Lou Adler Group - Originators of Performance-based Hiring
Lydia greeted Alex with a concerned look, the hum of the coffee shop blending with the gravity of their conversation. Lydia, once his boss and now a mentor figure, was someone who could help him figure out how to make important career decisions. Alex reached out to Lydia and asked if they could meet to […]
When you consider that the top 25% is a definition of outstanding performance rather than a statistic, it’s possible for everyone to meet this threshold of performance: A top 25% person is someone who is fully competent or can learn fast, is intrinsically motivated to do the work that needs to be done, gets it done with limited […]
According to ChatGPT everyone can now be in the top third despite the mathematical absurdity. These are people who are more motivated, more satisfied, more productive, stronger team players and more flexible. Here’s all you need to do to get started. When opening any new requisition, be sure to ask this question: What are the […]
I asked ChatGPT to write a story based on this postand the image below. It seems quite relevant today given that fact that most people are unhappy with their jobs. The theme: Time is your most valuable, don’t waste it. Given that. I’d rank number five as the most important. – LA, August 21, 2023. […]
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.
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.
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.
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.”
A client recently asked if we could update our performance-based interview to assess remote and hybrid workers for different professional staff roles.
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.
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.
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:
While it’s hard to believe that a single hiring mistake could cost a company $400 thousand, it’s not so hard to believe when looking at this table showing the incremental profit contribution of employees at these well-known companies. The idea behind this table is that it shows the full financial and business impact a person has on a company, rather than just considering the person’s compensation package.
Few companies calculate the ROI of the effectiveness of their different sourcing channels but those that do discover referrals are the best with job boards generating more mistakes. And the cost of these mistakes is staggering wiping away the benefits of lower cost and speedier hiring.
The primary purpose of this post is to argue that compensation shouldn’t be the primary measure of pay equity. The secondary purpose is..
In a post earlier this year I claimed that too many people change jobs for all the wrong reasons. Most often it’s for the stuff at the bottom of the “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Hiring Needs” graphic above, rather than the stuff at the top. Unless they’re (very) lucky, the result is always disappointment, dissatisfaction and regret.
LEADERS: The strongest people are easy to spot. They’re leaders. Leaders don’t just do their jobs reasonably well; they improve how they do their jobs. And whether they’re managing a team or not, they also help everyone they work with do their jobs better, too. You can use this Performance-based Interview to determine if your candidates are leaders, or not.
In my semi-retired state, I’ve decided to give away my best secrets for recruiting and hiring the top 25% with a new type of training program. Many of them are highlighted in the infographic above. You’ll be able to learn and apply them all just by reading Hire with Your Head (4th ed, Wiley. September 2021) and becoming a participating member of our virtual book club.
One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind.” This is great advice whenever implementing any type of process improvement program especially changing how hiring is done at your company. “Think win-win” is another one of Covey’s seven habits. When it comes to hiring, this habit is doubly important. It means ensuring the new hire and the hiring manager both recognize the importance of making the right decision and both have all of the information needed to make the right one. Due to its importance this habit has been adopted as the overriding goal and theme of the new edition of Hire with Your Head and rightly called “Win-Win Hiring.” It means hiring for the anniversary date rather than the start date.
Lists of the most common interview questions—10, 20, 50, even 150 questions—are all over the Internet. Many of these lists are intended for conscientious job-seekers who want to ace their interviews. Unfortunately, that also means that answers to these questions are endlessly rehearsed by candidates. On top of that, answers to many of these questions […]
More than 40 years ago the #1 recruiter in the world told me that applicant control was the key to making 2-3X as many placements per month. It took me one full year to master the technique but my placement rate soared by over 3X during the next 18 months as a result. More importantly, 75% of these candidates who were subsequently placed over the next 25+ years (more than 600 people!) were either assigned to stretch projects or got promoted during the first year. Just as important, less than 10% left during the first year.
One of our clients asked if we could develop a short version of Performance-based Hiring that hiring managers would actually use. Three questions seemed to do the trick as long as the hiring manager first defined job success as five or six key performance objectives (KPOs).
After years of interviewing and tracking hundreds of people post-hire, it became obvious that most candidates get hired based on criteria that doesn’t predict success: typically, their individual contributor skills, depth of technical skills, an ability to interview well and their personality. The problem with this is that when they underperform it’s largely due to their lack of soft skills; poor decision making; weak organizational ability; inability to fit with the team, manager or company culture; and lack of motivation to do the actual work required.
The past few months have been challenging for the staffing industry. LinkedIn has just announced its first layoff as companies reduce their Recruiter seat licenses, ATS vendors are reducing their teams and scaling back, HR tech vendors are cutting costs and rethinking their futures, live recruiting and sourcing conferences have been put on hold and staffing firms and RPOs are scrambling for more business as their PPE loans run dry.