The Metiss Group's Blog

All too often leaders make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s hard skill set.  Hiring managers fall in love with the fact that a candidate possesses a hard to find technical skill and overlook other aspects of the candidate they may soon regret.

The fact of the matter is, most hires are made based on a candidate’s technical skills or experience and most terminations are for an employee’s lack of personal skills.  Your selection process should include an in depth evaluation of a candidate’s personal skills, at least including:

• how they get along with others
• personal accountability
• results orientation
• critical thinking
• self management

Think about the hard skills that impressed you about a hire you made two years ago.  How important are those skills today?  Are the hard skills from two years ago more important today than personal accountability or critical thinking today?  When most leaders are asked if they would hire someone again given what they know today, the answer depends on the employee’s soft skills.

Empower your hiring managers to select for soft skills, and you’ll have fewer terminations.

“Would you hire this person again?” is probably the most common and most useless question asked in reference checks.  Almost every time the question is answered in the affirmative and provides little insight into the candidate’s work history.  Most hiring managers have made their decision to hire a candidate before reference checks and, if they do references at all, do them casually.

In fact, references are an important step in the selection process and should be conducted with as much concern as interviews.  We recommend allotting 20 to 30 minutes for the reference check call and at least that much time preparing.  The questions asked of the reference should be behavior based and tied to some concern you might have about the candidate.

No candidate is perfect; your job as the hiring manager is to find the candidate’s weaknesses and determine whether or not you can accept them.  What better way to understand this than by asking someone close to the candidate about their observations?  For example, if you are concerned about a candidate’s ability to handle conflict, one of the questions we would ask would be:

“We want to make sure we position Joe for success and like all of us I’m sure Joe does some things better than others.  We’d like to get your observation of some situations in which you observed Joe at work.  Can you describe a situation in which Joe had conflicting opinions with a co-worker?  How did he react?  How did the situation turn out?”

Don’t be afraid to push for specifics and ask for other situations.  References want their associate to succeed and often freely recount situations that will help you position the candidate for success.  These same recollections often help you decide whether you want to hire the candidate or not.

Most hiring managers have some sort of process they follow when filling an open position. Common processes include job definition, phone screens, behavior based interviewing, behavioral assessments, reference checking, and on-boarding.  Adding an email screen to your process is also beneficial.

The email screen should be done after the phone screen but before the first interview.  There are three objectives of the email screen:

1. insure the candidate is email savvy,
2. assess the candidate’s writing abilities,
3. assess the candidate’s ability to follow directions and meet time commitments.

We recommend hiring managers ask candidates to describe in an email how they have demonstrated one or some or the company’s core values in their prior job(s).  This provides additional insight into how well the candidate may fit into your culture.  For example, “Here at ABC Company, one of our core values is ‘find a way to say yes;’ give me an example of a time when you had a difficult customer and you had to find a creative way to say ‘yes’.  Respond to this email as if you were replying to your boss.”

You’ll be amazed at the responses you get.  Email screens provide insight difficult to get from interviews.  Best of all – they are free and require little of your time.

Empower your hiring managers with email screens and your new hires will be even more successful.

All good processes begin with some pre-planning and never is that more true than in a selection process.  We suggest getting crystal clear about what you’re looking for in advance to prepare for your interviews.

The most important preparation is identifying the critical activities for that job and how they should be done — giving careful consideration to the traits that will increase the likelihood of an individual’s success in that job.  Here’s the key: you’re identifying the key traits for THAT JOB.

Without careful planning, we may fall into the “I’ll know it when I see it” trap looking for traits we generally admire in people even if they may be detrimental or counterintuitive for the job.  For example, selecting a candidate who is outgoing with an ease for chatting up any topic in the interview may make sense for a sales position, but may be indicative of lacking the focus, attention to detail, and thorough consideration for a quality assurance position.

Empower your interviewers by agreeing in advance on the accountabilities and traits critical to the job for which they are interviewing.  As interviewers, the likelihood of them selecting the best candidate for the position increases significantly as does their buy-in and support of the new employee once selected.

We’ve all heard the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.  If you believe the way you’ve hired in the past gives you as much confidence as rolling dice, why wouldn’t you do something different in hopes of increasing your odds?

Many leaders have a process to yield excellent results and prevent weak, or worse, disastrous hires.  It is important to tweak your process from time to time to accommodate various needs.  That may include using a search firm to source candidates who are then run through your process, adding an additional round of interviews, moving assessments up in the process, or doing a much longer phone interview before flying a candidate into town.

The bottom line is, you need an evolving process – not just a particular kind of interview, or use of an assessment.  A process that yields certain results and allows for adjustments when necessary.  Don’t throw out an entire process, but critically look at what seems to be working well and where it could be improved.

Feel free to visit our website to use any part of our process you find useful (here).

Empower your hiring managers to make the right hiring decisions by giving them a process that works.

Whether you are defining jobs using a traditional job description or an Accountability Matrix (our recommendation), you’ll want to get input from people who interact with the individual in the job when outlining the key requirements.

The supervisor and/or HR are generally responsible for defining the requirements for a job.  Soliciting input from those closest to the job provides two important advantages.  The people working closely with the job know whether it’s being done correctly or not — often because it impacts their work.  Gaining input from these stakeholders helps further define the success factors of the job.  Additionally, consulting the stakeholders creates a commitment from them to the individual in the job to succeed since they had a hand in defining it.  Just imagine the support felt by a new hire!

Ask for input from many people when defining your jobs and your direct reports will succeed.