The last stage of the candidate process is the most critical and typically the least effective for both the hiring company and the candidate.  Generally and traditionally,  a series of interviews are scheduled and each interviewer is going to try to assess:

• The candidate’s knowledge, skills and special attributes
• Their likely behavior on the job
• Determine if they can work well with others at this company
• Do they fit into the culture.

You have got be kidding me!  Who works at this firm?  Behavioral psychologists?  More likely, you have a popularity contest at work here.

The final 2 or 3 interviews should take place solely between the candidate, the hiring manager, a peer of the hiring manager and finally, the next level up in the organization with the sole purpose of determining if they like each other and that their personal hot buttons are covered.  That’s it!  A simple chemistry test.

Use the tools outlined earlier in this series, throw in a couple of brief phone interviews to confirm the KSAs, one or two pure technical interviews if needed and then the critical decision makers. No guesses or hopes at this point.  You know they can do the job, they behave the way you want, they fit the culture and as their boss, you can work comfortably with them.  Make an offer.  Now!

This is a quote from a Silicon Valley colleague:

“Now I’ve had an experience with a large (computer) storage company where I interviewed 5 times with at least 17 people, talk with the VP of the organization and have the hiring manager tell me I would get an offer by Weds(it was Monday). “

A pretty rough calculation would suggest the hiring firm involved spent at least $5,100 with this process.  (17 interviewers, one hour each at about $50 X 6*, the business impact for their time) On top of all  this,  he didn’t get the job.   That means they probably spent another $5,100 on the person they did hire plus some additional money for others in the process.

What is the point of all of this?  Businesses spend a lot of money on the hiring process.  If you are not a trained behavioral psychologist you are not trained to rely on a complex interview process.

Simplify it.  Identify the problem areas in your hire process, use the right tool  and bypass the beauty pageant.  You are only interested in the talent competition anyway.

* I use a multiplier of 6 to 10 to gauge the expected value or return on the annual loaded wage.  For example, a manager should have at least a six times improvement in the unit performance, either revenue generation, cost reduction or a combination.  If not, you have the wrong person or the you don’t need that position.

So far in this series, The Art of the Hire, I have briefly discussed four of the six critical aspects of the prospective employee that you, the hiring manager, need to learn early in the process:

Art I   – Matching the applicant to the Knowledge, Skills and Attributes required.

Art II  – Matching their personal sense of Integrity and Work Ethic to your company.

Art III – Determining if the applicants “Thinking Style” meets the job requirements.

Art IV  – Answering the question, how will this person “Behave” on the job?

Art V  – Matching their “Interests” and Motivational drivers to your job, your company and to you.  The remainder of this post will address this.

Art VI – Personal Chemistry Test  About 30% of the final decision and a make or break issue for you.  My next post in a few days.

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Interests and Motivational Drivers otherwise known as “Culture Match”

If you can honestly answer or determine the answer to the question, ”Why am I in this business?” and answer it across a couple different dimensions, then isn’t it prudent to hire people that share those interests and drivers.  The process of personally getting the answer is a lot tougher than you think but the results for your business can be breathtaking.  Jennifer Walzer has a great article in the her blog, posted in the New York Times Small Business section that explores this issue.  Read it here.

Her revelation came as a result of a consultant’s question,“Why do you do this, Jen?” he asked. Easy. “I want to eliminate business owners’ headaches and make their lives easier.” But this wasn’t quite right. After much discussion, soul-searching and questioning, the result of our session with Simon was this: I had started my company because I absolutely loved taking care of people. That was my “why.”

Once again, there are assessment tools available that will help identify both your own drivers across dimensions such as People Service, Creativity, Financial, Administration, Technical, Mechanical or Enterprising as well as assessing an applicant’s degree of match.  Doesn’t it just make plain sense that you would want your staff, even if it is only a staff of one, part time at that, to be on the same page.  To use Ms. Welzer’s case again, she found out that a number of her employees were in it for themselves, not because they loved “taking care of people”.  I am not suggesting that these two interests are necessarily incompatible merely that they are part of her business drivers.

Why is this important to you?  Unless you really want to micro manage everything, you must let your staff go to make decisions for themselves with the expectation that they will make the choices that you yourself would make.  If they have the same drivers and the same focus, the odds are, they will.

If you are in hiring mode or are thinking about a turn around in the recession being on the horizon, contact me at Quade Consulting.   With our support, you will hire great people and improve your business performance.  We guarantee it!

joe.hoffman@quadeconsulting.com

Imagine that you are going to buy a new car.  One of the first things that you do is build a list, mental or written, of the behaviors or characteristics of your new vehicle.

o    It goes fast.
o    Holds the road
o    Carries people and cargo
o    Gas mileage
o    Cost to buy

All these can be easily measured, so you put a range against each one to describe the behavior of your ideal new car.

o    Goes Fast        Zero to 60 mph in 7 to 10 seconds.  Top speed 120 mph
o    Holds the Road    Runs a ¼ mile “S” track in 10 -18 second
o    Carries people and cargo  Trunk Space, Rear deck size etc in Cubic feet
o    Gas mileage        Between 23 and 27 mpg local
o    Cost to buy        Less than $35,000

Except for auto enthusiasts and people who want bragging rights, we don’t care how the designers and manufacture arrives at the performance and behavior.  You just need and want to know that when you leave for that camping trip, it will hold your stuff, keep up with the semis on the interstate, climb the mountain road and not cost a new mortgage on your house to keep it fed.

There are literally hundreds of vehicles out there to choose from, from drag racers (goes very fast, doesn’t hold the road real well), to two seater sport cars (goes fast, holds the road, no storage space) on down to SUVs and sedans (Not very fast, not too good at holding the road, lots of space).  We can peel off the drag racer and you won’t be buying a new Koenigsegg ($1.2 Million) but there are still a lot of SUVs and sedans that will work OK.  The more specs that have at the outset, the easier and more effective the choice.

As a business leader, you want to hire the best people, those that will enhance your business. One of the most important aspects of identifying the great employee is their on the job behavior.  How will they respond to the daily pokes that life offers?   Suppose that you are in the hospitality business.  Would you hire a great undertaker as your bartender?  Even if he or she could mix any libation your customers wanted.  Probably not! The behaviors that make for best fit in each job are pretty different.

Behaviors are things like:
o    Energy Level
o    Assertiveness
o    Sociability
o    Manageability
o    Independence

Just as in the vehicle choice, most of us don’t really care how the psychology of the person is designed; we just want to know how they will behave in real life.  If you know what you need for a particular job, there are tools (assessments) available to identify the good choices from the bad.  If you already have people that you consider great in that job, then a benchmark can be built against them to fine-tune your choice even tighter.

Getting at this level of detail through an interview process is very difficult even for highly trained (and expensive) psychologists.  A business can use assessments, spending less than a few hundred dollars and save the interview for the important stuff, like personal chemistry.  The bottom line result, if you use tools that are reliable and offer predictive validity, is a lower cost per great hire, lower turn over, higher productivity and of course, better business performance.

If you are in hiring mode or are thinking about a turn around in the recession being on the horizon, contact me at Quade Consulting.   With our support, you will hire great people and improve your business performance.  We guarantee it!

joe.hoffman@quadeconsulting.com

I’m a fan of Seth Godin’s blog for his slightly skewed view of business and marketing.  Actually he has a slightly skewed view of a lot of things but very thought provoking and insightful.  He recently had a post that looked at communications media and the bandwidth, or quality of the medium (information density)  versus the synchronicity of the sender receiver.

A thought provoking and I think, very funny quote from the post, “The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light.”  I urge everyone to take a look at his post and would like to hear back as to where you would place “Facebook” on the chart since he seems to have left it out.

Seth’s Post The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about

The real challenge for the business person is selecting the set of media that get your personal brand and marketing message out there into the world without wasting a lot of time or inadvertently hurting your image.  Make wise choices!