Traditional job advertising attracts the bottom third of the candidate pool by using traditional techniques of job advertising. Learn how to improve your job advertisements so that you can begin to attract top talent for every role in your organization. Discover the power of a Compelling Marketing Statement to bring outstanding candidates to your doorstep the next time you have an opening. Replace your outdated and ineffective job descriptions masquerading as classified job advertising. In this radio program, Brad and Barry walk you through the key elements of replacing your traditional job ads with a Compelling Marketing Statement.
To listen to or download this recording from our audio library CLICK HERE. Then scroll down to the recording.
There are seven non-monetary steps you can take to retain your best talent. Your best people may not leave today, but they may start looking if they don’t feel appreciated. Many managers never take the time to demonstrate how much they appreciate their team. Only a very small percentage regularly read books on leadership, take a workshop or seminar on developing people and then wonder why their best people just gave notice.
Part 1 Barry and I discuss 4 simple things all managers can start doing now that costs nothing but has a huge impact on retention. Implement even one of these 4 and your best talent will stay with you not your competition.
As mentioned in part one of this article, the wrong hiring decision can cost your company well over two to three times the individual’s salary according to Barry Deutsch, Impact Hiring Solutions. This figure may be a conservative estimate because of factors like training, evaluation, termination, re-initiating the hiring process, and lost opportunity costs. There is also an emotional factor involved in a bad hire situation. Not only can it cause stress and anxiety for both management and employees, but it also takes away focus from your company’s primary goals. Essentially, a bad hire can have a negative impact on your company’s bottom line and that won’t benefit you or your workforce.
These circumstances can be minimized during the initial hiring process by using several techniques including effective recruitment programs, skilled interviewing and in-depth work style and personality assessment tests. A personality assessment is a highly effective tool and an efficient use of company resources at this crucial point of the decision making process.
Which Personality Assessment Tool Should My Organization Use?
The following are some things to think about when reviewing various work style & personality profiles:
Training or degrees required for interpretation of the data. Weekend training programs can be problematic since testing and human behavior is a very complex subject. When making hiring or internal decisions, organizations need as much information and understanding as possible as the consequences can be very costly.
A copy of the resume should be supplied to the testing company to review when discussing the assessment results. We suggest that you make sure that they require this as part of the process so it is used when reviewing the assessment.
Scale for “Impression Management” to understand accuracy of results and if someone is trying to ‘fake good’. The questionnaire needs a minimum of 164 questions to gather enough data for this scale.
Common warning signs: When a representative uses absolute statements when describing human behavior, like ‘People are all the same’ or ‘People don’t change.’ This will convey what their level of understanding of the human personality is. Or when someone claims that their profile is 98 or 99% accurate, which rarely can be clinically supported. If you hear this, ask how the data was collected.
Career Matching: Some organizations claim to know what the perfect “sales person” or “secretary” is from a personality perspective. Ask how many careers and occupations have been studied; is the data base validated by outside organizations or only by “applied in-house studies”? “Ideal” is very difficult to define due to the variance of geography, job history and education. What is most important is if the individual has a similar thought pattern that meets the criteria within the job description.
Number of clinical studies conducted by major universities. There should be multiple studies for validation purposes.
How long has the profile been used – what is the history?
How often is the normative database updated and where is the data coming from? (For example, U.S. Census 1990, 2000)
Cultural bias – is it built into the profile and for which countries?
Does the profile meet U.S. government employment standards? Has it been reviewed for ADA compliance & gender, culture & racial bias?
Reading level required (5th grade English, etc).
Number of profiles administered.
Number of actual primary scales as defined by the “Big 5” testing standards. Many tests will claim to have more scales than they actually have – this can lead to misrepresentation of data.
Does the data provide the depth necessary to understand how an individual is wired inside?
Validity, reliability and basis.
These are some general questions and if a profile falls short in any one area, we strongly suggest additional research into the accuracy of the data being generated.
Conclusion
A personality assessment is only one component needed for a successful recruitment and hiring program. It can provide valuable information for critical personnel decisions. Combined with an effective recruitment program and skilled interview techniques, it can benefit your company as a whole, in addition to your individual employees. Armed with accurate and quantifiable data from an in-depth personality assessment, the interview process becomes much more reliable. Ultimately, this only adds to your organization’s bottom line, allowing more effective management of your existing workforce and limiting the potential for wrong hiring decisions. For more information, please visit our Web ite, www.lighthouseconsulting.com to sign up for our Open Line webinars and monthly articles.
Do you know your companies culture? Would others in your company describe it the same? Take our Company Culture Assessment to find out. It is FREE to download CLICK HERE.
Author Bio:
Dana Borowka, MA, CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC has over 25 years experience in the area of business consulting and helping organizations both nationally and internationally in raising the hiring bar through using in-depth work style assessments. Lighthouse Consulting Services, LLC provides a variety of services, including in-depth work style assessments for new hires & staff development, team building, interpersonal & communication training, career guidance & transition, conflict management, workshops, and executive & employee coaching. To order the book, “Cracking the Personality Code” please go to www.crackingthepersonalitycode.com.
Just because the haystack is bigger, it doesn’t mean that there are more needles in it. There’s a misconception in the market now that finding good people is suddenly easy.
HR people, hiring managers, and the general public believe that when unemployment is high, recruiters just have to run an ad and tons of top-notch, unemployed candidates will flood your email box. Well, they are half right. The inbox does get flooded on occasion, but not with top quartile talent, and not with the candidate who has the specific accomplishments I need for my client’s position. Despite the high unemployment, the bell shaped curve hasn’t suddenly changed to create more top quartile talent. If anything, it’s harder to find the right talent for the position because there are so many more people looking.
Consider:
• When companies downsize, they don’t let their top performers go first. They let the average to below average players go first, so the pool of available talent out there consists of far more average players than top quartile players. If you want to hire top quartile players you have to have a process in place to find and attract them.
• The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. In general, it’s harder to get top candidates to change companies right now. With the economy still uncertain, the perceived risk of making a move increases. A top candidate may not be happy where they are, but unless you can provide a very compelling marketing statement about your company and your position, inertia will keep the candidate where they are.
• “Experience” does not equal qualified for your position. There really are a lot of experienced people out there, but just because they are experienced doesn’t mean they know how to do the specific things you need done. HR departments and hiring managers are easily blinded by a flood of resumes from “experienced” people, but experienced at what? Have they managed the switch from one Chinese ODM to another that you need done in the next three months? Have they opened new distribution channels in the EU? Just because they worked for a company that outsourced manufacturing to China, or sold into Europe, doesn’t mean they have done what you need accomplished.
In real estate, it’s “location, location, location”. In recruiting it’s “process, process, process”. If you don’t have a basic hiring process in place that every hiring manager understands and uses, the odds of making a bad hire increases significantly. The basics of a good hiring process are:
• Put the destination in the nav system. Create a job spec that defines, specifically, what needs to be accomplished in the next 12-18 months. Ask the question, “What does success look like for this position a year from now?” Spell it out and quantify it if possible.
• Don’t expect to catch a tuna in a trout pond. If you want to hire top quartile talent, you have to go after passive candidates, not just aggressive ones looking for a job. You will need a compelling marketing statement that will convince the top quartile candidate to look at your opportunity.
• Interviewing 101. Despite hiring being one of the most important processes in any company, few companies train their hiring managers on how to interview candidates. Learn the “who, what, where, when and why” of interviewing.
• Get on the same page. Your hiring team needs to agree on what you are all looking for in a candidate. What are the specific accomplishments you want in their background and what are the qualities that will predict future success for the candidate? If you’re not looking for the same things, you might as well be comparing apples, oranges and cherries.
Don’t let the glut of available people fool you. Recruiting top talent still takes a lot of work.
Mike Hagerthy is an executive recruiter and President of Hagerthy and Company in Southern California and a Certified Strategic Partner of IMPACT Hiring Solutions. To learn more about Hagerthy and Company CLICK HERE.
There may never be a better point in the history of your company to upgrade your talent through improving your hiring process. You’ve got a small window of time to pick one or two under-performing roles and upgrade with talent that you might not be able to acquire once the economy comes roaring back.
These top talent employees in your competitors are open to talking with you right now. Once the job market rebounds, they might not be open to talking with you for another decade.
Are you taking the proactive steps to find, engage, communicate with top talent right now – even though you might not have an immediate opening. Are you using Step Two of the Success Factor Methodology to attract great talent? You can learn more about Step Two in our 5-Step Process by going to this page on our website: http://impacthiringsolutions.com/blog/Step-Two.
Before embarking on this path to upgrade, you might consider a FREE Sourcing Assessment to determine if you’ve got the right tools to find and attract top 25% talent. You can request your FREE Sourcing Assessment by going to this page on our website: http://impacthiringsolutions.com/blog/FREE-Sourcing-Assessment.
As many of you know I also coach high school girls basketball. I love to use metaphors of basketball to describe hiring, motivation, and performance. High School Basketball season is about to begin again in few weeks and it brings back a painful memory of the last game of our last season.
My team had a great season – however, they are disintegrating before my very eyes in the last season game. It’s almost as if the entire team has forgotten how to play. I’m using every motivation technique I’ve learned in 25 years as a recruiter and performance consultant I can think of to get my girls to play better. Nothing is working.
Then it hits me like a lightening bolt. I sit down on the bench and realize that the team members I have cannot deliver against my expectations. I don’t have the talent to do what needs to be done. What could I have done about my frustration: NOTHING! It’s high school basketball. In most high school districts you cannot recruit. Whoever shows up at your doorstep that year is who you’ve got to work with on your team.
Here’s the hiring manager irony: Why do most companies and hiring managers treat recruiting like it’s a high school sport? They take whoever shows up on their doorstep after a few simple basic tactics of finding candidates (a little bit of networking and an ad posting on one of the major job boards). These tactics fall into the worst of the primary pools of possible candidates. You can read more about the four pools of candidates under our Strategic Sourcing Plan Service.
As a hiring manager, recruiting top talent is not a high school sport. Don’t expect to ever build a top notch team by taking this approach to finding candidates.
If you would like to get our FREE Assessment of your sourcing, jump to our FREE Sourcing Assessment Page and we’ll be glad to walk you through how to determine if your hiring process is strong enough to attract outstanding talent at every level in the company.
You can read more about how this tribal hiring process of treating recruiting like it’s a high school sport impacts your overall hiring success by viewing our study, The Top Hiring Mistakes – of which poor sourcing and finding of candidates is a major factor.
Never blast your #resume out to recruiters. It is a complete waste of money. Few if any recruiters read them. It is just plain SPAM.about 8 hours agofrom HootSuite
