Volume 6
Issue 2
#1 |
Selecting Top Talent - Luck or Logic?
If you're not hiring Top Talent...you can't expect good results. Excellent performance, high productivity, and greater profitability result from having superior employees on board.
It's as simple as that!
The “costs” of hiring below average employees include lower productivity, higher training expenses, poor customer service, lower sales volume and more management time devoted to addressing and resolving workforce problems. Add it all up...the cost of having below average employees is phenomenal. Worse yet, the cost of replacing even a below average employee who quits or gets fired is significant. Research has shown that turnover can have a price tag of 33% of an annual salary for entry-level jobs and as much as three times total salary for higher-level positions. Do the math - hire the best candidate in the first place!
According to research by Michigan State University, the typical interviewing process in use by most companies is at best only 14% effective in predicting successful job hires. The remaining 86% keeps your recruiting manager extremely busy managing the proverbial revolving door of resumes, applications, hires, and fires. In turn, your business profits suffer from lapses in staff coverage that equate to lost opportunities, erosion of customer satisfaction, continual training expenses, and burnout for the remaining employees. That’s not counting your plummeting business reputation as seen by the outside world. Negative impact is so serious from continual talent churn that studies now show it is a contributing factor to the decline of company stock prices - and a reason for quality employees to carefully avoid working for those companies.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t focus on these costs. Their hiring process often consists of running an ad and placing openings on the Internet, reviewing piles of resumes and then conducting traditional interviews that typically fail to differentiate future top performers from below average performers. The bottom line: If you haven’t yet invested in the development of a plan that will enable you to consistently succeed in recruiting, screening and hiring good people - top talent - we recommend that you consider the following five steps:
| Step One: Benchmark the Job
Does your business currently measure human performance against the KEY ACCOUNTABILIITES of your critical jobs?You will have a much better chance of finding the right fit for a job if you DEFINE THE JOB and then HIRE THE MATCHING TALENT to fill it. A logical approach, the concept is still new for many businesses to comprehend, as they repeatedly practice talent mismanagement through “fire, ready, aim” instead of “ready, aim, fire!” Besides, is it possible to measure a JOB and then apply the SAME measurement to TALENT?
Yes, you can do it. You can define jobs and identify matching talent with factual, unbiased measurements to improve the rating on your company’s talent management scorecard. It’s a matter of beginning your next hiring process by assessing the JOB first, and quantifying its top 3-5 “key accountabilities.” The result will be a template for objectively assessing and hiring MATCHING TALENT.
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| Step Two: Develop a Recruiting / Evaluation / Selection Plan
Before looking outside the organization, did you make sure that potentially qualified internal candidates are given the opportunity to be considered? Have you evaluated recruiting sources for those that have produced the best pool of candidates - not from a standpoint of the quantity of prospects, but more importantly the quality of prospects? Do you conduct multiple interviews involving several different people in the organization? This process is an effective way to evaluate candidates objectively and avoid the common hiring mistake of selecting who you “like” rather than someone with the specific skills, experience and workstyle required for success in the position.
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| Step Three: Use Structured Interviews With Performance Based Questions
Since past performance is the single greatest predictor of future performance, you should incorporate questions designed to tell you what they have accomplished --- not just what they “promise” to do in the future.
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| Step Four: Utilize Pre-Employment Tests / Assessments
Validated assessment tools can add objectivity and “science” to the selection process. There are numerous tools on the market, the value of doing research to find the right tools that measure what the organization wants measured is extremely important. |
Step Five: Don’t Forget Reference and Background Checks in Your
Hiring Process
Did you know that 25 percent of job applications and resumes reflect incomplete or false information? The importance of verifying the accuracy of information included on the application / resume, obtaining (or at least attempting to obtain) references on past performance, and screening for criminal record or other potential issues in a person’s background cannot be overstated. This step should not be skipped in the selection process. |
Selecting Top Talent can yield significant advantages to your organization. Using the right process leading up to the final determination to extend an offer of employment can ensure that the decision is a good one based on logic, not luck.
Do you have the right talent in place NOW for the unique challenges of today’s evolving business world? |
