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the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.
What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”
Who places a strong emphasis on digging into past performance and references to avoid the pitfalls of someone having a great interview bedside manner and resume.
With executive hiring, though, people who think they are naturally equipped to “read” people on the fly are setting themselves up to be fooled big-time. Forgers can pass off fake paintings as real ones to the time-pressed buyer, and people who want a job badly enough can fake an interview if it lasts only a few minutes. Gut instinct is terribly inaccurate when it comes to hiring someone.
I'm probably guilty of this, though in some roles I think that being able to sell yourself in an interview is a pretty valuable indicator of how well you can do.
some interviewers like to ask their candidates to look into the future regarding the job at hand by asking hypothetical questions: “What would you do? How would you do it? Could you do it?” Fifty years of academic literature on interview methods makes a strong case against using these types of questions during interviews. For example, asking, “If you were going to resolve a conflict with a co-worker, how would you do it?” is sure to get the response, “Well, I would sit my co-worker down, listen to her concerns, and design a win-win solution with her.” Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
Who recommends digging into past jobs (the last 5) to avoid this pitfall. Don't ask how they *would* approach a key area of their responsibilities; ask them about a time in their past when they've done it.
Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them.
The hard truth is that you have to spend time consistently to make sure you're maintaining a large pool of talent-dense candidates.
The mission should help you find not the generalist who points you to the problem but the very best specialist to help you solve it.
I should figure out what I'm a specialist in - tbh maybe I'm more of a generalist right now.
Ironically, all that specificity frees new hires to give the job their best shot. They know what they’ll be judged on. They know what the company and the boss think is important in their position. Instead of guessing how to do well and careening among a dozen different fronts, they have the game plan right in front of them. That’s liberating, not confining.
On the importance of scorecards containing hard metrics.
Try gathering your leadership team in a room and asking this simple question: “What adjectives would you use to describe our culture?”
These define your company culture, which help develop the competencies you're looking for in your scorecards across all roles.
HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate
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Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks.
This also happens to be the most hands-on and time-consuming, so that checks out :)
You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names.
Try including something along the lines of “Source [number] A Player candidates per year,”
Could put something like this on existing employee scorecards to help foster internal recruitment as a metric for performance.
Many early-stage companies set up an advisory board to serve the same purpose as BSMB’s deputies. These advisors neither involve themselves with governance of the company nor take on fiduciary responsibility. Their reason for being is to offer advice and make introductions.
Mining advisors for candidates in a given role might be really helpful as an initial sourcing activity.
The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players.
To be a great interviewer, you must get out of the habit of passively witnessing how somebody acts during an interview. That puts you back in the realm of voodoo hiring methods, where you end up basing your decision on how somebody acts during a few minutes of a certain day.
I'll admit to putting a lot of stock in how someone behaves and interacts during an interview, perhaps without putting the appropriate amount of attention into preparing questions and directing the candidate.
We have found that people who give themselves a rating of 6 or lower are really saying 2.
*when asking a candidate how past bosses, peers, and subordinates would rate them from 1 - 10
Review the scorecard before the call to refresh your memory. Then begin the call by setting expectations, saying something like this: “I am really looking forward to our time together. Here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to spend the first twenty minutes of our call getting to know you. After that, I am happy to answer any questions you have so you can get to know us. Sound good?”
Screening call guidelines.
Better to miss out on a potential A Player than to waste precious hours on a borderline case that turns out to be a B or C Player.
I'm not 100% sure on this - what if your pool of candidates is small due to lack of a network in a specific discipline?
“Jane Smith, you say? That is S, M, I, T, H, right?”
Lol, no thank you.
A Players are highly valued by their bosses. B and C Players often are not. It is an important piece of the puzzle to figure out if somebody decided to leave a job after being successful (an A Player clue) or whether he or she was pushed out of a job by a boss who did not value their contribution (a B or C Player
When asking why someone left a previous position, make sure they were pulled and not pushed.
The Who Interview takes three hours on average to conduct. It might take five hours for CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies, or ninety minutes for entry-level positions. The ultimate time depends on the length of a person’s career and the number of chapters you create.
I've never interviewed someone for this long before 😰
You have to interrupt the candidate. There is no avoiding it. You have to interrupt the candidate. If you don’t, he or she might talk for ten hours straight about things that are not at all relevant.
I'm so bad at this, and need to get better. See next highlight, though!
The bad way to interrupt somebody is to put up your hand like a stop sign gesture and say, “Wait, wait, wait. Let me stop you there. Can we get back on track?” This shames the candidate, implies that they have done something wrong, and makes them clam up for good. You will really struggle to get the person to open up after that. The good way to interrupt somebody is to smile broadly, match their enthusiasm level, and use reflective listening to get them to stop talking without demoralizing them. You say, “Wow! It sounds like that pig farm next to the corporate office smelled horrible!” The
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Don’t skip the references! What can a reference tell you that you and your colleagues haven’t already gleaned after that exhausting day of interviews? A lot, it turns out.
A reference who hesitates is typically trying hard not to say something that will condemn your candidate or put him- or herself at legal risk.
“Adding too much value is easy to look for. If you are talking and you throw out an idea, does the candidate try to add too many of his own ideas to yours? If so, it implies that your idea was not sufficiently good on its own. It is a small indicator of ego gone awry.
I think this is something I do - too many "value-add" interruptions that probably aren't actually adding value.
“But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy.
On closing the deal and making sure to stay in touch and empathetic towards hires.
A raise given today is usually forgotten by tomorrow.
This aligns with my experience managing a team. Everyone is perpetually looking for the next raise, but it doesn't have the same staying power as something more personal and focused.
Occasionally you will turn a candidate off by being too ardent a suitor, but our experience has been that managers undersell far more often than they oversell.
This feels true. It's necessary to follow up with candidates we're really interested in frequently at the risk of losing folks who may get annoyed.
Great leaders are persistent. They don’t take the first no for an answer. They keep positive pressure on the A Players they want until they get them. From the first sourcing call to the last sales call, they never let up.
On maintaining a talent-dense pool of candidates you can pull from.
