I taught a hiring/interviewing class this week. And, I had some HR folks in the class — which was a treat. One of them asked how to know if you have an effective hiring process.
Effective hiring processes are like effective product development processes; they depend on the organization and the organization’s goals. But here’s a first cut: The more delays you have in your hiring process, the less effective it is. But that’s not all. Making bad decisions fast is possibly worse than making good decisions slowly. An effective hiring process will help you:
Weed out the unsuitable candidates early
Discover suitable candidates quickly
Make good decisions about interviewing and offers quickly
Check references quickly
Make a reasonable offer fast enough so that the candidate will be happy to say yes.
Whether you’re a hiring manager or an HR person, ask yourself how well you do these things. If you fall down somewhere, see if there’s something you can do to change how things work now.
Candidates should think of it as a chance to learn more about the company, department and position from more than just the Human Resources representative and the Hiring Manager.
Note that she doesn’t say it’s a useful technique to learn about the candidate Sorry Louise, if I put words into your mouth, but I rarely see group interviewing techniques that work, unless people plan in advance, and treat it as if they were pair programming.
In a previous comment, a reader points to a resume that’s written like a cross between a cover letter and a resume. While the resume has a number of useful points, the resume is too quick to tell possible hiring managers what they are doing wrong. That dismissal of what hiring managers sometimes do also dismisses a possible partnership between the hiring manager and the candidate.
A partnership? That seems like an odd comment or expectation. Here’s why: Part of what candidates seek is a cultural fit with the hiring company — in particular, the hiring manager. What the hiring manager looks for is someone who can perform the work the hiring manager perceives is needed, and who can fit into the existing organization.I have to admit, I hadn’t thought about this notion of a partnership before, but when a position really fits the candidate (and vice versa), it does create a partnership. I’ll be thinking about this more… But in the meantime, whether you’re a candidate or a hiring manager, it’s worth your time to think that each person is doing the best job he or she knows how to do, and that each person’s goal is to treat each other with respect.
Ego is a Good Thing. But the interviewers need to remember that interviewing a candidate is not about how great the interviewer is; it’s about understanding what the candidate will be able to do for you at work. Thanks to Rohan Kini’s “Scary interviews”, read Tips to technical interviewing.
I don’t buy tip 4/5, where Vikram says to explain the process and questions, and not to start with the hardest question. “It depends.” If the hardest question is an elimination question, ask away. You don’t have to explain your questions, but you should explain if you’re asking a behavior-description question, so people can understand you’re looking for specific examples.
My column this month on Fast Company/Inc’s Hiring center is Breathing Life into Your Employee Referral Program. You can’t leave comments there, but please do leave comments here.If you have a working and useful employee referral program, please do comment, especially if you take other actions than the ones I suggested. Most of the employee referral programs I see are “too little too late” for employees to take the time and deal with the paperwork. It’s too bad, because your employees can be a fantastic source of hires.
In his post, Scary - For Real!, Hank discusses a change in the hiring climate. Turns out, there is competition, at least in some places, for technical folks. (Good news to lots of great people.) He mentions some organizations’ troubles finding people and waiting too long to make an offer (and waiting too long for people to start).
I’m not a recruiter, so I don’t know enough about the competition for certain people. But I do know that too many hiring managers are screening out otherwise great candidates because the hiring managers don’t know how to see what’s in front of them.
Make sure you’re not screening out people who could perform the work:
If you’re a hiring manager still using puzzles, cut that out! Puzzles don’t tell you a think about how people work at work. They tell you whether this person likes to do puzzles — not a predictor of great job performance.
If you still think you need some number of years of some language or environment, stop using shorthand and describe what deep knowledge you’re looking for. Maybe you can find it some other way. Maybe you don’t need some number of years, but you need some kind of application context.
If you think you need someone with a degree, stop right there. (Unfortunately, the comments from a previous post about this are gone.) I realize that things may be different across the world. But certainly, in the US, a degree is not a predictor of job success.
The other part of Hank’s article deals with speed of getting people to start. Speed comes from paying attention to all parts of hiring every day: screening resumes, using multiple sourcing schemes, using a group interview and limited consensus to make hiring decisions, knowing what kind of an offer would make a candidate say yes, making an offer promptly, checking references quickly, and making a start date that’s relatively soon.
Make sure you’re screening people on what really matters — things that predict their ability to do their jobs. And make sure that you make time for your hiring activities.
The end result is that it’s essentially impossible to become successful or well off doing a job that is described and measured by someone else.
I still think managers can describe parts of a useful, non-cog job. But jobs where a person’s qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills don’t matter are going to be outsourced or automated. Here’s an example: If you’re looking for a manual black box tester, why? If that person has to wait until the product exists to test, what value does that person add to development of the product? That’s a cog position, unless you can articulate some specific value that this person will add, that can’t be automated or outsourced. Another example: if you’re looking for a fill-in-the-blank language (Cobol, Java, C#, any language) programmer, what value is that person supposed to add? Why aren’t you looking for people who live to break software in various ways, if you’re looking for testers? Why aren’t you looking for people who solve a variety of problems using a variety of functional skill expertise? (If you’re hiring for other positions, think about the variety of functional skills required by the position.) The more varied the required functional skills, the more valuable your position is, and the less cog-like it is. The less cog-like, the less of a commodity it is. So it’s clear why candidates want not-cog positions. But why should employers care? Because you’re in business to deliver results and build capacity. You can’t deliver results without people who can adapt their skills to your context. You can’t build capacity without people who can learn new things. Two very un-cog-like reasons. Without delivering results and building capacity, the organization dies, eventually. It’s very expensive in the medium- and long-term to hire for cog positions. It’s cheaper to higher fewer non-cogs, but people who can deliver for you.
What’s interesting about Deloitte’s prediction of a “critical talent” shortage is that they’re onto the fact this isn’t about bosses alone. The biggest skills gap will be smack in the middle of the so-called creative class workforce. “Critical talent represents those individuals who possess highly developed skills and deep knowledge of not just the work itself but how to make things happen within a company,” (quoted from someone in Deloitte)
Hmm. Sounds to me like they’re talking about technical leads in any discipline), project managers, managers, anyone who successfully works with more than one person effectively. Notice that the report is talking about people who know how to make things happen.When I work with managers who ask for some number of years of experience in a job description, I ask them to describe how many product shipments or completed projects or some other indication of people who have seen an entire project through — a better indication of experience than just a number of years. (I talked about years of experience here).
There are always people out there who know how to get things done. If you want to find them, make sure you’ve worked through a job analysis, so you know what getting things done means to you. If we really are headed for a labor shortage, you’ll want to know what you need and what you can trade off. If we’re not headed for a labor shortage, you still want to know so you don’t have to waste a lot of time looking for people who aren’t quite right.
Sorry Louise, if I put words into your mouth, but I rarely see group interviewing techniques that work, unless people plan in advance, and treat it as if they were pair programming.