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On Becoming a Great Recruiter, Part 6
Defend your candidate against managers who
make dumb decisions — and save $42,888 per year per
recruiter
If one of your client groups has ever incorrectly eliminated a
good candidate because someone on the hiring team was a weak
interviewer, this article is written for you.
But some background first. We're now into the final stages of
this series on becoming a great recruiter. If you've participated
fully, you're now much better at taking the assignment and finding
more top active and passive candidates and closing more assignments
more quickly. If you haven't participated, you're sending out too
many candidates to be interviewed, you're not seeing as many strong
active and passive candidates as you could be, and if you haven't
tried out the techniques presented last week, there's no doubt that
you're losing candidates who drop out due to compensation
differences, or you're overpaying for the candidates you
are hiring.
Now consider this. If you followed the guidelines provided in
this series, you're at least 20% better than you were just two short
months ago, and that's if you're an experienced recruiter. You're
now at least 30% better if you're a mid-level recruiter, and at
least 50% better if you're just starting out. But, you're no better
if you don't think you need to get better, and unfortunately many
recruiters fall into this category.
Not wanting to get better is the first sign of decline. You might
want to take the Recruiter Diagnostic
and our annual Recruiting Challenges
2006 to see where you stand on this point. Even better,
use this same concept when you interview your candidates. Top
interviewers know that a candidate's personal growth rate is a great
predictor of potential and self-motivation. Knowing this and a few
other interviewing tips which you'll learn in this article will help
you defend your candidate from managers who don't interview too
well.
If you've ever lost a good person because someone on the
interviewing team was unprepared, emotional, or a weak interviewer,
you know what a waste of time this can be. Equally as bad is having
great candidates not even be considered because they didn't have
exactly the right mix of skills, experience, or academic background.
Good interviewing skills can help recruiters minimize these types of
non-hires.
The goal of this article is to reduce your sendouts per hire
ratio by at least one. For most recruiters, this will result in a
productivity increase of at least 20-30%, which means you'll be able
to make one additional hire per month, or 12 additional hires per
year. At an average cost per hire of $3,574, this is a cost savings
of $42,888. Per recruiter! Each year! Just by following the tips in
this article!
Here's how:
- Know the job. Reread Part II in this series and
follow the instructions suggested. If you're the type of recruiter
who uses the traditional skills- and experience-based job
description to merely screen candidates while the hiring team
determines if they're suitable for the job, you're just a
box-checker. At a minimum, good recruiters need to determine if a
candidate can do the work at a high level of competency, and get
the person excited about proceeding in the selection process by
positioning the job as a career move, not a compensation increase.
Where do you stand on this measure of recruiter competency?
- Get your hiring team to agree on real job
needs. With everyone present who will be interviewing the
candidate, ask them all what it would take for them to hire a
person who had half the experience listed on the job description,
without compromising on-the-job performance. They'll probably say,
"Demonstrated proof that the person has done exceptional work
doing similar things required on the job." Then, ask the manager
to describe some of these typical things.
- Now, use the interview to get the proof you need that
your candidate has done exceptional work in these areas.
Getting the group together and getting them to agree to real job
needs is really the core secret of great recruiting. Getting the
hiring manager and interviewing team to switch the hiring decision
to performance objectives rather than skills is how you reduce
your sendouts per hire by at least one, and how you save $42,888
per year. The basis of performance-based interviewing was
presented in Part IV. (Here are a
few other articles on
this topic.) The key is to determine if the candidate is competent
and motivated to do the real work required. If the hiring team
doesn't agree on what work is required, then even if they agree
upon a candidate there's a good chance that you'll hire the right
person for the wrong job.
- Implement an evidence-based assessment
approach. One of the big problems with interviewing in
most companies is the informal and unsophisticated way in which
consensus is reached. Here's a quick (and crude) way to rank your
organization on selection effectiveness on a 1-10 scale, with a 10
being outstanding.
- Ranking 1: Unsophisticated. Interviewers make quick
decisions based on first impressions and skills, and use the
interview to collect information to confirm their initial
reaction; then, they vote yes or no. The votes are then
tabulated with minimal or informal discussion, and no votes
typically override one or more yes votes. Unprepared or weak
interviewers are given equal voting rights.
- Ranking 5: Average. Some interviewers make quick judgments,
some don't. Many interviewers dig deep into technical skills.
Other interviewers focus on intelligence and drive. Some
interviewers are trained; many are not. Sometimes, the
post-interview debriefing is formal; sometimes, it's not. There
is no formal, set approach to conduct a debriefing session.
There is no formal process in place to handle all of these
different approaches and variations in interviewing skills.
- Ranking 10:
Sophisticated. While it is recognized that some interviewers
make quick decisions based on first impressions and presentation
skills, tools are in place to minimize these natural biases. All
interviewers know real job needs and are trained to measure core
competencies against these real job needs. The up-down voting
process is prohibited. The roles of interviewers who are
unprepared or don't know how to interview properly are
minimized. A formal, approved debriefing process is in place
that addresses all of these differences in which interviewers
meet formally 100% of the time to share evidence and reach
consensus.
Recruiters lead
these debriefing sessions.
Getting somewhere between a 7 and 8 ranking (which is good enough
to get the savings indicated) is pretty easy. During the formal
debriefing session, have the interviewing team rank your
candidates on a 1-5 scale (5 being superb) on these five core
competencies: 1) competency to do the real work, 2) motivation to
do the real work, 3) team skills working with comparable teams, 4)
achievement of comparable results, and 5) cultural and
environmental fit. If you want to get a little more sophisticated,
you can use this 10-factor candidate assessment
template to guide you through this. Defend your candidate from generalities, intuition,
and emotional biases. If you know the job and conducted a
thorough interview yourself, you should be in a position to
question any opinions about your candidate's ability to do the
work based on vague general statements. The key to this is to ask
other members of the hiring team for specific proof. For example,
an "I don't think the person would fit here," can be offset by
someone saying, "While at ABC company last year, Kathy closed as
many deals with major accounts just like the ones we expect her to
handle with us." Recruiters need to facilitate these types of
in-depth conversations to prevent good candidates getting excluded
from consideration due to superficial interviewing skills.
Lead the panel interview before you get to the
debriefing session. Panel interviews tend to be less
emotional and more business-like. If the recruiter can lead these
using some type of structured, in-depth, performance-based
interview, then the evidence like that suggested above will be
heard by all members of the hiring team. Getting the evidence is
how you defend your candidate from bad decisions. The key here is
to use specific information as evidence to hire or not hire
someone, rather than generalities, emotions, intuition, or biases.
A panel interview is a great means to accomplish this. A panel
interview also allows weaker interviewers to participate fully in
the process.
That's it. That's how you defend your candidates from bad hiring
decisions. In the process, you'll reduce your sendouts per hire and
save at least $42,888 per recruiter per year. Better still, you'll
stop hiring great people for the wrong jobs, and start hiring great
people for the right jobs, even if they don't meet the exact
criteria on the job description. Collectively, this is how you make
sure the best person gets the job — not the best interviewer.
Lou Adler (lou@adlerconcepts.com) is the president of
The Adler Group, a training and consulting
firm helping companies hire more top talent by implementing
performance-based hiring. His Amazon bestseller Hire With Your
Head (John Wiley & Sons, 1997, 2002) started the
performance-based hiring and selection movement. This was
followed-up with the award-winning Nightingale Conant audio tape
program, POWER Hiring: How to Find, Assess, Hire and Keep
Great Talent (1998). Adler
is a veteran recruiter and founder of CJA Executive Search. His
early industry career included general management positions with the
Allen Group, as well as senior-level financial management positions
with Rockwell International's Automotive and Consumer Electronics
groups. Adler holds an MBA from UCLA and a B.S. in Engineering from
Clarkson University, New York.
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