentor should not be the person’s manager or boss.
- A mentor should be a trustworthy team member who can help answer questions a new hire might not feel comfortable bringing up during the first days or weeks at work.
- A mentor should have an exemplary work ethic and knowledge of the company’s culture, history, workflow and expectations.
- A mentor should be able to smooth over particular social details such as where people go for lunch or happy hour drinks.
Getting Serious About Onboarding
From the new hire’s perspective, a comprehensive onboarding process is about more than just getting acclimated to a new company; it shows your company cares about this person’s success and want him or her to fit in with your company’s culture. Zappos has even put a dollar amount on the value of that fit. After that company’s month-long employe orientation, it offers new hires $2,000 to quit if they feel they’re not a good fit.
So, here are a few onboarding best practices, courtesy of the Society For Human Resource Management, to implement alongside a months-long mentorship program to get your new hires comfortable and set up for success:
- Write out your onboarding plan, and ensure it is implemented consistently each time.
- Monitor the program, and use milestones at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and 120 days to check on a new employee’s progress.
- Be transparent in communicating to new employees their objectives, your expectations of their timeliness, and their roles and responsibilities.
images by:
Annie Spratt, Benjamin Child, Ben Rosett