by Jay Forte Monday Mar 8, 2010 & seen on www.bizmore.com
It is a difficult and personally troubling lesson when you hire someone you feel to be a good employee and are soon disappointed by the performance and the inability to live up to your expectations.
I was involved with a client last week who was struggling with this situation. She was a very capable corporate controller and was promoted to vice president of finance. In order to continue to making a significant difference in her company, she needed a strong replacement for herself — a new controller. She hired who she felt to be a good choice and over the following six months was consistently disappointed with most every aspect of this employee’s performance, attitude and effort. Though this employee could handle the daily skills, the overall attitude, focus on exceptional results, organization, efficiency and innovation were not part of her thinking — her talents. The new controller was not a good fit for this role. My client was more upset by how she could have made such a poor hiring decision.
We assessed the situation and determined the following problems in the way the employee was hired:
1. Skills and experience were used as exclusive criteria to identify viable candidates; the employee had done a similar job before in a similar work environment. There was no outside verification of the impact or the success the employee had in the other role.
2. An assessment of performance talents, attributes, attitude and passion for the work was not completed; the organization was not clear who would be a good “fit” — both in the role and in the workplace culture.
3. Performance expectations for the role were not created or reviewed with the applicant to corroborate expectations or fit at the outset.
I find most organizations continue to use this outdated and ineffective hiring process, resulting in average or low-productivity employees. And though there is a glut of unemployed talent in the market, a poor hiring process will still yield poor hiring results.
We modified the process to search for a new employee, knowing the current employee would need to be released. I introduced this new process:
1. The creation of the Talent Matrix (one of the Fire Up! Process worksheets I present in my book, Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition). This worksheet defines the performance talents (needed to be effective in the role), the team talents (what is needed to be effective in the particular workplace) and the skills and experience that will encourage great performance for the role; this can be done for every role in the organization to clearly define the attributes needed to be successful in each role.
2. Once completed, the Talent Matrix clearly defines the attributes needed to create a clear and precise employment ad. This improves the ability to define performance attributes and expectations, improving the ability to source the right employees.
3. Once candidates are sourced, use talent-based phone and face-to-face interview questions — questions designed to elicit candidates’ first reactions about situations (these indicate their talents and attitudes) – to see how they would react to situations they will encounter in the particular workplace. This is the truest assessment of candidate fit and role effectiveness.
4. Previous work experience is used to assess and to corroborate the existence of the required talents — to assess whether they used these talents in other work or roles.
5. Work histories are reviewed to determine the degree of value creation the candidate created in other work or roles.
The result is a clearer selection of better candidates and ultimately a candidate who not only has many of the core skills, but also has the attitude, focus and talents to fit in to this the particular workplace culture. The hiring of the right employee — for the right reasons — will now allow this VP Finance to focus on her larger role instead of constantly stepping back in to the controller role to do the work the miscast employee could not do. The candidate responses have been exceptional and significantly different from her earlier process.
Sometimes we don’t know our approach is outdated. Hiring today is not best done on skills and experience. It is in creating a profile of a high performing employee for the role — and what talents, skills, experience and passions the ideal employee will have. Talents and passions now lead performance. Rule them out and you will hire employees who do just enough. Rule them in and you hire employees who impress you with their performance. Things have changed. Has your hiring approach?
One way is to create the goal. This is where choosing the right words helps. It’s using a cooperative vocabulary. Instead of saying, “Unless you get moving fast on those statistics, I’m not going to be able to get this report done on time,” try emphasizing the common goal: “We could get our report done quickly if you fir m up the statistical data while I enter the text.” Use words like perception of a common like we and our.