Today in board rooms around the world, business leaders are meeting to make plans on how to best weather the current economic crisis.  None of these seasoned leaders, however, truly know the extent of the financial crisis or how long it will last.  Their strategies will include such things as cutting costs, increasing marketing expenditures, selling off assets, buying struggling businesses, and reducing – or in some cases expanding – their work forces.  These decisions will quickly trickle down through their organization creating a whole host of emotional reactions.  In some cases there will be paralysis as leaders struggle to define a clear direction.  If you happen to be in one of the few recession-proof industries like health care, you are probably counting your blessings.  If not, you are wondering what changes you need to make to thrive in the current and coming storm.  

On September 16, 2008 Carly Fiorina made the statement that none of the presidential or vice-presidential candidates had the experience to be the CEO of a major corporation. Somehow she, or the media, emphasized the McCain/Palin half of the foursome. As a result, she's now in some hot water, and has been off-camera for awhile.

In my book, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007), I introduced the idea of using an evidence-based assessment process when evaluating and comparing candidates. This is based on using ten factors that have been shown to accurately predict on-the-job success, and on having the hiring team rank each one in a group meeting on a 1-5 scale after the interviews are completed. Click here for a sample of the form we use for staffing and middle-management positions. I thought it would be interesting to use this 10-Factor Scorecard to evaluate who would make a better President, Obama or McCain.

I wrote a version of this article for ERE in April 2007. It seemed worthy of repeating as a year-end reminder of the critical role that recruiters need to play to ensure that bad decisions don't preclude the best person from getting hired. As you'll find out, the key point of the article is that good candidates, who we spent a great deal of time developing, can often be lost for easily preventable reasons. Setting up some process or check-point can prevent the problem from arising in the first place. If this isn't possible, you need to have some counter-measures ready to employ to mitigate any problems that do arise.

Two months ago I gave a presentation to a room full of HR managers and executives from an engineering company in Omaha, Nebraska. After the presentation I had several conversations about their hiring challenges with individual managers. I ended up giving three people copies of the audio CD, "The One Question Interview," with the challenge that they use this approach on their next big hire and report back on their results. Last Thursday I received the following voice message from John Martin of Cascade Engineering. Here's what he had to say:

Our clients do a lot of dumb thing that cause us recruiters to work too hard. These all seem to fall into big buckets of lost opportunities. Here are the ones that head the list:

Every sport has rules, even pickup games. We even have rules for our kids -- when they can watch TV, play video games, go to bed, etc. Business has rules for just about everything -- important things like capital expenditures, accounting, SEC reporting, and product design and testing; or less important things like how to dress, when to come to work, how to earn vacation, and how to fill in expense reports. What's surprising is there aren't any rules for what's supposedly the most important thing a company needs to do -- hire and retain top talent.

I spent the first half of the '90s working at GE. This was in Jack Welch's heyday: best practices, work-out, and management course from Harvard professors at the training center at Croton-on-Hudson (affectionately referred to as Camp GE.) It was a great experience, but there were a few things about GE's personnel policies that didn't really make sense. One of these was what we called the 10-80-10 policy.

If you want to increase assessment accuracy and save time, conduct more panel interviews. These are much better than an all-day series of one-on-one 45-60-minute interviews. When organized properly, panel interviews help everybody involved learn more about the candidate, even weaker interviewers, if they just observe. Panel interviews also provide a great means for subordinates to get involved in the hiring process. Subordinates should never conduct one-on-one interviews, since they usually are trying to work for someone they like, so they focus on the wrong issues. For another, they're rarely objective, and worse, many of them are weak interviewers. A panel interview overcomes all of these problems. However, I didn't always believe this strongly that panel interviews were that good of an idea.

I learned to become a better interviewer than my clients for only one reason: to prevent good candidates from being excluded for bad reasons. Too many of my clients were assessing candidates improperly, either overvaluing first impressions or using some narrow range of skills to determine competency.