AnimalScienceMonitor

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(By Dan Simmons)

One of the privileges of being a recruiter is that I get to work closely with a variety of executives and learn what they look for in the people they desire to hire.

Recently, I began to reflect on these leaders and what they look for in people, and I realized that I’ve observed the hierarchy of leadership. Since I write this column each and every month for The Animal Science Monitor, I thought I would share my observations with you here. For this purpose, I enlisted the help of dictionary.com in defining four key terms.

Executive: A person having administrative or supervisory authority in an organization.

Manager: A person responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or organization.

Leader: The person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country. A person followed by others.

Mentor: An experienced and trusted adviser. An experienced person in a company, college, or school who trains and counsels new employees or students.

The most evolved executives I encounter are those who have what I call executive style. These individuals have evolved from manager to leader to leader/mentor. They control all or part of a company by counseling employees to become leaders themselves and by behaving in a manner that makes people passionately desire to follow the direction they’re headed and to achieve the organization’s goals.

These leaders do not talk in terms of dollars or units. They speak about values, passion, customers and balance. Of course, they manage their business units by the numbers, but they don’t manage people solely on numbers. Instead, they lead them by ingraining the company’s vision into their team’s work and empowering individuals to make decisions in the company’s best interest. These same leaders make certain that team members balance life and work so they will stay happy and self-fulfilled over the long haul.

I encourage each of the executives who read my column to reflect upon their own executive style and ask if they would like to work under a leader just like them.

If you have any questions about this article, please contact me at dan@consearch.com.

Behavioral-based interviewing is designed to help ensure more targeted and more successful hires.  Although a resume is what initially catches the eye, it’s the characteristics and behaviors the candidate possesses that should ultimately dictate whether or not they’re hired.

The first part of the behavioral-based interviewing process is to thoroughly evaluate the position you’re seeking to fill.  The next step is the actual interviewing of the candidates, and when it comes to behavioral-based techniques, the questions you ask are quite divergent from standard interview questions.

‘Tell me about . . .’
The main difference of behavioral-based interviewing questions is that they’re designed to probe deeper and to uncover more information about the candidate.  The key is to ask questions that will elicit detailed responses, revealing the candidate’s skills, how they utilize those skills, and in what manner they facilitate their problem-solving strategies and their character.

Some call this approach STAR interviewing.

The acronym stands for Situation, Task, Action, & Result.

The bulk of your questions will be situational in nature.  You can ask a combination of both fictitious and past situations, or they can all be real situations.  It’s not recommended that they all be hypothetical.  It’s not enough to ask an initial question or two and leave it at that.  Follow-up questions are essential to discovering how the candidate will think and act in a given situation.

Example:

Instead of “Tell me about yourself,” you might say, “Tell me about a situation where you had to overcome a conflict, including between you and another co-worker, in order to accomplish a common goal.” While the candidate tells their story, you can ask additional questions, such as “What were you thinking at that point” or “What led you to make that particular decision?”  This will help you uncover the candidate’s behaviors, characteristics, and interpersonal skills.

This interviewing technique is more difficult for the candidate to navigate.  It requires them to answer questions they didn’t foresee and helps to evaluate their ability to think and respond quickly.  It will also reveal something about their behavior based upon the way they answer the questions themselves.

It’s all about ‘who they are’

Behavioral-based interviewing requires a slightly different perspective.  That difference can help you to not only avoid a potentially bad hire, but also zero in on the candidate who can help take your company to the next level.  That’s a win-win situation—and you win both times.

According to one of the trainers in the recruiting industry, “People are hired for what they do, and they’re fired for who they are.” If you hire people both for who they are and what they do, you’ll find they might be stars at your company for a long, long time.

(By Dan Simmons, CPC)

(In the first part of this article, published in the previous issue of The Animal Science Monitor, Dan defined what a “MPC”—“Most Place-able Candidate”—is and what motivates them.  In this part, he’ll discuss what you can do stay informed about the “MPCs” within your industry and more importantly, how you can hire them before your competition does.)

So how can you make sure that you hear about as many “MPCs” as possible?  By ensuring that the relationships you’ve built with your recruiters are as good as possible. These relationships can mean the difference between hearing about the routine candidates that most hiring managers hear about and being presented with a true “diamond in the rough.”

The initial step is to trust your recruiters to first find and then bring you the best and brightest candidates.  It’s important to invest time into your relationship with these recruiters.  Trust them with specifics about yourself, your group, and your plans for the future.

The second step is to give your recruiters flexibility.  Do you give them an assignment asking for exact qualifications that restrict the talent they present to you?  Having a recruiter search for the same people you surface merely duplicates your efforts, and you can accomplish much more than that.  A recruiter who is a professional will get to know you, understand the culture of your company, and screen for the type of people in whom you’ll truly be interested.

By establishing a relationship of trust with recruiters and providing them with flexibility and latitude, you’ll enable them to assume the role of your “talent scout.”  You’ll be surprised and more than a little satisfied with the people they present to you, people you might never have uncovered on your own.

You may spend a few hours each month on the interviewing and hiring of additional staff, with the majority of your time spent managing your group and delivering a product.  It’s imperative that you have the chance to evaluate candidates before your competition does.

By developing quality relationships with your recruiters and giving them the latitude to present their best candidates, even when you don’t have an open assignment, you can help guarantee yourself the opportunity to maximize a recruiter’s efforts, energy, and time and leverage their industry resources to your full advantage.

Are you doing everything you can to ensure that you see the best possible candidates in your industry?  By how much could you increase production (and profits) in 2011 if you added two or three superstars to your team?  What do you think your competition is doing to locate and hire the best in the business?

If you have any questions about this article, about “MPCs,” or about your workforce needs in the coming year, you can contact me at dan@consearch.com.

Follow Dan Simmons on Twitter.

(By Dan Simmons)

Superstar candidates are always at a premium, regardless of the economy, and those companies that can find a way to uncover them and hire them will be the ones that thrive.  Although you can’t create more candidates, there is one thing you can create—time. Time that you can use to assess whether or not a candidate is the right person, and time to hire candidates more quickly.

One way to do that is to streamline your interview process.  Wasting time during the interview stage of your candidate search is the easiest way to miss out on a great hire, somebody who might bring incredible value to your company.  There are six key techniques for accomplishing this, which I’ve listed below:

• Re-evaluate the job description after someone leaves. The person who left that role brought their own talents with them, and most likely that role “evolved” into something different than what it was previously.  Make sure that the description is accurate and reflects the current needs of the company in every way—not the company’s needs prior to the previous employee.
• Circulate copies of the job description so that everybody is on the same page. If there are issues with the job description, get those worked out before beginning the search.  Miscommunication is the surest way to derail any process.
• Conduct phone interviews to eliminate candidates. You don’t want to waste your department’s time in face-to-face interviews with candidates you could have eliminated via phone interviews.  In order to move the process along more quickly, schedule phone interviews during early morning, lunchtime, or early evening so that work schedules do not have to be rearranged.
• Combine steps of the interview process. Instruct candidates to fill out an online application prior to the interview, or e-mail the application so the candidates can fill it out and bring it with them to the interview.  If testing is needed, have the candidates come in a few minutes early instead of asking them to come back at a later date.
• Show everyone involved the advantage of keeping the process moving. If your interview process bogs down, you will lose top talent.  Instead of saying that you want to hire somebody “ASAP,” decide on a firm date you need someone employed and work backwards.  Make sure to deal in specifics, not generalities.
• Become more “results-oriented” or “ability-oriented” in your job description. Utilize this approach instead of asking for X-amount of years of experience.  These days, what a candidate did during their years of experience is more telling than how many years they’ve have.

There are two more related aspects of the overall process that you should keep in mind.  First, be sure that everyone in your organization is actively selling the company.  They should know how to differentiate your company, stress its benefits, ensure its street reputation is a good one, and be able to recite their 30-second “story” of what they like about the company and why they stay.

Second, arrange exit interviews with those employees who are leaving the company.  These interviews should be conducted by an unbiased third party.  By knowing why candidates are leaving, you can correct any potential problems that may exist within the organization and be able to position the company in its best light.

Everybody knows the saying, “He who hesitates is lost.” Well, he (or she) who hesitates in this market can lose excellent candidates.  There’s another saying in our industry: “Things that drag get dirty.” Sometimes it’s easier to get the process rolling, but more difficult to bring that process to a close.  Don’t hesitate to streamline your interview process with the steps outlined above.  You’ll position yourself to hire more of the talent you need to take your company to the next level.

If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to contact me at dan@consearch.com.