The Metiss Group's Blog

You just finished following your selection process and you are ready to make an offer to a superstar. The superstar accepts your offer and commits to starting in two weeks. Now what do you do?

If you found a superstar, someone else is about to lose one. Expect the superstar’s current employer to try to keep them from leaving by offering increased pay, more responsibility, or a promotion. You are at a disadvantage here as the superstar has some allegiance and may have second thoughts. All your hard work and expense following your selection process may be for naught if the superstar decides to rescind their acceptance.

After your offer is accepted, stay in touch with the future new-hire. Coach the superstar on how to handle their company’s offer to stay. Ask them, “What is your current boss likely to offer you to get you to stay? What are you going to do if you are offered more money to stay? What are you going to tell your boss if s/he offers you a promotion?” Give them tips on how to answer. Simply planting these seeds will help your chances of not losing your superstar. Additionally, regular emails and calls are essential to letting the superstar know you really want them. Meeting for lunch before the new hire starts working for you is a good idea. Your superstar will be excited after deciding to come work for you; keep that excitement from wearing off and avoid the risk of losing them.

Empower your future new-hires for success and your career will soar. 

In his 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, you 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.

According to Wikipedia, a business process is defined as:

a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service; a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points.

We recommend every hiring manager have a repeatable selection process consisting of three phases: job and candidate definition, screening, and evaluation.  How do you know if your selection process is any good?  If you can answer yes to these questions, you probably have an excellent selection process:

• Do your employees respect the new hire for succeeding in your selection process?
• Would your employees cringe if they had to go through your selection process?
• Do weak candidates drop out of your selection process because it is too hard?
• Are superstars attracted to your company because your selection process ensures weak candidates are not hired?
• Does every new hire, without exception, go through your selection process?

Develop a quality selection process, be disciplined in administering it, and empower your team for success.

Click on the link below to view a recent webinar for the MSU Alumni Association on our recommended selection process.

https://connect.msu.edu/p2phg8iiyp5/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Several years ago there was a report of a highly recruited law school graduate who was offered and accepted a job with a prestigious law firm.  Prior to bringing the new hire onboard, the law firm searched the internet on the new hire and found several compromising photos from her recent spring break.  The law firm rescinded their job offer claiming the photos if/when viewed by their clients would compromise the firm and damage their reputation.

The fact is in today’s internet world we are all researched online by our associates, customers, and prospects.  It is common practice to view someone’s LinkedIn profile and Facebook page before meeting them and you should expect your customers are doing the same with your team.  Selection screeners must review the online profiles of candidates with the same scrutiny as a resume to prevent an embarrassing situation after the hire.

Empower your team to add an online screen to the selection process and you’ll have more successful hires.

We’ve all heard stories about silly interview questions aimed at gauging a candidate’s fit: “If you were a tree, what would you be and why?”, “What animal are you most like?”, “If you were to get rid of one state in the U.S., which would it be and why?”.

Also, there are the mind-bending questions Google asks trying to determine how smart a candidate is: “When there’s a wind blowing, does a round-trip by plane take more time, less time, or the same time?”, “Using only a 4-minute hourglass and a 7-minute hourglass, how can you measure 9 minutes.”, “At 3:15, what is the angle between the minute and hour hands on an analog clock?”.

While hiring managers may have good reasons to ask these questions, asking this single question can provide much more insight into a candidate’s qualifications: “What would you consider the most significant accomplishment in your career?”.

Follow up these with these probing questions:

• Tell me about your role and the team involved; why were you chosen?
• What were the actual results achieved?
• When did the project take place and how long did it take?
• What were the 3-4 biggest challenges you faced and how did you deal with them?
• When did you go the extra mile or take the initiative?
• Explain your manager’s style and whether you liked it.
• What were some of the biggest mistakes you made?
• What aspects of the project did you truly enjoy?
• What aspects did you not especially care about and how did you handle them?
• Give examples of how you managed and influenced others.
• What would you do differently if you could do it again?
• What type of formal recognition did your receive?

You’ll be amazed what you can learn about a candidate by digging deep into just this one event.  Empower your hiring managers to ask insightful interview questions, and you make more successful hires.

Source: Lou Adler of The Adler Group

If you google “how to sell customers”, you’ll get about 835 million results.  Googling “how to write business plans” returns about 409 million results and “how to raise capital” about 222 million.  Oddly, searching for “how to hire employees” only yields 146 million results (“how to fire employees” returns even more at 199 million).

The fact is, leaders are not taught to hire employees as much as other business practices.  As a result, leaders should not expect to always make great hires (even if they were well trained it’s impossible to do every time).  Most hiring managers will make at least one hiring mistake sometime in their career.  That’s fine, maybe even encouraged.  What isn’t okay is not correcting the mistake.

Good leaders recognize when they make a poor hire, admit it, and correct it.  Though a good selection process and reliable assessment tools increase the odds of a successful hire, nobody expects hiring managers to be perfect.  But the team does expect leaders to fix their mis-hires.  The team will respect the leader for admitting and correcting their error.

Empower your hiring managers to correct hiring mistakes and you’ll have a more successful team.

We’re all familiar the mantra: hire for hard skills but fire for soft skills.  This is true for CEOs too.

It’s a popular belief that CEOs get fired (or forced to resign or retire under pressure) because of poor financial performance. But that’s wrong, according to a four-year study by LeadershipIQ.com who interviewed 1,087 board members from 286 public, private, business and healthcare organizations that fired, or otherwise forced out, their chief executive. Below are the five reasons the CEOs were fired and the percentage of board members providing the reason:

• Mismanaging Change – 31%
• Ignoring Customers – 28%
• Tolerating Low Performers – 27%
• Denying Reality – 23%
• Too Much Talk, Not Enough Action – 22%

Board members or other hiring managers can minimize mis-hires by focusing on screening for soft or healthy skills.  While it is easier to screen for hard skills, behavior based interview questions and workplace behavioral psychological assessments can provide insights regarding candidates’ likelihood of struggling with healthy skills.

Empower your selection team with the tools to screen for healthy skills and you’ll make successful hires.