There’s been a lot of commentary lately about the costs of getting your hiring wrong and it seems that everyone is complaining about everyone else. At the same time, almost all search firms are promoting impressive success rates of up to 95% while failed recruitment statistics are quoted as anywhere from 40 to 70%
On the one hand, you’ve got candidates moaning about lack of feedback, saying that recruitment firms are ghosting them and that the quality of the hiring experience is poor. On the other, hiring organisations complain about candidates not showing up for interviews, recruitment firms sending them underqualified or too few candidates. The bottom line is that it’s a really tough market for hiring people at senior levels with candidates in short supply for limited positions.
Hiring organisations ultimately want the best person for the job. But selecting new employees, especially senior leaders, comes with risks for all concerned and understandably so. There’s a lot riding on it and appointing the wrong leader can directly impact on performance and results.
What I want to address in this article is what organisations can do to improve their hiring outcomes. Or to put it another way, what’s contributing to poor hiring and costly mistakes?
Here are some points to consider:
1) Don’t overengineer the process
The fear of getting it wrong is often reflected in the hiring process – organisations include too many steps in their senior selection process. This might consist of five or six separate stages and within each you might have two or three different people involved either in one-on-one or panel interviews. You might get to a point where the candidate is being interviewed by 10 people!
Companies are so concerned with making the wrong decision that they prolong and draw out their processes, often repeating the same interviews and questions but with different stakeholders.
What impression does this give? Not a great one. The fear of not wanting to hire the wrong person has a negative impact on candidates who feel that they constantly need to prove themselves, which makes them question whether the company is actually interested in them.
Top takeaway: Excessive steps results in a poor candidate experience, which increases drop-off rates
2) Set clear parameters at the outset
You need to be very clear as to the kind of leader you are looking to appoint, the key outputs they are expected to drive and what being successful in the role entails.
This information must then be passed on to the talent acquisition (TA) teams or headhunters doing the sourcing and having those initial conversations. If they’re unclear, they will likely present you with a homogenous group of candidates who have worked in a similar industry in similar roles. You want them to cast the net wide to ideally provide you with a diverse shortlist.
Also, unconscious biases can creep into the process. What happens it that you end up hiring a person who shares common interests with you or the incumbent. The language you use in job adverts or role profiles could deter women or other under-represented groups from applying.
And involving multiple people in the selection process with no clear common view won’t get consistent results. Why? Because you’ll have diverging views. All parties must understand what it is that’s required so that they can look for the same things.
Top takeaway: Create clarity around the skills, knowledge and experience you want
3) Understand your role profile
Job specifications can be so detailed with lists of desirable and essential skills running into several pages. And no one can fulfil every requirement or do it all anyway!
You need to establish your top five or six outputs, the critical things that you’re looking the individual to deliver against. Be less prescriptive in terms of how you want them to do it, and the knowledge, skills and experience they need to hit those KPIs. Build these into the interview process.
All parties involved should get together and preferably input into what goes into the role. That conversation should take place at the start of the process. And whatever tests you put the candidate through, always ask yourself whether they elicit the behaviours and competencies that will make that person successful in the role.
Top takeaway: Are the skills required fundamental to the person’s ability to do the role?
4) Establish timelines
You need to be efficient when planning the various stages and what each is likely to cover. The trap that many companies fall into is that they design processes from their own perspective – they don’t think about the candidate’s availability for example. It’s a sure-fire way of dragging out the process.
If you’re going to put candidates through assessments, then make sure you tell them in advance so they know what’s coming! Candidates need to know who they’re meeting and when. Otherwise you risk losing potentially good people because of poor communication.
Uncertainty around the selection process is frustrating to put it mildly. It’s also not professional and neither is it respectful. Even if you have an amazing brand that everyone wants to work for, it doesn’t take much for reputations to be tarnished. And what does a shoddy recruitment process say about your culture?
Top takeaway: Be upfront with candidates so they too can manage their time!
5) Have a standard interview process
What you want to unearth at interview is the candidate’s ability to run your department or organisation. What’s the point in having three or four interviews asking the same things? Would you not be better off reducing the number and having a panel interview where you divide up the questions?
Unstructured interviews are fraught with bias. Each interview is different and each interviewer will evaluate a candidate in a different way, identifying for people like them. This has far-reaching implications on diversity too.
The problem is that many managers are not trained on the nuances of structured behavioural competency based interviews. Yes, there are standard questions that we’re all aware of (and you can Google set answers to your heart’s content) but the real value lies in probing and understanding the challenges the person had to overcome to achieve desired goals.
Top takeaway: To be done well, competency interviews require skill, time and preparation
6) Order! Think about first, second round interviewers…
The most important person in the process aside from the candidate is the one that will have the most influence and impact on the new hire. Yes folks, the hiring manager. As obvious as this may seem, why do many companies arrange multiple interviews with HR, TAs or other people first?
I would argue that the first round interview should always be with the hiring manager. That might be the CEO – yes, even CEOs need to find time to interview, especially for what could be one of the biggest decisions they make for their company. The second interview could then be with a member of the board or the CHRO, which could then be a more in-depth conversation to assess suitability.
You can then move on to the assessment stage where an external expert would get under the skin of what that person is able to do and predict how they will likely perform in the role. Armed with this feedback, the final interview should then be with the hiring manager.
Top takeaway: The first interview should preferably be with the hiring manager
7) Be forensic with references (but check them yourself)
My advice here would be not to rely on the search firm or recruiter to take references for you, which is what a lot of organisations do. Make sure you plan ahead and have a structure to the process before contacting the professional referees listed by the candidate.
With the insights from interviews and assessments, you can now use this information to find out about the person’s experience of working with the individual in a previous role. This is a great way to validate what you already know or think.
While interviews and assessments allow you to evaluate people through inference from psychometrics and what the candidate has told you, references go that step further as you’re talking to people who experienced and witnessed the behaviours first hand.
Top takeaway: References allow you to sense check what you already know
8) Have you thought about onboarding?
This vital part of the process you’ve guessed it also needs to be structured. You want to get your new employee set up quickly so they are good to go from day one. This will include scheduling meetings with their team, peers and other stakeholders, sorting IT, desk, phone etc. lace, so that they can start to acclimatise to a new context and culture. It also makes them feel part of your organisation.
You would want to involve the external assessment company to relay back findings from the tests, highlighting areas to be mindful of (these providers would also provide feedback to unsuccessful candidates), which of course forms part of the individual’s ongoing development.
If you don’t offer this support and don’t facilitate the introductions and the rapport building, you lose time and potentially engagement right at the outset and even run the risk of that person leaving. And this would have been totally avoidable.
Top takeaway: Onboarding is a vital part of the hiring and selection process To be avoided at all costs…
As we know, the cost to companies of a person leaving comprises several different strands such as the salary you’ve paid person while in role as well as additional employment and training costs. You’ve then got the cost of repeating the recruitment process, the search firm’s fee, and the hiring manager’s time.
But there’s also the people factor to consider and the negative impact on teams and performance due to the hire not working out. Morale takes a dip and results suffer. In economics parlance, you have an opportunity cost of not having the right person in the role and the revenue foregone because you didn’t have a great leader. For some senior roles, some argue that this equates to as much as 15 times salary!
To avoid this scenario, you need to strike the right balance between efficiency, robustness and rigour among all the key participants, namely the hiring manager, candidate and external search firm. And as I’ve mentioned clarity is absolutely critical.
Follow the points above and you can ensure that your record of failed appointments won’t be anywhere near as bad as some of the numbers we’re seeing. And you’ll save yourself a lot of time, stress and money!
Summary of top takeaways
- Be clear as to what you’re looking for
- Establish timelines for interviews etc.
- Streamline the process – add fewer steps
- Don’t chase perfection: five-legged sheep don’t exist!
- Hiring is a two-way process – get your messaging right
- Be transparent and upfront with candidates
- Schedule an interview with the hiring manager first
- Train your managers on competency based interviews
- Link everything to the person’s ability to do the job
- Validate assessment insights with referees
- Provide a thorough onboarding programme
- Share feedback as part of ongoing development
If you want to discuss any of the above or learn more about how Target Leadership Consulting can help with leadership assessments, psychometric tests and interview skills training, email paul.surridge@targetleadership.co.uk or call 07587 003 990.