Six Steps to Selecting a High Performance Employee
What constitutes a good employee - a real winner? Many
people think there's one profile for a position or one set of criteria
cast in stone: "This is a winner." But that's just not the
case. Winners are unique to your organization.
The criteria which make up a winner should be determined case-by-case,
based on what makes sense and what works within your organization. For
instance, if you have an outside sales force calling directly on customers,
a winning sales rep is going to have a set of skills and abilities completely
different from an inbound or telemarketing sales rep. So, what is a
winner? A winner is a person who is successful in your organization.
Step 1: Developing a Profile
Developing a success profile is like painting a picture of the successful
person. If you want to hire a winner, you must first have a clear picture
of what success means for your particular position.
To begin, work backwards from the end result. In the selection process,
the end result you're trying to achieve is to label a person a success:
you hire him, hes on-board, hes contributing, and hes
successful.
Two things must occur for you to label an individual a success. First,
he has to be doing the right things. If hes not handling the tasks
and demands of the job, you will never label him a success.
Second, he must do those things the right way. For example, you may
know a person who gets the results you're after, but does it in a way
that may alienate your customer. We've probably all known a customer
service representative who answers the customer's question, but in a
way that really turns the customer off.
Following this logic, the process for developing a success profile
breaks down into two steps. The first step is to determine the what:
what must the person do for you to label him a success? To develop your
list of expectations, ask yourself: what must this person deliver to
the organization in terms of results, outcomes, accomplishments and
deliverables in order to be labeled a success?
Once you've determined what those outcomes are, the second step involves
taking each desired outcome and determining the qualities or characteristics
needed to accomplish those tasks and meet your expectations. For example,
it may not only be important for a sales rep to have good sales skills.
She may also need to be self-directed, organized and an excellent time
manager.
Its critical to put your success profile in writing. The old
adage, Ill know it when I see it just doesnt
work. A concise description on paper of your expectations, and the characteristics
necessary to meet those expectations, will guide you toward hiring talent
- not enthusiastic interview behavior.
In summary, to paint a profile of success, first determine what a person
has to do to be labeled a success. Then determine the knowledge,
the skills and the abilities - or the qualities and characteristics
- that he needs to meet those expectations. Once you make your determination,
put it down in writing.
Step 2: Recruiting
The definition of recruiting is to develop a qualified applicant pool
- to find the bodies you can consider for employment. This may be the
toughest challenge facing your business today. There is just a lack
of qualified people. Therefore, you have to double your recruiting efforts,
and do it more intelligently. You just can't run an ad in the newspaper
or a trade journal and assume that people will come flocking to your
door. You need to be a lot more creative to generate a decent candidate
pool.
Start by thinking, "Where are the people that I would like to
attract sitting today?" For instance, how many of the people that
you would like to attract are reading the classified want ads of your
local paper? What are they doing right now? The following page offers
some suggestions for alternative recruiting tactics:
- Work referrals. What always has been - and always will be - the
best source of candidates is employee referrals. But you have to be
proactive about getting employee referrals. Don't wait for your people
to walk in and suggest other people who might be good candidates.
On their very first day on the job, ask them, "Do you know anyone
else whom you think would be successful here?" If you're proactive
about soliciting names from your employees, you'll do much better.
- Try on-line recruiting. Today there are lots of places where you
can post positions on-line. The good news is that in many cases theres
no charge. Go to the career section of your favorite on-line service
or web browser for ideas.
- If you want to advertise in a publication, focused technical journals
make more sense than newspapers. The best place to advertise is where
your prospects are reading. For ideas, find out what your current
employees read.
- Consider working with a staffing service. In many cases, staffing
services can provide a cost-effective alternative to recruiting candidates
on your own.
- Recruit 365 days a year. If you start to recruit when you have an
open position, you're recruiting reactively and you will almost always
find yourself in a desperate mode. Be proactive about it. You think
pipeline in terms of clients, so you need to think pipeline in terms
of candidates for your jobs.
Step 3: Screening
Effective screening is a two-part process which will enhance the productivity
of your interviewing time. A thorough screening process starts with
a resume screen. Those candidates who make it through the resume screen
should then complete a telephone screen before being invited in for
an interview.
The resume screen
Screening resumes is a difficult part of the selection process because
it forces you to make a decision about a candidate based on a piece
of paper. So rather than trying to make a hiring decision based on a
persons resume, you should only determine whether it is worthwhile
to invest more time in that candidate. Here are a few guidelines for
effectively screening resumes:
Look for trends and patterns of accomplishments, as opposed to individual
occurrences. For example, if there's a single gap in a candidates
employment, it may be nothing. Remember, it's only one data point about
that candidate. Look instead for a series of gaps in employment.
Look for results and behavior you think will be effective on your job.
Look for patterns of accomplishments that are similar to those things
they're going to have to do on your job. Read the resume in correct
chronological order. Most often, resumes are written starting with a
candidates most recent job and go backwards. If you read a resume
in correct chronological order, you'll follow that person through her
career and be better able to detect patterns and trends: Has she picked-up
new technologies? Has she absorbed those very quickly? If not, is there
a pattern of her sticking with a position?
Give the benefit of the doubt. At this stage, you really know very
little about a candidate. If youre undecided as to whether to
include a candidate in your yes pile, give the applicant
the benefit of the doubt. Use the phone screen to make your determination
as to whether or not to bring the person in for an interview.
The telephone screen
Have you ever invited someone in for an interview, and in the first
two minutes said to yourself, "Boy, this person is totally wrong.
How did I get myself into this?" If so, think back: did you screen
that candidate on the phone first? An effective telephone screen may
be the most under-utilized tool in the selection process. A good rule
of thumb is to never meet anyone face-to-face until youve first
spoken with him on the phone. During this mini-interview,
spend a few minutes delving into one aspect of his background. Alternately,
ask a few targeted questions regarding a particularly critical requirement
of the position and get as much data as you can.
During the telephone screen, try to answer the question, "Is this
someone I want to invest my time in and bring in for a face-to-face
interview?" In a nutshell, you want to gather as much information
during screening, to determine whether it is worthwhile to invest more
time in a person.
Step 4: Gathering Data - An Effective Interview
The real key to making an effective decision is to gather enough data
so you can make a quality evaluation. The majority of the information
you gather comes from the face-to-face interview. As such, the effectiveness
of your face-to-face interview is totally dependent upon the types and
quality of questions you ask. High-quality questions should have four
characteristics:
- They should be easy to answer. The questions you ask ought to be
focused and direct.
- They should have only one answer. Instead of asking a general question
like, How do you deal with deadlines? ask, What
was the biggest deadline you had in writing your last book? Step me
through how you dealt with that deadline. The second question
gives you specific information you can use to evaluate the candidate.
- They should have a specific, planned purpose. The purpose of every
interview question is the same: to gather a piece of data. So, if
you want to know if someone stays current on the latest technology,
a good question would be, What technical journals do you read?
as opposed to, Whats the last book you read?
- They should be job-related. We all like to delve into personal issues,
but youre always better off if you stay with topics that are
very specific to the job.
While all good questions should have these characteristics, there are
still several types of highly effective questions to use when interviewing.
For the most part, they can be categorized into the following six types:
Factual questions
A factual question is one that provides a factual answer:
How many people report to you?
By what percentage did you increase sales last year?
What financial software package do you use?
The answers to these questions are very simple and straightforward,
but they give you good information to build a case for whether or not
the candidate will be successful.
Action questions
These require the candidate to respond with examples of actions they
have taken:
How did you handle the last customer problem elevated to your
level?
Step me through how you debugged that particular program.
How did you build your business plan for the roll-out of that
division?
In every case, the person has to respond with a specific action they
have taken. Remember, youre most interested in the candidates
behavior and how they deal with situations that are the same or similar
to what they will face in the job. So ask them to describe that behavior.
Candidate-specific questions
These questions are tailored to the specific candidate and the specific
situation:
What was the last deal you closed?
What was the biggest objection you got in that sales cycle?
Step me through how you overcame that objection.
These questions elicit very specific behavioral information. And most
importantly, its behavioral information that helps predict whether
or not a candidate will be successful.
Specific questions work for two reasons. First, they provide more accurate
information than general questions. Second, they are easier for the
candidate to answer than generic questions. If you ask a candidate how
she overcomes objections, she may not really know how to answer because
it is such a broad question.
But if you ask her about a specific opportunity and about how she overcame
objections on that deal, she doesnt really have to think about
the answer. Shes just sharing information about what she did,
and you end up getting much higher quality information.
To re-cap, these candidate-specific questions are good because they
require specific examples of behaviors, not just sound good
theories. If your candidate can provide specific examples of past behaviors,
chances are shell exhibit those same behaviors in the position
you have available.
Probing questions
These are follow-up, clarification and detail questions:
Tell me more about that.
Could you please be specific?
What do you mean by that?
Probing questions help you get the complete information you need, as
opposed to just the information the candidate wants to tell you.
Examples
Ask for examples of things that are the same or similar to what the
candidate will need to do on your job. For example, if you have a job
that involves solving customers technical problems, ask candidates
for examples of how theyve solved customers technical problems
in the past. If you are hiring for sales positions that require calls
on Fortune 500 MIS directors, ask candidates for examples of how theyve
called on corporate executives in the past.
More Examples
Dont ever stop at one example - get two or three or four in addition.
If a candidate can provide you with several examples, it will help you
confirm the candidates behavioral pattern. Then you can be fairly
certain thats how they will behave when they come to work for
you. Remember, past behavior is the best predictor of future performance.
Step 5: Data Verification
Conducting a thorough reference check is critical to a successful hire.
This step is not optional. But, the nice thing about focusing on behavioral
information in the interview - the things a candidate has worked on,
projects shes done and how shes done it - is that this type
of information is relatively easy to verify.
If you have a hard time getting references because nobody will talk
to you, there is an easy solution: make it the candidate's problem.
If you have a qualified candidate you want to pursue after you've conducted
the interview, ask her for references. If you call those references
and they won't speak to you, or if they say that all they can do is
confirm the employment dates, go back to the candidate and say, "You
need to find some people who will speak to me about the quality and
quantity of work you've done." Put the burden of getting people
to talk to you back on the candidate. Don't make it your problem.
To avoid fluffy responses during reference checks, ask pointed, specific
questions like, "How many people has George hired? How many did
he interview? How did he train his people? What recruiting techniques
did he use?" These very specific questions allow you to confirm
and verify the data you gathered during the interview.
Step 6: Evaluating the Candidate
Evaluating candidates should be the easiest part of the selection process.
If you've done a good job up to this point, you will have gathered so
much data and so much quality information that the decision will really
be pretty easy.
When you are finished with the previous five steps, use a simple matrix
to evaluate your candidates. Along one axis list all of the requirements
you generated when you created your profile: the knowledge, the skills,
and the abilities the person must possess to be successful. Once you
have created your matrix, evaluate each candidate against the requirements
- one at a time.
At this stage, you may be tempted to make an overall evaluation of
a candidate such as, "Will this person be a good sales manager?"
or, "Will this person be a good customer support representative?"
These are hard determinations to make, because theyre so vague
and encompasses so many variables.
But answering a series of specific questions about each candidate,
such as, "Does this person have good knowledge of Unix?" or,
"Does this person have effective writing skills?" eliminates
the need for broad evaluations. Instead, it forces you to think of the
candidate in terms of the individual requirements that will lead to
success. You developed your success profile for this position one step
at a time; you should conduct your candidate evaluations the same way.
To substantiate your evaluation, you should be able to back-up your
conclusions with the data you gathered in the interview. For instance,
if your determination is, "George has very effective writing skills,"
you should be able to back that up with real data. Review your interview
notes to see if George has written any brochures, ad copy, newsletters
or anything similar. If he has, that's pretty good supporting data for
your evaluation of his writing skills.
If you break your evaluation job into small requirements and then substantiate
each evaluation with the data you've gathered in the interview, you'll
find that hiring decisions become much easier.
Summary
An old proverb says that if you dont know where youre going,
any road will get you there. The same holds true in selecting winners.
The process outlined here is designed to serve as your road map
for hiring a candidate who will be successful within your organization.
Six
Steps to Selecting a High Performance Employee
Developing
a Profile
- Determine
what the candidate must do to be considered a success in the
position
- Determine
the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to meet your expectations
Recruiting
- Ask
for referrals from each new employee you hire
- Recruit
365 days a year
Screening
- Read
resumes in chronological order
-
Conduct a brief phone screen before inviting any candidate in
for an interview
Gathering
Data - An Effective Interview
- Ask
specific questions with a planned purpose
- Always
ask for examples of behaviors, and use follow-up questions to
clarify
Data
Verifications
- Put
the responsibility for getting references on the candidates
shoulders
-
Ask pointed, specific questions to confirm and verify data
Evaluating
the Candidate
- Use
a simple matrix to evaluate candidates
- Back-up
your evaluation with data you gathered in the interview
Hire
Your Winner
- Following
these steps will make your final hiring decision much easier
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