Upgrading Your Team in the Recession

Back in July, I made the recommendation on this blog (and was interviewed by Forbes Magazine Online) to use the recession as a unique point in history to upgrade your team.

Have you selected one or two key roles and upgrade the positions yet?

If not, what’s holding you back? Don’t miss out on this wonderful special time in history to attract a level of talent to a couple of key roles that you might never again have the opportunity to acquire.

What’s holding you back from taking the first step?

Here are some of the “arguments” I hear against upgrading when I mention this idea in our workshops and to our CEO/President clients:

• This person has been with me a long time and is loyal
• The individual in that role might have a hard time finding a new job
• I’m embarrassed that the hire didn’t work out – I’m hoping it turns around
• I think the person will eventually get better
• I don’t have time to spend on hiring someone
• The person is okay – they do some things well – no rush to make a decision
• Not sure I won’t make a mistake the second time around again
• No idea where to start or find this person
• I can live with this person – I’ll do part of their job
• What if I screw up the hire – then I wouldn’t look good to my ____ (fill in the blank)

Does this sound dysfunctional? Sure it does.

The number ONE trait of success for managers and executives is the ability to hire and retain an outstanding team of people. Are you a great manager/executive or an average one?

• Do you have an exceptional team in place right now?
• Why are you tolerating average/mediocre performance?
• Are you doing part of the work your team should be doing?

Do you have some people on your team that are good at doing 70-75-80% of their job, but stink at the other 30-25-20% of their job. Who gets to do this piece your subordinate cannot do? You guessed it – you do.

Before you can blink, 50% of your workload is doing the work your team should be doing. You’re doing 8% of Mark’s job, 5% of Susan’s job, 20% of Kelly’s job. Now you can’t do your job because so much time is being consumed by doing the work of your team.

Why are you continuing to accept this less than stellar performance.

Take action now and upgrade a few key roles that are below your expectations. Emerge from the recession with a team that truly is a strategic advantage.

Recognize that right now is a unique historical time period for hiring. There are some exceptionally talented individuals who might consider your opportunity. As the job market recovers – you may never again be able to acquire and/or afford this talent.

Discover the simple steps to find, assess and acquire great talent.

Barry Deutsch

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retention Discussion Group to follow the conversation around upgrading your team and finding great talent.

Choosing Recruiters: Mistake #2 – We Need an Expert

Some executives believe that the only way a recruiter can be successful is to have many years of recruiting in a particular functional category (finance, marketing, human resources, manufacturing), or in a specific industry (construction, bio-technology, education, non-profit, electronics, distribution).

Using the criteria of a functional or industry expertise is a classic mistake in choosing recruiters.

The best recruiters are not industry or functional experts. Their expertise is as world-class recruiters. They know how to play detective to find the very best talent, they understand human motivation and the key elements of why candidates are open to new opportunities, and they are master interviewers capable of extracting information from candidates – information they wouldn’t share with their closest friends or spouses.

Most functional or industry focused recruiters work the same old tired lists of candidates, move the same people from one company to the next and back again, and lack an in-depth understanding of how to nurture, excite, motivate, and create passion in candidates around new opportunities. Rarely do they actually “recruit”. They have no process for identifying new candidates other than a little light networking, running advertisements, and searching their “database” of candidates.

Two decades ago (B.I. – Before Internet – who can even remember this???), the only way to be successful as a recruiter was to specialize since the data you possessed in a 3×5 card system was your inventory or earning potential. Your success as a recruiter was a function of the strength of your network. Today, within 24-48 hours, any good recruiter can identify 80-90% of the key targets on an executive search using the Internet (Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, industry lists and publications, and many times – simply visiting the competitor websites). There is NO longer any need to maintain a unique database of candidates in a particular functional discipline or industry specialization.

Recruiters who still hang onto the tribal methods of recruiting from 20 years ago will claim “I know all the key players in the industry”, “I am well connected”, “I have an extensive database”, “I once held the blank title for the same job you want to hire” or “I worked for years in the blank industry”. None of these claims translate into being a great recruiter. You might have once been a great CFO or Marketing Executive, but that doesn’t mean you’re a good recruiter. Just because you have a phone and a rolodex does not mean you can recruit top talent. The recruiters who claim they have the industry contacts and databases will typically throw a bunch of resumes at you while keeping their fingers crossed that you fall in love with one of them – consequently owing a recruiting fee.

This is not recruiting – it doesn’t even remotely resemble executive search. Instead, it’s nothing more than brokerage – flinging resumes by email with the hope that something will stick. The best recruiters understand which ponds to fish in and how deeply to fish in each pond. The best recruiters EARN their fees by uncovering the very best talent – not candidates who are convenient from their database.  Brokerage (or a referral fee for flinging a resume) shouldn’t be worth more than 5-10% of the candidates first year compensation. Real search fees in the 30% range can only be justified if the recruiter does the following:

Identification of target candidates

A major campaign to convince those candidates to interview and leave their current jobs

Helping you to screen, interview, validate, and vet candidates instead of box-checking job descriptions and then “flinging resumes” (more on why most recruiters don’t see their job as helping you to interview and evaluate candidates in a future posting).

Let me share a personal example: My specialty as an executive recruiter is recruiting – and Brad and I are two of the top recruiters in the United States – how many recruiters can claim they are great recruiters as opposed to “I understand what it’s like to be a CFO or I understand the industrial fastener market”.

If you are a company executive, which would you rather have:

A recruiter who claims to understand the functional role and industry and suggests they have a great database,

OR

A recruiter who has a proven track record of ferreting out the best talent, motivating that talent to get excited about your opportunity, and helping you to validate they can deliver the results you desire.

You obviously want the recruiter who can deliver the results you desire – why then do most companies use the wrong criteria to pick recruiters.

Brad and I talk have spoken a number of times in our weekly radio show about choosing recruiters. You can download our radio shows in our FREE audio archive. We are also preparing a recruiter best practice scorecard which you can use to benchmark recruiters before choosing a firm to help you fill a critical role.

Barry Deutsch

Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Hiring and Retaining Top Talent for a more in-depth discussion on choosing recruiters.

Are You Ready for Your Best Talent to Start Leaving?

What would you do if your top performing subordinate left tomorrow? Would the pain be unbearable?

Do they possess your entire customer history in their head?

Would key customers follow them to a new job?

How much would productivity decline?

Would others follow  – like a domino effect?

Can you afford the costs of replacing and developing a new person in this role?

You get the general idea- it would be disastrous if one of your top performing subordinates left? Let’s go one step further – What if multiple top performing subordinates left? Perhaps, Armageddon?

What is the likelihood this might happen in the next year?

There is a tremendous pent-up demand of employees to start actively trying to see if the grass is greener somewhere else. The demand has built up to the level of boiling-over due to very few jobs being available in the last 2 years. Many candidates have felt that they are lucky just to have a job. As the economy rebounds and the job market returns (which it will – although it’s difficult to predict whether that will be in 3 months, 6 months or a year), many candidates will have an opportunity to explore whether the grass is greener somewhere else – an opportunity that has not been available for 2-3 years.

Are you Retention Proofing your company?

Do you have a systematic plan for defining roles, challenging your best people, making sure they are learning and growing, structuring non-monetary rewards and recognition, tuning up your performance management process, and improving your culture?

If you’re not working on all these areas right now, the risk is starting to increase exponentially over losing key people in the coming job market rebound.

If you’d like to see if you’re prepared to keep your best people, request our RETENTION CHECK-UP. This is a 5-10 minute conversation with one of our partners to determine what retention best practices you should be implementing right now.

Barry Deutsch

Don’t forget to join our HIRE AND RETAIN TOP TALENT LinkedIn Discussion Group to participate in the discussion around retention proofing your company to keep your very best talent.

Choosing Recruiters: Mistake #1 – No Systematic Process

CEOs and Senior Executives in our survey assumed that all retained executive recruiters must have a rigorous process to help clients hire key executives that will deliver expected results.

How many times have you crossed your fingers in the hope that the recruiter you hired will hit the bullseye? Conversely, how many times have you felt like you’ve thrown good money down a dark hole – never to see an appropriate outcome?

After all, if you visit the recruiter’s website, doesn’t it always identify that the recruiter has a “process” to do search. This assumption represents the number one mistake that is made in working with recruiters. Falling victim to this mistake results in searches that do not get filled in a timely manner, do not get filled with a top caliber candidate, or do not get filled at all.

Industry statistics show that less than 65% of all executive searches are completed by the search firm. The Success Factor Methodology is a process which overcomes the #1 mistake when it is used both by the recruiter and by the company.The vast majority of recruiters have no process. If you go to their website, they claim they have a process – but there is no real process. There is no application of best practices in sourcing, interviewing, assessing, and recruiting top talent.

It’s random, willy-nilly, and seat of the pants. Most recruiters approach is superficial and lacking in substance.

The next time you interview recruiters to select one to help you fill an important position – ask what their process is? Probe for their specific methodology on sourcing or interviewing. Ask what specific questions they use, the research it’s based upon, and what the uncover through those questions. Discover how they build sourcing plans, where they fish, the precise techniques they use to fish in deep waters for the best candidates.

Most of the time, you’ll hear fluff instead of substance. Having a phone and asking interview questions does not make for a great recruiter. Understanding the best practices in sourcing, assessing, recruiting, and interviewing – then applying these on a consistent basis – does make for a great recruiter.

Like the failure behind hiring in many companies, the vast majority of recruiters fail because they have no process.

For over two decades we’ve been using a highly structured process in our Retained Executive Search Practice called the Success Factor Methodology. Using this process has resulted in a success track record over 95% of helping clients hire key executives. We’ve taken this process, and modified it so that you too can implement a rigorous hiring process to find, interview, and select Top Talent. A few years ago we wrote a book, “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”, detailing the steps to implement the Success Factor Methodology in your company. We’ve built an ecommerce site around video, audio, templates, and tools to help you implement the process. Finally, our website contains a wealth of free products, downloads, audio archives, and examples to reinforce improving your hiring process.

STOP relying on recruiters who have no systematic and rigorous process to help you hire top talent. Take back your searches by implementing a simple and effective process field-tested in thousands of companies.

Barry Deutsch

The Top Ten Mistakes Executives Make in Choosing Recruiters

How do you pick the right recruiter?

How do avoid making a mistake in selecting such an important trusted advisor?

In a survey project conducted over 3 years with 425 CEOs and Senior Executives we identified the Top Ten Mistakes that are made in choosing executive recruiters. We took on this survey project after hearing over 25 years horror story after horror story from companies who had retained recruiters to help fill critical positions.

We began to wonder why so many CEOs and Senior Executives were frustrated by the process of choosing and working with executive recruiters.

In my following ten blog postings I’ll identify the Top Ten Mistakes of Choosing Recruiters. You’ll probably want to LOLROFL as my daughter is fond of texting – you’ll first want to Laugh Out Loud while Rolling on the Floor when you read the Top Ten Mistakes. Then laughter will give way to anger and frustration as you realize how your company has made multiple mistakes in choosing and working with recruiters over the years – the bad hires, the painful experiences, and searches not completed – all the result  of mistakes in choosing recruiters – and which could have been easily avoided.

Do you have a pet peeve about choosing or working with recruiters?

What’s your horror story that you could share with our blog readers?

If there was one mistake you’ve made in the past in choosing a recruiter, how would you avoid making that same mistake in the future?

Listen to our recent Radio Show Broadcast in our FREE Audio Library on this subject of the classic mistakes companies make in choosing recruiters.

Join us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Hiring Top Talent for a conversation about choosing and working with recruiters.

Barry Deutsch

What’s the most stupid interview question?

Amy Andrews at The Secrets of the Job Hunt Blog, posted an article titled “The Dreaded “Tell Me About Yourself”. Right after posting, my partner Brad Remillard posted an article on our Job Search and Career Management Blog titled “Tell Me About Yourself. Why Is This Question Asked In An Interview“.

As I mentioned in my comments on her blog posting, I consider this to be one of the most stupid interview questions of all time. Why bother to ask it? What does it really tell you?

After 25 years in executive search, having sat in thousands of interviews with my clients, this is one of the most common interview questions – if not THE most common interview question. The first time my clients ask this question in an interview is the last time they’ll ever ask it.

Once we’ve trained them in the 5 Core Question Interview structure, they know if they do the “Tell me About Yourself” – I’ll literally take them into the hallway and slap them around.

This “Tell Me About Yourself” is a throw-away question.

It’s asked by hiring managers who have not been trained in effective interviewing techniques.

It’s a tribal hiring question passed down through the generations of “I learned it from the old guy who learned it from the dead guy”.

Many hiring managers fail to explain to me why they’re even asking the question. The usual response is either “That’s what I thought I’m supposed to ask” or “That’s how I learned to start an interview (based on what I was asked 22 years ago when I got interviewed for the first time).

For a better set of questions that can yield accurate interview results well into the 80%-90% range, examine our 5 Core Question Interview . These questions have been deeply researched by Brad and I over 25 years and well over 100,000 candidate interviews. The first 3 of the set are the primary behavioral elements for top talent, and the last two are specific to the job. The questions can be asked at every level in an organization – from the part-time warehouse clerk to the Senior Vice President of Marketing.

As an additional resource, Brad and I have posted our radio shows talking about interviewing and the proper questions to predict future success. You can find these in our FREE Resources.

Stay tuned for the my next blog posting on a better way to open the interview instead of asking a canned, inane, and useless, unfocused question.

Barry

Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group for Hiring Managers on How to Hire and Retain Top Talent.

STOP Letting Job Descriptions Miss The Target

The Number ONE reason hiring fails for most companies is that success in the position is not defined!

In our research project, we documented that NOT defining Success was one of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes made by hiring managers. Not only is it in the top ten, NOT Defining Success is most likely the number ONE culprit behind hiring mistakes and errors.

As we’ve pointed out in previous blog postings, using a traditional job description to both attract and measure candidates against in the interview process is worthless. Job descriptions define a person, not a job. Job descriptions categorize what people should have when they show up for work the first day, NOT what they should do with their skills, degrees, knowledge, experience, and behaviors.

A much better approach is to define the success you desire in a role. This can be done for any role in your organization, from the customer service rep position to the senior vice president of marketing. It is the core of our entire hiring process, the Success Factor Methodology. We’ve verified, validated, and field-tested the use of defining success to attract, assess, and retain top talent.

Over the last decade, thousands of companies around the world have defined success for positions in their companies. Through this simple exercise, they’ve increased hiring accuracy, improved execution of major projects, raised the reliability of obtaining important results, and strengthened the ability to retain top performers.

In our Success Factor Methodology, we call the end product of a definition of future success for a position – the Success Factor Snapshot. The process of building a Success Factor Snapshot is through S.O.A.R.ing. The SOAR process has 4 key components. You don’t have to be great at defining any of them – you just need to work through each one step-by-step. The 4 components of the SOAR job definition process include:

1. Situation – what’s not working or what is the missed opportunities?

2. Obstacles – what are the obstacles standing in the way of achieving the results

3. Action Steps – what are the quantifiable/time-based outcomes

4. Results – what specific results will tell us the situation/opportunity was achieved?

There is extensive information on our website of how to SOAR for a position, including the step-by-step process, products to teach all your hiring managers how to do it, services to help implement across your organization, and an extraordinary wealth of FREE Resources.

Brad and I have posted all our Internet Radio Show Programs in a FREE radio archive. We frequently talk about defining success and creating Success Factor Snapshots through the SOARing process. We’ve also posted real-life examples of Success Factor Snapshots.

If you use the SOAR process to develop Success Factor Snapshots and then use those in place of traditional job descriptions, you’ll immediately start attracting better quality candidates, you’ll make better assessments and evaluations of candidates in the interview process, and you’ll be able to keep your top performers engaged and excited about their jobs.

STOP using outdated tools, like the traditional job description, to define work. Use a tool that permits you to hit the target every time on hiring top talent.

Barry

Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group for Hiring Managers and Executives on how to hire and retain top talent.

How can you change your luck in hiring?

In 25 years as Retained Executive Recruiters, Brad and I have had the pleasure of conducting more than 2000 workshops for hiring managers, executives, and CEOs on how to hire more effectively.

In every workshop we ask the question: Looking back over the past 5-10 years, what’s your success in hiring? What percentage of candidates whom you’ve hired have lived up to or exceeded your expectations and what percentage fell short of your expectations?

On a consistent basis over those 25 years, most managers, executives, and CEOs would be jumping for joy if they felt they achieved a 50% track record on hiring candidates who met their expectations in the first 12 months on the job.

Is there any other process in your company that will you accept that level of random variability in hiring? How about the payroll checks you write, or the bills you pay for vendors?

I doubt it.

Why then do most hiring managers, executives, and CEOs accept average and mediocre results when it comes to hiring?

There are many reasons that lead to average and mediocre results in hiring and the acceptance of poor hiring practices. We’ll explore many of these in coming blog posts.

The number one reason hiring fails in most companies (whether you have 6 employees or 60,000 employee) is that there is no systematic process for hiring. Okay – maybe you’ve got a checklist, a few steps, and a couple of forms. However, the reality is that most hiring managers and executives do whatever they want to find, select, assess, evaluate, and hire candidates. There is not a systematic rigorous process across the company from manager to manager.

The minute you implement a structured, systematic and rigorous process across every hiring manager in your company, hiring accuracy will explode upward. Over the past 20 years we’ve seen companies that implement our simple 5 step Success Factor Methodology raise hiring accuracy from roughly 50% (standing at the crap tables) random results to successful hiring outcomes in the 80-90% range.

Imagine this for a moment: Every hire your company makes from the day you implement a structured, systematic, and rigorous hiring process – you’ll have an 80%-90% confidence level that person will achieve your desired results and outcomes.

No more crossing your fingers depending on luck and hope as the primary elements of your hiring strategy.

Take our FREE Hiring Assessment to determine if you’ve got a hiring process capable of finding, interviewing, and selecting top performers at every level in your organization.

Barry

Don’t forget to sign up for our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Hiring and Retaining Top Talent

On-line Programs This Week for Hiring Managers – August 24th

If you are a manager or executive, you might be interested in two of the programs Brad and I are hosting this week

Brad I will be hosting our weekly Internet Radio Talk Show today for Hiring Managers and Executives titled “Upgrading Your Team During the Recession” at 11-noon PDT on LA Talk Radio. You can listen in and also pose questions live during the broadcast.

We’ll be taking your emails and live calls to discuss the steps you should be taking right now to upgrade your team so that when you emerge from the recession, you’ll have a powerful team capable of propelling your business or team forward as a strategic advantage.

On Friday, we will be putting on our popular one hour webinar presentation based on our half and full day training program titled “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. You can register for this webinar by clicking here.

We’ll provide an overview of our award-winning workshop that teaches the Success Factor Methodology. This hiring process has been implemented in thousands of companies around the world with validated success in dramatically raising hiring accuracy and improving the ability to hire top talent at every level.

We hope you’ll join us for one of these programs this week.

Barry

Why is your employee referral program a failure?

Why do most employee referral programs fail to achieve success?

Your employees are your greatest source of outstanding talent!

Why are they not whispering in the ears of their former co-workers, associates, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who can deliver the results you need?

In over 25 years of executive search, hiring and sourcing consulting, and implementing hiring process improvements in thousands of companies, we’ve discovered a few key differences in why some programs work and others fail miserably. Here’s a list of the key reasons employee referral programs fail to live up to their potential:

• Financial incentives don’t work
• Most companies do a terrible job communicating about an opening
• Employees don’t trust their referrals will be handled in a professional manner
• Classic networking methods are not usually applied to employees

Let’s take each one of these in turn and dissect it over our next 4 blog posts.

However, before we jump into how to improve your employee referral program, let’s talk about metrics of success in employee referral programs. Most companies we’ve encountered achieve somewhere between 5% and 20% as a target range on number of candidates hired who came through an employee referral. I’m going to suggest that your target should be 50%.

Over the next 12 months, 50% of all hires should come from employee (modify this to be stakeholder) referrals. Some of my clients that I’ve worked with over the last quarter of century have continually refined their employee/stakeholder referral program to the point where 75% or more of all hires come from a referral.

Employee/Stakeholder Referrals are one of the main elements of our Success Factor Methodology in using Success-based Sourcing Methods. We dig into this subject in much more detail in our award-winning book, You’re NOT the Person I Hired. We’ve posted examples of using Compelling Marketing Statements in your referral program in our FREE Resources (we’ll talk more about creating a compelling reason for employees to make referrals in a subsequent post).

We’ve even created a FREE Assessment to judge the effectiveness of your sourcing methods, including employee referrals. If you would like to take the FREE Assessment, please complete the application form on our website and we’’ll show you how to quickly and inexpensively improve your referral program.

Once you really focus on implementing best practices in employee referrals, you’ll see that your quality of hires goes up, employee satisfaction goes up, employee performance goes up, recruiting costs go down, the costs of bad hires goes down, time to find and select a top performer goes down.

When should be the best time for you to implement best practices in an employee referral program?

What would you consider to be the primary best practice in your company that generates an abundance of employee/stakeholder referrals?

Barry