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How to hire great employees - every time

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: What are the chances the person you just hired will still be here in 18 months? Answer: Flip a coin. It's sad how bad we're doing. Is there a better way?

How to hire great employees - every time

News Release(WASHINGTON, D.C.) -- According to a new study by Leadership IQ, 46% of newly-hired employees will fail within 18 months, while only 19% will achieve unequivocal success. For more on another theory, read "Why New Hires Fail."

In this chart, the red represents failure, blue is so-so performance and green is "unequivocal success" Conclusion: The current approach gives you a great chance at failure, a decent chance at a so-so hire, and almost no chance of hiring a linchpin - someone who works outside established rules to create exceptional results.



That's right. Almost 1/2 fail and less than 1 in 5 achieve "unequivocal success." It's that bad. Why is it not working?





The Fallacy of the Job Description

Why do companies keep making hiring mistakes? I believe it's because they rely on an ineffective approach - evaluating candidates based on the job description. They are trying to turn a 3D person into a 2D list of skills.

To illustrate why job descriptions don't work, let's look at a scenario, to see if we can uncover the root causes why managers keep making bad decisions.

You're the hiring manager Here is an actual case study:

You're hiring for a large software company and you are looking for someone to own global responsibility for your largest customer - a huge global firm. Revenue has been stagnant and competitors are nipping at your heels. Time for a change.

You have three candidates under consideration- we'll call them A, B and C:

• Candidate A - The current rep on the account. Has handled this huge global client for three years and is well-respected.
• Candidate B - New employee. He wowed everyone with a fast start, but never handled this account and is new to the industry. Does not know the account or the industry.
• Candidate C - Handles that global account for our #1 competitor

Whom do you hire?

1. Undoubtedly the vast majority of hiring managers choose C (competitor rep) - he has experience in our industry and with the client - a safe choice. We try to steal him from our competitor.
2. Many would choose A (existing rep) - she has experience and client experience too.
3. Few if any would choose B (green rep) - as he has no experience in our industry or with the customer. They might try if he was an existing employee, but no one would hire B off the street to do this job.

You're in luck. All three did the job, so we have measurable results from all. We can examine actual results of each.

Bottom line: It was no contest. One's results dwarfed the others. But the results are not at all what we expected.

• Candidate A was up first- revenue continued to decline. She was pushed to the side.
• Candidate B was up second - revenue shot up by an unheard of 224% in the first 12 months. But after our company shipped a buggy release and lost a key services person, he resigned.
• Candidate C (the best choice) - After B left, we went out and took the rep on the client from our top competitor. But he did not last 6 months - he was unable to touch Candidate B's results. We fired him.

Conclusion: Candidate B was the best choice by far. The one no one would choose.

To understand why that happened, let's examine all three candidates.

A and C were traditional product salespeople. They were old school. But candidate B was very different - he worked differently. His passion, teamwork skills and creativity made him a star. He devised a brilliant plan and executed it to perfection. He had the unique ability to see the world through other's eyes - for instance, to get the rep in Italy to call on the global client. He knew that he had to make the global client the EASIEST of her 30 accounts to sell.

No one else had a plan - they were salespeople, while he was an executive leader. But a job description would not uncover this candidate.

Problem is that any job description for the role would quickly eliminate our ideal candidate. Missing experience would have killed his candidacy.

This begs a question. How do we find stars, especially when we cannot rely on standard measures of experience and industry knowledge?

The key thing we need to do IMHO is to stop driving everything through a detailed job description. Critical information is missing - namely, the personality characteristics of the star employee.

I believe the answer is for companies, before they search for new employees, they look to their top performers. Since you want to hire a top performer, learn about what makes a top performer.

Ask questions of your top performers to learn what makes them different from run of the mill employees. For instance, ask

• What is about these people that makes them so successful?
• What are the personality traits?
• What are the interpersonal skills?
• Name a time you failed. What did you learn from it and how did you recover? (Stars fail fast and learn.)
• Tell me a time of when you did something for someone else without asking for anything in return. (Stars are self-less.)

Use what you learn to create a very different job description. I bet you'll start including factors like passion, honesty, creativity and listening skills.

While I'm today President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, FindNew Customers today, I'm was Candidate B at the huge software firm.

By the way, I was featured in the popular book for job-seeking professionals, Get Back to Work Faster.

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Article Tags: hiring practices, job descriptions, recruiting, resumes



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Re: Should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals - [quote="BuzzAroundBooks":2ijq3b5e]As a small business owner, should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals? My friend's father is a relatively successful entrepreneur and it's his belief that you should primarily hire employees with no ambition because you can get away with paying them less and they're less likely to leave (thus saving you money from a high turnover rate). "Grunts" are the way to go, even though ambitious workers are typically smarter. What do you think?[/quote:2ijq3b5e] I say YES to hirin employees with no Goals!!! they make great "front-line" employees as long as you have carefully documented your process for them to follow. They typically are open to perform routine administrative tasks and they work for a much lower wage. I know what I've said is pretty gloomy but it's reality from my experience. Occasionally one of the "employees with no goals" will stand up and say, "I love working here". You pluck these individuals and promote them to tasks which require more decisions.
Re: Should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals - Hiring employees in a small business is more a matter of personal fit than an absolute standard. If the business owner is a hands-on, controlling character, hiring people who follow orders precisely may be the way to go, but if the owner is a freely delegating, open to new ideas kind of person, ambitious employees will suit better. Personally, I've always hired the latter. In any situation, I wanted to be able to grow my employees and the entire system, so that I can grow myself. Having employees who require continual supervision means my capacity to manage them will be maxed out at some stage and development will stop. I guess someone who sees himself as a business owner may hire people who can carry out a specific function and no more, while an entrepreneur will hire people who can "grab the ball and run with it", so that he can move on to the next initiative, while the current business ambitiously runs itself. What a great discussion!
Should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals - As a small business owner, should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals? My friend's father is a relatively successful entrepreneur and it's his belief that you should primarily hire employees with no ambition because you can get away with paying them less and they're less likely to leave (thus saving you money from a high turnover rate). "Grunts" are the way to go, even though ambitious workers are typically smarter. What do you think?
A regular employee or a contracted employee? - Thank you Louis, Also in Japan, an employee is an employee. In my opinion, contracted employees don’t receive enough training. And they are often engaged in routine chores. Which factors should we choose about hiring regular or contracted employees? I choose contracted employees if I hire someone engaged in routine chores. On the other hand, I choose regular employees if I hire someone engaged in important duties. One of the most important factors especially for an entrepreneur is wages, too. What do you think?
What holds people back? - I'm reading an interesting book that focuses on helping already up and running business owners take their companies to the next level. One of the ideas behind the book is that the people you hire is who hold you back. You can only do so much yourself so you have to delegate. Most people are fine doing this - but they hire people at entry level positions. The challenge comes when those entry level employees can't help you grow to the next level - you need to hire people who are more senior and can take on full projects instead of simple tasks. It's something I have been thinking about for my business as well - how to delegate out entire projects instead of tasks. I would love to hear your thoughts / experiences on this!


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