Whether they care to admit it or not, hiring managers, like most people, suffer from tunnel vision, unconscious prejudices, and a far narrower range of experience than they realize. Thinking they know what they want, they shut themselves off to innovative possibilities. For that reason, a smart approach to hiring would be to sample widely, beyond your usual selection criteria 
First of two parts By Dr. John Sullivan What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything. Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). 
How do you find—or, better, create—individuals who operate serenely in chaos, and know when to punt, duck, or even run for cover? How do you find people who can focus relentlessly for days on end, without being distracted by the noise around them? Are these skills teachable? I don’t think so. But they’re learnable—and often taught too damn well to children raised in dysfunctional families. In many ways, the environment of the dysfunctional family is quite similar to that of a start-up 
There is no perfect person for a role. There is a perfect role for a person. Smart people know this, and make their role their own. They also play to other people's strengths. 
When you make a mistake, you're forced to look back and find out exactly where you went wrong, and formulate a new plan for your next attempt. By contrast, when you succeed, you don't always know exactly what you did right that made you successful (often, it's luck). 
As they say, "Tigers don't change their stripes." Everyone follows patterns in their career, so the key to effective interviewing is understanding those patterns and deciding if someone is a good fit for both your culture, and the job you are offerring. "When making judgments about whom to hire and promote, context is crucial. It's important to know the situations in which people worked, and the methods they used, before judging their performance. In the case of the CEO, for instance, it's a lot easier to post great numbers in a booming industry than a shrinking one. Unfortunately, we usually don't look at those factors. Evidence from several studies suggests that we're biased toward results when making these crucial decisions. Time and again, we look at what candidates have achieved—without asking where or how they achieved it." 
The traditional interview is a poor predictor of performance on the job, and nowhere is this more evident that in executive interviewing. To rise to senior leadership, people simply must excel at a certain kind of performance art--the art of "taking a meeting." Here are some tips to look beyond the performance art, and assess someone's ability to get results in a way that fits your organizational culture. |
I've long said that salary surveys are a poor way to set a salary target for hiring. Apparently I'm not alone. According to a 2010 survey of Mercer clients, 72% of the executives said the focus in the future would be placed more on paying for critical skills and less on market comparisons 
You ask a ton of questions. Your process is exhaustive -- and exhausting. And that might be your problem. Hiring using a laundry list of attributes is not as effective as focusing on a small number of key attributes that really drive performance in the job. 
Why do some companies consistently outperform their competition? Why do some people become champions while others fall short? What skills do you need to improve to reach your highest potential? 
Senior executives express frustration these days about corporate talent hunts at all levels. The gripe: "We're pouring tremendous energy into finding the right resumes. But we're losing the ability to find the right people." When you insist on a "perfect resume" you often miss out on people with the character traits to drive business results. Forty-one percent of companies that made a bad hire estimate that it cost them more than $25,000 and one in four said it cost more than $50,000. A rushed decision was the top reason companies gave for making a bad hire. 
"We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? ... people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness." 
"Most of us want to follow our gut when it comes to identifying good leaders, whether it’s a CEO or a presidential candidate. The problem is that our guts often play with our minds." |
