One of my all-time favorite books is Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I started developing the two-question performance-based interviewing system in the early ‘90s to assess these seven traits. I felt that if candidates possessed them there was a high probability the person would be a strong performer and someone with high potential. These seven habits were later merged into our 10-Factor Candidate Assessment Scorecard.

During the process of developing Performance-based Hiring we were often asked how the interviewing component compared to behavioral interviewing, which at the time was considered the standard for interviewing. As a means to demonstrate the comparison I'll use Covey's seven habits as the benchmark.

Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder – Lie Zi

I was in Moscow the day the invasion of Georgia began. Our Russian guides, who up to that date were pro-American, saw the same conflict as a liberation clearly provoked by Georgia. Some of the more vocal on our tour, as well as the Russian guides, saw Barak Obama as the new American ideal, with John McCain being quite troublesome. Others saw Obama as a neophyte, ill-equipped to go belly-to-belly with Putin the Terrible. A former CBS Moscow bureau chief on the tour suggested diplomacy was called for, while the hawkish Americans in the group wanted a strong U.S. counter-attack. It seemed most Russians wanted an escalation of the conflict to demonstrate that they were no longer going to be pushed around by the West. I could go on, but by now you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with recruiting.

If you frequently find top people who are either over-qualified, uninterested, or tell you they've just accepted another job or are close to it, job-hunting typecasting can increase the number of top performers you see.

I've observed over the years that top people enter the job market in predictable ways depending on how satisfied they are with their current jobs. Here's a short video highlighting the job-hunting psychology of the top performer. Obviously, the more anxious they are about the quality of their current jobs, the more aggressive they'll be in looking for something else. Ten classic job-hunting styles stand out, from those who are simply open to talk about possible opportunities to those who are ready to accept a reasonable offer in a few days. From a consumer marketing perspective these would be called customer personas. Knowing the type of person you're seeking can help you develop a targeted sourcing strategy, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. Segmenting your candidate pool this way will become more and more necessary in order to increase the quantity and quality of top performers you're seeing.

Consumer marketing ideas have overtaken traditional sourcing approaches faster than anyone could have imagined. Job boards are dead; talent hubs are alive. Skills-based postings will soon follow the dodo bird into extinction, and will be replaced with ads focused on the future, not the past. They will be crafted with the latest search engine marketing concepts in mind. If you want your fair share of tomorrow's talent, you'd better start changing how you source them today.

Here's what I see as the fundamental ground rules for sourcing top talent, circa 2010. Implementing them now will give you a reasonable head start.

No amount of art or magic will help you consistently hire top people. A bit of science, however, might just do the trick. By this I mean a series of steps that if everyone in your company follows will allow you to hire more top people on a consistent and repeatable basis.

Over the past 30+ years I've been involved in thousands of searches, worked with hundreds of different hiring managers, trained 3,000 to 4,000 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools I've seen and used. Collectively, they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it's the details and execution that will ultimately determine success.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

- Bob Dylan

As most of you would agree, how companies market and advertise jobs to top people is changing at an accelerating pace; in most cases, more rapidly than companies can respond. Simply put, the winners in the ongoing war for talent will be those who can establish nimble and targeted programs designed to both anticipate and subsequently lead these changes.

Understanding where sourcing has come from and where it's going can help you get the needed jump-start as you begin developing your sourcing strategies for the recovery just about to start.

In the Olden Days of Sourcing – considered anything before 1995, or pre-Internet – print media and the telephone were the primary sourcing tools of choice. This was the era of the hidden job market, classified ads, company loyalty, and where networking was largely Rolodex-based. Big display ads dominated the Sunday Times and Thursday's Wall Street Journal. Job changes were fewer, but each decision meant more.

For most of us, cooperating with people, discussing ideas, collaborating on projects, influencing others, and working on cross-functional teams typically represents 50-75% of most workdays. Team skills are critical and those that do it well are rewarded in terms of influence, support, promotions, and bigger reviews. Those without it are avoided, shunned, or assigned to the proverbial closet. Working with people without decent team skills literally sucks the energy out of the rest of team, bringing everyone down.

As a recruiter, and as part of a rather callous objective of maximizing income in the shortest period of time, it became quickly apparent that being a better interviewer than my clients was a critical skill. The quest to achieve this was how the two-question Performance-based Interview and 10-Factor Candidate Assessment scorecard were born.

Sometimes the best person for a job is not the best interviewer. Most often the best interviewer is not the most talented among a group of three or four candidates. Frequently the best person for a job, who is a good interviewer, is underwhelmed by the opportunity available and comes across as quiet or uninterested. On top of these problems, add hiring manager bias, lack of understanding of real job needs, temporary nervousness on the part of good candidates, and lack of preparation on the part of the interviewing team members. Collectively, it's fairly obvious why current interviewing and assessment techniques are poor predictors of on-the-job success. All this suggests that the traditional unstructured interview as well as the structured behavioral interview are inadequate in overcoming these hiring process problems.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss this topic as a panelist on a Human Capital Institute web program with Cathy Lee Gibson, the former Director of the Human Resources Program at Cornell's Industrial and Labor Relations School. The focus was on how to better "manage" hiring managers. This is a point of significant interest to any of the recruiters among us who have lost a good candidate because one of our clients made an incorrect assessment. It should also be a point of major interest to any hiring manager who is at odds with their recruiting or HR group regarding how to best measure candidate quality.

During the webcast I described the evidenced-based assessment approach we've developed as part of Performance-based Hiring^sm to specifically address this all-too-common problem. Our solution was to change the method used by the interviewing team to decide whether to hire someone or not. Rather than add up a bunch of superficial or biased yes/no votes, the idea was to delay the assessment until all of the interviewers could present their findings. Once this is completed, the group collectively makes the hiring decision based on all of the evidence presented. Cathy summarized this whole point succinctly by saying it was akin to being "a juror, not a judge," during the interview.

Early in my search career I realized that many of my clients weren’t very good at evaluating candidates. This made me have to find more candidates than necessary to complete most searches. To minimize this wasted effort, I created the one-question Performance-based Hiring^SM interview, primarily to better defend my candidates from weak interviewers. Once I became proficient with the technique, I started training my clients how to use it. This helped prevent good candidates from being excluded due to bad interviewing, and required fewer candidates to be seen on each assignment. Here’s how the process works: