Taming Hiring Managers

From ERENet.com | by Lou Adler | Apr 30, 2010

In an earlier life, and at a relatively young age, I was running a
business group with more than 300 people for a Fortune 500 company.
Primarily out of greed, I became a recruiter, and quickly did far
better than working for a living. Things fell apart when I started
taking on assignments I knew little about. I've summarized these trials
and tribulations in Hire With
Your Head. An alternative title could have been How to
Tame Hiring Managers, but this would have limited the audience.
Regardless, that's what the book is about.

The idea behind it was to get hiring managers to do the right thing,
which conceptually is easy, less so in practice. With this perspective,
here's the short list of how hiring managers mess up the hiring process
and why they need some tough love to get it right:

1. They complain they don't have time to describe real job needs. Of
   course, it takes extra effort to hire a top-notch person, and no effort
   to fill a seat with a sub-par person. So take your choice.


2. They haven't thought through real job needs and instead rely on
   skills-infested job descriptions to screen candidates. Their counter to
   this is that they'll know the person when they see him, so this is okay.
   My counter to their counter is top people want to know what they'll be
   doing before they agree to meet, so you need to think through the job
   ahead of time and tell the recruiter why the job is a step-up, not
   lateral.


3. They knowingly let candidates accept offers without giving the
   candidate the true story about the job, about their management style,
   what the culture is actually like, and how they'll be judged. In my mind
   this is unconscionable. For example, being responsible for developing
   the material selection for an advanced product line is not the same as
   conducting an exhaustive evaluation of different metals 45 days after
   starting, with no budget, when it normally requires six months and a
   fully staffed research lab to do this properly.


4. They exclude good people for superficial reasons based on flawed
   assessment techniques, rather than their inability to consistently
   deliver the results required for on-the-job success. In my mind hiring
   top people should not a game of chance.


5. They hire underperformers for superficial reasons, like strong
   handshakes, strong communications, strong academics, strong first
   impression, affability, etc., rather than their ability to meet the
   results required for on-the-job success.


6. They narrowly focus on the wrong stuff. It takes more than technical
   brilliance, affability, strong communication skills, and a great
   personality to consistently deliver high-quality results. While these
   are often necessary, they're certainly not sufficient. Worse, even if
   they are necessary, you can't assess them properly in 30 minutes.

Now sometimes hiring managers don't have enough time. If not, they're
in a Catch-22 of being forced to make short-term decisions just to get
the spot filled. More often than not, it is lack of good managerial
ability and the use of traditional job descriptions to screen and select
candidates. The problem with this is that the best people, even if they
have the skills, are rarely looking for lateral transfers, so they
never apply. The best people with fewer of the skills listed, or a
different mix of them, who might see the job as a career move, won't
apply since the job spec indicates they're not qualified. Collectively,
this makes no sense if a company wants to hire better people.

With this in mind here are some ideas on how to tame your hiring
managers and in the process see and hire more top performers.

1. Implement a raising the talent bar committee. Don't
   let managers who aren't able to hire people stronger than themselves
   make the decision alone. Either include the manager's boss, or create a
   raising-the-talent-bar team, with one member involved in every hiring
   decision to ensure talent standards are always met.


2. Give managers quality-of-hire objectives. Make
   hiring top people part of the manager's performance objectives and
   review process. Some of the metrics as part of this must include team
   turnover and job satisfaction and performance reviews.


3. Use a performance management process to write job
   descriptions. Have your company require all managers to provide
   new hires their performance objectives on the day they start. Use these
   as the screening and selection criteria, instead of job descriptions.
   Most managers are weak at clarifying expectations, so this logical step
   eliminates this problem in the bud.


4. Create the employee value proposition before starting the
   search. If the person is not looking, and/or has multiple
   offers before starting the search, ask managers why a top person would
   want this job. Generic statements are not acceptable. It must describe
   what the person can learn, will be doing, and could become, if
   successful. To highlight the importance of the position, tie it to the
   company strategy or a major project.


5. Conduct exploratory interviews before the in-person
   interview. Don't let managers talk with the candidate in-person
   first. Ever. More mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of the
   interview than any other time. An exploratory interview over the phone
   starts as a two-way dialogue among equals. It allows candidates to
   evaluate the job from a career-move perspective before deciding to be
   seriously considered a candidate. Adding online video minimizes the
   impact of first impressions, so there's a double-benefit with this type
   of exploratory interview. (We're now launching a beta test combining an
   exploratory interview with video, so email
   me if you'd like to consider participating. We'll be taming hiring
   managers in the process.)


6. Control the first 30 minutes of the in-person interview.
   I worry that managers will become distracted during the critical first
   30 minutes when they meet the candidate in-person. To minimize the
   impact of first-impression-related errors, I ask the candidate to write a
   quick summary of two major accomplishments related to actual job needs.
   I then ask hiring managers to review these right after conducting a
   quick work history review. As part of this, I highlight things in the
   candidate's resume I want them to focus on. This allows me to know what
   goes on behind closed doors without actually being there.


7. Conduct more panel interviews. With hiring managers
   I'm really worried about, I lead the first interview between the
   candidate and the hiring manager. The way I can be sure biases are held
   in check and we both can focus on the candidate's ability to deliver
   consistent results. Interestingly, this is always a second evaluation
   interview for me, and frequently my assessments of the candidates
   changes dramatically - some getting better, some worse. As a result, I
   always suggest hiring managers meet with their final candidates at least
   two separate times alone, and once in a panel interview.


8. Formal debriefing program. Under no circumstances
   add up a bunch of yes/no votes to decide whom to hire. This is akin to a
   popularity contest. Instead, use some time of formal talent scorecard
   system covering a broad range of factors. Assign different interviewers
   different factors and make them share and justify their rankings using
   evidence, not feelings. (Email
   me if you'd like to review the scoring system I describe in Hire
   With Your Head.)

Hiring is too important to leave to chance, yet most companies do
just that by letting unsophisticated hiring managers run wild in a
scarce population of in-demand top performers. A end-to-end companywide
hiring process based on the needs of top people is one way to tame your
hiring managers. Not only will you increase your share of the best
talent available, but you'll also turn your hiring managers into your
best friends.