Get to the Heart of the Hire.

Hiring is hard, but it’s not complex. Don’t let the title fool you though. There are inherent complexities with hiring strong performers, of course. It’s not quite so simple as “I knew in 5 minutes they were the one” although I can’t believe how frequently I hear this, and from leaders of organizations with high turnover. High turnover, I wonder why. However, hiring is often made far too complex of a task or set of processes. Oftentimes, a lot more processes and tasks that are not meaningful and don’t translate into identifying top talent are infused into hiring. The challenge and solution lie in simplifying the process, getting leaner, being more agile in customizing your process based on what you’re trying to hire. Agile isn’t just for projects. It’s also for people. In hiring, we must answer the question, what does a good hire do that will lead to success for us? How do I know a year later that he or she was a great hire? Those questions must be answered before you even create the job requirement, and those questions absolutely should be driving the interviews that will occur before hire. What will make them a successful hire must be infused in every phase of the hiring process.

Hires are not Toolboxes. They Perform and Deliver.

I think hiring managers and candidates both have conditioned each other to focus on skills and knowledge and away from solving problems and focusing on the deliverables of the customer. Any quick glance at the thousands of job openings and their similarities should be proof enough of the almost universal approach of emphasizing the laundry list of required skills and technologies and not homing in on how someone has performed. From the outset here at MAJUS, we have collected and evaluated what we consider as key data. Do they have a track record of upward mobility? Do you see evidence of them grabbing more and more responsibilities, being entrusted with more and more accountabilities? It’s a much more fruitful examination of a candidate’s background if you look at what they were hired to do and what they ended up doing. The level of their performance can be found in achievements and deliverables, versus the ABCs on the resume as they correspond to the requirements of the job. That’s not to dismiss requirements. There are tools, skills, and knowledge that are important, critical, and required. But what’s more important is how they use them to solve problems, not whether they have them listed on the resume. And I think if we start with that point, we will be more on our way to hiring a top performer.

Keep it Simple. Focus on Delivery.

Simplifying the hiring process and focusing on performance and problem-solving abilities rather than a checklist of skills is the meat. Emphasizing a candidate’s track record and their ability to take on increasing responsibilities provides valuable insights and predictive future performance. It’s about understanding how individuals apply their skills in real-world scenarios.

• Candidate Question: What would you hire yourself to do?

• Candidate Question: What were you hired to do, and what did you end up doing?

• Organizational Question: Why should this top performer want to join our organization?

• Organizational Question: Why should this top performer want to stay in our organization?

Develop the Path. Follow the Path.

What is truly hard in the hiring process is to develop a process that yields quality hires. And once you do, and that process is simple and customizable to who and what you want to hire, it takes energy and effort to keep all people who touch your hiring process to stay aligned and disciplined in following those processes. It is hard work to collect data and evaluate that data on your hiring success, being truthful to yourselves and being your harshest critics. That data is important. You don’t want to make good hires by accident, and you certainly don’t want to make bad hires. You have to develop the right process, pay attention to the results, track the results, and assess the results. At MAJUS, we have already made several small changes off our analysis that have enhanced our accuracy in predicting strong performers. If you had a good hire, ask yourselves why. You’ve got to continually evaluate your adherence to those processes. If the focus is on continuing to refine your hiring process to maximize the identification of high performers, top performers, or strong performers in the end, then that hard work and energy will yield great results. Eliminate and trim the fat in your hiring process. Don’t ask a candidate about other skills, other tools, if that’s not needed. You really want to streamline what you’re asking, what you’re looking for, and get that information back, to make a firm, confident, and deliberate hiring decision. And most importantly, you want to be able to duplicate that success hire after hire after hire.

Making Good Hires shouldn’t be an Accident.

Developing a customized, disciplined hiring process and consistently evaluating its effectiveness is crucial. Ensuring all staff in the hiring process follows the process and tracks the results is also crucial, and well worth the hard work involved. Iterative refinement based on data and continuous self-assessment are key elements in ensuring the hiring of top performers. Streamlining questions and focusing on essential information aligns with the goal of making deliberate and confident hiring decisions.

• Candidate Question: What is the larger problem your project or contract is trying to solve?

• Candidate Question: What does Java have to do with solving that problem?

• Organizational Question: Why were we awarded this contract?

• Organizational Question: How is the hire going to help us add value to our customers to enable us to keep and possibly grow the project or contract?

Actions.

There are immediate steps that can be taken towards hiring top talent, and talent that has incentive to remain with you long after hire. 1) Audit your processes and be brutal in deciding what fat needs to be trimmed. 2) Evaluate the full process that was executed for your top performers. 3) Include what defines a successful performer for that specific position as a central evaluating criterion in assessing candidates. Thinning out the process, requiring all hiring staff in the process understand and follow the same approach, and being disciplined around collecting data and making iterative changes off that data, is a great way to improve an organization’s ability to hire top talent. We all want great hires, and we want them to be on purpose.

back to MAJUS