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Performance-Based Hiring^sm - Case Studies

By Jason Weseman, May 24, 2006

Let me begin by introducing a scenario that will include a question that many of you are quite familiar with, as well as an answer that will be very foreign to most of you. One of the people that I am featuring in this week's article completed a survey of all of her hiring managers about a year after implementing Performance-based Hiring. One of the survey questions she asked was, "What do you do when someone doesn't fit?" That question obviously isn't earth-shattering; in fact, I bet that many of you in recruiting and HR either ask or are asked that question on a regular basis. The answer that she received most often, however, will be reason enough for you to read on.

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This week, we are going to take a look at two companies that are NOT wasting millions of dollars and thousands of hours by using antiquated hiring methods that prevented them from consistently hiring top people in a timely and cost effective manner. What do they have in common? They have implemented Performance-based Hiring as their complete sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, assessing and hiring solution. As we wrap it up, we'll show you a company that wants to start enjoying these savings as well, then we'll give you the opportunity to receive a free review of your recruiting processes as a parting gift. Now let's get to the good stuff, including that answer that I promised you earlier.

HealthEast Care Systems

Trudy Knoepke-Campbell is the Director of Workforce Planning for HealthEast Care Systems in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has been a champion of Performance-based Hiring within her organization for many years because she has seen firsthand how their implementation has dramatically decreased turnover in two of their most difficult roles to fill and retain, Registered Nurses and Nursing Assistants.

In 2004, their turnover was 21.05% for Nursing Assistants and 8.52% for Registered Nurses. After the first year of implementation, these dropped to 18.34% and 7.48% respectively. Pretty good for the first year, but it gets better. The projected numbers for 2006 are 15.98% for the NAs, 6.43% for the RNs. Those numbers equate to trained people whose expertise they didn't have to replace, to new people that they didn't have to spend time and money on training and to money they didn't have to spend on temps and overtime because the positions weren't filled. All because they hired the right people the first time using Performance-based Hiring.

If those numbers don't jump out at you, how does an extra $21 million sound? That is how much HealthEast saved since 2004 due to the decline in vacancy rates of those positions. They didn't have to pay the high cost of temps or overtime because there were people in those jobs. The use of Performance-based Hiring allowed them to find and attract better people, hire better people and keep better people.

Oh yeah, the answer to the survey question. When Trudy asked, "What do you do when someone doesn't fit?", the answer she received from hiring managers across the board was, "I don't remember, it's been awhile. I don't know the last time somebody didn't fit." Now I don't know about you, but that sounds like a memory problem we'd all love to have.

YMCA of the USA

Dave Long of the YMCA of the USA faced a unique challenge. The National YMCA is responsible for finding, interviewing, assessing and hiring the CEOs of local YMCAs, but they do not own or control those YMCAs. To accomplish this task, they use a hiring committee made up of volunteers from the community for which they are hiring. In the past, we've discussed how random the interviewing and assessing processes can be within one company. Now imagine a group of 5 - 9 individuals, all from different companies, all using their own interviewing and assessing styles, trying to come up with an accurate candidate assessment for their hometown YMCA's most important position.

To make the situation even tougher, it had become clear that many of the people coming into the CEO role had little idea of what the job entailed and the commitment that went along with the role. There was no common document that the people doing the search, the interviewers and most importantly the candidates all could look at and say, "This is the job." Something had to change.

To address these issues, Dave Long brought in Lou and Bryan to consult during one of their CEO selections over six years ago. A Performance Profile was created and the core team of the YMCA of the USA was trained in the 2-Question Interview. According to Dave, "We saw immediate increases in objectivity during the interviewing and assessing phases. But the biggest change is the use of the Performance Profiles to drive the entire process. We now have a better way to design our sourcing processes and focus better on who we go after. The Performance-based Hiring process has vastly improved the selection committees' accuracy and organization." Sound like something that could help you with your challenges?

Baptist Health Centers

Baptist Health Centers out of Birmingham, Alabama is our newest client. Tracy Hill, Director of HR, and her team completed an evaluation of their current recruiting and interviewing processes, and decided that they needed to make some changes. Specifically, they concluded that "(1) our recruiters would benefit from training in the areas of advertising, networking and finding/recruiting applicants to attract top talent to Baptist; and (2) we need to establish a standardized interviewing program that is easy to use, cost effective and time efficient to help us improve on our interviewing and selection skills."

The Adler Group went head-to-head with the big boys on this one. Baptist looked at DDI, Wonderlic and us, and "After considering products provided by the vendors, we agreed that the Adler Group could best meet our current needs." These are clearly smart people! They are sending their recruiters through Recruiter Boot Camp in June and July, are bringing in a Performance-based Hiring training session on June 1st, and to ensure that this is implemented on a system-wide basis, we will conduct a customized train-the-trainer session for 12 of their HR staff, who will in turn train all of their hiring managers. We will be doing a case study on Baptist in a year or so, and I'm confident you'll see the same results as you've read about above. And it will be because Tracy Hill showed the vision and leadership that a company needs to build a reproducible and scalable hiring process.

So let me ask you this: What is holding you back from taking a step towards hiring the best? Is it your budget? If so, I hope you put enough in there to account for the cost of bad hires. Not enough time? If you consider how much time it takes to do a search over, the time commitment might not seem so daunting. Do you enjoy hiring average employees instead of hiring top talent? Whatever is keeping you from making hiring the #1 priority at your company, it's time to take a look at how you do things and decide if today is the day you make it happen. To make it easy on you, we'll give you a free one-hour consultation where we will evaluate your entire recruiting process from start to finish. Simply send an email to info@adlerconcepts.com and we'll set up a time to talk. The companies you've just read about made hiring top talent a company prerogative. Why wouldn't you do the same?