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Are You Hiring Future Champions or Future Saboteurs? by Jon Kaupla

This article provides great food for thought around our interview practices .... Thanks Jon!

Six effective practices

3/25/2008 | by Jon Kaupla

about the author

Jon Kaupla

Director - BrandConnect

Core Creative, Inc.

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Each time we interview a prospective employee, we not only question the recruit, we question ourselves. Am I talking to a candidate who would become an asset to the company? This candidate looks good on paper and is in a best-behavior mode, but will he or she be a good match to support our organization's goals? Or is this a potential company saboteur?

As recruiters, we have the daunting job of selecting employees who can deliver what an organization defines as its on-brand activity. We want to avoid an employee who doesn't fit in, who will be unproductive, criticize management, provide substandard service, or undermine a company's internal culture and its promise to its clients. These are traits we've identified as workplace "sabotage."

If you think the word "saboteur" overstates the situation, consider the potential damage a saboteur can inflict on your organization: squandered recruitment costs, decrease in productivity, harm to company reputation, inadequate customer service, and negative workplace morale. Ultimately, these behaviors also chip away at your bottom line.

Distinguish Champions from Saboteurs During the Interview Process

Employees play a critical role in the success of the company by carrying out its values and establishing a culture of engagement and success. So we need to communicate to recruits what will be expected of them and, most critical, identify the characteristics we're looking for and weed out potential saboteurs.

Each organization calls for a different set of behaviors and personality traits. Identifying these behaviors (and recognizing the absence of these traits) in the recruits we interview is a weighty challenge, but I've found the following practices to be effective:

Read Jon's Six Effective Practices at http://www.ere.net/articles/db/1C084E18DF8F496DA512ABA8A3E8D81D.asp

E-mail Management

How frustrating is an Inbox with 400+ e-mails, and how easy is it to lose the important ones amidst the clutter of the unimportant?

There is always an endless stream of clients to follow up with, prospects to contact, inquiries to address, and relevant articles to read....on and on and on.

I’ve just implemented a new “system” for myself and thought I’d pass it along. I’ve created two new folders in my “Favorites.”

• E-mails to be Answered
• Read and Review

Upon opening my Inbox I immediately begin funneling e-mails into the appropriate “for later review” folders. Remember these new folders are in your “Favorites" folder at the top of your sidebar, and not lost somewhere down the endless list of your “Personal” folders.

This allows me to address quick and important issues immediately without having to dig through all the clutter of an overfull Inbox.

The goal is to save myself time, energy and frustration by keeping my Inbox manageable, plus this system allows me the ability to truly focus on responses and important information I might pass over if handled right away.

Testing and Selecting Employees

In an article on HRLeaders.org (http://www.hrleaders.org/) my colleague Dr. Wendell Williams (AIM -Attitudes, Interests and Motivation and MAT-Multi-Tasking assessments) discusses best practices for assuring that the assessment tools you are using meet the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing "Guidelines."

"Know all about the test(s) you are using.

Several organizations assembled test development experts to develop the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. While the 'Guidelines' outline best hiring practices, the 'Standards' outline best test development practices. That is, any test used for placement or hiring should meet the following minimum criteria:

• Based on an established theory that predicts job performance
• Follow sound test development practices to ensure reliability and accuracy
• Be shown to actually predict job performance
• Be fully documented"
  (read more here http://www.hrleaders.org/ViewArticle.aspx?id=220)

There are great assessments on the market for general training & development needs, and then there are great assessments which focus on employee's "best fit" specific to the work being done. Understand this distinction and the assessments in your hiring practices will become very useful tools.

Five Common Types of Hiring Mistakes

Below are five common hiring mistakes,

1) The Unmotivated Hire. This is hiring someone who sounded good in the interview and who is reasonably competent, but not motivated to consistently do the work needed to be done. These are the people who need to be over-managed just to achieve average results.

2) The Partial Hire. This mistake refers to a person who does parts of the job really well, but not all of them. For example, a hard-working developer who misses deadlines.

3) The Non-Hire. This covers all of those hiring mistakes associated with a top person being excluded because someone made a bad assessment. This typically happens when interviewers base their decisions on first impressions or some superficial, narrow, or flawed reason.

4) The Lost Opportunity Hire. These are the worst mistakes of them all. This refers to a great person who you probably would have hired, but who decided to voluntarily opt-out before an offer was made or declined your offer for some preventable reason.

5) The Wrongful Hire or Wrongful Non-Hire. Asking inappropriate or illegal questions causes lawsuits, especially from weak people who you didn't hire. You'll also get these from weak people you hire and then quickly fire. A structured objective interview where everyone asks the same questions and evaluates everyone the same way will eliminate this problem.
(Read Lou Adler's complete article http://www.ere.net/)

How does one overcome one or all of these hiring mistakes? Information, information, information!

When notifying candidates of their assessment passwords I'm always a bit amazed at the amount of information they are willing to share. People like to talk about themselves; use this tendency to pick up on nuances during the interview.......

The more comfortable you make a candidate, the more relevant information they will share around past accomplishments, attitudes towards teamwork, frustrations and how those were overcome, thus increasing your likelihood of making a great hire.

Don't settle for first answers, always probe deeper with "Tell me how that worked out" or "What did you do then?" Do your best to keep quiet and let your candidates do the talking!

Your goal is to discover relevant position/performance related information from the candidate before the hire.

National Human Capital Summit

National Human Capital Summit:
We are live blogging the event today and tomorrow.

While we won't be able to get every session, you can still get a great sampling of the information and excitement being discussed at the Summit. The blog is available at: http://humancapitalinstitute.wordpress.com/

Be Aware...

A great observation was made by Nick Corcodilos - syndicated columnist, "Remember that most candidates a company sees are not the best people it can hire. They are simply applicants - people looking for a job."

Always gather as much information on your candidate's skill sets and behaviors, good and/or bad, as they relate to the position you are filling.

Best practice - identify "best "fit" candidates before the hire.

Welcome!

Welcome to Windridge Consulting’s “Hiring Line” blog....

This is a place where you will be able to learn about ‘best practice’ hiring strategies, assessment use, interview guidelines and ask questions.

Enjoy, Lindsay