By Karl Ahlrichs
Have you ever made a bad hire? Did you do it on purpose? There’s a chance you weren’t prepared with the correct information or the right questions to ask. Managers often make the mistake of hiring employees who don’t align with the organization’s culture or share its values, leading to poor results.
Peter Drucker, the father of “management by objectives,” defined the challenge best:
“Executives spend more time managing people and making people decisions than on anything else—and they should. No other decisions are so long-lasting in their consequences or so difficult to undo. And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their batting average is no better than .333: at most one-third of such decisions turn out right; one-third are minimally effective; and one-third are outright failures.”
Drucker is right. No other area of any organization tolerates such a high failure rate.
Hiring mistakes have many causes, one of which we will focus on here: lackluster assessments resulting in inadequate evaluation of candidates’ cultural fit within an organization. This can prove challenging, especially considering that applicants often massage their answers to put themselves in the best possible position in interviews. At the same time, interviewers are selling the benefits of their job offers.
Let me put this in simpler terms. The first job interview is akin to a first date—both parties are putting a positive “spin” on their message. The applicant says, “I’d be a great employee,” and the organization says, “We’re a great place to work.”
Uncovering values and cultural fit
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. How do we find the truth, the genuine answer to “Where do I fit best in your organization?” for the applicant and “Will you fit our culture and mission?” for the organization? Does the candidate hold values important to the organization?
Following are some questions that can elicit information about values:
What was the best job you’ve ever had? Why did you like it so much?
Think of the worst supervisor or manager you’ve had. What characteristics made that person poor?
What traits do you most admire in co-workers?
Do you feel fortunate at work?
A new approach to candidate assessment
Rather than using a résumé at the start, gather the work chronology and skill data in the application, then examine the applicant’s values and attitudes before scheduling a face-to-face interview. Use the information from the narrative application as background, drilling down for more detail about values and attitudes.
When an applicant comes in for an interview, the hiring professional has invested less time, yet gathered more helpful information for assessing the candidate’s values and attitudes. The hiring manager has a wealth of data that can be used to prepare structured questions.
Benefits of a rigorous hiring process
This isn’t easy for the applicants, and that has an additional benefit. The rigor of the process leads low performers to opt out early, resulting in a pool of candidates that skews toward high performers. It’s a win-win situation.
Our back-to-basics approach changes the process of the talent pipeline. I repeat the question I used to begin this series: Are you willing to change how you hire, manage and spend more quality time with the high performers?
Karl Ahlrichs is a national speaker, virtual facilitator and author. He has decades of strategic HR consulting to all industries, using risk management and organizational development theories to bypass “best practices” and move directly to “next practices.”
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