Key Insights - Hiring Top Talent

One of the biggest challenges our clients face is hiring and retaining top talent. "Talent management" is mentioned as a priority by most companies today.

Having the right people on your team can spell the difference between success and failure. When it comes to building a team, finding and hiring the right people is one of the toughest challenges leaders face. 

If you want the right people, you must have at the core of your approach the following guiding principle: past behavior speaks volumes about future behavior. Yes, people can change; however, change rarely occurs unless some major crisis or demand for change comes about due to external circumstances, such as being fired, a major illness or accident. That's why you must find a way to ferret out information about the candidates' past successes and failures.  Then you must judge how these past events and behaviors may influence success in the opportunity at hand.

Gathering focused information to paint a realistic picture of the candidates' strengths and weaknesses is essential. Corroborating your findings through interviews with references and other assessments you might use will greatly improve your odds that the chosen candidate will be a right fit for your team.

Let's take a look at some of the most common mistakes people make when interviewing and hiring.

• Hastiness or operating from a sense of urgency that overrides good decision making. Hiring someone too quickly to fill a gap that suddenly got bigger with business growth is a frequently mentioned reason why organizations hire the wrong person. Hiring someone in haste winds up making more work for everyone, not to mention the backlash that results from picking someone who fails in a leadership role.
• Replicating ourselves. Sometimes people want to find someone that reminds them of themselves. Picking "another you" is a common strategy to find someone you think you can count on.  Unfortunately, this practice usually backfires in the end. Organizations need diversity to inspire creativity and innovative thinking. Besides, it's hard to judge accurately whether or not the initial traits you see in a candidate really are similar to yours or to those of someone you admire.
• Going mostly by "gut feelings." Not collecting the right information or enough information to know if the candidate really has the competencies and motivation essential to the job is a common error. Intuition always plays a part in business; however, gut feel alone can send you down the wrong path. Be clear on the competencies and expectations of the position in question and investigate how the candidates you meet fit or don't.
• Asking questions that don't give you any usable data.  A favorite example of this is when some interviewers ask pseudo psychological questions like, "What animal best symbolizes your personality?" or "What are three adjectives that you would use to describe yourself?" The interviewer has no clue as to what to do with the answer and wastes precious time on questions that don't give you the right data.
• Not assessing the right culture fit. One of the mistakes that many of our small to midsize clients have made is hiring someone from a big public company who is used to having lots of resources available, only to find that the new hire can't get used to the more entrepreneurial environment where s/he is expected to be proactive, resources are less plentiful, and there is less structure in place to guide actions.
• Not involving enough people in the interviewing process or not training them to go deeper and broader in the interview.  So often, people don't include others who could add value to the interview process.  Using multiple interviewers allows you to get perspectives that balance that of the hiring manager. However, we do not recommend using multiple interviewers to conduct a single group interview because that actually greatly limits the depth and breadth of the data you can collect compared to conducting separate systematic interviews with a variety of interviewers. On the other hand, if the multiple interviewers are not trained or don't have an integrated plan for who asks what type of questions, this approach can backfire. You can turn off a top candidate by asking redundant questions and miss an opportunity to get more varied information about the candidate's past behavior.