Load the Dice and Hire Right with Great Interviewing Skills!

Have you ever interviewed Dr. Jekyll and had Mr. Hyde show up on their first day of work?  If you’ve hired more than 5 staff odds are this has happened to you at least once.  Not only is this frustrating, it can be very costly.

Bad hiring decisions inhibit your ability to get your work done.  If the individual is not the right fit they either don’t have the skills to do the job at hand or they are somewhat of a disruptive influence to the team.  Either way, you probably have an unproductive employee, a disgruntled team and you spend far too much of your time, as a manager, trying to make them work out or trying to manage them out.

Bad hires can also cost you money.  If you factor in both hard and soft costs, you can spend from 50% - 200% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them, depending on experience level, skill set, scarcity of talent, and other factors.  

But it doesn’t just cost money to replace a bad hire, it costs to keep them as well.  Hewitt estimates that a dis-engaged employee loses up to 1/3 of their annual salary in productivity.  

Conversely, hiring well can create exceptional teams who perform at peak levels.  Skilled, cohesive teams are also happier teams.  And a happy team makes for a happy manager - and one with more career opportunities.

But how do you ensure that every hire is a good hire?  Well - quite frankly you don’t.  After spending 15 years in recruitment and interviewing over 5,000 candidates (for myself as well as my clients) I can safely say that hiring is, as they say in Texas, a Craps Shoot.  Human beings are unpredictable so you will never be able to get it right 100% of the time.

But you can load the dice.  And one of the easiest and most effective ways to load the dice is to learn to interview well.

I know, I know.  How hard can it be, you ask?   All I need to do is to go through the resume, make sure I can get along with the candidate and that they will fit into the team and ask questions about whether or not they can do the job.  Then I select the best candidate - and hope I’ve made the right decision.

And you’d be right.  That is exactly what you need to do.  The problem is, most managers have never been trained to do this effectively and therefore lack the tools and skills to do so.  Interviewing is one of those skills that managers think should come easily.  But, without proper training it’s actually one of the toughest things to do well.

As a result, many managers go by “gut feel” or a set of inexact criteria poorly applied to all candidates interviewed.  Many times to their detriment.

Even if a manager understand the importance of hiring for a set of values or culture fit and building skill set, they can lack the tools to properly identify these values, culture fit and innate abilities needed to fill the open position.  

Most managers also lack the ability to structure questions in such a way as to elicit what the candidate did do in a similar scenario rather than what the candidate would do.  

This is critical because, unlike the share market, when it comes to potential job candidates, past performance is indicative of future results.

And this is hard because, even when asked directly about a past event, most interviewees will talk in theoreticals, trying to impress by giving the right answer, instead of giving specific examples. And most interviewers don’t press them because itʼs not in most people’s nature to hold others’ feet to the fire when they give information that’s not exactly what they are looking for. But itʼs the interviewerʼs responsibility to do exactly that.  To continue to press until the candidate relates a real live incident - one that can be verified with reference checks.  This is a skill that must be learned

Even when asking situational interview questions (where you give a candidate a scenario and ask how they would respond) the structure many managers use to ask these questions often seeds the very answer they are looking for!  It’s like giving an open book test - what’s the point?  You don’t actually learn anything about the candidate except that he or she can listen and parrot back what the manager asks.

How do you learn to interview well?  Consultants, like myself offer Interview Skills Training courses.  But some  recruiters will offer this service for free.  Caveat emptor here though.  Make sure that you only work with recruiters who know your business well and whom you trust to do a good job.  There are many “cowboys” around who could actually do more harm than good.

Make sure any training you attend includes the following:

• How to plan and structure a great interview which will allow you to objectively compare candidates and ensure the best choice.
• How to determine if the candidate is truly the right cultural fit for your team (and not rely on “gut feel” or hire someone just because you like them).
• The difference between skills and strengths: only one can be taught, while the other is the most important for a great hire.
• How to structure robust interview questions to elicit the verifiable information you need to determine if the candidate can perform in the role.
• How to increase your ability to hire top talent within the marketplace by accurately and effectively selling the position and company.  Remember, it’s quickly becoming a candidate’s market again.  It’s as important for you to sell the opportunity as for them to sell themselves.

Learning to interview well is one of the most important things you can do as a manager.  Great hires help you and your team become more productive, save you money, reduce stress levels all around and, last but certainly not least, make your job more enjoyable!

An astounding 1/3 of Aussie workers are planning to change jobs. What are you doing to retain your staff?

 

Depending upon which survey you read: The Hay Group or Drake International, an astounding 25 - 33% of Australian workers are planning to change jobs with 50 - 71% of workers saying they are dis-satisfied in their current role.  

With the cost of replacement being anywhere from 50 - 150% of an employee's salary it's much more cost effective to keep the ones you have!

But how do you actually do that?   There is a lot in the press these days in Australia around employee retention and there are a lot of theories on the best ways to retain staff.  In my opinion most of them are flawed. 

They are flawed because, on one hand they take the easy way out.  Yet on the other, they make the issue more complex than it needs to be.

Retaining good employees is hard work - especially in today’s environment - and yet the concepts behind it are actually very simple. 

How do they take the easy way out?  It’s common wisdom that one of the best ways to retain staff is to adjust pay and benefits. 

Now, I’m not saying that you should not increase pay or adjust benefits.  Indeed, as I wrote  in my last newsletter, The Australian Business Review just reported on the new survey by the Australian Institute of Managers which cited that "at least 90 per cent of large companies expect a review of wages for some employees during the next year, compared to 73.6 per cent in salary increases paid in 2009/10."

Speaking to both individuals and companies on a daily basis, I know there are a lot of firms out there that have not increased pay in 1 - 2 years.  Either they could not afford to do so or their overseas parent restricted them from doing so.  So in many cases a pay rise is definitely in order.

But in my experience over 15 years as a recruiter, this is a temporary fix.  Over 90% of people who are unhappy will leave within 6 - 12 months once convinced to stay for a pay rise.  So, at best companies simply buy time by increasing wages as a retention tool.

How do common retention theories over complicate matters?  It’s been my experience that frustrated employees leave for just a handful of reasons.  And that satisfied employees will endure long hours, low pay and less than ideal working conditions because they are so passionate about what they are doing that these just become minor inconveniences. 

What are those handful of reasons?  Interestingly enough, I’ve just read a classic management book for the first time which supports what I saw during my recruitment career and articulates them more succinctly that I’d been able to do in the past. 

First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham resulted from the Gallup Organisation’s 20 year research project into excellence in the workplace.  They interviewed literally millions of employees and thousands of managers to determine patterns of excellence.  They came up with 12 questions that accurately measures the “strength of a workplace.” This, in turn leeds to better engagement, stronger customer service and ultimately bigger profits.

They contend, and I agree, that of the 12 questions, the first 6 are the most relevant where it comes to employee retention. 

These 6 questions are the following:

• Do I know what is expected of me at work?
• Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
• Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

These questions are deceptively simple.  Many, if not most employers would give these questions a cursory glance and say, “but of course my employees have all of those.”  The truth of this statement though, can only be measured in your retention rate.  If you are losing employees, or suspect they are looking I can almost guarantee that the employees would answer no to 1 or all of the above.

And whether or not you are losing staff I urge you to look deeper.

This is why retaining good staff is hard work.  Companies, more precisely individual managers, need to look at these questions, really look at these questions.  More appropriately, they need to engage their staff and find out how they feel and then be prepared to hear the answers (some of which they won’t like) and to address the issues.  This process doesn’t have to cost money, but may involve a bit of loosened control, autonomy and different management styles.  This is where things become complicated.

Over the next few weeks I will be delving into these questions in more detail.

And, forgive me for being self serving here, but I believe one of the brilliant things about The Critical Path to Career Management is that it’s a great framework to use to address these questions and a great system to use to supply some, not all but certainly some, of what employees need to answer a resounding YES to all 6 of the above. 

So, what’s the first step?  Engage with your employees.  Find out where they want to go within a 3 - 5 year time frame  (questions 1, 5, & 6) and then help them “Mind the Gap” (questions 1, 2, 3, 5 & 6).

Bottom line, you must engage with your employees for better employee engagement.