MAKING BETTER HIRING DECISIONS

Get below the surface and

find people’s real potential

 A landmark study of 20,000 new hires conducted by Leadership IQ revealed that 46% of newly hired employees

fail within 18 months, while only 19% will achieve unequivocal success.

By Kimberly Paterson, CEC

No matter how experienced you are, it’s easy to make a bad hire. You do your homework. You carefully clarify the role, responsibilities, and expectations and develop your list of qualifying questions. The candidate interviews well, credentials look good on paper, the fit seems right and there are no red flags in the reference check. But then the new hire shows up for work and their performance tells a different story.

You’re not alone in your disappointment. A landmark study of 20,000 new hires conducted by Leadership IQ revealed that 46% of newly hired employees fail within 18 months, while only 19% will achieve unequivocal success. Forbes’ data hub statistics show that 30% of new hires quit within 90 days.

Mis-hires are expensive and painful. The time and money spent recruiting and onboarding are only the beginning. The cost of additional hours spent dealing with mis-hires’ weaknesses, severing relationships, potential lawsuits, and disruption to the team can significantly impact the bottom line. If your hiring track record falls short of your expectations, it may be time for a different approach.

Getting a better result

Managers tend to rely too heavily on candidates’ credentials and interview skills. They overvalue factors such as past employers, years of experience, titles, schools attended and grade point averages. Research shows that credentials aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in predicting job performance.

A study of over 28,000 students showed that those who attended higher-ranking universities performed only slightly better than their peers on consulting projects. If you look at the quality of their work and their contributions as collaborators, a Yale student was just 1.9% better than a Cleveland State student. It also turns out that a person’s years of experience is also borderline irrelevant. A meta-analysis of 44 studies with over 11,000 people across a wide range of jobs showed that prior work experience had virtually no bearing on candidates’ performance.

There is also a tendency to give too much weight to the interview. Interviews favor extroverts. The best talkers aren’t always the best doers. Interviews tell you how well someone interviews but reveal little about how the person will do the job. Once people meet the threshold competencies, intelligence requirements and social skills, character trumps credentials as a better predictor of job performance.

Character traits that are the best predictors of success

Next time you’re managing the new hiring process, pay close attention to the candidate’s:

1. Ability to learn and adapt. The critical criterion isn’t how long the person has done the job; it’s how well they can learn to do the job. Biology teaches us that it’s not the most intellectual or strongest species that survives; it’s the one with the best capacity to absorb and adapt. When assessing candidates, consider if the person is comfortable with the discomfort that’s part of the learning process, is willing to step outside their comfort zone, and can absorb the right information and adapt.
   As social psychologist Adam Grant writes in his book Hidden Potential, “Ultimately, success depends on how well a person learns, not how hard they work. It’s not the labor that counts; it’s the fruit it bears.” Questions to help you identify someone’s ability to learn and adapt include:

• How has your job changed over the years? How have you had to adapt?
• Can you tell me about a time when you had to adjust your approach or strategy in response to feedback or new information?
• How have you handled a situation where you were given a task outside your area of expertise or comfort zone?

2. Perseverance. Does the person have the determination to reach the goal when the task is difficult or outside factors get in the way? Can they muster the discipline to perform in the face of contrary impulses? When they make a mistake or fail, how do they internalize that failure? Do they see it as defeat, a sign of inadequacy, or a learning opportunity? Questions to help assess perseverance include:

• What aspects of your current job do you dislike the most? How do you stop yourself from procrastinating or avoiding those tasks?
• Can you tell me about a time when you faced a difficult challenge? What methods did you use to sustain your ability to keep going until you had fixed this problem?
• Tell me about a time when a project was at risk. What steps did you take to ensure the project was completed? How did you respond to the pressure of this situation?
• Can you tell me about a time when you failed or made a significant mistake? What did you take from that experience? How did you move forward?

3. Proactivity. Is the person curious and confident? Do they seek positive control and feel they have a personal responsibility for influencing their environment and life circumstances? Do they demonstrate an inclination to take action when appropriate or passively accept their circumstances? Questions to gauge proactivity include:

• Tell me about a time when you took initiative.
• Tell me about a time when you were given a project without guidance. How did you figure out what to do?
• What do you know about our company?
• Think back to the best manager you ever worked for and what was it that made him or her effective?

4. The red flag of perfectionism. There is a belief that perfectionism leads to success. Current research, including a study by Thomas Curran of the behavioral and psychological studies department at the London School of Economics, shows that perfectionism has negligible to non-existent correlation with performance and has significant downsides.

It’s essential to be clear that when talking about perfectionism, we’re not talking about people who set high standards or strive for excellence. High standards are driven by doing the right thing and achieving results. Perfectionism is driven by how things will appear and what others will think. Excellence is achievable. Perfectionism is always out of reach. Excellence is learning from failure. Perfectionism is being devastated and dwelling on it.

Perfectionism comes largely from a desire to avoid failure; they fear they’ll expose some inner weakness or frailty if they don’t do it perfectly. This leads perfectionists to procrastinate, avoid tasks outside their comfort zones and work harder but accomplish less. The unrealistic expectations they place on themselves contribute to high stress levels, mental and physical illness and burnout. As managers, perfectionists can be incredibly hard on others.

According to Curran’s work, “the belief that our environment demands perfection is rising.” The National Education Association calls it an “epidemic.” The Association of Child Psychotherapists calls it a “silent catastrophe.”

In a survey of 25,000 Canadian elementary and high school students, one in every two participants felt they needed to be perfect, while 48% of high schoolers went further and said they felt under specific pressures to appear physically perfect in every possible way. Questions to help you evaluate whether someone is a perfectionist:

• How do you judge when good is good enough?
• Do you think you’re a perfectionist? What makes you say that?
• Can you tell me about a time when you were involved in a mistake at work? What went wrong and what did you take from the experience?

Make people comfortable enough to reveal who they are

Interview skills and credentials are fairly easy to assess. Determining whether someone has the character traits that help predict success is more difficult and may require a shift in how you interview. In character-based interviewing, your goal is to make people comfortable enough to reveal who they are and communicate their values, work ethic, and mindsets. Five practices that will help put people at ease are:

1. Dial down the stress level. Job interviews are intimidating even under the best of circumstances. Avoid adding to the tension by asking tricky questions, having a cool, overly professional demeanor, including multiple interviewers in the room, and making candidates feel like it’s an interrogation rather than a conversation. Some interviewers believe these techniques help them see how a candidate performs under pressure. That is seldom a good test for how a person will handle the real pressures of the job and can leave the candidate with a bad impression of the organization.
2. Create a conducive environment. Choose a quiet setting that equalizes both parties, like a meeting table or seating area, rather than being behind your desk. Turn off your computer monitor, office phone and cell. Give the person your full attention and ensure that there are no interruptions. Be familiar with the résumé, and tailor the conversation to the individual.
3. Use a warm up. People will be the most nervous at the start of the interview. Skip the awkward chit-chat about the weather or traffic. Instead, offer the person a beverage and take them to the office lounge, ask if they’d like a short tour of the office or explain how the interview process will work.
4. Lead with questions that build positive energy. Use questions like: “What do you like most about your current job?” “What would you like to be able to do more of in this job?” “What is something you’ve accomplished in the last several years that you’re particularly proud of?”
5. Ask the person to assess how the interview went. If a candidate shows any promise, wrap by asking the person how they felt the interview went and if they performed at their best. If not, offer them an opportunity for a do-over.

Concentrating on potential

Looking beyond credentials and focusing on the character traits that lead to success takes more time, but when you consider the value of each employee, it’s worth the effort. Talent and experience may determine where people start but character determines how far they will go.

The author

Kimberly Paterson, Certified Executive Coach and Master Energy Leadership Coach, is president of CIM (www.cim-co.com). CIM works with organizations and individuals to maximize performance through positive lasting behavioral change. Her clients are property and casualty insurance companies, agencies and brokers. She can be reached at kpaterson@cim-co.com.

Follow Kimberly on www.linkedin.com/in/kimberly-paterson and twitter.com/CIMChangeMinds.