The Metiss Group's Blog

In her book, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, Leigh Branham lists the causes workers quit their jobs as:

1. Job not as expected
2. Job doesn’t fit talents and interests
3. Little or no feedback/coaching
4. No hope for career growth
5. Feel devalued and unrecognized
6. Feel overworked and stressed out
7. Lack of trust or confidence in leaders

#1 and #2 are a result of not using a job accountability or job definition document in the selection process.  If you don’t have the open job clearly defined before talking to candidates, your are doing them (and you) a disservice.

Share the job accountabilities with candidates early and often (we suggest before the first phone screen).  Thoroughly cover the job accountabilities during the first face-to-face interview.  Share the job accountabilities with reference checks when vetting candidates.  Review the job accountabilities with the candidates one last time before sending the job offer.  Candidates should have little doubt what is expected or whether the job interests them before they accept the position.

Some experts estimate the cost of a poor hire to be two to three times their annual salary.  The cost of developing job accountabilities and using them is nominal.  Empower your selection team to use job accountabilities during the hiring process, and you’ll experience better hires.

Most leaders admit to being poor interviewers.  Interviewing is a learned skill and is something hiring managers seldom do and typically have had little or no training.

Those leaders who conduct their own interviews often miss much of the candidate’s response (verbal and non-verbal) as they prepare for their next question or process the answer to a prior question.  Also hiring managers tend to spend too much time talking and not enough listening.  We recommend hiring managers use an experienced interviewer to conduct interviews while they observe the candidate being interviewed.

The hiring manager learns much more watching and listening to the candidate when they are not leading the interview because they have the opportunity to use the critical thinking skills they’ve honed while processing the answers from candidates.  The leader may contribute occasionally but the majority of the interviewing should be done by someone else.  You’d be surprised how much more you are able to evaluate a candidate when all you have to do is observe them.

Empower yourself to have an experienced interviewer lead your interviews and you’ll make more successful hires.

As you may know, behavior based interview and reference check questions are based on the premise that previous performance is a better predictor for future performance than anything else.  So behavior based questions ask for specific examples, not generalities, of things an individual has done in the past rather than how they “might” do things in the future.  If you ask people how they should behave, most people can provide the right answer, but have you always done what you should do?

Recent advances in behavior science have created many precise behavioral assessment instruments and the internet has made administering these instruments easy for hiring managers.  Given the perceived accuracy of the results, hiring managers often let one assessment alone determine whether or not to hire a candidate.  We recommend using a variety of assessment instruments to measure many different aspects of a candidate’s behavioral profile along with other screening approaches.  Using one assessment alone is to assume people are one dimensional without having various skills, abilities, strengths and weaknesses not possibly evaluated through just one tool.

Regardless of the number of assessments and their validity, relying only on assessments to hire or not hire someone is committing leadership negligence.  Aside from compliance requirements (the US Department of Labor states assessments should not represent more than one-third of the hire/no hire decision and must be directly tied to success in the position), leaders must include other screening mechanisms with candidates.  Assessment results should generate more conversation with the candidates and/or references to verify how the individual performs in real life.  If a decision is made based solely on the assessment without follow-up, then the assessment has become a go/no-go decision point which is not only in direct violation of the EEOC guidelines but just isn’t fair to the candidate.

Empower your hiring managers by giving them sufficient tools and processes to make the right selection decisions for the right reasons.

We have all known a leader who’s struggled trying to fill an open position because they wanted the perfect combination of hard skills and really weren’t persuaded by exceptional soft skills.  These leaders are holding out for a candidate’s work experience which includes a particular previous employer, or an unusual technical skill, or a certain project experience.

Surprisingly, when these same hiring managers are asked whether or not they would have been better off hiring a smart, energetic person to whom they could teach the hard skills, they answered “yes”  — especially when they’ve been waiting for those elusive hard skills for months.

To make matters worse, in almost every case in which a hiring manager was seduced by some particular hard skill for which they’ve hired, they fired for misaligned soft skills.  When was the last time you heard someone being fired for not having a hard skills they professed to have?  Yet, how often have you heard someone fired for poor work ethic, no initiative, poor people skills, or they just don’t fit?

So why are hiring managers still so hung up on searching for candidates with ideal hard skills when they know most (not all) critical hard skills can be learned?    One reason is these leaders aren’t sure how to screen for those soft skills.  Another reason may be the IBM syndrome: the leader stands a better chance of being criticized for taking a risk on an unknown than for going with someone who has a “proven” track record.  The flaw in that reasoning is we don’t know if the candidate’s perceived success is due to their own skill, others on their team, the environment, or just a perception created by this candidate.

When reviewing candidates, challenge your bias towards hard skills and ask yourself what can be learned by someone with good soft skills.  One of Jim Collins’ most important leadership principles is “first who, then what.”  Empower yourself to focus on the “who” and the successful “what” will come.

Many people still make New Year’s Resolutions and begin the new year with much energy and excitement around them.  If you don’t believe this, just try to get on a treadmill at 6:00 pm in any gym from January through about March; they are all occupied by well-intentioned, at least temporarily dedicated people.

One very common resolution is to get a “better” job, or find a boss who appreciates his direct reports, improve home life by finding a job with more reasonable hours, etc.  All of this means great opportunity for you if you plan on doing any hiring in the first quarter of the year.  The reason it impacts you is because otherwise passive candidates are looking for new opportunities even if they have yet to update their resumes.

Historically we advised clients to take advantage of this phenomenon by running advertisements in the first Sunday paper following New Year’s Day.  While the newspapers may no longer be the hot spot for job searching, the logic still applies.  The difference is now you can take advantage of the whole week or two after New Year’s Day, by posting open positions on appropriate internet sites or tapping your network for referrals.

Just remember, after providing a title and maybe one sentence about hard skills required in the role, spend most of your advertisement describing the type of person you seek to fill the position.

Empower your hiring managers in trolling for talent by encouraging their participation in job posting the first week of the year.