In this series, professionals share their hiring secrets. Read the stories here, then write your own (use #HowIHire somewhere in the body of your post).
If there is one thing that I ought to be really great at, it’s
hiring. I’ve spent the last 20 years working in leadership roles at the
same company — one that is more dependent than most on top talent. Given
my tenure,
I’ve got an unusually deep level of insight into my company’s services
and culture; I’ve had lots of practice at bringing people into the
business; and my client base
includes about 3,000 heads of HR at the world’s leading companies, so I
benefit hugely from proximity to the best in the business.
Now add to that the fact that a good chunk of our revenue comes from helping the world’s largest companies acquire and develop
talent of their own, and one would argue I ought to be the Serena
Williams of making great hiring decisions — long track record of
achievement, good in all situations, and seemingly getting better every
day.
I ought to be, but I’m not. Left to my own devices, I make
a litany of mistakes. Just ask our recruiters, who usually talk me out
of my worst ideas, but not all. (As an example, I once hired a sales
executive whose particular skill was leveraging great marketing lead
flow to close business. I neglected to inform her that, at the time, we
did not actually have lead flow, or — for that matter — a marketing
department.)
It turns out that I’ve got a lot of company. Hiring someone is the
most common task across all executive roles and yet even the most
successful executives (when left to their own devices) fail routinely.
In fact, our data suggests that up to 50% of executive hires fail, and of those who make it, only 10-20% are considered high performers.
Obviously, this matters. More than half of long-term corporate
revenue stalls are as a result of talent gaps, and about 1 in 10 were
due specifically to gaps in the leadership bench. To give you a sense of
the financial impact, organizations with the strongest leaders have
nearly double the revenue growth compared to those with weaker ones. Who wants to leave that kind of money on the table?
So if it matters so much, why are so many hiring managers (including yours truly) bad at it?
- We refuse to admit we need help. No matter how
much we try to avoid it, we bring with us a set of biases about people,
roles and cultures that often lead us astray. Either because our
perceptions of candidates are biased or because our perceptions of the
true demands of the role and context are.
As an example, I carry around a warped notion about the size of our company. When I joined, CEB was about one-thirtieth the size of the company today, and I still have an image in my head that — when we really need to think through an issue — we can just gather everyone in the Map Room and talk it out. While it sounds charming, it can cause me to wrongly prioritize certain elements, and even misrepresent certain attributes of a job to candidates. - We overestimate our sample size. Over my decade as a CEO, I’ve hired or elevated roughly 40 people to my leadership team – either as a direct report or in other key roles. So about four a year. Even assuming that I seriously evaluated five or six candidates for each role, I’m evaluating roughly 20 people a year. To put that in context, our various hiring analytics platforms will evaluate nearly 40 million people this year. By leveraging broader analysis of people, jobs, and outcomes, I can hugely improve my odds of making great decisions. No CEO worth his salt would evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy using only customers he or she had talked to, but we seem to do this routinely with hiring strategies.
- We can be out of touch with labor market realities. Labor markets are incredibly dynamic and often hiring managers can miss the mark on a position description or comp package. Worse, they may incorrectly prioritize attributes, appealing to the wrong type of talent. Pretty simply: if you are aiming at the wrong target, you’re guaranteed to make a bad hire.
So if I (and frankly every other hiring manager) can’t be left to
our own devices to hire, what should we do? Don’t get left to your own
devices.
Instead, take advantage of the huge advances in behavioral
economics and psychology, which when coupled with advanced outcomes data
management and analytics, make it possible for hiring managers and
their partners in Recruiting and L&D to:
- more precisely understand labor markets and pools
- correlate key behaviors with outcomes data
- better document the key contextual factors of a role, and prioritize attributes accordingly
- measure skills, cognitive ability and behaviors
- target and remedy skill or competency gaps
- measure the impact of different training platforms
- better tap and access nontraditional profiles for roles
Collectively, these devices are a lot better than my own. Properly
deployed they won’t make me a perfect hiring manager, but they will
improve my odds. And as we all learned from Moneyball, in a competitive marketplace, we aren’t seeking perfection, but merely to generate a few more wins each season.
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