If you want to fill vacancies at a company with reasonably competent people, you have to step away from the paraphernalia that companies are increasingly getting used to. In line with what Netflix’s former head of human resources says, it is very hard to find a competent worker if we don’t know exactly what we need them for or what the role we want to fill actually involves. Otherwise, talent acquisition can end up turning into a talent drain.
Lou Adler, CEO of The Adler Group and author of The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, says there is a lot to learn from the best recruiters on the planet. To do so, we need to understand how they think and act when hiring, so we avoid wasting time and money. When managers work together with the head of human resources, the process can be simplified, making the most important and difficult part easier.
They will also help us define the job properly, so that applicants recognise their abilities in terms of what they know rather than what they have. Another scourge companies struggle with is the “90-day wonder”: workers who are perfectly suited to the job but don’t last more than three months at the company, because it isn’t really a company that motivates them or where they want to stay until retirement. Let’s say they landed there in passing, until something better came along.
(Read: Richard Branson: don’t hire a résumé, hire a personality)
In short, learning from the world’s best recruiters will make you a better manager and turn your company into a much more competitive one. That is the result of working with motivated, capable and competent people.
Recruiting and hiring rules for managers, learned from excellent recruiters
1. Write a performance-based job description that sets out the main performance objectives of the role.
In other words, don’t say you are looking for an IT specialist, because you will receive hundreds of thousands of applications. Let’s be realistic: any job can be filled by an incompetent person who meets the requirements the employer wants. But every job, according to Adler, has 5 or 6 things a person can do to succeed where others fail. We are looking for those 5 or 6 things in the person, not a general trait.
In short: don’t state the requirements the person should have, but the specific function they will have to perform. For certain jobs, this simple change rules out 50% of candidates.
2. Potential over experience.
You can have 10 years of experience in a job and still be incompetent in that market. Don’t insist on, or give too much weight to, exact knowledge and a minimum number of years of experience. It is the best way to keep talent out of the company. Some people manage in 2 months what others haven’t achieved in 5 years.
(Read: Some biases that lead interviewers to make bad hiring decisions)
3. It takes talent to hire talent.
Attracting talent requires talent. If you put a fool in charge of hiring, don’t expect them to fill the company with competent people. Remember that real headhunters often go fishing for talent outside the usual pools. What if the sales expert you need is working in a cap behind the counter at a McDonald’s?
Two of the best investment managers at Bill Ackman’s fund were hired when one of them was driving a taxi and the other was a tour guide.
4. Reread the requirements and skills listed for the job. Most of them are pointless.
Every one of those needs and requirements, competencies, skills and demanded experience should be tested with one simple question: How is this requirement I’m asking for actually used in the job I’m offering? Whenever you can’t answer that simple question, start deleting requirements.
Example: “We are looking for a worker aged 25 to 35.”
Only an idiot would turn down a highly competent person for being 38 (three years outside the requirement).
(Read: 40 skills you should put on your résumé)
5. Achievements over experience, requirements and skills.
Once again, before experience, listed skills and so on, let’s look at what the person has achieved at the companies they have worked for. It is a question that should never be missing from a job interview, but be careful!
Often, when a person failed to meet targets at a company, it was not the candidate’s fault but the company’s own mistake: it may have hired a tiger only to cage it. We should pay close attention to the explanations the candidate gives on this particular point.
“I increased my company’s turnover by 300% after I arrived.” Look into that figure, and if it is true, you probably have an excellent professional in front of you.
“At my company I couldn’t do everything I would have liked to.” Quite possible too. Ask what they would have liked to do and how they would do it, and, most importantly: will we give them the tools they need to do it at our company?
(Read: 7 types of toxic people who shouldn’t stay in the company a minute longer)
6. We want committed, flexible and clearly available candidates.
Changing jobs and companies is a critical decision. HR directors must make sure they invest extra time to ensure the candidate clearly understands the change, and the company must be very clear that it is offering what that candidate needs.
If a candidate wants to grow and be promoted within the company, while at ours nobody has been promoted in the last 50 years and it is not a policy we plan to change, that person will eventually jump ship. In fact, some companies deliberately lie to land the ideal candidate, but in the end they have only invested time and money in someone who will apply their knowledge and experience at another company.
Perhaps the most important point for most companies to understand is that we hire, or have, a human resources department so that it works together with the manager or company and helps draw up the requirements needed to hire the ideal candidate. We need to avoid the “solid lines” that companies sometimes impose on human resources, which stop hiring professionals from doing their job properly.
Further reading
Featured image: Communications Office, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
