Is Your Hiring Process at Risk?

After many years of helping companies mitigate their post-hire / pre-hiring talent risk vulnerabilities, the same culprit always surfaces: scarily bad hiring processes.

When companies seek out our people strategy advisory services and talent performance data analytics, I almost always undercover that their job design process has almost no process at all.

When a hire is needed, managers tell the talent acquisition 'get me someone' in a particular role without much additional input. Many job descriptions are cut and pasted from internal and external sources, and mostly focus on experience, skills, and knowledge, aka the 'resume' requirements of the job.

What is often missed are the behavioral requirements, i.e. the day-to-day of the job. They're missing from the job posting and missing from the interview process.

The day-to-day behaviors of work have various levels of decision-making (risk), interaction with others (communication), pace of the work (pressure), and rules and structure of the work (precision).

Often people are hired for 'what they know' and fail for 'who they are'. E.g. one's expertise in your industry doesn't mean they'll succeed in a fast-paced role requiring them to make quick decisions with little information and resolving conflict 90% of the time.

I've never heard of employee or leader underperformance being blamed on a gap in the resume.

Underperformance can simply be caused by a misalignment in the day-to-day needs of the job and the person.

HIRING STARTS WITH CLEARLY DEFINED JOB ROLE DESIGN

We've assembled millions of data points over the years that predict on-the-job performance based on how well or not someone aligns to the behaviors of any position.

A company recently reached out after their client's Director of Engineering announced that they are leaving for another job with a competitor.

ALL-HANDS-ON-DECK! The talent acquisition team drops everything to prioritize this critical hiring imperative.

Within our data analytics platform, we had 5 individuals that work closely with the 'Director of Engineering' take our ten minute survey to share their 'must-haves' in the role. What you see below is alarming:

Above, you can see that these 5 people had materially diverse and conflicting views of what the role should be. Imagine if this was not caught?

Misaligned job requirements = unstructured interviewing = unstructured onboarding = new hire insecure in the job = disengagement = underperformance = team toxicity = multiple talent looking for other jobs = financial losses, lost customers, bad reputation, etc.

Ever been in a role where you got conflicting direction from management from day to day, week to week? How did THAT feel? Even worse, imagine a culture of employees feeling that on varying levels....

Once the data quickly and clearly alerted the talent acquisition team to this major risk situation, all parties were assembled to spend as much time as necessary to come to agreement on what the Director of Engineering needed to look like in order to align to the mission of their company:

Because of the complexity of this role, we analyzed a second data point to help further take the guesswork from identifying the best fit. Cognitive data combined with behavioral is powerful.

The behavioral and cognitive data narratives above were included in the posted job description along with experience, skills, and knowledge requirements. Having the additional behavioral and cognitive data points helped define a very clear picture of what the day-to-day of the job entails.

Once the resumes were reviewed and the 'yes pile' was agreed upon, the hiring team's process to help candidates better understand the role fit includes a request to complete a behavioral workstyles exercise (10 minutes) and a cognitive learning exercise (12 minutes).

Below is the additional data of the 'A+' resumes that helped dig deeper into whether candidates will be successful in the role.

With customized behaviorally-driven questions, there's no way a candidate can misrepresent themselves, or 'game the interview'. Below are a few of the hundreds of questions available:

• Tell me about a time when you were required to lead a team or a project.
• Describe a situation when you had to initiate something new.
• Tell me about an experience when you were required to solve a problem by working closely with others.
• Describe a situation when you needed to influence the decision of others.
• Describe an experience when you were required to complete a project under a tight deadline.
• Describe how you handle multiple objectives simultaneously.
• Describe an experience when you worked within an existing set of rules and standards.
• Share an example where you were required to do something as prescribed in order to accomplish a goal.

What behavioral profile is your next job hire looking for?

If your company's hiring process employs a lot of guessing, you are putting leaders and teams at tremendous risk.

The good news is that post-hire and pre-hire talent risk challenges are resolvable and preventable. It's all about the right process for aligning talent strategy to business strategy.