6 Steps for Hiring the Best Every Time

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0800

Over the past 30-plus years, I've been involved in thousands of searches, worked with hundreds of hiring managers, trained 3,000 to 4,000 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are some of the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools that I have seen and used.

Recruiting Darwin Awards – Not Everybody Evolves

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:24:06 -0800

Several years ago my children introduced me to the Darwin Awards. We've had a lot of fun reading some of the stories of the winners (or should I say "losers"?). These awards go to members of the human race who do something so dumb that they end up removing themselves from the gene pool – hence the name. For instance, take the guy who had a fuse in his car blow out on a long trip. He had the bright idea to use a bullet to replace the fuse. The logic was sound – it's made of metal and conducts electricity, doesn't it? Everything was going fine until the bullet heated up and exploded, leaving a big hole in his chest. As we travel the world talking to recruiters and recruiting organizations, I've become aware of some practices that, while not quite as deadly as the above example, do cause one to wonder what people are thinking. In the interest of brevity, I'm going to list just a few of the more egregious examples. I'll stop short of naming names, but know that every example is real.

The Antidote for Bad Interviewers

Wed, 21 May 2008 10:24:03 -0800

You've been working hard to put together a strong slate of candidates for a hard-to-fill position, and through networking and sheer force of personality have assembled three qualified individuals. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but they all have been successful in the past achieving the types of goals and completing the types of tasks that need to be done in this job. Your biggest concern: an unpredictable hiring manager. You're never sure just who is going to hit the mark with this manager because it doesn't follow any pattern that you can see. The manager tends to take immediate likes and dislikes to certain candidates for reasons not based on their backgrounds.

How to Interview Top Performers

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0800

Top people cannot be interviewed the same way as everyone else. Although most recruiters and hiring managers know this, few know how to do it. It's not about selling the job, charming the person, and over-talking. It's about using the interview to get the candidate to sell you.

The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:52:18 -0800

Everybody - from the Board and CEO down to every manager and supervisor - talks about the importance of hiring top talent. But only a rare few have converted the concept into reality. A number of companies have actually succeeded in embedding the idea into their corporate cultures, but in most cases, even these leave the "how" up to the recruiting department and each individual manager. Creating a road map on the "how to" of hiring top talent is the purpose of this book. It's now more important than ever. The worldwide demand for talent has increased as the supply of trained, talented, and available labor has declined. Even a temporary economic slowdown will not alter demographic trends and the long term need for talent.

Defend Your Candidate from the Competition and Superficial Assessments

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:40:01 -0800

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.

12 Great Sourcing Gifts for the Holiday Season

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:10:51 -0800

If you want to generate one great candidate day after day after day, follow my 12 golden rules for sourcing the best. These are this year's stocking stuffers whether you're hiring active or passive candidates.

10 Steps to Increase Interviewing Accuracy into the 90% Range

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

There are two huge problems when hiring is viewed as an end-to-end process. The first one involves sourcing. Most companies are terrible when it comes to advertising, recruiting, and attracting the best. Of course, as a recruiter, how I make my money is by finding top people that others can't. And, in today's Internet age, this is actually quite easy. However, this is a big waste of time if you or your hiring managers don't know how to accurately assess candidate competency.

Hiring and Recruiting Challenges Survey 2008 Preliminary Results

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

We are currently in the midst of our somewhat annual Hiring and Recruiting Challenges 2008 Survey. You should take the survey. Just the questions will get you jazzed. The answers, on the other hand, will make you shudder.

The One Question Interview Challenge

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:06:26 -0800

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:

The Secrets of Top Recruiters Finally Revealed

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:06:19 -0800

I'm very proud of the fact that I've helped hundreds (maybe thousands) of recruiters in the U.S. and around the world increase their monthly placement rate by 50-100% and in some cases much more. As part of our planning for our 2008 "The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent" tour, I've put together my list of "recruiter essentials" we'll cover during the workshop. These are the secrets that every top recruiter follows in order to maximize their placement rate. [FYI: We've incorporated these same points into our final Recruiter Boot Camp Online program for this year (the four-part course starts Nov. 2, 2007) and our San Jose LIVE: Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 event on December 5, 2007.] While there are about 20 key techniques we teach during the workshop, in my opinion the following 10 techniques represent the difference between average and great recruiter performance:

How to Control Your Hiring Manager Clients and Make More Placements

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:51:46 -0800

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:

The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:27:46 -0800

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.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:39:53 -0800

I'm in Australia this week working with a number of different recruiting organizations. In Australia the talent supply is far short of demand, so getting assignments is relatively easy, while finding and closing strong candidates takes exceptional sourcing and recruiting skills. Candidates always have multiple offers and counter-offers are standard. To meet this challenge head on, the recruiting teams I'm working with wanted to figure out how to double their monthly production within six months.

Compared to What?

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:50:52 -0800

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.