Ponder for a moment the last people you hired. After you selected them, did they work out as intended? Or did they turn into people who were totally unlike what you thought when you interviewed them? Gregory P. Smith, President of Chart Your Course International, wrote the following article for PIC's Profit Improver magazine:
The most important aspect of any business is recruiting, selecting and retaining top people. Research shows those organizations that spend more time recruiting high-caliber people earn a 22% higher return to shareholders than their industry peers.
However, most employers do a miserable job of selecting people. Many companies rely on outdated and ineffective interviewing and hiring techniques. This critical responsibility sometimes gets the least emphasis.
Hiring and interviewing is both art and science. Refusing to improve this vital process will almost always guarantee you will spend money and time hiring the wrong people. As you hire your top managers, do you consider their ability to hire good people? That’s an important consideration for any business, including pork production. Here are several reasons why traditional techniques are inadequate:
• The majority of applicants “exaggerate” to get a job.
• Most hiring decisions are made by intuition during the first few minutes of the interview.
• Two out of three hires prove to be a bad fit within the first year on the job
• Most interviewers are not properly trained nor do they like to interview applicants.
• Excellent employees are misplaced and grow frustrated in jobs where they are unable to utilize their strengths.
Hire the Best, Avoid the Rest
Sisco CEO John Chambers said, “A world-class engineer with five peers can outproduce 200 regular engineers.” This same philosophy applies to the pork business. A CEO who hires the right HR director, or the right production manager, can save a bundle in improved productivity and efficiency. Instead of waiting for people to apply for jobs, top organizations spend more time looking for high-caliber people. An effective selection and interviewing process follows these five steps:
1. Prepare
Prior to the interview, make sure you understand the key elements of the job. Develop a simple outline that covers the job duties. Possibly work with the incumbent or people familiar with the various responsibilities to understand what the job is about. Screen the resumes and applications to gain information for the interview. Standardize and prepare the questions you will ask each applicant.
2. Purpose
Skilled and talented people have more choices and job opportunities to choose from. The interviewer forms the applicant’s first impression of the company. Not only are you trying to determine the best applicant, but you also have to convince the applicant this is the best place for him/her to work.
3. Performance
Identify the knowledge, attributes and skills the applicant needs for success. If the job requires special education or licensing, be sure to include it on your list. Identify the top seven attributes or competencies the job requires and structure the interview accordingly. These attributes might include: authority to discipline, hire and/or fire others and establish performance objectives; financial responsibility, authority and control; decision-making authority; accountability for performance objectives for the employee’s team, business unit or organization; consequences the employee is responsible for when mistakes are made.
4. People Skills
The hardest to determine, as well as the most important part of the process, is identifying the “people skills” a person brings to the job. Each applicant wears a “mask.” A good interviewing and selecting process discovers who is behind that mask and determines if a match exists between the individual and the job. By understanding the applicant’s personality style, values and motivations, you are guaranteed to improve your hiring and selecting process.
Obviously many jobs, particularly sales jobs, require a high degree of people contact. By placing someone in this job who dislikes interaction with others would be a mismatch, affecting his or her job performance.
Pre-employment profiles are an important aspect of the hiring process for a growing number of employers. By using behavioral assessments and personality profiles, organizations can quickly discover how the person will interact with his/her co-workers, customers and direct reports. They provide an accurate analysis of an applicant’s behaviors and attitudes, otherwise left to subjective judgment.
5. Process
The best interview follows a structured process. This doesn’t mean the entire process is inflexible without spontaneity. It does mean that each applicant is asked the same questions and is scored with a consistent rating process. A structure approach helps avoid bias and gives all applicants a fair chance. The best way to accomplish this is by using behavioral-based questions and situational questions.
Behavior-Based Questions
Behavioral-based questions help to evaluate the applicant’s past behavior, judgment and initiative. Here are some examples:
• Give me an example when you…
• Describe a crisis your organization faced and how you managed it.
• Tell me about the time you reached out for additional responsibility.
• Tell me about the largest project you’ve worked on
• Tell me about the last time you “broke the rules”
Situational-Based Questions
These kinds of questions evaluate the applicant’s judgment, ability and knowledge. The interviewer first gives the applicant a hypothetical situation such as:
“You are the manager, and one of your employees has just told you he thinks another worker is stealing merchandise from the store.”
• What should you do?
• What additional information should you obtain?
• How many options do you have?
• Should you call the police?
These guidelines provide a good foundation for developing effective hiring procedures, and will help you and your organization identify the best candidates for every job.
Editor’s Note: This article is sponsored by PIC, Inc. and first appeared in the PIC magazine, The Profit Improver. Greg Smith is President of Chart Your Course International. He helps create high performance organizations that attract, keep and motivate their workforce. He has designed and implemented professional development programs for hundreds of organizations globally. For more information, visit www.chartcourse.com or call 800.821.2487. For more information on PIC breeding stock, go to www.pic.com
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