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How to Tame 500-Pound Gorillas (aka Your Hiring Managers)

Lou Adler, December 2, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

I've been in the recruiting business in some way or another for the past 30 years. Here are the ten most common hiring mistakes I've seen repeated year in and year out by company after company. Most of them are attributed to the inability of hiring managers to properly assess and recruit top performers. The second big problem is the lack of understanding of real job needs on the part of the recruiter and hiring manager alike. What's most surprising is that most companies aren't focusing on addressing the hiring manager facing problems. This is the 500-pound gorilla in the room that HR and recruiters seem to be afraid of, or can't see. First, let's review the problems and see if they line up with your personal experiences before we introduce some taming techniques.

Adler's Infamous List of Top 10 Hiring Mistakes

1. Managers overvalue motivation to get the job, not motivation to do the job. Lack of motivation to do the work required is one of the primary reasons for underperformance, lack of job satisfaction, and turnover. Managers seem to think that extroversion and interview preparedness correlate with on-the-job performance.

» Continue reading "How to Tame 500-Pound Gorillas (aka Your Hiring Managers)"

The Best of Lou Adler's Recruiting Rules

Lou Adler, October 1, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

I’ve discovered a few critical recruiting principles over the past 30 years placing hundreds of top performers in staff, management, and executive positions. For marketing purposes, I call these Lou’s Recruiting Rules. If you learn and implement these twelve techniques from now on, on every search, you’ll call them lifesavers. Here’s my list of rules that will take you to the upper echelon of recruiters anywhere in the world:

» Continue reading "The Best of Lou Adler's Recruiting Rules"

Behavioral vs. Performance-based Interviewing Using Stephen Covey's Seven Habits

Lou Adler, September 17, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Behavioral vs. Performance-based Interviewing Using Stephen Covey's Seven Habits"

Whole Brain Interviewing

Lou Adler, August 20, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Whole Brain Interviewing"

Recognize These 10 Job-hunting Styles to Source More Top Performers

Lou Adler, July 23, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Recognize These 10 Job-hunting Styles to Source More Top Performers"

A New Perspective on Sourcing Top Talent - Eight New Ideas You Need to Consider

Lou Adler, July 8, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "A New Perspective on Sourcing Top Talent - Eight New Ideas You Need to Consider"

10 Steps for Hiring the Best Every Time

Lou Adler, June 25, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "10 Steps for Hiring the Best Every Time"

Why a Nimble Early-adopter Sourcing Strategy Will Yield the Best Candidates

Lou Adler, May 28, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Why a Nimble Early-adopter Sourcing Strategy Will Yield the Best Candidates"

Assessing Team Skills

Lou Adler, May 14, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Assessing Team Skills"

Assessing Leadership Using the Two-Question Interview

Lou Adler, April 30, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Assessing Leadership Using the Two-Question Interview"

Use an Evidence-based Assessment Process to Hire More Top Talent

Lou Adler, April 16, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

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.

» Continue reading "Use an Evidence-based Assessment Process to Hire More Top Talent"

A Dozen or So Different Ways to Ask the One-Question Interview

Lou Adler, April 2, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Interview Training, Newsletter

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:

» Continue reading "A Dozen or So Different Ways to Ask the One-Question Interview"

Sourcing Basics: Stop Throwing Away Good Candidates for Bad Reasons

Lou Adler, March 19, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter, Recruiting, Sourcing

I can't remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives and company leaders didn't complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along we were promised the solution was at hand. But more than 10 years later the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. Perhaps, just perhaps, the solution to better sourcing is not better sourcing.

» Continue reading "Sourcing Basics: Stop Throwing Away Good Candidates for Bad Reasons"

All You Need to Know About Using ZoomInfo to Source Great Candidates

Lou Adler, March 5, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter, Recruiting

ZoomInfo and LinkedIn should be the starting points for any search assignment from experienced staff to CEO. Here's the link to an article on how to use LinkedIn for passive and active candidate sourcing. This week's article will focus on using ZoomInfo to find more great candidates within hours.

ZoomInfo is different than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an opt-in networking site whereas ZoomInfo constantly crawls the Internet seeking out information about companies and people connected to those companies. The company information includes an overview, basic financial performance, and an easy means to find industry information, competitors, and current and past employees. The biographical information is presented in a manner that appears to be resume-like, but in reality is a web page consolidating information from a variety of web sources about the person. This includes information like someone being mentioned in a company press release or having spoken at an industry event.

» Continue reading "All You Need to Know About Using ZoomInfo to Source Great Candidates"

Great Active Candidate Sourcing Ideas

Lou Adler, February 20, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Interview Training, Newsletter

There are some top-notch, fully-employed people who sometimes voluntarily seek out new career opportunities. Since they’re fully-employed and top-notch they don’t expend too much effort in looking for something else. When they get itchy or at the first hint of trouble they’ll first start networking with friends and former associates. Then they’ll contact a recruiter or two. Then they’ll probably Google for jobs (e.g., searching on the job title and a location) and check out some specialty or niche job boards. If nothing develops from these sources, they’ll probably look at the career websites of some highly regarded companies. As a last resort, they’ll check out the major boards.

» Continue reading "Great Active Candidate Sourcing Ideas"

Back to Basics: Understanding Real Job Needs

Lou Adler, February 5, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter

As far as I'm concerned, to be a great recruiter you need to understand real job needs. This is the core competency of the best recruiters. I've never met a top 20% recruiter who didn't understand that the real job was not the job description. A job description just lists skills, qualification, experience requirements, and an overview of responsibilities. The real job is what the person does every day: solving problems, making things happen, influencing others, overcoming challenges, making decisions, and getting results consistently. Those recruiters who use the job description to screen candidates are little more than box checkers, missing out on some great people who have comparable but not identical backgrounds.

» Continue reading "Back to Basics: Understanding Real Job Needs"

10 Great Tips for Using LinkedIn to Find the Best Passive Candidates on the Planet

Lou Adler, January 23, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Networking, Newsletter, Recruiter Training, Recruiting, Sourcing

LinkedIn is a great tool for finding passive candidates who want to be found. This is its little-discussed power. No one would publish their profiles otherwise. While some recruiters are still reluctant to jump on board, others have been making placements since day one. Here are some ideas on how to get started right away to take full advantage of this remarkable networking tool:

» Continue reading "10 Great Tips for Using LinkedIn to Find the Best Passive Candidates on the Planet"

Inside the Mind of the Top Performer - Part I

Lou Adler, January 9, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Interview Training, Negotiating, Networking, Newsletter, Recruiter Training, Recruiting

Top performers are different than average performers both on the job and how they look for a new one. Simply defined, a top performer is a person who consistently exceeds expectations. While you might be able to determine a person's potential to be a top performer in 30 days or so, it takes at least a few months to determine if a person is a top performer. This has to do with motivation, team skills, and the consistent achievement of results. For a variety of reasons, just because a person can do the work, it doesn't mean the person will do the work. Generally speaking, if a top person takes a great job that perfectly fits his or her needs and aspirations, it's unlikely the person would even consider changing jobs in the first year or so. The person is typically on a steep learning curve, making an impact, and highly satisfied with the current work and the potential future opportunities.

» Continue reading "Inside the Mind of the Top Performer - Part I"

The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent

Lou Adler, January 3, 2008

Topics: The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Interviewing, Newsletter, Recruiter Training, Recruiting, Sourcing

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.

» Continue reading "The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent"