The primary focus of this management briefing will be on selecting the right people for your organization.

Defining the Job

Before you start thinking of individual people, it is helpful to actually define the job. Here are some guidelines:

A. A written description of the job's responsibilities that is clear to you and agreed to by all of the candidates' future peers. It is also important to spell out specific objectives that a person in this job should be achieving in the next one to two years and the standards of acceptable and superior performance.

B. The best job description will be clearly linked to the organization's strategic and operational objectives. It should be clearly spelled out how this job supports the unit that it is in as well as the organization’s constituents.

Describe the Candidate

Once the job description is clear, it is possible to describe the type of person to best fill that position. There are three broad areas to think about:

1. The can-do area. This area includes all of the skills, knowledge, and experience that are desired in the candidate. The can-do area can often be broken down into:

• Technical skills.
• People skills.
• Organizational skills.

2. The will-do area. This area describes some of the individual qualities of the desired individual and includes such things as:

• His or her attitudes.
• Her or her philosophies.
• Whether this person is a leader, or a manager, or a doer.

• Compatibility with future peers.

• Compatibility with future boss.

• Compatibility with future subordinates.

• Compatibility between your organization's culture and the culture of the candidate's former organization. (At a supervisory or managerial level, a mismatch here guarantees failure at about 90% of the cases.)

• Compatibility between the individual's stage of career and life, and job demands. (If the individual has a high devotion to family and outside interests, and the job demands extraordinary time commitment, the compatibility is low.)

Balance

It may be helpful to think about the balance you want between three of the major factors that seem crucial in any job. You might assign percentages to each of the three.

• Technical skills.
• Organizational skills.
• People skills.

In general, technical skills are least important when hiring. If a person has aptitude or talent, he or she can learn the technical skills. The other skills are less easily acquired, if the person does not have strength in these areas to begin with.

Job Design

If you are filling a vacancy, find out why others have vacated this position. Is there anything in the nature of the job which should be altered or changed in order to make it a more attractive position.

Input from Peers and Subordinates

In addition to your own input, here are some ideas on how to more precisely define a job. The first way is to seek fresh input from those workers who would be peers and subordinates to this position. What can-do, will-do, and like-to-do skills and qualities would they like to see in this person?

Observe High Performers

Another way to help you define the job is to observe an employee in the same or similar position who is performing successfully. By observing and analyzing this person, it is often possible to better define the job and the candidate.

Additional Help

Read other briefings about building the best staff to stimulate and sharpen your thinking in preparing a description of a job candidate.

Criteria

Beware of over-reacting to a prior person's weaknesses. In some cases, when an employee is doing a poor job and is dismissed, the criteria for the person to replace him is often an over-reaction and not a balanced picture of what is needed in the job.

It is important not to add every desirable human quality into your candidate description. Try looking at your list of the candidate's can-do, will-do, and like-to-do attributes, and indicate which of these actually must be present in the candidate and which of them you would simply like to have in the candidate.

Before you actually begin the evaluation, recruiting and selection process, it is often helpful to decide the minimum criteria of an acceptable candidate. If you set these criteria after the interviewing process, there is a likelihood that you may set the criteria too low, simply in order to produce a viable candidate.

If you have done a good job of recruiting, you should have at least two healthy candidates. If you find yourself in the position of selecting the best of the worst, it is a set up for future problems. Unlikely as this sounds, I have found too many CEOs discussing problem employees months or years after they were hired, who admitted that they first suspected that the individual would not work out during their interview. They went ahead and hired anyway, because they didn't have time to start recruiting all over again.

If you do a good job of setting up your selection criteria, it will help you start your recruiting all over again, if the first round of recruiting does not produce a sufficient number of viable candidates.

Exercise

For this exercise, you should choose a job in your organization that you are very familiar with. Ideally it would be a job for which you are responsible for hiring.

Job Title: _________________________________________________

List some of the major responsibilities, tasks and objectives for this job:
______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

List some of the important can-do qualities in a candidate doing this job:
______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

List some of the will-do qualities:

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

List some of the like-to-do qualities:

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

For each of the above three areas, list two behavior-based questions that you would ask.

A. Can-do

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

B. Will-do

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

C. Like-to-do

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

Sourcing

Sourcing is the identification of potential candidates. There are many channels of sourcing available to you through head hunters, employment agencies, and advertising in general and trade journals. This section will mention a few additional choices that often produce the best candidates.

The Best Ways to Find People

1. Seek candidates who are already working, not someone who is unemployed.

2. Seek candidates whose skills and qualities are already known to you or to someone whom you know.

3. When you first begin sourcing, call and/or write everyone you know who might possibly know someone who would be appropriate. This word of mouth approach to sourcing is not only the least expensive, but also often the fastest, and it produces prescreened candidates.

4. Keep an ongoing file of potential candidates even if they are not currently available, and even if you do not currently need them. Keep in touch with them. When an opening occurs, you've got a ready made pool of candidates.

5. Consider offering a referral incentive to current employees. Any employee who refers someone who is hired and lasts at least one year, receives an incentive of $200-$2,000. You choose what's appropriate. This also puts pressure on you not to keep poor performers.

6. When a good employee leaves your organization, stay in touch with them. There's a chance they may become disenchanted with their new position. An occasional phone call is sufficient. Don't try to sell them on a return until it's clear that there are some tell-tale signs of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the new job.

Ex-Employee Interviews

While on the topic of keeping in touch with ex-employees, it may be useful to point out that there is a value in keeping in touch even with those employees whom you would not wish to return to the organization.

If you build a good relationship with an ex-employee, it is possible to gain a great deal of information about your organization. For instance, if you have a problem keeping employees on the front line, your first response may be a brief exit interview to ask the departing workers what's wrong. The problem is that you'll seldom get a straight answer at this point.

If you contact them three to six months later, you'll find them much more responsive to talking about what was really going on in the organization and what caused them to leave. You may even offer people a brief cash incentive to return for the interview.

Recruiting

Recruiting is the process of obtaining the services of the desired candidate.

Identify the attractive and saleable aspects of the job, such as:

1. The organization:

• Its purpose.
• Its culture, e.g., management style.
• Its strategic position, e.g., leader in the field.
• Its growth.
• Its potential.

2. The job, its:

• Challenges.
• Opportunity to learn.
• Opportunity to grow.
• Activity.
• Title.
• Compensation.
• Special prerequisites.

3. The location:

• The community.
• Nearness to relatives.
• The climate.

Isolate these aspects and place them clearly in front of the candidate early in the process to build motivation.

The aspects that will motivate will vary from one individual candidate to another. Therefore, it is necessary to quickly identify each candidate's motivations early in the sourcing and evaluation process.

Push and Pull Motivations

The attractive aspects of the job will pull the candidate to you. Other motivations are the ones pushing the candidate out of his current job. These unattractive aspects of the present job may include:

• Dissatisfaction with a superior.
• Dissatisfaction with prospects for promotion .
• Too little authority or autonomy.
• The political atmosphere.
• A negative culture.
• Poor organizational systems and structure.
• Undesirable geographic location.

You can reinforce both the pull and the push factors to generate maximum motivation.

Employed vs. Unemployed

It is more difficult to recruit someone who is not looking for a job than someone who is. You must invest more effort in sourcing and recruiting someone who is not looking. You may also get a better person.

When a prospect is not looking for a job, two critical barriers come into play. These can be overcome if you recognize them and build strategies to overcome them.

Inertia

All human beings must overcome their inertia to change. Initial reluctance can be converted to enthusiasm by a consistent and repetitious recruiting effort.

Mistrust

All candidates will have some degree of mistrust and believe you are selling them on the good aspects of the job while covering up any negatives.

Before a candidate is converted to an applicant, their inertia and mistrust must be overcome. In addition to perseverance, your recruiting effort must be consistent. The candidate must not receive mixed messages about your organization or the position.

Spouse

The involvement of the spouse in the recruiting process (especially if a relocation would be required) has valuable payoffs, no matter what the level of the job:

• Understanding the spouse helps understand the candidate.
• Surfacing the spouse's needs enables you to better address them.
• The spouse’s understanding of the organization and job can be beneficial to the candidate.

Interviewing

This is one of the most critical steps in the selection process. Always prepare your questions and design the interview in advance. It is much too easy to forget to ask a crucial question. It is also possible that you will inadvertently ask a question that could be challenged in a court of law by a disgruntled candidate. The third reason for having your questions prepared is to free your mind to listen during the interview, instead of concentrating on what your next question should be. The rest of this section should give you some ideas on how to design the interview process.

Interviewing is probably the central process which employers use to select employees. Unfortunately, most interviewing does a very poor job of selecting people for one or more of the following reasons:

1. You spend too much time talking about the job and the organization.
2. You spend too little time in really listening to the applicant.
3. The sequence is wrong. You describe the job and then ask the applicant to describe how well they fit.
4. What an applicant says about him or herself is not always an accurate reflection of who they are and how they perform.

Even though the goal of a selection interview is to find out how the applicant will perform on the job, you cannot just ask, "How will you perform in this job?" Responses to this question contain too much conjecture, promise and selling.

The best possible information on an applicant's future performance is past performance. This is why internal promotions succeed at a much higher rate than hiring a new person from the outside. You have a chance to truly assess the internal person's performance before promoting them.

When selecting a new employee, the closest we can come to this is by using Behavioral Interviewing. In a Behavioral Interview, you ask the applicant to tell you about his or her actual behavior instead of describing skills and qualities. This process involves several steps that must be done in sequence.

1. Take less than five minutes to give the applicant a general description of the organization, not the job. Give them the kind of description you might find in your organization’s brochure.
2. Tell the applicant you would like him or her to take a few minutes and write down ten questions about the job. Announce that the questions should be carefully selected, so that (a) when they are all answered and (b) if you are offered the job, you would then have enough information to decide whether to take the job or not. No other questions are to be allowed. Give the applicant as much time as he or she wishes to compose the questions.
3. When the applicant has finished writing questions, it is time for you to begin the Behavioral Interview.
4. Answer the applicant's ten questions and any additional questions if necessary.

The Behavioral Interview—Part I

This part of the interview helps you find out the applicant's actual strengths and weaknesses in past situations. Ask the applicant to select about five examples from his or her life of experiences where he/she:

• accomplished something.
• had an impact.
• felt successful.
• used his/her talents.

Allow the applicant a few minutes to select the incidents and then describe each. Encourage details and specifics, and probe for what the applicant did to contribute. Record the can-do, will-do, and like-to-do qualities the applicant shows in these historical incidents.

The Behavioral Interview—Part II

In Part II the focus switches from broad to specific. It focuses on questions relevant to the job.

Once you have determined the job description and the desirable characteristics in a candidate, it is a fairly easy jump to determine the questions you should ask. For example, to determine an applicant's expertise in a can-do skill, such as knowledge of computer languages, you might ask, "Describe in detail your experience with word processing, or a spread sheet program." To test constituent service orientation, the question might be, "Think of a time when you were faced with a particularly difficult constituent (or client, or customer,) what did you do to resolve the issue?"

To determine a will-do skill such as initiative, ask the candidate to tell you some of the suggestions he or she gave the boss within the last 6 months. Conflict resolution might be evaluated by the question, "Tell me about a time when you and your subordinates disagreed about how to handle a project. What did you do and what was the outcome?"

Determining like-to-do qualities is often the most difficult area. You could ask the candidate what aspect of his current (or last) job and organization is most satisfying and why. Conversely also ask what aspects of the job and organization are most dissatisfying. Listen carefully for the real responsibility and authority the candidate has or had. You should further collect information by asking the applicant sufficient questions about his prior organization to learn about its culture, so that you can compare it with the culture of your organization.

Surface the candidate's career goals, and more importantly, the motivations which underlie the goals.

Identify any peripheral motivations such as: geographic location; employment potential for the spouse; family ties; need for special education or health care facilities; lifestyle, etc.

You should also learn enough about the applicant's outside interests, hobbies and lifestyle to determine where the applicant's energy is currently focused.

Interview questions can also be individually developed from an applicant's resume. Scan the resume for areas of particular success or weakness. Look for inconsistencies or points that may need clarification.

Be sure that questions focus on past behavior. At this point it is important to avoid setting up hypothetical situations and asking the candidate to explain how he or she would handle it.

Questions should be open-ended; that is not answerable by a simple yes or no. The more freely an applicant speaks, the more information available by which to make an intelligent decision. Be sure to allow plenty of time for a candidate to answer. Thinking of specific examples of past behavior is not always easy. Most interviewers are afraid of silence. They have a tendency to either answer the question themselves, or to move on to another question. To make the situation more comfortable, you might make a statement such as, "I know that's a tough question. Please feel free to take you time in thinking about it before you answer." It is helpful to continually reassure the interviewee that there are no right or wrong answers at this point.

Individuals who are highly verbal as well as those who are highly shy respond well to behavior based questions. When a candidate is unable to come up with a specific example, it is often likely that they are unwilling to discuss the issue or have simply never dealt with the problem before.

Remember, the primary responsibility for you as an interviewer is not to ask questions, but to listen, to observe, and to learn. Pay attention to body language as well as verbal responses.

Just before the interview, it may be helpful to find one or two items in the candidate's resume to use as an ice breaker, such as a common interest. Beginning with a non-threatening question can help set a tone of friendliness and openness for the interview. It's important to maintain the candidate's self-esteem throughout the interviewing process. You can help this by occasional comments and smiles throughout the process.

As you watch the candidate during the interview, try to see the person through the eyes of those who will be relating to him or her in the job, such as fellow employees or constituents. What sort of initial impression would you get as a constituent?

Take thorough notes. Most interviewers will forget a fair amount within an hour or two after the interview. This is particularly true if you are seeing several candidates. It is very easy to confuse the information if you don't keep reasonably accurate records. It is helpful to keep notes during the interview, and then write down additional notes for a few minutes after the candidate has left.

One of the most precise ways of getting information on can-do skills is by actually asking to see samples of the candidate's work. This might include such things as written materials, a spoken presentation, or things done or made. When the technical can-do skills are a significant part of the job, which is common at the hourly worker level, your organization should design standardized tests to determine a candidate's knowledge and skill in such things as word processing or running a particular piece of machinery.

The Situational Interview

Before you can design a Situational Interview, you must have a clear description of the position you wish to fill, including the desired qualities of the person who fills it. It's also helpful to have a clear, specific and written statement about how the person in this position must relate to subordinates, peers, and the boss, as well as to the overall goals and philosophy of the organization. No motherhood and apple pie statements; just important and specific statements.

Now, select about ten critical situations that are likely to occur in this job. A critical situation is one that will have a significant negative impact on others or the organization, as a whole, if it is not well handled. Your outstanding employees, by definition, should handle all critical situations well.

Now, write a brief description for each critical situation. The description should be concise and specific. It should be written so that most applicants will have an easy time in understanding what the situation is. Describe the situation without implying any value judgments or solutions. Some sample descriptions are listed in the next section.

Test out your critical situation descriptions by giving them to current employees who hold the same or similar positions. Ask them how they would respond in the situation. If the situations are well chosen and described, you should be able to distinguish your high performers from other employees by their responses. If not, you may need to revise the descriptions and/or your selection of top performers.

When you come to the Situational Interviewing step, give the applicant your written description of the situation and ask how they would respond. Give them one situation at a time. Keep notes on their response. Focus on listening and recording their responses rather than judging it at this time. Do not comment on their responses, but go on to the next situation.

As you gain experience in using these situations with applicants and with on the job performers, you will learn how to refine the situation description so that they can become highly selective in identifying people you wish to hire.

By not telling the applicant what the job is, what the required qualities are, and presenting them with a critical situation, you will get a response from them which most closely reflects what they actually would do in that situation. It is an unbiased interview. Most of us learned early in our educational careers, to read the nonverbal signals which teachers gave us, that will tell us whether we are answering the questions correctly or not. Many students learned how to change their answers in midstream based on this feedback. Thus, the teacher gets the right answer but fails to find out what the student would really think or do.

Examples of Critical Situation Descriptions

For a secretary:

You work for several people in the office. Each one gives you a variety of small tasks and a fair amount of typing to do. Recently the workload has built up considerably and you've been getting complaints about typing not being done on time. You also have heard some grumblings of dissatisfaction with the quality of the typing. What do you do?

Administrative Assistant:

The last three days have been extraordinarily hectic as you helped your boss prepare for an important meeting that is to take place in another city. You and your boss worked late last night getting ready. After he left the office, he caught his plane to the site of the meeting, which will take place tomorrow morning. When you come into the office the following day, you find some important papers on his desk, which you think he should have taken with him. What do you do?

Constituent Service:

In talking with a constituent, you learn that he has already had a bad experience with another person in your organization. He tells you that he will never do business with your organization because of the poor service he has received and goes on to describe, in detail, a specific problem he had with the other person. What do you do?

The Applicant's Questions

After the Behavioral Interview, be sure to evaluate the applicant based on the ten questions that they selected to ask you. You can learn a tremendous amount from the kinds of questions the individual asks you. Questions about the organization's future direction or career opportunities down the road indicate the candidate is interested in more than just salary or benefits. Of course, if the candidate has no questions to ask, you should really start to worry.

Interview Form

Defreeze _____________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

1st Impression _______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

Five Minute Introduction on Organization

Candidate Writes Ten Questions

Life Experiences

Behavioral Questions

Critical Situation Questions
Actual Questions (Ask for specifics.)

Can-Do

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

Will-Do

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

1. ________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________

Applicant’s Questions:
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________

Any promises for follow up?
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________

Guidelines for the Interviewing Process

1. Have future peers and subordinates conduct interviews also. Be sure that they are clear and agree on the job description and qualifications in the three areas.

2. Plan and coordinate interviews so that they are complimentary and not repetitive. In order for the Behavioral & Situational Interviewing process to work, it is essential that no one else has done a traditional interview with this person beforehand. If several people will be interviewing the applicant, you might have each person prepare some critical situations to use in the interview from their point of view.

3. Give everyone background information on the candidate as well as the job.

4. Give everyone a form to keep notes on during the interviews.

5. Have everyone meet to give input in evaluating the candidate as a group.

The Team Interview

When an important skill in your candidate is the ability to work with a team of people, there's often a benefit in having this person make a presentation or run a meeting with the actual team he or she would be working with. For instance, when a new CFO is hired, you might ask the candidate to come to a meeting of the senior management team and make a presentation on some of the key things that he would do in his role as CFO to help the organization achieve its goals. Tell the candidate you'll supply him with whatever information he would like in order to prepare for the session.

This could also be approached from a slightly different perspective. Give the candidate a specific and real problem in the organization that would be appropriate for the candidate to address in his new job. Tell the candidate you would like him or her to conduct a meeting with the appropriate key people to begin work on the problem.

Third Party Input

References

Once you have narrowed potential candidates down to two or three, it is appropriate to contact references. One of the most convenient ways to collect reference resources is to have one person request this information from each candidate during the interviewing process. A simple form is often useful which requests names and addresses of former bosses, former peers, and former subordinates, as well as their phone numbers.

Bear in mind that former bosses are often quite hesitant to provide critical references because of the fear of legal backlash.

For this reason, it is often beneficial to interview former peers and subordinates as well. They will often speak more openly and certainly will give a different perspective than the candidate's boss. Here is a list of questions to consider in a reference interview.

1. What were the candidate's responsibilities in order of importance?

2. How would you rate the candidate's quality and volume of work?

3. How would you describe the candidate's attitude?

4. How would you characterize the relationship between the candidate and his or her staff?

5. What were the candidate's principal strengths, outstanding successes and significant failures?

6. What was the most effective way to motivate the candidate?

7. How would you compare the candidate's performance to the performance of others with similar responsibilities?

8. How did the candidate work with other people?

9. How did you feel about the candidate's management practices?

10. How would you describe the candidate's success in training, developing and motivating subordinates?

11. What could the candidate have done to produce even better results?

12. What organization did the candidate work for prior to joining you and what organization did he or she join after leaving?

13. What would subordinates say about the candidate?

14. What does the candidate need to do for continued professional growth and development?

15. What other information do you have that would help to develop a more complete picture of the candidate?

Personality Profiles

Many organizations find that personality profiles are a useful tool in selecting candidates. Profiles are of least use on a one shot basis. They become most useful when you do a profile of all current employees and simultaneously rate all employees as to their strengths. It is then possible in most cases to correlate scores on the profile tests and actual behavior on the job. Qm2 recommends using a Personal Strengths Profile from PREP Profile Systems. Contact us for details.

Outside Interviews

The benefit of having a person outside of your organization conduct an interview with a candidate is to provide more objectivity and/or to bring some special knowledge or skills to the interviewing process. In most cases it does not make sense to do this unless you are hiring a very high level and key person. Here's some ideas on outside interviewers.

1. A Technical Expert. If you are hiring an accountant or a computer expert, and these are areas which you do not have internal expertise in, it may pay to find an outside expert such as your CPA firm to help interview.

2. Consultants. If your firm is currently working with consultants whose work may be relevant to the person being hired, the outside consultant may provide some valuable insights from an interview with the candidate.

3. An Organizational Psychologist. A face to face interview with a person trained in understanding people in organizations can deepen and enhance the sort of data that might come from the personality profiles described above. In this case it is important that the individual not only have psychological but also organizational background.

4. Your Peers. If you are the organization’s CEO, for instance, and you are seeking to hire someone to be on your management team, it may be worthwhile to have another CEO who knows you and your organization interview the candidate. If you are a department head, you might have another department head conduct an interview for you.

5. Board of Directors. It may be particularly important for the Board to interview anyone at a senior level, since the board may have to work with this individual now or in the future.

Selection

Ultimately, the decision of whom to select should rest with a single individual. In order to help this individual make the best decision, it is helpful to have input from all those who are involved in the interviewing process.

When you are making a selection, the candidate should not only meet your rational criteria, but also your gut criteria. In too many cases, the candidate met all the rational criteria, but someone didn't feel right, and no one helped the person with the "uneasy feeling" pin down what it was all about. In cases like this, it is not unusual to find that a poor hiring decision gets made. This is particularly true if the person responsible for making the decision is not skilled in encouraging and extracting information from others, and then listening to it.

The Offer

Remember the organization's offer is based on rational economic considerations. The candidate on the other hand is viewing the offer from an emotional point of view. By romancing and motivating the candidate, you boast his or her value. If the offer is perceived to be lower than this value, the candidate may feel devalued.

To avoid this disappointment:

1. Design the offer based on your understanding of the push and pull motivations that are unique to the candidate.

2. Make the offer in person, not by phone or letter. This allows you to reinforce the individual's value.

3. The first focus of this meeting should be on the job and the candidate's long term contributions and opportunities. The second focus is the offer.

4. When the offer is accepted, involve the candidate in the new job immediately, before the start date. This can be done in several ways:Provide reading materials.Assign a project.Introduce the candidate to future peers and staff.Help the candidate relocate.Help the spouse get established if a relocation is necessary.