Making Great Hires
Yesterday, RoundPegg hosted a 15-minute webinar on improving your hiring process in order to increase your odds of making a great hire.
RoundPegg’s Chief Psychologist, Dr. Natalie Baumgartner runs through the hiring landscape, the pitfalls most fall into, how to improve the process and finally, how RoundPegg can help.
Please check it out. And if you’d like to learn more or have specific problems you’re struggling with please email us at: Natalie.Baumgartner@roundpegg.com.
Discovering Culture + Values
photo by: didbygraham
We recently uncovered an article on The Ladders about questions to ask to discover the culture of your prospective employer. As they say, “company culture is everything. You can’t work where you don’t fit.”
Bravo.
Their questions are great for a prospective job seeker, but we want to offer up a few points on how to view this from the company’s point of view. After all, culture is a two-way street.
Culture ultimately comes down to what is valued. From a company’s point of view what is valued is what gets rewarded (not always, but it should be).
Every new person who walks through your doors will change the culture. If it’s a new CEO, she’ll change it a lot. If it’s a new marketing assistant then the sphere of influence will be much more limited.
So how do you identify what a prospective new hire values?
- Ask about mentors. Have them describe a person they look to for mentorship (even informally). What is it about the person they admire and try to emulate? Get the candidate to list the six or seven attributes that person has that are worth emulating.
- Rate themselves against their mentor. Then ask the candidate to rate themselves against their mentor on those six or seven attributes.
- Utilize the resume. Believe it or not, resumes can be used for things other than skills and accomplishments. Look for patterns in their work. Did they constantly create something new, did they improve existing processes or do they talk about how they got more out of a team?
- Ask them to talk through their obituary. Okay, maybe morbid (try retirement announcement if that’s less so) and maybe a little out of left field. But the idea is to get them to think about the things of which they are most proud. These will announce their values loud and clear.
- Where and when were they most successful? At which job were they most successful? Ask them to describe the environment. What contributed to their success? What were the people like around them? What were their best traits?
At RoundPegg we’re objectively quantifying culture to provide a rigorous data point which you can use in the interview. Please contact us if you’d like to find out more about using it in your interviewing process – info [at] roundpegg [dot] com.
What other techniques have worked well to identify what an individual values in the past?
What is RoundPegg?
At RoundPegg we recognize that ‘A’ players are largely situational. That is, people perform more effectively and efficiently when they fit the work environment. When they share values, work style and have a personality that jives with the team.
RoundPegg’s mission is to help companies find the right person to hire based not upon what people have accomplished, but how they’ve accomplished it. And similarly, to help job seekers understand the environments in which they work best and help them identify the companies where they’ll have the best chance of succeeding.
To learn more download our ‘one page’ PDF.
Hiring is Hard. Here’s Proof.
photo by dbking
Hiring is a headache.
Dr. John Sullivan’s latest post at ERE pulls together a ton of shocking numbers that should convince you we need to find a better way.
50% new executive turnover — nearly half of new executive hires quit or are fired within the first 18 months at a new employer (Source: Corporate Leadership Council).
50% of the processes users (both managers and new hires) later regret their “buying” decision (Source: The Recruiting Roundtable). In addition, 25% of new hires later regret taking their new job within one year (Source: Challenger, Gray)
66% regret hiring decisions — Nearly two-thirds of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions (Source: DDI)
Hiring and retaining below or even average performers have real opportunity costs because top performers can increase productivity, revenue, and profit by between 40% and 67% over average performers (Source: McKinsey & Co.)
Only a 19% success rate — only one out of five of the process output can be classified as unequivocal successes (Source: Leadership IQ).
Basically, we’re not good at hiring, we regret most of the decisions we make, there’s a big difference in contribution between average and good people and the people we hire are often unhappy we choose them. That’s pretty damning.
A good hire requires finding someone with the skills to do the job AND the right person who can thrive in your company’s work environment. Our guts don’t adequately assess the latter because inevitably we revert to deciding whether the candidate is one we can imagine having a beer with after work.
Again, why we created RoundPegg. RoundPegg will objectively and rigorously identify which candidates will function best with your company’s culture, with the work team and the hiring manager. We just released the first version of the application. If you’d like to learn more please drop us a line at employers [at] roundpegg [dot] com.
Employee Retention – Good or Bad?
photo by antkriz
Dueling philosophies on hiring and employee retention at the latest Web2.0 conference (via WSJ Blog).
Mark Zuckerberg touted the Facebook culture of hiring entrepreneurially inclined people who burn brilliantly and then fade away (presumably of their own volition). Tony Hsieh of Zappos provided the counter philosophy of finding the folks who fit the culture and aspire to stick with the company for 10 years or more.
Who is right?
Both. The key that makes both of them right is that everyone is aware of the culture. Each CEO knows exactly what they’re looking for and how to identify it. Success is achieved by aligning the culture/working philosophy and getting everyone pulling in the same direction.
Corporate success comes from recognizing what you want to achieve and defining the culture accordingly.
Facebook is about changing our relationship with each other and the Internet. Thus, they need people who can conceptualize a radically different world and execute to get everyone there.
Meanwhile, Zappos is about customer service. So it makes sense that Zappos creates a very cultivative company. How employees are treated is how they’ll in turn treat customers.
There aren’t necessarily good or bad cultures. But there are good or bad cultures for you.
The ability to explicitly describe what each company is looking for enables people to opt-in or out of the application process. And that same explicitness enables everyone hiring at the company to hold all applicants up to the same light and identify the ones who will be successful by honoring the company’s philosophy.
Unfortunately, most companies can’t state their cultural philosophy as passionately or clearly as Zuckerberg and Hsieh. And, it’s not much of a surprise there aren’t many companies doing as well as these two either.
