Friday, March 25th, 2011
Why your next potential hire will be a failure….
The art of recruitment, if you’re so inclined to call it an art, has taught me some very valuable lessons over the 10+ years that I’ve been involved within the industry. Having recruited more than 600 IT professionals and having dealt with more than 100 businesses and organizations throughout Australia, I would like to believe that I’ve clocked up more than a little knowledge about what does and does not assist in achieving the “best possible hire”.
You see, like a car, recruitment comes in many models and colors. To clarify my analogy, just like a car, the one’s that looks the best, does not necessarily drive or handle the best! A slick recruitment model which purports to offer state of the art processes including behavioral interviewing as well as psychometric, medical and personality profiling and testing are all packaged up as the highest performing models on the market. Hence as a client or customer, it’s easy to buy into the glitzy showrooms jam packed with dynamic sales people who sell their products as the sure fire way to get the best solution. For some reason the “wow factor” of a sleek and slick showroom and nicely decorated venti latte, half decaf with skim milk seems to obfuscate the actual intention, which is to purchase a great motor vehicle that performs at the top of the market.
Sadly, just like my Porsche Boxter S, when you rip away the glitz and glamour and forget about the bells and whistles of an otherwise overrated “sales-cycle”, you might in fact be buying yourself, as is the case with my Boxter S, an overpriced and underperforming lemon! (Dear Porsche – when you said, “You’ll love this car I guarantee it, did you really mean it? If so, can I please have my money back!!!!!).
According to Sir Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power” and this is absolutely the case when we consider how to arrive at the best possible outcome from a recruitment perspective. Information and every bit of it can assist in helping managers to make the right hiring decisions. No doubt that when looking at the recruitment model of 90% of companies in the western world, there is a real attempt to obtain as much knowledge as possible. However, my point is, the information collected during the accepted model of recruitment is actually the wrong information! From my experience, the things that are being assessed have absolutely NO correlation with a candidate’s capacity to perform well in their engagement.
Let me explain…..
Recently I had the pleasure of introducing an Analyst Programmer with a long term client here in Melbourne. The client I work with knows me very well and knows that any candidate we represent will be a good hire. However, after the interview, the client called me and explained that a) The candidate interviewed very poorly, b) he failed the behavioral questions, c) he failed the technical questions and d) Seemed very placid and unexcited about the opportunity. Fortunately for me and the candidate, due to Milestone’s long standing relationship of delivery with the client, and the clients belief in our capabilities within the IT recruitment space, he reluctantly agreed to engage the candidate anyway! Four months later the very same client called me asking for me to locate another two developers exactly like the candidate he initially didn’t want to engage! He stated, unsurprisingly to me, that this candidate was the best programmer that they had ever hired and was a gunn AP! Yet, had there been no involvement in the recruitment process from my end and had the client relied on the standard recruitment model used by most companies, this would not have occurred and the candidate would have been overlooked as a potential hire. Why ? Simple, as hirers we are focusing on all the wrong things.
To elaborate, let’s focus on the current model of recruitment. The entire idea is around assessing ones ability to “impress” in an interview. Within this context, a potential employee is forced to communicate well, sell themselves in the interview and leave the client “convinced” that they can do the job that he or she will be appointed to perform. However, what many people do not understand is that being able to perform well in an interview itself is a skill-set which in many instances has nothing to do with actual ability of that candidate to do their job well! Ironically, the ability to sell yourself in an interview is something that people will, over time, get better at doing. The more interviews a candidate attends, the better they will get at the whole interviewing process. Ironically, there is one specific kind of candidate that goes to a lot of interviews, and frankly, these are probably not the kind of candidates that you would want to hire! On the other hand, the skills associated with programming for example require an entirely different set of skills to those that would allow a candidate to come over well in an interview. As such someone who is a great programmer, may in fact, be a terrible interviewer. So the question remains, how can we as employers arrive at an outcome that will help ensure a great hire?
One thing I’ve always found fascinating about Orthodox Jewish circles is that dating is limited to the search for a marriage partner whereby both sides (usually involving the parents, close relatives or friends of the persons) make inquiries about the prospective partner, e.g. on his/her character, intelligence, academic background, financial status, family and health status, appearance and level of religious observance. The idea is that such information is key to finding a compatible life-long partner. Whilst an employment engagement is not strictly the same as marriage, it does have certain aspects that are very similar and choosing compatible partners remain key to the role of a good recruiter. Ironically, unlike the traditional western practice of choosing your own life-long partner, the traditional orthodox model has a much greater success rate and focuses extensively on obtaining as much background information as possible. Whilst the various reasons that such a high level of success occur remains contentious, the truth is that statistically the orthodox model does have a far greater likelihood of working out in the long term because they are intent on researching background information in order to make the best decisions and life choices.
Imagine for a moment the likelihood of success after selecting your marriage partner based on a one hour dinner date. What then would be the likelihood that the marriage would be a successful? Of course, proponents of behavioral modeling and psychometric tests like to argue that such tools in conjunction with 1 or 2 ‘dinner dates’ is all that is required to identify an appropriate or suitably qualified employee! Ironically, many of these individuals that promote such tests also advise that these tests remain only an ‘indication’ of the candidates overall personality type and need to be taken within the correct context. So really, the idea of these tests are a little like a tarot reading! They involve a lot of guess work and then hope for the best!
So what then is the key to selecting an excellent staff member for an organization? In my experience, I’ve seen many employers hold incredibly long drawn out interview processes with a any particular candidate which includes three to four separate interviews, each with different managers within the organization, then psychometric tests, technical tests, medical tests only to arrive at a bad hire. Why? The answer is actually far less complex than most people realize!
You may have heard the old commonly held belief that a leopard never changes its spots! Of course, this tears away at the very fabric of humans in that it seems to contradict with the notion that we are all the masters of our own destiny and have the ultimate say in who we are and how we act. However, experience has taught me that history repeats itself, and a poor performing candidate will usually always be a poor performing candidate and a high performing candidate, will usually always be a high performing candidate.
To elaborate, there have been over the course of my recruitment experience some candidates who, after having conducted extensive background checking allowed us to unearth various concerns and issues. There was one such candidate who I stumbled upon early in on my career was in his early twenties and had jumped from one job to another. In fact, he had never held down a job for more than 4 months at a time. After raising this issue with him he assured me that he had changed and was now looking for a long term career. Well, with no surprises, 3 months later I was contacted by the client who informed me that the candidate had just resigned from his position. This example is one of many whereby the previous actions of a candidate were repeated over and over again. Another example is of a candidate who was generally disliked by his manager in his current job and as such was looking for another opportunity. Upon further checking I discovered that the same held true in his last two previous roles as well. He assured me that there were valid reasons for each of the previous engagements failing and none of them were his fault! After having him convince me that this was actually the case I decided to represent him to my client, only to discover 6 months later that the candidate had serious interpersonal problems and had been walked off site. The lesson here? Each and every candidate had a history of failure prior to their engagement and repeated his/her behavior when I placed them with their new employer. I can happily say that I have learnt my lessons in respect to the whole notion of ‘a leopard never changing its spots’!
However, after more than 10+ years of recruitment experience, one thing that rings true all the time is that every top performer has always performed at the highest level of performance in previous engagements. They are held in the highest regard by their peers, and well revered by their previous managers and continue to repeat this throughout their employment careers! The lesson here is – vigorous background checking of a candidate is far more important than how they actually perform in an interview. After all, people lie in interviews but history cannot be rewritten (unless you’ve just won a war!) By background checking I am not referring to ‘official reference checks’, but rather, conducting intense and unofficial checks to validate a potential candidates performance and capability. How is this done? Well, we’re not one to kiss and tell, but in short, this is why Milestone continues to deliver the best “outcomes” for all our clients. We’re focused on the outcome and not the “sale”. By focusing on what matters we help our clients obtain the best possible hire, and unlike many of our competitors and the glitzy slick sales consultants that convinced me to by a Porsche Boxster S, our model is geared around delivering the best results……Unlike my Boxter, not lemons.
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Tags: bells and whistles, best practice, best recruitment model, candidate, client, failure, glitz and glamour, how to get the best staff, interview, it, Melbourne, partner, porsche boxter s, recruitment, sir francis bacon, what to look for in recruitment, why recruiters fail
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