John Sullivan wrote a great piece on ERE a few months ago, titled Five Ugly Numbers You Can’t Ignore. John’s article pointed out public research indicating fundamental flaws with the interviewing and assessment process used by most companies.

Here are my quick answers regarding the impact Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI) has on improving quality of hire:

Let me start off this article by saying that I’ve been working with top candidates, top hiring managers, and top recruiters for the past 30 years. As a result of this we’ve developed training tools based on how top candidates make job change decisions, how top managers who can attract and recruit the best talent make their decisions, and how top recruiters out-produce their average peers by factors of 100-200% or more.  Many of these ideas, tools, and techniques are described in my book, Hire With Your Head (Third Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007).

 

Over the past year, I’ve been making the case that the best people – the top-third of your future workforce – won’t look for jobs, nor decide which one to take, based on the primary sourcing processes you now use. Making matters worse, traditional behavioral and competency interviewing are not designed to differentiate between the best and least best of your fully-qualified candidates, even if you can find them. To address these issues, fundamental changes are required to improve the overall talent level of your company as the economy improves.

The financial gain of hiring A-level talent is probably 10-100 times the person’s compensation.

The financial cost of hiring a walking lawsuit is probably 10-100 times their compensation.

Assuming the duds and the stars represent 10% of your total hires, it’s what you do with the other 90% that really matters.

As you know the best people typically don’t look for new opportunities the same way as everyone else does.  For one thing they’re looking for careers, not lateral transfers, and they find them largely through some type of networking effort.  This suggests a massive shift away from generic job boards to new tools for networking including the implementation of an aggressive employee referral program.  It also implies using a different approach for closing that gets candidates to consider the long- and short-term factors in balance before making any decision.

 

At an early age I had the unique opportunity to work at the corporate offices of two different Fortune 500 companies. One was number 37 on the list, and the other one 497. While there, I learned a few timeless strategy lessons. They might be useful as you develop the hiring strategy for your company or organization.

Over the past several months I’ve been advocating a strategic view of the recruiting function based on quality of hire as the metric of choice. In case you missed any of the missives, here’s a quick summary of what some would contend are blasphemous repudiations of the recruiting department of yesteryear.

As you know I suggest using the 10-factor talent scorecard to measure quality of hire on a pre-hire and post-hire basis. This form is available for members of the Recruiter’s Wall network to download. Using it is based the on the concept described in my book, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007), suggesting that in order to maximize assessment accuracy, candidates need to be assessed against real job needs. This way,10-factor talent scorecard rankings pre- and post-hire are directly comparable.