How to hire the best people

How To Hire The Best People www.thechemistrygroup.com

H O W T O H I R E T H E B E S T P E O P L E

www.thechemistrygroup.com


Intro

Does this look familiar?

A recruiter hires someone and the hiring manager says, “Well, they aren’t any good.”

The recruiter asks,

“Well, what would be?” The hiring manager replies,

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

And the recruiter says,

“How can I find it if you can’t explain it?”

And the hiring manager answers,

“You’re a professional recruiter.”

And so it goes on in circles


The problem: there’s no standard Quality of Hire metric in business today.

Think about the people you’ve hired recently.

Are they any good?

What are you using to draw your conclusions - a gut feeling or an objective metric?

Everybody thinks they know

what they’re ta lk ing about , but

nobody understands each other.


Qual i ty of Hire

You might say it’s not so easy, that your roles are unique. Well, you’re dead right.

That’s why we want to make Quality of Hire simple.

See there’s no quick formula that you can apply across all jobs to determine Quality of Hire. It’s situational. It changes with every business and every role.

Even if you sell and market similar products, your leadership, culture and business stage will all affect what the right person looks like.

But get it right and you get great performance - productivity and happiness shoot up.


Quality of Hire

The first, most essential step is developing a common language and a clear definition of what you’re looking for.

This way you avoid conversations and practices that skate around subjects without getting to the heart of them. It’s not about, ‘I’ll know it when I see it’, which shrouds information in subjectivity and bias. It’s about objectivity and clarity, and finding the best people for your business.


You don’t.

Businesses don’t need the best people.

They need the right people.

So, how do you f ind the best people?


We pretend that there are great candidates and candidates that are not great. We say that these great candidates, these talented people, are scarce.

And then we fight; we start a war, spending tons of money and energy competing madly over a small pool of talent with absolutely no idea whether they’ll actually be any good in the job.

Finding the best people



A World At War For Talent A World At Peace With A Large Talent Pool



‘The answer isn’t new recrui tment gadgets’


By reframing our thinking and realising that ‘right’ is specific to every organisation, we can avoid the ‘war for talent’ and open up all kinds of possibilities.

Instead of businesses spending millions of dollars trying to attract the same people, they could pool resources and select people based on their definitions of what ‘right’ is.


The answer isn’t new recruitment gadgets, because we’re building on a broken infrastructure. The answer is thinking about what we really need from people.


There’s a r ight person for every job?

When the right people are in the right place miracles happen. Happiness across the workplace climbs, productivity jumps up and there are more ideas in the air. Everything’s better. Everyone wins. We call this What Great Looks Like. Put simply, it’s a consistent definition of the behaviours high performers display. Put even more simply, it’s the right person for the job.


There’s a right person for every job

What does a great employee look l ike? Who are your high performers and what makes them great? What do you real ly need from your new hire?


Is it a conscientious, introverted person who really wants to help people, who loses track of time when they’re finding ways to solve people’s problems? Or is it someone with sales experience on his or her CV? Is it a gregarious IT whiz who bounces ideas off of people and makes fascinating connections between ideas? Or is it someone who studied computer science?

Would Jony Ives – who suggested glass iPhone screens and brushed aluminium MacBooks – have been successful at Microsoft? At IBM? Would he have been given a P45 instead of a knighthood?

Talent is situational.

There’s a right person for every job


In April 1995 McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks with a gun and robbed them. He did this in broad daylight, in full view of cameras, with no apparent attempt to disguise himself.

He was arrested that night after the CCTV footage was distributed. When the police arrived he was visibly stunned, and said incredulously:

“But I wore the juice!”

Wheeler had rubbed lemon juice on his face in the mistaken belief that, since lemon juice is an ingredient in invisible ink, it would make his face invisible to security cameras.

Your process has to be al igned with What Great Looks Like.


Your process has to be aligned with What Great Looks Like

McArthur Wheeler did not lack logic, he just drew the wrong conclusion from the information he had. Unfortunately for him, he used the wrong tools for the job. We sometimes do the same. We say, “Well, he was a great employee for our competitor, so he’ll be great here.” But that misses out all of the other information - the difference in the cultures of organisations, the different requirements of jobs. When we think like this, we’re rubbing lemon juice on our faces because the qualities that made them great elsewhere might have nothing to do with what makes your high performers great.

What’s th is got to do wi th recrui tment?




But it’s fixable. The processes we use to hire people — the screening tools, the tests, the interviews — need to align with What Great Looks Like, what the right person looks like, and need to be formed in a common language that everybody understands.


So what are you measuring? And why?

Are you measuring for experience?

Why?

Does intellect actually correlate with performance? Are you measuring intellect?

Why?

Does intellect correlate with performance? Yeah? How do you know? Do you have evidence?




Qual i ty of Hire is get t ing the r ight people into your organisat ion.

The model Chemistry has built, based on everything we’ve done in 12 years of working with global businesses, shows that organisations that employ the right people consistently (great Quality of Hire) demonstrate these three key attributes:


Chemistry ’s qual i ty of h ire model



Their processes and decision making are totally aligned to the definition of the right person.The hiring process has been designed to deliver the broadest, most diverse pool of talent to the hiring manager.

Hiring managers and the stakeholders in the hiring process have total confidence in the process.Everybody involved in the hiring process, 3rd party agencies, recruiters and hiring managers uses the same language to describe the ‘right person’.

The process and the people involved are focused on the end user (the applicant/candidate). They think about them, and treat them, as if they were customers.

Acc

urac

y

Bus

ines

s Co

nfid

ence

Bra

nd

Enha

ncem

ent


Accuracy:

Measuring candidates on the things that matter


Whether it’s screening CVs or online assessments, whatever processes you have in place need to be focused on finding the right people.

Chemistry worked with a FTSE100 company where the Head of Talent Acquisition had won a CEO Award for contributing to the organisational good.

The award was for getting the cost per hire down to less than $1000.

But we’d been asked by the Sales Director to look into why there was 54% first year attrition, costing upwards of £10 million per annum.

Accuracy

Proc

ess


They weren’t hiring the right people because they weren’t creating an environment where the right person could be hired.

The recruitment team were effective at hiring. The jobs were filled within budget, just with the wrong people.

Accuracy

We worked with another business that was convinced that they needed people who were in the 60th percentile in verbal and numerical reasoning tests. When we analysed their high, middle and low performers, it turned out that their verbal and numerical reasoning scores had nothing to do with job performance. What they were measuring had no bearing at all on what was needed to be productive.

You can have teams of HR people, scientists, psychologists, experts and others working on What Great Looks Like. You could have the clearest picture in the world of What Great Looks Like, and still hire the complete wrong people if the processes you have aren’t set up specifically to find What Great Looks Like.


Accuracy

“The jobs were f i l led wi thin budget , just wi th the wrong people.”


Bia

s

18% of men in the US are over 6 feet tall, but 61% of the 450 men running Fortune 500 companies are over 6 feet tall.

You won’t be surprised to learn that being tall doesn’t actually make you any better at most jobs. Tall men aren’t better leaders, they’re just beneficiaries of a bias in selecting leaders.

Objectivity gets rid of this. It removes bias, dramatically opening out the talent pool and increasing diversity.

We see bias all the time, like when we worked with Lexis Nexis to transform their sales team. It involved defining What Great Looks Like and bringing their hiring procedures into line with that definition. There were lots of good results, but one of the most striking was that 41% of new recruits were women, compared to only 10% before.

Accuracy


Accuracy

Removing bias means people real ly have to be good at what they do, which is great for d iversi ty.


Business Conf idence:

Using a consistent language across the hir ing team


A common language means that everybody understands when people talk about what they’re looking for.

When people don’t speak the same language you wind up with bizarre situations:

We asked all the managers in a FTSE 100 company if they knew what ‘right’ looked like. 100% said they were very confident that they knew. In the same survey,

we asked if they were confident their peers knew what ‘right’ looked like, and 0% said they were.

What’s going on here? Nobody had any confidence at all in the system. Everyone was walking around with internal biases. Every person operated with the quiet assurance they knew what they were doing when hiring and were equally self-assured that nobody else did.

Business Confidence

Ali

gnm

ent


“Nobody’s on the same page, nobody’s using the same language”


Business Confidence

Think back to that conversation between the recruiter and the hiring manager with the ‘I’ll know it when I see it’. It’s the same thing. Nobody’s on the same page, nobody’s using the same language or data points to determine whether someone’s right for the job.

The more interviews that take place without documented alignment to the measures of candidate success, the more likely it is to be a bad hire.

Because there’s no way you can achieve Quality of Hire when nobody actually knows what it is.

Start-ups have pretty good retention and productivity rates. It’s easier for the leaders of small businesses to successfully articulate and identify what they’re looking for and find it. This could be replicated in large organisations by defining those qualities in a way everybody can understand.

For example, one of our clients, by using a small cadre of people to do the hiring is able to make sure that what they have identified as ‘right’ for their 12,000 strong retail business remains undiluted and clear – the more focused the hiring philosophy, the less chance of people being on the wrong page, no matter how big the organisation.


“I have no faith in our recruitment process.”

“We use all the wrong agencies.”

“I would do something about poor performance but I’m not confident I’ve got the right people coming through.”

Does this all sound a bit too familiar?

Most hiring managers hate hiring; it’s risky, full of administration and recruitment agencies filling their inbox with unnecessary CVs and their voicemail with unwarranted messages. It’s a pain.

Why would they want to do it if they didn’t have to?

Man

ager

Expe

rien

ce

Business Confidence


Business Confidence

The best recrui tment has hir ing managers engaged at the beginning of the process, kept out of the middle, and reintroduced towards the end.


Business Confidence

The most accurate decisions are made when the experience and intuition of hiring managers is augmented with objective data, when they have data to which they can apply their expertise.

Recruiters are the experts and hiring managers are the decision makers. The more confident the hiring manager is in the decision at the point of hire - because the hiring manager doesn’t suspect that they’re the wrong hire and look for confirmation of that - the more likely it is that the candidate will make it through their first six months.

“Recrui ters are the experts and hir ing managers are the decis ion makers.”


Brand Enchancement :

A seamless, informative process that gives feedback


Giving candidates a great experience isn’t just about interacting with future customers and people who are interested in your brand and enhancing your brand for marketing reasons (though that is a huge opportunity).

It’s giving your business every chance to find the right people.

Brand Enhancement

Cand

idat

e Ex

peri

ence


We worked with SAP to help them build a programme for hiring young people. We wanted it to be as interesting and enjoyable an experience for candidates as possible. And the results were dramatic:

Brand Enhancement

Dropout rates went from 97% of candidates to 25%, which gave SAP an additional 30,000 candidates. So that is 30,000 people - possibly perfect for the job - that would never have been seen if they hadn’t had a great candidate experience. And 100% of candidates — whether successful or not — said that it increased their motivation to work for SAP.

Dropout rates went from 97% of candidates to 25%


They want the process to be easy - they want to be able to do it on their mobile, they want to know up front what they’re getting themselves into and they don’t want it to take three years.

They want to be kept informed - it’s easy to give candidates feedback and they will thank you for it.

Brand Enhancement

Appl icants mainly want just two things:


Brand Enhancement

A great recrui tment experience gives you more candidates who want to work for you, which gives you a much bet ter chance of f inding the r ight person.


Web

inar We’ve produced two webinars on

hiring the best people. These are available on demand now.

Watch now to find out:

• How global enterprise businesses have implemented this methodology

• How to create a measure of Quality of Hire and then report against it

• How you can differentiate your business with great people

Watch now: How to hire The Best People

Watch now: How to measure Quality of Hire?

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2355749115436629250





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visit us:www.thechemistrygroup.com

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How to hire the best people