Welcome to the Recruiting Daily Advisor! Recruiting—probably the most important job in the organization—is certainly not getting easier. Because your responsibilities or interests include recruiting, you have been selected to receive this valuable new resource.
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Our new Recruiting Daily Advisor will offer meaningful, field-tested tips—one 2-minute tip each day—on how to do your job better. Look for us to get down to the nitty-gritty of recruiting challenges like:
- How far can you trust technology to do your job? Are the decisions that job boards’ “recruiting robots” make as good as yours?
- How to tell “eagles” from “turkeys” in the interview process.
- Should you consider a “Zappos-style” approach to recruiting, meaning abandoning traditional approaches in favor of social media interaction?
- What are the real rules for social media background checks?
- What are typical “time-to-hire” statistics?
- How do you deal with standard recruiting problems like:
- Hiring for an undesirable location?
- Hiring when your salary guidelines don’t match market?
- Dealing with aggressive hiring managers?
- Demonstrating your effectiveness to upper management?
All this and more is coming your way starting April 1 in the Recruiting Daily Advisor.
I am always eager to hear from readers about the topics they would like to see covered. Please e-mail me at sbruce@blr.com.
Let’s start off with a helpful article on turkeys and eagles in the interview room.
Recruiting is a challenge for 2015. Learn what’s happening in the real world with our new research report, Recruiting Best Practices: Finding and Attracting Talent in 2015’s Challenging Business Climate. Learn More
Stop Hiring Turkeys! Keys to Finding, Hiring, and Retaining Top-Level Talent
Admit it: You’ve made some hiring mistakes over the years—we all have. If you haven’t, it probably just means that you have very low standards, or that your mistakes haven’t yet revealed themselves.
Hiring mistakes are nothing to beat yourself up over. The ability to hire well is a skill; fortunately, it is a learnable one.
It’s also one you should put at the top of your must-do list. Turnover is annoying, disruptive, and incredibly expensive—by now, everyone has seen the oft-cited statistic that it costs 200% of a departing employee’s salary to replace that person.
Whether that number is accurate or not, there’s no question that turnover is costly in many ways and that sound hires more than pay for themselves many times over. Here are some strategies for getting it right.
Why Do We Hire the Wrong Employees?
Nobody wants to hire employees who are a poor fit—so why does it happen so often, despite the best of intentions and a thorough recruiting process?
Mel Kleiman, founder of hiring consultancy Humetrics, offers six reasons:
- Shortages. There will never be a shortage of applicants, but there will always be a shortage of star employees. There are never enough truly high-caliber hires available, especially at the moment we need them.
- Desperation hiring. Most of the time, we hire someone when we have a need that must be filled immediately. We don’t have the luxury of time to really search for the best employees.
- Turkeys disguise themselves as eagles,,. In other words, even bad applicants can ace interviews. This happens a lot, and you may be surprised to know that quite often, poor employees actually do have good interview skills. “In most cases, they are absolutely better at interviewing than the people doing the interviewing. You know why? They get lots of practice,” Kleiman explains.In fact, it may not even be difficult to ace an interview because interviewers work to put the interviewee at ease. Interviewers even often start the interview by telling the interviewee what the company is looking for, and the interviewee simply has to parrot it back.
- Eagles sometimes look like turkeys. In other words, first impressions can be wrong. “Most of us make a decision whether we like somebody or not in the first 14 seconds. And if we don’t like them, we look for reasons not to hire them,” Kleiman warns.If we’re not careful, this propensity to make a snap judgment can easily make us overlook someone who would have been a good employee had we given him or her the chance.
Recruiting strategies? Onboarding practices? What’s working in retention? It’s all in this report: Recruiting Best Practices: Finding and Attracting Talent in 2015’s Challenging Business Climate. Click Here
- Interviewers are not trained. They don’t have a structured set of interview questions that will truly help them get the information they need. The interviewer is often simply the supervisor who will be working with the employee, and he or she has to learn interview skills by trial and error.
When you look at this situation from the outside, it’s easy to see that it’s not ideal for finding the best employee.
- Not setting the bar high enough—or setting the bar too high. Sometimes we accept mediocrity because we need to fill the position. And sometimes we want so badly to hire the “perfect” employee that we dismiss everyone we see. Everyone has flaws. What we should be looking for is the best possible fit that will work, says Kleiman.
Lack of Skills Isn’t Generally the Problem
While turkeys come in many varieties, the main problem isn’t usually that they aren’t capable of doing the work. That’s only a problem a small percentage of the time, in fact.
Mark Murphy, founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, recently tracked 20,000 new hires. Forty-six percent of them failed within 18 months. And when these new hires failed, he says, it was due to the lack of necessary technical skills only 11 percent of the time.
The other 89 percent? Most of it boiled down to attitude.
In tomorrow’s Recruiting Daily Advisor, the seven questions you need to ask if you want to hire A players.
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