A far more practical view of hiring good employees
Sometimes a slight change in perspective can produce an astonishing clarity of vision…even with age-old problems. Successful businesses depend upon hiring successful employees. The effort to find such employees has spawned countless interviewing techniques, each requiring varying expenditures of time, energy and money. Human resource managers are sometimes trained to listen for the right answers to carefully crafted interview questions. Some systems recommend hours of intensive interviews, involving multiple executives. Each of these methods has demonstrated some positive results, but none have proven to be as effective as the users wished.
Then came the assessments. Simple DISC-type products, while adequate enough for fun, team building programs, lacked the depth and range of data to do much more than sort out the obvious personality types. Too often, this allowed poor performers to be hired at the same time as potentially good performers were eliminated. Other early psychological concepts found their way into the business world, although like DISC, they were mismatched for the task at hand. In the 80’s and 90’s, business and psychology combined to develop newer instruments. The Test your best & hire more like them method was born. Test the best performers in any job and identify the common traits. Then test candidates for that job and determine how closely the candidates matched the traits of the top performers. It made sense on the surface, and it was clearly more effective than just interviewing. Yet poor performers still seemed to sneak into companies despite being strong matches to the profile or benchmark of the proven performers. The data from these instruments was solid. It was the application that was flawed. The key data was mixed with so many other factors that the true story was often unseen behind a high percentage match to the model. The data was good, however. What was needed was a different way of looking at the data.
My family goes to Maine every summer, spending two weeks on a magnificent lake with fishing, boating and a myriad of non-work activities. Over the years, we have rented various houses to meet our changing needs. The visiting French student meant a house with three bedrooms instead of two. The boat we bought required a house with a boat dock. These requirements enabled the real estate broker to eliminate houses that would not meet our needs, although they might be wonderful lake houses in every other respect. That was when I realized a different perspective. We do not rent the house; we rent the features of the house. Some features are more important than others, such as the boat dock or the right number of bedrooms. A ping pong table would be a nice feature, but it would not be essential. More importantly, it would not compensate for the lack of the boat dock or a missing bedroom.
There is an interesting parallel between renting a lake house and hiring a new employee. When an employee is hired, in effect, the company is renting their behaviors. For example, upscale hotels often offer a breakfast buffet, with an omelet station, where a chef will prepare whatever type of omelet you prefer. What behaviors are the hotel renting from that chef?
- A smiling greeting to every guest
- Consistent omelet making
- Reacting positively to unplanned requests
- Handling a routine job day after day
- Standing and not sitting down between omelets
Now, if the candidate for that job could not deliver all of these behaviors, would the hotel accept:
A. An impersonal but consistent omelet maker?
B. A smiling chef who sometimes makes good omelets and sometimes makes bad ones, but who enjoys the routine of the job?
C. A consistently good omelet maker who hates to be interrupted by guests and shows it?
My guess is that if the hotel would say NO, just as we say no to the beautiful lake house without a boat dock. While the candidate may have many wonderful traits and abilities, they are lacking one of the critical traits or abilities upon which success in that job depends. Interviewing is not able to unbundle the candidate’s skills, experience, values, and likely behaviors from the whole person. Profiling assessments unintentionally mask key missing traits or abilities by factoring everything into one percentage match number to a model that was also created by a mix of factors. Even the addition of various weighting procedures cannot bring the necessary level of clarity to the hiring decision. This does not mean that interviewing and the use of profiling assessments is not beneficial. It does suggest that an extraordinarily more effective method is possible.
A more effective approach to understanding job performance is based upon the concept of renting behaviors. Each position is described by a set of specific job behaviors. Each job behavior is dependent upon a single trait or ability. An individual lacking a particular trait or ability would be unable to perform the job behaviors that are dependent upon that factor. Job behaviors are ranked as being Critical, Important or Other.
- A Critical job behavior is one without which successful performance is not possible. Identifying these Critical factors enables companies to screen out candidates lacking them earlier in the recruiting process, saving time, energy and money.
- Important job behaviors can impact job performance, but they are not absolutely necessary.
- Other job behaviors are “nice to have.”
Examples:
Persuasive Sales Position
- Closing sales is a Critical job behavior. Success is not possible without being able to close sales opportunities.
- Making Sales Presentations is an Important job behavior. Anyone can make a sales presentation, but their hard-wired traits and abilities determine the level of energy and enthusiasm that is communicated to the prospect. A high level may help to sell more, but an adequate presentation will often sell something.
- Handling Paperwork is an Other job behavior. It has a minimal impact on sales compared to those job behaviors that are Important or Critical.
Financial Position
- Handling Detailed Information is a Critical job behavior. An individual lacking the strength for that job behavior will accrue mistakes as they work with the detailed information that is a part of financial positions.
- Learning Speed is an Important job behavior. It can actually have either a positive or negative impact on job performance, depending upon the nature of the financial position, but it is unlikely to be Critical for accomplishing the job.
- Being Warm and Friendly is a good job behavior to have, and coworkers will certainly appreciate it. However it is clearly in the Other category, having little actual impact on the performance of the job.
This method of describing jobs demands a focus that is often missing from traditional job descriptions, which can become virtual wish lists, including anything that might possibly be useful for a particular position. It also has the additional benefit of recognizing the strengths and abilities of each individual in a way that connects directly with the needs of the company. With better definition of a person’s strengths, it is possible to design jobs more effectively; to train employees more effectively; and to plan more effective career paths.