Talent savvy CEOs recognize that hiring can represent one of the biggest reasons for organizational success or failure.
Many organizations can identify potential candidates, but lack the understanding that mismatches, poor hiring practices, disconnection from culture, bias, and shoddy-word-of-mouth are the norm. Sadly, this is far too common. Ineffective hiring practices can consume enormous amounts of profit, doing the most significant damage to the future of your business.
Talent fitness begins with an intellectual and gut sense of the right fit. It is highly improbable to have excellence in hiring unless you are conducting enough interviews yourself. It is important to practice.
Practice helps you become clear on what kind of person fits your business strategy.
Practice helps you define your tribe and the broad qualities required for membership.
Practice helps you develop informed accountability in your company’s hiring practices.
You must lead as the Chief Hiring Officer to ensure your talent agenda works. So, here’s where you begin this week. Interview three people – your interviews could be mid-level or entry-level individuals.
You’ll want to leverage this experience to form a point of view for how your organization selects talent. Are you looking for technical skills? Does grit matter more? What about the ability to collaborate across a team?
Since it will ultimately drive your business strategy, you want to have a strong influence on selection. Your human resources team can help with the process and interview models. What they need is your direction on what the organization should hire for.
When you are finished, take a few minutes to answer the following questions:
1. How effective does your current model evaluate what you have prioritized as critical capabilities and competencies?
2. What are your hiring managers not searching for that you assumed they were? How would they know?
3. How efficient is your process? How would you change it if you thought of your candidates as customers?
The value of you choosing to lead in this area will be well worth your time. Interviewing can only be improved through skill-building and practice. You will be able to recognize those in your organization who are highly capable in this area and identify those that are costing you talent and resources.
For most organizations, human resources is blamed for hiring failures and they play an important role. Your talent acquisition function needs to build the right talent communities for sourcing, to ensure the process is not bogging down, to provide the right tools, and to constantly enhance the end to end process to ensure an excellent candidate experience.
But what happens when they are sent to the hiring manager?
Begin this exercise and continue to work on these questions, meeting candidates and exploring the current state of acquisition until you can articulate exactly what you want with the interview process, culture fit, candidate word-of-mouth and the desired hiring skills of your managers. The resources are available for almost any solution. The missing ingredient is you.
When you become talent-fit in this area, you’ll be amazed at how much better aligned you and your organization are on key components of your talent agenda. Great things will follow. The right people will follow.
If you don’t take charge, it’s like taking your team to a shooting range, blindfolding them, and asking them to hit your targets. Don’t forget to duck!
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Brought to you by Jackson Lynch, President – 90 Consulting
P: (832) 930-7449 / E: jackson@90Consulting.com
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