The Advisor

HIRING FOR THE LONG TERM
by William G. Bliss

Most managers and senior executives would agree that the task of hiring can be one of the responsibilities with the most impact in their organization. There are many reasons for this including:

• Many managers simply do not interview often enough to become expert at this function.
• Many managers feel that hiring is not a logical process such as that used to determine a make vs. buy decision or the adoption of a marketing campaign.

Hiring mistakes cause disruption in the workplace. People who do not perform up to a desired standard cause a drain on other staff resources, making that staff far less productive, costing real dollars. In addition, management must devote time to attempt corrective action. This takes away from managers being able to develop new and innovative ways to make or save money, address customer needs, develop plans to grow the company, or take advantage of new market or business opportunities.

Can all mistakes be avoided? No. Can you take steps to significantly minimize them? Definitely. Here is a step-by-step process that will establish a much higher degree of confidence when hiring staff for your organization and provide an environment that will encourage the employment relationship to last for a long time.

Step 1: Define the job in the clearest terms you can. This may sound overly simple, however, this is where many hiring decisions actually start to fall apart. In addition to listing the key responsibilities, duties and tasks, the definition should include key goals or accomplishments you want the person to complete within the first 6 - 12 months. Have all people involved in the selection decision confirm their understanding of the position definition. Test the reasonableness these position responsibilities. This step is completed when you identify longer-term needs and goals for this position.

Step 2: Define the experience, skills, and talents you want the person to possess in order to be successful in performing the job. Experience is defined as the set of past jobs where people have learned functional aspects of a job. Functional aspects may include items such as sales, product management, manufacturing or accounting. Define how much experience you want to have. Skills are those technical requirements of a position such as specific computer programming, ability to create a budget, good verbal communications, etc. Talents are those attributes that set people apart from one another such as a strong enthusiasm for working on new challenges or motivating others to perform to high standards.

Step 3: Define the culture of the department, division and overall organization. Elements of organization culture include the decision-making process (autocratic or consensus), communication style (informal or formal), and, work values (family friendly or 80 hour work week expectations). The correct definition of the culture will aid greatly in hiring for the long term. People will have a chance to excel when they are in an environment where they can thrive because their values and the values of the organization are in alignment.

Step 4: Identify the personality traits that are valued in your organization along with those that are not valued or detrimental to success. Personality traits include the level of aggressiveness, initiative, sense of humor (this works quite well at Southwest Airlines but not at the Internal Revenue Service), empathy, cautiousness, etc.

Step 5: Define the ways you are going to identify potential candidates. Unless you are paying a retainer executive search firm, I suggest you utilize as many possible recruiting avenues as possible, including your own network, employee referral, former employees, advertisements in appropriate places, looking for people at conferences, seminars and industry meeting, internet searches and other avenues. You don't want to leave any stone unturned.

Step 6: Define your decision making process for selecting candidates. Make sure all involved in making the decision agree on the selection criteria. Many companies do not take this step up front and wind up missing the opportunity to hire the best candidate because they can't agree on the selection criteria when that great candidate comes along. Then they are disappointed when they lose the candidate because they have taken too long to make them an offer.

Step 7: Utilize two interview approaches: the first to assess candidates' experience, skills, and talents. The most effective way to arrive at sound assessments is to utilize an interviewing concept known as behavioral interviewing. The second interview focuses on personality and cultural fit within your organization. See the section below on the "Art of the Interview."

Step 8: Conduct assessments in order to verify your conclusions about the top candidates' qualifications. These include aptitude, style, technical skills, and personality testing that is available for reasonable fees and administered quite efficiently by a few outside assessment firms.

Step 9: Sell the company to the best candidates. They have to be as excited to join your organization as you are to want to have them join. Open your company up to the full inspection of the best candidates. Freely discuss the company environment in terms of team orientation, level of formality and bureaucracy. Describe the plans for growth you have along with the negative press or conditions that the company has recently faced. The good candidates will discover this information in their due diligence anyway, so you might as well be up front about this information. They will be encouraged and impressed by your honesty.

Step 10: Fully understand what your best candidate wants in terms of a complete offer package. Know up front what your company can do in terms of salary, benefits, accommodations, title, vacation, and other elements of a complete offer package. Do whatever you can to put together the best package possible. After all, you have now invested a good amount of time and effort to woo the best candidate and you do not want to lose them based on incomplete information.

The Art of The Interview

We have all had interviews where the interviewer did so much of the talking that, as a candidate, it was hard to give your best examples of how you can help this company. Then, when the interview is over, the interviewer makes a bold proclamation that this candidate is perfect for the job. Sound familiar? As the interviewer, you should try to talk no more than 25% of the time and allow the candidate to speak at least 75% of the time.

For the interview that assesses skills and experience, the most effective approach is one where the candidate is given the most opportunity to relay their experiences as told in the form of stories. Using the technique of behavioral interviewing, ask the candidate open ended questions that request descriptions of how, what, why, or when they had a particular experience. For example, if you are interested in a candidates' ability to learn quickly, you might ask, "What was the most difficult aspect of your present job that you had to learn?" The follow up question is to ask how long it took them to learn it and how they went about learning this difficult aspect. Your objective is to have the candidate give you a full description of an experience they had that answers your question.

In the absence of behavioral interviewing skills, many interviewers will ask a leading question such as "Are you a quick learner?" Of course, the candidate is going to say yes, yet the interviewer has no way to assess the accuracy or validity of this answer.

For the personality and cultural fit interview, get a clear understanding of what they enjoy doing and what they do not enjoy. Do not think that they will change. It is like a marriage partner who says they will change after the marriage or learn to like the person. It really does not happen too often. If you ask a candidate to describe their worst working environment, and they respond with an answer that describes your environment fairly closely, do not think they will be successful in your company. It does not mean that your company environment is terrible; it just means that this person is not going to be happy. Unhappy employees do not make long-term employees.

Other areas to explore include:

• Ask what special or unique experience they had that they really felt great about and those experiences they hated.
• Ask about the kind of supervision, guidance or direction is optimal for them.
• Ask them to describe their best boss and worst boss. Ask what they did not like about the management style of their worst boss.

Optimizing Chances of Success

What can you do to keep the great people you have hired? Just because they are performing well doesn't necessarily mean they are enjoying the environment, the company, or the culture. Here are some tips to optimize the chances of success at having a long-term employee in your organization:

• Make sure you and your new employee agree on clear standards of measurement for their performance. Set clear goals and objectives to accomplish within the first 6 to 12 months. Have this conversation within the first 2 weeks of your new employee's start date.
• Ensure your new employee has adequate learning time to become acclimated with the job, the department, the people, and the company. If you expect the person to fully "hit the ground running" you may be expecting the impossible.
• Allow your new employee to meet and get to know the key people who will rely on this person to perform up to the defined expectations.
• Provide the new employee the opportunity to fully understand the goals, mission and values of the company or department.
• Provide regular and honest feedback in a manner that is comfortable and effective for the new employee. If you have some performance issue to discuss with the new employee, hold that discussion as soon as possible to allow for change. Provide as much positive and reinforcing feedback as possible and as often as possible.

William G. Bliss, is President of Bliss & Associates Inc., a Wayne, NJ firm that works with business owners who want to have their management teams be more effective and with executives who want to improve their own performance. Reach him at wbliss@blissassociates.com.