“You’re not the person I hired!” (Uhh… yeah, they are)
A few years ago, I attended a hiring workshop entitled, “You’re not the person I hired.” Hiring and selection is a topic for which I have great passion and energy. There are two reasons for that: The painful mistakes I’ve made as a hiring executive in my past and the same painful mistakes I see hiring executives making today!
Here’s the thing… I have a pretty doggone good track record for spotting, recruiting and hiring talent and I’m pretty proud of that. Still, I’ve had some misses. And while my batting average is pretty good, it’s those misses that have caused so much pain for me, my company, and even the persons I missed on. So about 10-12 years ago, I declared war on mis-hiring and have been on my own personal crusade since. And it’s worked.
Part of that is paying attention to who’s doing and producing great work in the space, continually refining the core of solid processes. (Hence, my attendance at the workshop.)
The title, “You’re not the person I hired” was a playful spin on the very real dynamic many of us have experienced where we later find out that our new team members isn’t performing as we expected based on the hiring process. We think they’ve somehow changed and are not the same person from the interview.
The hard truth is that they are the same person. The problem is not their change but the inadequacy of our own processes. This is the adage that when pointing a finger at someone, there are 3 more pointing back at you. We have to come to terms with the fact that we have made an offer to the wrong person. In my experience, there are 2 main causes:
We haven’t established a clear target. Before we ever get to the interview, we often spend to little thought and energy in identifying what we actually care about in a role. With an ill-defined starting point, is it any wonder why experience a miss?
Our processes are designed to fail. I saw a stat last week that the reliability of traditional processes as carried out is about 0.38. That’s worse than a coin flip! Think about that!
At this point, you may be asking whether there is any good news. Fortunately, there is! Both of the causes above can be addressed. There are ways to identify the important job factors, how to test for them, how to solicit candidates who possess them while discouraging would be applicants who do not, and how to equip those in the company involved in the hiring process with the training and skill-building to carry this out consistently and reliably.
I do not claim to the sole source of how to to this well. Some of what I teach companies today I was taught 20 years ago in my corporate life. Much of it continues to be effectively crowd-sourced from others who have sound tools and experience in this constant state of refinement. Still, I will be bold enough to challenge you to consider just how intentional your company has been in its quest to hire the right people to make your business and those within it flourish.