I uploaded this PDF describing the 12 factors in our Hiring Effectiveness Index (HEI) into ChatGPT. I then asked if the scoring system would help a company identify potential problems in its current hiring processes.
Spoiler alert. This could be scary. It represents the future of hiring.
I just used ChatGPT to fundamentally change how job candidates will be sourced, assessed, recruited and managed in the future. Here’s how to get started. If you dare.
I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I asked ChatGPT if our Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard could be used to improve hiring results. I was surprised it was so insightful interpreting relationships and ideas that were never written. You’ll see what I mean below.
Note: I asked ChatGPT to write this post in my style. It also came up with the title. It took less than one minute. It took me more time to cut and paste this into LinkedIn. What do you think?
It’s important to note that using behavioral interviewing #BEI without a detailed job analysis pretty much invalidates the entire interview. Without knowing how a skill, competency or behavior is actually used on the job, the assessment is left to the interviewer’s biases and perception of the job and how well the candidate presented their answer.
When creating a talent acquisition strategy it’s important to note that about 20-25% of those in the workforce are always actively looking for another job. This is the group companies need to target to fill open jobs as rapidly as possible. There’s another 20-25% who are always proactively passive. Don’t even attempt to contact these people unless you’ve worked with the person before. Given this, it’s obvious the candidates you’ll want to hire for your most important roles are in the other 50-60%. While this is the ideal talent market, these people won’t respond to your emails or calls unless you become an expert at passive candidate recruiting. This involves a number of critical skills, in particular:
As a recruiter I abhorred the idea that an outstanding candidate for an important job was being judged by a person who wasn’t a very good interviewer. Sadly, after having debriefed over one thousand different interviewers, I estimate that about two-thirds fell short. And too often the assessments of those who were valid were overridden or discredited by those who weren’t.
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Be Careful What You Wish for …
I’m getting nervous with the proliferation of all of these AI-infused chatbots that will change life and work as we now know it. Some of them are wrong. Really wrong.
I’ve always found it odd – maybe even dumb – to hire people based on their skills and depth of experience without telling them much about the job until they start. Then to determine if they are good or not after they’re hired, we assess them on their performance doing some job they weren’t assessed on.
If your tactics, techniques, and technologies don’t support your talent strategy, you won’t be seeing or hiring too many good people.
Long ago a CEO for a mid-sized company asked me how much experience a person needed to have to be the VP Operations for his company. My glib response then was, “Enough to do the job. It’s what people do with what they have, not what they have that matters. Some people need more experience to do the same job and others need less.”
In my mind, being more efficient hiring the same people you’re now hiring is a trivial use of ChatGPT.
Last month I was speaking to a senior director of software engineering for a major high-tech company. With over 200 developers in his department and years of experience hiring top performers this observation was earth-shattering:
A client recently asked if we could update our performance-based interview to assess remote and hybrid workers for different professional staff roles.
I was just talking to the director of engineering for a major consumer products company about new ways to improve the hiring decision for software developers. His first comment was profound and applicable to just about every technical role.
I’ve just wrapped up recording a new course for LinkedIn Learning (available in Q2, 2023). The core theme of this new program is that by embedding post-hire success into the pre-hire sourcing and interviewing process it’s possible to attract and hire a different type of candidate. These are people who are more diverse, who have less traditional backgrounds, who are more focused on learning and development and who are more interested in long-term vs. gig employment. Achieving this goal requires a different process at every step from how jobs are defined to how candidates are onboarded and managed.
The other day someone asked me if she should quit her job. I handed her the graphic shown above and told her to rank the six factors on a 1-5 scale from terrible to outstanding.
I was a guest on Simon Fagg’s excellent After Dinner Leadership podcast last week. Simon brings an oldie with a newbie to discuss how business ideas of the past might still be useful today. Simon’s first question to me was to highlight some early leadership lessons that I felt were still relevant. Here’s what I came up with from the early 1970s.
You might recall that this was formerly known as the most important interview question of all time.
As an old manufacturing guy it’s pretty obvious that when a machine is producing scrap you stop the machine and fix the problem before turning it back on.
The Hiring Formula for Success shown in the image above defines all of the factors that best predict on-the-job success. Soft skills top the list.
I think too many people including those in HR, OD experts, hiring managers and recruiters, believe being a good interviewer requires some remarkable insight into human behavior. I think they’re mistaken. There is an alternate path: being a good detective.
Having tracked the performance of thousands of senior professional staff and managers over the past 50 years it turns out it’s not hard to predict who will be successful. All you need to do is ask candidates to describe their major accomplishments most comparable to the key performance objectives (KPOs) of the open job. As long as you dig deep enough the factors shown below will pop out. Consistency is what matters, though, not one-time occurrences. This preview of the Sherlock Holmes deductive interview describes the probing needed to gather this information.
It turns out hiring people who will be in the top half is pretty easy. You just have to stop making hiring mistakes.
The other day a candidate asked me how to figure out if he was qualified for a new role given 15 years of experience with the same company.
It turns out that anyone can be in the top 25% with the right job, the right company, and the right hiring manager. But this is a rare event despite having spent $400-500 billion in job postings and HR tech in the past 25 years in the hope of matching the perfect job with the perfect candidate.
It turns out that hiring outstanding talent on a consistent basis has little to do with your ATS, which job boards you use or the quality of your competency model. The process shown in the image below (PDF version) will give you consistent great results as long as you do these four things first:
The traditional interview process has been shown to be unreliable in predicting job performance, often due to bias, lack of training and a focus on surface-level characteristics. The Performance-based Interview (PBI) is a natural language approach that seeks to assess an individual’s competency, fit and motivation by asking them to describe their past performance in specific situations. Studies have shown that the PBI is a more accurate predictor of job performance than other interview methods, making it a valuable tool for organizations seeking to hire the best candidates. Moreover, the PBI can be used to assess candidates at all levels of experience, making it an ideal method for career development and succession planning.
If you want to hire a great person, you need to offer a great job, not a laundry-list of skills, experiences and competencies that at best is no more than an ill-defined lateral transfer surrounded by some generic boilerplate. This is even more important today with candidates leaving within 90 days after starting if the new job turns out to be more promise than substance (Fortune, May 2022).
The worst question about career goals is something like, “What’s your major career goal for the next five years?”