In last month’s edition I emphasised the importance of recruiting top-quality staff for your business. In this article, I will follow up on the five-point system, presenting the final three crucial steps to ensure you attract and select the best possible person for the job.
Step three
Filter: Interview objectively against the performance scorecard.
Your goal is to measure a candidate’s ability to do the job, not their ability to get the job. Substance is more important than style, but sometimes it is hard to tell the difference when interviewing.
You need to break the emotional link between the interviewer and the candidate and make performance the dominant selection criteria.
Your goal is to measure a candidate’s ability to do the job, not their ability to get the job. Substance is more important than style”
Your interview process should reveal the candidate’s ability to produce the results required. Ask questions that
will help you uncover those abilities. Use the phrase ‘please describe’ to get candidates to reveal the information you need. For example, please describe:
How you get access to high-level decision makers
How you deal with pressure to discount
How you grow accounts after the initial transaction
How you control the sales process with multiple decision makers
How you build momentum into deals to avoid stalled pipeline opportunities
It is key to focus the questions on what they actually did and not on theory. The way you do this is to get them to give you specific examples of:
How they used a specific skill: Give me an example of how you got to decision makers
What they did at each of the last three companies: Give me an ex-ample of how you got to decision makers in your last company, and the two before that
How they produced the desired result: In those examples, did you win the account?
Another strategy that you can use is called the three ‘P’s. Ask a candidate to describe their performance in the last year of the last company they worked for. Then ask these three follow-up questions:
Performance 1: How did that number compare to your previous year’s performance?
Performance 2: How did that performance compare to plan?
Performance 3: How does that performance compare to your peer group?
When interviewing candidates, it is important to focus on their performance in previous companies, rather than just how they perform in the interview
Step four
Finish: Make a job offer that gets accepted.
At some stage in the later part of the interview process, you will need to start discussing the offer. There is a lot more to this than just telling the candidate what is on offer and asking them if they want to join.
We need to cover what is motivating the candidate to change jobs and make sure we can deliver on that motivation. There are two core motivations we need to cover.
1: Financial motivations
To uncover a candidate’s financial motivations, try asking a question like this:
What would you be able to do financially if you are successful in this role? Why is that important to you?
Here is another powerful question:
What is the minimum amount of money you need to earn?
The answer to this question needs to be close to the high-end of your OTE if you want a candidate to be motivated to work for you.
We need to cover what is motivating the candidate to change jobs and make sure we can deliver on that motivation”
2: Career motivations
To uncover career drives and motivations, ask this question:
What is most important to you in your career right now?
Then ask this follow-up question:
What is important about that?
Once you have uncovered both of those motivations, position your job to deliver on the candidate’s needs. Obviously, it goes without saying you have to be authentic around this.
Step five
Strategy: Raise the talent bar in your organisation so the top people work for you.
We all know what happens at the end of the football season each year; the transfer market opens up. And the mad dash to acquire the best talent for the available money starts.
This is true in every sport, and it is also true in high-performing businesses. The best teams are continually chasing the best talent. The better the people you can attract into your company, the better results you will produce.
B and C players imperil the jobs of everyone else and can put your whole organisation at risk. It is immoral to not either develop them to ‘A Player’ status or move them on”
In a football team, it is very difficult to score goals unless you have a fantastic striker. And it’s hard to get ‘scores on the board’ in business unless you have great people on your team.
‘A Players’ are talent magnets. The more you have, the easier it is to add new ones.
B and C players imperil the jobs of everyone else and can put your whole organisation at risk. It is immoral to not either develop them to ‘A Player’ status or move them on. You cannot expect a B or C player to hire an ‘A Player’.
One of your top five strategic imperatives for the leadership and management of your organisation needs to be the raising of the talent bar. Set a strategic goal to have 90 percent ‘A Players’ and set a time for when
you would like to achieve that level. Depending on your organisation size, that may take one to three years to achieve.
Do not hold onto ‘C Players’. Poor performers are like a cancer in your organisation. They will eat away at the insides of your potential in your performance. When you get a sign of cancer, you deal with it rapidly and aggressively. You do not mess around.
Now that you have all five steps, it is time to take action.