How to make sure you recruit the best people

by | Feb 13, 2020 | Articles

“Avoid employing unlucky people by throwing away 50% of the job applications without even reading them.”

David Brent, The Office

Introduction

Do you recruit people because they have a firm handshake? Because they’re just like you? Because they’re the complete opposite of you? Because you like the cut of their jib? 

Do you reject people if they have dirty shoes? Because their CV has spelling mistakes? Because they don’t look you in the eye? 

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to finding the right person: none of the above increase your chances. Recruitment takes time and effort, but it’s worth doing properly, because if you get it wrong, you’ll only have to do it all over again. The estimate is that a failed recruitment costs 5 to 10 x their annual salary, based on your wasted time and the opportunity cost to the business of not finding that top employee. 

Like everything we write about, the recruitment process we are about to outline fits in with our framework of best practice for running a business. Last time, we discussed how identifying what you need from a recruit is a vital first step in finding the right person. This time, we will outline what a great process for identifying the right candidate looks like. Next time, we will discuss in detail how to structure an interview.

Selling yourself

Don’t forget that a recruitment process is always two-way. Whilst you need to find the right person, the candidate needs to find the right job. A good well-run process will positively influence candidates to want to work for you, whilst at the same time weeding out the ones that aren’t right. Candidates are looking for the 5 Fs; make sure you cover them in your discussions:

  • Fit – a role where they can be peak-performing.
  • Family – does the job work for their family, too?
  • Freedom – peak performers don’t like to be micro-managed.
  • Fortune – but for most of us, whilst too little money can be a disincentive, more rarely motivates. This is especially true for the staff you most want, the ones driven by Values.
  • Fun – will they enjoy the culture?

You need to sell the organisation at every stage of the process – and throughout the first 100 days of employment. Part of their assessment is whether they would like to work for you as an individual. Can they learn from you? Do your Values align? Do they buy into your Vision?

The process

This is the process we follow:

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It looks standard enough, but don’t be deceived! Let’s look at each stage more closely.

CV Review

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Don’t throw half the CVs in the bin unread, but do be ruthless in winnowing out the wheat from the chaff. Look for clear indications that a candidate can do the job; in other words, actual experience in whatever it is that you think is key to the role, rather than possessing a university degree, for example. Don’t get hung up about things like spelling or grammatical mistakes, unless there are lots and it’s important to the role. Similarly, avoid the trap of thinking someone must be good because they worked for a large and prestigious company; find out why they left first.

Telephone Screening

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This step is all about preventing wasted time. A 30-minute phone call can weed out unsuitable candidates quickly. We structure our screening calls (to be made by the recruiting manager) as:

  • Introduction
  • Career goals
  • 12 things you are good at professionally (a long list, but it provides a great overview)
  • 5 things you don’t enjoy or don’t want to do (this gives greater honesty than the traditional ‘What are your weaknesses’)
  • How will your past bosses rate you out of 10 when we ask them (and we will…)

Don’t be afraid to cut short the call if it’s a clear no, but always be polite.

The interviews

Next time, we will take a whole article to describe the actual interviews, but just a quick word now on who should interview. 

Although interviewers can find safety in numbers, we have found that solo interviewing works best: you can build a better rapport with the candidate. In our process, the manager of the recruiting manager (the grandparent of the role) conducts the first interview, looking for cultural fit and generalist skills (Values and behaviours, management, strategic, financial). In that way, the recruiting manager is never told by their boss that they can’t have a candidate that they want, as they only get to see ones that have been approved. It also favourably impresses candidates to be seen by someone senior. The recruiting manager conducts the second interview, focusing on more role-specific skills.

Other assessments

Broadening out the recruitment process from just interviews can be very effective. If the role requires practical skills, set a test. For example, get laboratory workers to do a titration (if they still do such things) or accountants to build a spreadsheet. For other roles, set a case study. How would you launch this new product? What should our strategy be? Make the task typical of what they will be doing, so only ask for a formal presentation if that is within the job role.

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Personality tests and profiles can be used: make sure that they are scientifically robust and proven (many are not). Aptitude test and intelligence tests can also support a recruitment. But use them carefully. Remember that personality profiles show our preferences, but we can override them, and change and grow. Intelligence is one indicator of success, but hard work and resilience are more accurate ones. These tests are best used as a basis of further questioning. Neither ignore weaknesses nor treat them as the whole truth; consider the impact they could have on the success of the candidate in your business. 

These tests are generally best done between the two interviews, with results questioned at the second interview. However, you may want to hold the second interview on the same day as the first; this can help you move the recruitment forward quickly. If so, let the candidate know that they have to pass the first interview to go on to the second, and be ready to give quality feedback to failed candidates face to face. Not easy!

Taking references

The importance of this can’t be over-emphasised; you need other perspectives than just the candidate’s. The recruiting manager should personally speak to former peers, direct reports and bosses of candidates that you are considering making an offer to. Ask the candidate to provide them; you could also ask for customers or suppliers. If there are significant names or roles that the candidate mentions repeatedly in the recruitment process, ask to speak to them, too. Respect the fact that they may not want you to speak to their current boss! 

Although time-consuming, this step is essential. Get more value from it by using it to expand your own network: take time to talk to the referees, and LinkIn with them too.

Note that many companies don’t want to provide any references beyond a confirmation of dates worked. But we are asking here for personal references, not company ones. In our experience, it is unusual that people are unwilling to give such a reference, but you might want to reassure them that it is an off-the-record conversation. 

Confirm in what context they knew the candidate. Ask for the candidate’s strengths, and their biggest areas for development. Can they rate how the candidate performed in the role out of 10? Ask them to explain what was good or bad about the performance. Look for consistent themes in the feedback, and be sure to dig into any concerns that have arisen in the process. 

Final Selection

It will often be completely obvious who the lead candidate is. But when there are two or more compelling candidates, a selection meeting with everyone who met them can be effective. Make sure the conversation is fact-based and you are focusing on the most important areas for success in the role. 

The biggest recruitment mistake usually occurs at this stage, and we have all been guilty of it. There is no standout candidate, and you are thoroughly bored of recruiting. The temptation is to appoint the least bad person that you have seen. Go back to your scores on the position contract. If there are areas below Minimum, what are you thinking?! If most of the areas are Minimum, this is not the top 2% performer that you were looking for. Restart the process – you will thank yourself in the long run!

Offer

The process so far should have presold them on your offer (more on how the interviews do this in the next post). However, a final meeting can increase the chances of acceptance, especially with more senior candidates. A phone call can suffice for more junior ones.

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Key questions to ask are:

  1. Has anything changed since you last met?
  2. If you were to make them an offer, what notice they would need to give? 
  3. Is there any one question you can answer that will help them make the right informed decision?

Then tell them what your offer is, making sure it is within their range (see next post!).

Don’t forget to inform the candidates who haven’t succeeded. Most of them will be within your industry, and they could be customers one day. Leave them with the right impression of you and your business.

Conclusion

Good new recruits can revitalise a business. Bad ones can ruin it. This process has been proven to identify good candidates, and to increase the chances of those candidates wanting to join you. We would suggest it’s worth writing up and training out as an XOX process…

We’ve all had our share of recruitment disasters. Feel free to share yours with us… What have you done in your business that has increased the predictability of successful recruitment?

Next post, we will dig deeper into how to conduct a best practice interview.

igesia Consulting helps businesses and the people in them to become peak performing. We understand what the very best organisations do, and work with companies like yours to give you the skills, plans and structures to do the same.

How to find the right people for your business

by | Feb 6, 2020 | Articles

Introduction

We all have stars in our business. People who get things done, keep customers happy, have the respect of their colleagues and keep us awake worrying that they might leave.

When we described a strategic performance management system in our last posts, we encouraged you to assess staff from the perspective of both achieving business objectives and behaving in line with your Values. You can plot your people on a grid:

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Your stars will fall in the top right. A true star, a top 2% performer, will create 15 times more value for you than an average employee. If you have any employees in the bottom left, what are you doing? A poor performer will actually destroy value for your business – you are better off without them financially and culturally.

You can’t allow the question marks to remain where they are. It is generally easier to improve someone’s delivery of objectives than their behaviour (unless you happen to be a qualified psychologist); this is what your performance management system is for. 

Employees in the top left therefore pose you the biggest challenge, people who deliver against their objectives but don’t align with your Values. They might be very good at what they do, and you worry about the impact of losing them. But you know that they cause huge disruption all around them, and you know that tolerating their behaviour undermines everything you say about your Values. And doing nothing is seen by the rest of your people as tolerating.

Exiting these people from the business is often a huge relief, and again, a good performance management system makes that easier from a legal perspective. Their colleagues congratulate you, and you wish you had done it earlier. But there is also a big hole that you now need to fill.

If you had been following our framework, you would have documented the key processes in that area, so not all their knowledge walks out of the business with them. You would also have been developing staff in that area, who can now step up and do more. 

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But for whatever reason, you may need to recruit someone externally to fill that role. The average business has a 50% success rate in recruiting external staff: they could save themselves the hassle of the recruiting process and just flip a coin. The best businesses are able to predict who will succeed in their business 80% of the time, with huge benefits as a result. The next few blogs will help you improve your chances of finding and attracting the right person. 

One of the big challenges of recruiting is getting over our own assumptions and innate prejudices, to allow us to see the real person in front of us. This is why following a process is so important; it helps us to be objective rather than subjective. Or if you like, it shifts our mind from System 1 fast thinking to System 2 slow thinking.  

Before you start

Before any recruitment, you should question whether you need the role at all. Are you trying to do the same as before? Is there scope to be more efficient? Do you put the same effort into justifying a recruitment as you would an equivalent capex spend? And no, ‘It’s in the budget’ is not a justification….

Describing what you need

Going into a recruitment process without a clear understanding of what you’re looking for dooms you to fail before you start. We once heard a manager say: “I don’t know what we’re looking for but we’ll know it when we see it.” Needless to say, the unfortunate lady who ended up being chosen was gone within a year. That’s not fair to either the business or the recruit. 

The tool we use to describe the star that we are looking for is a position contract. A position contract sets out all the different areas expected from a role; every role in the business should have one. And then it goes a step further, by describing three levels expected in each area, a Minimum level, a Preferred and a Peak. These levels should be expressed as outcomes, and should map directly to your BHAGs, wherever possible. Your next BHAG should relate to the Minimum target, the one after relates to the Preferred level. This helps ensure that you have the skills you need to achieve your strategy.

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You will find that much of a position contract is common across roles at the same level. For instance, all managers will have the same areas around managing a team, understanding finance, creating a strategy, owning processes, showing the right behaviours etc.. But there will also be role-specific areas, which should be based on the accountability charts we created earlier.  

You can immediately start to see the value of this document. It allows employees to understand precisely what is expected of them in their role and the standard to which they must do it. It links roles to the strategy. It allows you to have better development conversations with staff, for either their current role or the next one, and you can create objectives against selected areas. And it describes what you are looking for when you are recruiting. It is a key part of our whole framework.

Finding candidates

Once you know what you are looking for, you will need some candidates. The best businesses task their employees with identifying a number of top-performing people each year. When a vacancy arises, they have a number of good people that they can contact. In effect, they have become head-hunters. Even if you haven’t got a list ready, it’s always worth tapping your business’ collective knowledge of who might be worth talking to from their friends and family or amongst your competitors’ staff. It’s a great sign if your employees are happy to recommend the company they work for to others.

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Many businesses are now bringing large elements of recruitment inhouse. LinkedIn and the big online job boards allow anyone to identify potential candidates. Head-hunters and traditional recruitment agencies (especially for specialist roles or industries) can also work, but at a higher cost. You get best value from them when you are completely open about who you are, what is wrong in your business, and what you need. But be wary of any that say that they can do all the filtering for you. Would they really make the same decisions as you as to who is a good fit for the role and your business? 

You should ensure that the role is publicised internally. Nothing demotivates good staff, especially potential stars, more than being overlooked for a promotion, particularly if you have been developing them for that role using your performance management system. Internal promotion has both pros and cons for the business; the goal should always be to find the very best person for the role. That might be the internal person who understands your business, buys into your Values and knows your processes, but it could equally well be the external person with a different perspective and fresh ideas. 

Always take an internal candidate seriously. Even if they are clearly unsuited to the role, the recruiting manager should take the time to interview them. The candidate should understand where they fell short, and this should feed back into their development plan, so they can be ready next time. If you don’t, you are likely to lose them from the business. 

And even if you have an outstanding internal candidate, still put them through the process. You will find out more about them, and you may change your mind. And if you go on to award them the job, they will feel like they have earnt it, giving them more confidence to succeed.

Good businesses will send a recruiter’s pack to external candidates. This will answer many of the common questions that candidates will have, as well as making you look professional. Cover off areas such as your company background and history, your size and scale, what you do and how you do it, as well as why you are different. You can also include information about the local area if candidates might be relocating.

Conclusion

Research shows that your stars, those top 2% performers, deliver 15 times more value to your business than average performers. Good performers delivers 7 times more value. You simply can’t afford to retain the wrong people in your business. 

Similarly, you probably can’t afford to change everyone at the same time. Think about the spinal roles in your business – the ones that are really pivotal. Focus on these ones first: make sure that you have the very best people, the brightest stars, in these positions.

You now know what you are looking for and have a pool of candidates. What tools have you used to find great candidates? Please get in touch!

Next time, we will outline a best practice recruitment process that will find the peak-performing individuals you need to deliver your strategic dreams.

igesia Consulting helps businesses and the people in them to become peak performing. We understand what the very best organisations do, and work with companies like yours to give you the skills, plans and structures to do the same.