Reviewing Resumes? Don’t Make This Common Mistake

Imagine you advertised an open position, and are now sitting down to review a stack of 100 resumes.

If the first ten resumes you read are terrible, you feel a sense of dread coming over you. Without realizing it, you lower the bar, so if the 11th resume is even close to being qualified, you breathe a sigh of relief and eagerly move them to the “Yes” pile.

But if the first ten resumes you read look well-qualified, you raise the bar. You become very selective about who makes it into the “Yes” pile. You invent new criteria to help you winnow the field.

In both cases, that 11th resume is not being judged strictly on its own merits, it’s evaluated primarily by what came before it.

In the first case, all those unqualified resumes are corrosive to your selectivity. You get desperate and lower your standards. This happens with astonishing frequency in hiring.

In the second case, an abundance of apparently good choices leads to hyper-selectivity. You get picky on criteria unrelated to job performance just to save time interviewing. You become desperate to “weed out” some people that would have been perfectly fine otherwise. You rule out people without stopping to consider that you only have a resume and your assumptions … but none of the facts. In my experience, the best candidate rarely has the best resume, so being hyper-selective in resume review always causes you to overlook potentially great people.

So how do you prevent yourself from arbitrarily raising or lowering your standards?

You have to notice what is not in front of you. That stack of 100 resumes may or may not be representative of the available pool of people for your job. And each resume may or may not be representative of the true talents of each person.

Ask yourself two questions:

• Before you select candidates from the stack of 100 bad resumes, ask yourself, “Am I confident that this candidate pool represents the best people I could attract to this job?” 
• Before you rule out good people from the stack of great resumes, ask yourself, “Have I fairly considered everyone potentially qualified for the job, or have I ruled out people based on factors that may be irrelevant and assumptions that might be inaccurate?”

You may find that in both cases, you forged ahead, trying to “save time” in the interview sequence, instead of taking the necessary time to hire the best possible person for the job.

Job Seekers Went Mobile, and Left Small Employers Standing Still

Where do you think most job seekers begin their search for a new job? Most recruiters will tell you that candidates start by searching on the big job boards like Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder.

And those recruiters will be wrong.

Ten times more job seekers start their job search on Google than anywhere else.  (Update: I have not been able to verify this statistic elsewhere, and it clearly uses global information, not just the United States.)

Where do small employers post their jobs? When I ask HR managers where they post their open jobs, they usually rattle off a list of job boards. But they almost never mention Indeed. Yet three recent studies found Indeed to be the number one external source of hire for employers in the US.  (Not coincidentally, all three surveys were from companies that provide Applicant Tracking Systems that integrate seamlessly with Indeed: iCims, SilkRoad and Newton Software.)

How did that happen?

It’s simple, comScore research shows that two out of three searches of any kind originate on Google. And Google job searches often lead job seekers to Indeed. See for yourself. Type your own title and location into the Google search bar and see what comes up. The first few jobs you will see are probably posted on Indeed. Consequently, Indeed has three times more unique visitors per month than CareerBuilder (80 million vs 24 million). (UPDATE: In January Indeed had 100 million visitors)

But the bigger threat to small employers long term is not Google upending the job boards, it’s mobile and social.

According to comScore, more than one out of every three minutes spent online is now spent “beyond the PC” on smart phones and tablets. Already 30% of Indeed’s total candidate visits are mobile. They encourage it. Both Indeed and CareerBuilder have mobile apps that let candidates apply to jobs from their phones with minimal effort … as long as the employer enabled the mobile-apply functionality. But very few small employers make their job ads and career sites mobile friendly … because many small employers don’t have a career site.

In a 2012 study by potentialpark, 77% of recent college grads expect to see a company career site and 94% go on to say that in addition to the career site, employers should present themselves on at least one social or professional platform. 61% expect employers to have a Facebook career page, and more than half expect a company page on LinkedIn. And if you disappoint them, they will be vocal about their job search experiences. 92 percent say they discuss their job search experience with others, both in-person and through social media.

So let’s sum this up. Only 4% of job seekers start their job search with a specific company in mind. So if your ads are not in the right place to be seen, you won’t be considered. And if somehow candidates do see your ad, 34% will not apply if your application process is too much of a hassle. And if they do apply, and don’t enjoy the experience, they just might leave a bad review about your company on Glassdoor or Indeed, scaring off everyone else who might consider working for you. (I called this trend, “The Amazonification of Recruiting” in a post on The HR Examiner.)

Employers, this is your wake up call. In the past 3 years, almost everything you took for granted about job advertising has changed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(To see more research on recruiting, visit my online library of articles.)

DISCLOSURE: This is not an endorsement of any vendor. I am not paid by anyone mentioned in this post. I am however, a client of Careerbuilder, iCims and Indeed.

How To Interview An Innovator

Clients often engage us to help them find an innovator for a strategically significant project. They need people who have taken something entirely new and gotten it off the ground, which is all too rare.

So that means we need to help them find a way to interview innovators and distinguish the poseurs and pretenders from the Real Deal Innovators. The world is full of one-hit wonders who, like Forest Gump, happened to be present once at a successful time in history. Their false confidence and hubris will stand in the way of your innovation as surely as their inflated salary requirements will impoverish your new initiative.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to separate the pretenders from the doers. I consider you the Real Deal if:

• You spend more time innovating and putting your ideas into practice than almost anyone in your peer group (which accelerates your expertise far beyond everyone in your field).  You have earned the respect of a few industry  insiders, but you are probably not famous or widely known. (This is widely misunderstood. Being famous is a reverse predictor … it takes time and effort to build fame. Time that could be better spent on innovation.)
• Unlike the famous people who speak at all the cool conferences, you have the tyranny of daily results driving your innovation. You measure yourself against hard metrics. You don’t come up with ideas and then spend time giving speeches about it. Trying to look smart. Leading to the inevitable decline of your actual skills as you progressively lose touch with reality and spend more time with sycophants.
• And you probably don’t work in a place where your ideas have to be approved by a committee. You don’t spend all day in meetings. And you certainly don’t spend all day reporting on your results instead of producing them

No, when you are the Real Deal, you spend the vast majority of your time in the trenches. You know that most ideas don’t survive contact with reality. But parts of them do. So you try things, fail, learn, refine, and improve. Constantly experimenting, and constantly challenged by the imperative of producing results. Genius physicist Neils Bohr said “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

It’s bloody hard to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. Creating the future is always uncomfortable and from day to day it usually feels like failing … until you look back from time to time and see how far you’ve come. (I am collecting a series of the most useful articles on this topic here: http://www.scoop.it/t/driving-innovation. Scott Berkun’s classic book The Myths of Innovation is also a must-read for innovators.)

So how do you interview an innovator?

• Listen for the daily grind of it.
• Listen for the experimentation, the risk, the failure and the grit and resilience to try again.
• Run from people who describe it as a big success with no moments of uncertainty.
• And then ask yourself, “Am I really ready to put up with a Real Deal Innovator?”

Hiring is Not Like Your Other Work

Hiring is not like your other work. In your other projects, customers notice every mistake and point it out. Every missed deadline gets the attention of upper management. Every failure has consequences.

But hiring is like operating in a sensory deprivation tank. You get no feedback at all for long stretches of time. Until the very end, when things often go disastrously wrong.

Let’s say you have an important job to fill. So you start recruiting and get a nice pipleline of qualified candidates going. You’re pleased, the interviews are going well. Life is good. A few quiet months go by and then it’s time to make a hiring decision.

And. then. everything. bogs. down.   

• One of your top candidates suddenly becomes really hard to schedule for a final interview so you had to hold things up until they could be scheduled. You could have chosen to proceed without them, but hey, nobody was complaining about the delay.
• Just when you are ready to make the job offer, you take that one last look at your budget. You start to worry about what the CFO will say, so you shave a few thousand dollars from the job offer. Nobody will give you a hard time about that, right?
• Then someone in HR has to draft an offer letter, but they are out sick and when they get back, your job offer is not their priority, so another week slips by. Hey, what are you going to do? Other things take priority over pushing out some paperwork, right?

And before you know it, weeks have blown past with you pinned to the wall, wasting time on unproductive delays. But hey, nobody complained, right?

Except your delays raised serious doubts in the mind of the candidate. They have started to ask themselves dark questions like, “Are they serious about me, or am I their second choice?” And, “Are they capable of making a decision over there?” And, ”If this is how they treat me now, how will be be after they start taking me for granted?” 

And, of course, you gave the candidate ample time to go get another job offer. So they reject your job offer to go work for someone who made them feel valued and important.

And suddenly you find that your failed hiring project is getting lots of uncomfortable management attention.

OK, so maybe hiring really is just like your other work. I guess I need a new title for this post.

Questions Great Candidates Ask in Interviews

Be honest. Do you feel that the part of the job interview where you ask the candidate, “Do you have any questions for me” is almost always a waste of time?  Chances are good your answer is “yes.”

The problem is most candidates don’t actually care about your answers; they just hope to make themselves look good by asking “smart” questions, says Jeff Haden, writing for Inc magazine.

But great candidates handle that portion of the interview differently, writes Haden, They ask questions they want answered because they’re evaluating you, your company–and whether they really want to work for you. Here are five questions great candidates ask:

1.    What do you expect me to accomplish in the first 60 to 90 days?

          Great candidates want to hit the ground running. They want to make a difference–right away.

2.    What are the common attributes of your top performers?

Great candidates also want to be great long-term employees. Every organization is different, and so are the key qualities of top performers in those organizations. Great candidates want to know because 1) they want to know if they fit, and 2) if they do fit, they want to be a top performer.

3.     What are a few things that really drive results for the company?

Employees are investments, notes Haden, and every employee should generate a positive return on his or her salary. In every job some activities make a bigger difference than others. You need your HR folks to fill job openings… but what you really want is for HR to find the right candidates because that results in higher retention rates, lower training costs, and better overall productivity. Similarly, you need your service techs to perform effective repairs… but what you really want is for those techs to identify ways to solve problems and provide other benefits–in short, to generate additional sales.

Great candidates want to know what makes a difference. They know helping the company succeed means they succeed as well.

4.    How do you plan to deal with…?

Every business faces a major challenge: technological changes, competitors entering the market, shifting economic trends… there’s rarely a Warren Buffett moat protecting a small business.

So while a candidate may see your company as a stepping-stone, they still hope for growth and advancement… and if they do eventually leave, they want it to be on their terms and not because you were forced out of business.

Say I’m interviewing for a position at your bike shop. Another shop is opening less than a mile away: How do you plan to deal with the new competitor?

Bottom line, Haden says: A great candidate doesn’t just want to know what you think; they want to know what you plan to do–and how they will fit into those plans.

Should You Run The Search Yourself?

A client called me to discuss a job opening at his firm. He’s very well connected, so naturally he was wondering if he should try recruiting on his own before engaging us to run the search. “Can you help me weigh the pros and cons of paying you a fee to do what I might be able to do on my own?”

It’s a fair question, and the answer is not as simple as you might expect.

Yes, search fees are expensive, but before running the search yourself, here are a few aspects of the recruiting process it’s easy to overlook:

Identifying candidates:

If you are considered “well connected” in your field, you are probably directly acquainted (1^st degree connection) with up to 20% of the potentially viable candidates for your job opening. But are you actually willing to open your rolodex, and aggressively recruit them? Is there anything that would prevent you from contacting some of the top people at your competitors (are you comfortable being perceived as a “raider?”)

Having the ability to identify candidates is only one part of the recruiting equation. The next step is to develop a compelling marketing message (beyond the job description). Messaging quality significantly impacts recruiting results—just emailing around a job description rarely does much to attract the top people.

Do you have time to reach out individually to top candidates?  “Jerry, I thought you might be interested in hearing about this position, and here’s why…”  We get most of our response on our second or third direct contact with a candidate. Successful, focused, busy people often ignore job board ads, don’t read generic newsletter job postings, and even brush off the first direct inquiry. Are you ready to be responsive when candidates express interest? You can’t recruit  people and then leave them hanging.

Evaluating candidates:

After the interview, how comfortable are you in rejecting the people you just went to the trouble of recruiting? it’s easy to reject a stranger who answered a job ad, but harder to reject someone you personally invited to interview.

If you are well-connected, you stand a fair chance of finding at least 2 or 3 qualified candidates on your own. Of course, if you are advertising your opening, you will also receive inquiries from hundreds of less qualified people … many of whom are connected to you through mutual acquaintances. Who will receive all those resumes; who will respond graciously to each one; who will keep your candidates informed of the hiring schedule; and who will send all the rejection letters? Beyond that sort of hiring administrivia, who is available to screen all the candidates against a uniform selection criteria, without showing favoritism?

Moving the Process Toward a Decision:

Finally, who is tasked with moving the hiring process forward to resolution? Hiring delays can be quite costly, but hiring often languishes behind other more urgent priorities. Driving the hiring process forward based upon fair selection criteria usually requires significant leadership focus. Indecision and perceived unfair handling of candidates reflects poorly on all involved.

When your ideal candidates are all connected to you in some way, these issues should be considered before you start the process. A significant number of our new searches come on the heels of a failed search conducted by a busy executive who had the best of intentions, but simply lacked the time to follow through on the search process all by himself.

A solid hiring process involves far more than simply knowing good people.

Want Better Hiring Results? Shift Your Perspective

“If we’re paying a search fee, then I expect to find someone who can really ‘wow’ me,” the Director told me in my morning meeting. “I’m not going to settle.”

Later than day I met with another client to discuss their new search. The COO was explaining her expectations, “I want to see qualified candidates from a variety of backgrounds, so we can compare them.” She outlined how her very stable team would benefit by including new people with diverse perspectives.

The simple act of paying a search fee dramatically raised the expectations of both hiring managers.

Think about that for a moment.

When you post an ad on a job board, you hope to get someone good.  That’s your hope, but you’ve learned not to expect much. When you “industrialize the hiring process” (like posting ads, letting HR process the responses, and only interviewing the people who happened to notice the ad, and who took the trouble to apply) your hiring managers know they should lower their expectations. And when you lower the caliber of people you hire, you are forced to spend more time managing average people.

Alternatively, when you invest more effort in your hiring process (either by investing in your internal recruiting process, or by engaging a search firm), you come to expect more .. so you end up hiring more exceptional people, and getting higher productivity with less management effort.  (Managing high performers is not easy, but it’s far less exhausting than managing low performers).

When you pay a search fee, you feel like your money would be wasted if you only saw people who were good–you want someone great. In fact, you don’t just want someone great, you want to know you hired the best possible person, so you expect to interview people from a variety of backgrounds. This diverse outside perspective helps prevent the kind of stale, insular mediocrity that follows the phrase “5-10 years of experience in our industry.”

So if you want better hires and more productivity with less management effort, shift your perspective. Invest in your hiring process. Trust in the fact that organizational commitment follows money–when you invest more money in recruiting, your managers will invest more energy getting the hiring exactly right.

Pause Before Plunging Into the Job Offer

The HR Director was irritated. “I told the candidate he could have a week to decide about our job offer,” she complained, “But the department really wants his answer sooner.” This candidate had first interviewed almost three months earlier, so after all that time, the Director felt like she was not in a position to deny the candidate some time to think it over.  Although I never recommend giving more than 2 days to decide on an offer, the real issue here is that the HR Director did not ask for what she really wanted (a fast decision) so she was left in limbo.

But not asking for what you want applies to both employers and candidates at every stage in the interview process. To make a nice first impression, people often indicate maximum flexibility at the beginning of the process:

• Candidates indicate they would consider a much lower salary than they really want.
• Employers indicate they have far more upward mobility, or workplace flexibility than they really want to offer.

Everyone plays nice at the outset. The courtship phase of recruiting is all good feelings about a mythical future with lots of bright possibility. But then as the hazy distant future comes into focus … things change. And when a job offer hits the table, reality comes right along with it, and everyone’s perspective instantly shifts. That sought-after candidate could take a week to schedule an interview, but once the job offer was on the table, well then, that employee was making his new boss wait a week for an answer … unconscionable.

I recommend you pause before you run from the warm sauna-like haze of the recruiting process and plunge into the ice cold water of job offer reality.

Once an offer is made:

• The hiring manager thinks, “This hiring process has taken far too long. Now I’m behind on my work. I need that employee to get here soon and hit the ground running!”
• The candidate/employee thinks, “Oh geez, this is real, now I have to decide. What have I gotten myself into? Is this job really any better than my current job? And, ugggghhh, now I have to give notice to my current job–and the thought of that makes me really uncomfortable.”

So before you make a job offer, before everything changes, while you are still in the warm sauna of the recruiting phase …. hit the pause button. Check in with your candidate. Have a conversation about your expectations, and theirs. “Hey Sally, we are seriously considering making you a job offer and wanted to check in with you on that. I know we initially discussed (whatever), are you still thinking along those lines?” And “Have you thought about what your current employer might do? Are you expecting a counter-offer? How do you plan to handle that?”

Just dip a toe in that water before you plunge in.

Catching Lying Job Seekers

Every few weeks some headline blares, “How to Catch Lying Job Seekers.” In the article, some self-proclaimed expert reveals the shocking statistics about how often job seekers lie on their resume. And the solution is usually to hire that very same expert to ferret out the truth for you. Otherwise you are a rube, a patsy … a stooge.

The whole “lying job seeker” meme makes my skin crawl.

We conduct over a 100 executive searches every year, interviewing thousands of people, and looking at over 50,000 candidate resumes and online profiles.  I cannot imagine anything more exhausting or counterproductive than reflexively distrusting all of them.

Call me naïve, but I just don’t think most people lie to deceive you–they just want to look good. It’s not malicious … it’s just what some people do. And you need not wrap yourself in some body armor of distrust just to to protect yourself.

Job seekers generally divide themselves into three groups.

• Some folks are pretty darn selective about their accomplishments, they shade their stories to look good, and they brag about stuff they were perhaps only tangentially involved with….but they don’t just do this on their resumes–they also do it at dinner parties. Some people are just braggarts, and you can easily interview them to suss out the truth. Problem solved.
• The second group is WYSIATI–what you see is all there is. They are plain spoken and tell it like it is. They make great employees. These people are sometimes called stalwart workers, but their resumes are pretty dull and easy to miss.
• The third group are folks are raised to be humble about their achievements, to give credit to others, to downplay their role in successes. These are the people who score a 96 on a test and obsess over the 4 points they missed. I call them the “A students.” And you probably didn’t even select them for an interview because their resume was less impressive than the braggarts. That’s why I think the Perfect (Resume) is the Enemy of the Good (Hiring Process). If you are not careful, you might end up selecting only braggart resumes to interview.  (Click the link and find out how one HR manager protects herself from that mistake.)

The risk of listening to the distrust fear mongers is that you will start to only see the bad in people and not the good. Going down this slippery slope, you begin to telegraph your distrust–and inject poison into what might have become a blossoming new relationship with a Stalwart, or an “A Student.” You just might find yourself  instilling doubt where there was none.  And then you really would be a rube.

The Smart Assumption to Make When Interviewing Candidates

The CEO called to tell us he was ready to extend a job offer to a COO candidate. “Offer her $185,000, but we have some room to go up from there if she doesn’t go for it.” His assumption was that the candidate would be comfortable negotiating and would ask for more if she wanted more.

Bad assumption.

The candidate was perfectly comfortable negotiating, but she was also comparing this offer to another offer she received that week to see who placed a higher value on her skills. She was using the offer as a signal of which firm would treat her better. By not leading with his best offer first, the CEO sent the message that his new COO would always have to negotiate for fair pay, instead of simply being paid the fair market rate.

The smart assumption to make when interviewing candidates is that the best people will receive multiple job offers at the fair market rate for their skills. 

When you make this smart assumption you won’t lose great candidates by:

• Low balling your job offer to make candidates negotiate up to a fair market rate
• Offering a salary based upon their last salary and not their fair market rate
• Dragging out your hiring process under the false illusion that you are the only game in town
• Making them come back to your office five times to meet five more people.

When you make this smart assumption you will:

• Put your best foot forward, and give the candidates a compelling reason to join your firm.
• Run an organized, predictable hiring process. You will let the candidate know where they stand at each step of the process, and you will not allow long delays between steps.
• Make your first job offer your best job offer–if you are going to be willing to offer a certain salary, or vacation schedule, or whatever–offer it right up front.

Employers Beware; Great Candidates Know Their Value

As the job market continues to improve in the Washington area, I’m seeing a trend. Great candidates know what they are worth on the job market, and they are not settling for less.

It’s not just that top people are receiving multiple job offers … although we are seeing plenty of that. It’s not just an increasing self confidence level that makes candidates more willing to ask for what they want …  although we are seeing plenty of that also.

No, the really interesting development is how well-informed candidates are. They really know, within a few thousand dollars, exactly what they are worth. That’s a long term shift that employers ignore at their peril. You simply must assume that both parties to the job offer have very similar information now–they know what you know.

As an employer, you simply cannot low-ball an offer by a few thousand and hope the candidate will fold–when you do that now, you only snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up with nothing.

The Franken-Candidate Dilemma

Jim had just interviewed six people and was giving us feedback on them, “I liked various aspects of all of them, but each one had a weakness in some area.” Jim told us he really wanted to find someone who combined each of their strengths. “I’d love to see someone with Jim’s enthusiasm and Lisa’s analytical skills,” he pondered that a moment then added, “Ideally they would also have Brooke’s subject matter expertise and Lauren’s curiosity.”

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Jim was fantasizing about creating some entirely new, entirely perfect candidate from an amalgamation of the best aspects of all the other candidates. I call it the “Franken-candidate dilemma.”

A similar problem occurs when you’ve had the privilege of working with someone truly remarkable. When they leave the organization, it’s easy to become fixated on finding someone with the exact same rare combination of skills, as in, “Find me someone just like Sally.” But you can waste months trying to find another receptionist with a flair for accounting, or another brilliant salesman who actually turns in his sales reports on time. Business owners often want to hire someone like themselves, when of course, people with those same entrepreneurial attributes are all busy starting their own companies … not looking for employment in yours.

The “Franken-candidate dilemma,” the “find me another Sally” fixation, and the “find me another me” approach all suffer from the exact same logical fallacy—overgeneralization. They all assume, “If there is one person like that, there must be many people like that.” And like Captain Ahab, hunting for the white whale can drive you mad.

So how do you know when it’s time to keep looking for more candidates, and when it’s time to choose from the candidate pool in front of you? It comes down to three factors:

1. What is the ongoing cost of leaving the position unfilled? There is a real cost to leaving most jobs open. Know what you are giving up by delaying the hire of someone new.
2. How likely is it that you will find your perfect Sally, ””Mini-Me,” or “Franken-candidate” in a reasonable period of time? (Ask yourself this question, “How many people like that have you ever met in your life?”) Are you doomed to spend several months in a potentially fruitless search for something that may not exist? And if you get lucky and somehow find another Sally, are they so rare that you will be held hostage to them because of the extraordinarily high cost of replacing them in the future? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to simply reorganize the work, so you no longer require your receptionist to handle accounting?
3. What, exactly are you giving up by “settling for” someone who lacks one of your desired attributes? How does that cost compare to the cost of leaving the job vacant for months?

High performing organizations usually do a terrific job of balancing these three factors–and here is how they do it. 

Still Waiting for the Response to your Job Offer?

After a lengthy search process, Kathy finally made a job offer. Because every other candidate had already been ruled out, Gerald was the last man standing. Kathy dearly hoped he would accept, she certainly did not want to start all over with the search.

At first Gerald was hard to reach, it took him 24 hours to get back to Kathy just so she could extend the offer (he was traveling). Then he asked for time to think it over, he was not specific about how much time he needed, and Kathy was reluctant to push the issue. Then almost a week later Gerald had a few questions about the benefits. Once he had that information, he made a counter-offer to get a bit more money (to offset the benefit costs), and he also wanted some more vacation time.  (Gerald’s negotiating playbook must have been the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”

And then, of course, almost two weeks later, Gerald turned down the offer.

My father-in-law often said “Deals that don’t happen quickly, usually don’t happen.” The longer I work in the executive search business, the more I value that advice. For any position below CEO, I suggest you give candidates no more than 2 days to accept your offer. Then withdraw it and move on.

Oh, and here is how to avoid getting into this situation in the first place….

Removing Bias (and Desperation) from Your Hiring Decisions

In a doomed attempt to save time, many hiring managers unwittingly make themselves both more desperate and more biased in their hiring decisions. When you prematurely narrow the number of candidates you are willing to interview, you set up the perfect storm for bias and desperation.  Here’s why.

The Washington DC metropolitan area has a great job market. As I said in The Washington Business Journal,  job seekers have the upper hand again. Mid-career professionals often receive multiple job offers and can afford to be choosy. This means that candidates who do well in their first interview with you often withdraw from consideration before you’ve even had time to schedule their second interview.

So, if you have not started your first round interviews with a field of at least six highly qualified candidates, you will probably find yourself coming down to the wire with only one viable candidate. That makes your hiring decision both simple and dangerously flawed. When you only have one person, your choice is either a) hire, or b) don’t hire. Really, the choice is a) continue doing two jobs, or b) get help from someone. So naturally most hiring managers a) decide to hire now, and b) live to regret it later.

A recent study suggests why you make better decisions by improving your frame of reference. Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet explains it this way:

“Our hunch is that the mechanism works something along the following lines: if you look at one pair of shoes, it’s hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes. You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pairs of shoes available, you’re much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes.”

The Harvard study showed promising results in removing gender bias from hiring and promotion decisions, but the frame of reference principle applies equally well to other aspects of hiring, such as evaluating the competencies and cultural fit of the candidate.

Don’t set yourself up to make a bad decision. Do what it takes to assemble a robust slate of qualified candidates, you won’t regret it.

Pre-Employment Testing and Human Sacrifice

If you think the era of human sacrifice is over, think again. Humans are sacrificed every day on the altar of pre-employment testing. Hey, I’m not saying that all pre-employment tests are uniformly bad, I’m making the far more reasonable argument that most small organizations who rely on testing are worshiping a false god. (There, see? Wasn’t that less incendiary?)

To know me is to know that I am a recruiting process geek. We track dozens of metrics on every stage of our search process. We track the retention rate of our placements for three full years. And we focus intently on doing everything we can to improve the results we get for our clients (i.e. faster searches, with more qualified candidates who will drive business results, and stick around long enough to make a meaningful impact).

So naturally, people assume I’m a fan of pre-employment testing because it just sounds so scientific and process oriented. Except in my experience, most small organizations are actually harmed by their pre-employment assessments. Rather than improving hiring results, the testing actually gets in the way.

It’s not always the tests themselves that cause the problem (well, OK, sometimes they do). The issue is how managers behave around the tests:

• Some managers overtly surrender to the test. “Well I liked Candidate A, but the test won’t let me hire him.” (Managers idolize the test, Like “The Claw” in Toy Story, it alone determines “who will stay and who will go.”)

• Some managers covertly surrender to the test using the politically correct language. “Well, after the interview I preferred Candidate A, and admittedly the test is only one component of our assessment, but after seeing his score, I’ve now decided that Candidate B is my preference.” (Managers generally don’t want to stick their neck out and take full responsibility for the hire. So when they pick the candidate who scored well, at least they have political cover if the person later fails.)
• Some managers abdicate completely and just let the test select who they even interview. These managers cut short their own interview process, figuring they should not waste time interviewing if they are only going to hire people who pass the test. I’ve heard of first interviews as short as 15 minutes and then going straight to testing. (See “The Claw” above).

If you want to undercut your managers, and make them doubt their own interviewing ability … introduce a pre-employment assessment. If you want to make managers feel less responsible for who they hire … introduce a pre-employment assessment. But if you want to discover factors about a candidate that will cause them to become top performers in your culture, tread carefully. Personality traits that are correlated with high performance do not necessarily cause it.

“Anyone can compare two sets of numbers and tell you whether they correlate, but, it takes careful study to know whether A actually leads to B. For example, skirts and stock markets tend to move up and down together, beach ice cream sales and shark attacks tend to move together, and watermelon sales and temperature move together. But, skirts do not cause the market to change, sharks do not buy ice cream, and selling watermelon does not cause it to be hot.”  Dr. Wendell Williams on ERE

********************************************

Note to people (and trolls) who want to comment:

This is not my first rodeo in social media.

• I know some testing vendors will want to hawk their products here. Let me stipulate for the record that of course you are the exception. I’m talking about everyone else, of course … and please don’t call me, this post was not an RFP.
• I know some big organizations are saying that you’ve validated your test and trained your managers. Congratulations, I’m not talking about what GE can afford to do, I’m talking about small organizations.
• But hey, if you work in a small organization and have a different experience, then please comment and teach me something. As long as I get to learn something, I really don’t mind being proven wrong.
• Oh, and if you agree, please comment, I’m always happy to take a big slice of that.