Hiring Right
When it comes to recruiting decisions, patience and discipline pay big dividends
There is no shortage these days of high-minded talk about the importance of creating a workplace where employees are happy, engaged, and genuinely committed to their employer’s goals and vision. And I, for one, think this is a positive trend. The notion that respecting employees pays big dividends in productivity and a willingness to walk the extra mile is both healthy and long overdue.
Still, I sometimes suspect that the real reason managers want to hang on to good employees is something more basic — a primal dread of searching for, interviewing, and, finally, hiring new employees to replace those who have moved on to more congenial pastures. Every new hire represents a leap into the unknown. And even though we strive to recruit the best and the brightest, we live in fear that even our most confident hiring decisions will someday come back to haunt us.
“We always hear people say, ‘If I can just get a body in here, I can mold them into something that I’m really looking for,’” cautions Shelly Funderburg, the Philadelphia-based regional practice leader for Right Management, a consulting subsidiary of Manpower. “But it’s very costly to make that assumption without having any information that would back it up. It could be a very expensive mistake.”
Chuck Martin, chairman and CEO of Madbury, N.H.–based NFI Research, agrees. Martin and his associates have identified 12 cognitive functions, or “executive skills,” that are essentially hardwired into every person. These include traits ranging from self-restraint to focus to organization to flexibility. By the time a person reaches adulthood, these skills are fully developed and, for all practical purposes, unchangeable. Thus, hiring an inflexible person to fill a job that requires flexibility, for example, is bound to be an exercise in futility.
“You have to measure the strengths that are required for the job,” says Martin. “Anyone you interview for a job will likely have the technical skills to perform the job, but they are not necessarily going to have the right executive skills. The technical skills can be changed. They can be learned, but the executive skills cannot.”
Getting a sense of a person’s executive skills requires a bit more effort, of course. Personality tests can be useful, but ultimately, it means you have to make every interview count.
“If you are just having a conversation and going through their resume, that’s not enough,” says Funderburg. “You need to remember what your basic requirements are and make sure you get some questions developed around those requirements. If innovation is important, you have to ask, ‘How have you been innovative in the past?’ Questions like ‘What kind of tree would you be if you were going to be a tree?’ don’t predict anything relevant to the job.”
Ultimately, smart hiring is a matter of establishing a process and sticking to it. “It amazes me how some organizations skip even the most simple points,” says Funderburg. “This won’t make a big difference the majority of the time. But [a bad hire] is not a mistake you want to make even once.”
— Dayton Fandray
(Read@Work)
By-the-Book Hiring
Executive skills should not be confused with the skills of effective executives. They are, rather, a measure of the way our brains manage information and behavior. Chuck Martin and co-authors Peg Dawson and Richard Guare define and explore the nature of the key executive skills in their book, Smarts: Are We Hardwired for Success? (AMACOM, 2007). The book includes tools for accurately assessing a person’s executive skills as well as helpful tips for matching people with jobs that play to their strengths.
Dr. Pierre Mornell’s 45 Effective Ways for Hiring Smart: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game (Ten Speed Press, 2003) is an essential step-by-step guide to the hiring process, from preinterview screening to background checks. — D.F.
