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Unusual Hiring Practices

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Unusual Hiring PracticesInterviews are terrible vessels for people to get to know each other truthfully. Everyone is putting on a show. To make a terrible analogy, consider dating. People are at their best, hiding their flaws and playing up their strengths, flirting with lying and omission in order to control the perception of the other. Interviews share a lot of this.

The opposition between the interviewer and interviewee makes it so that both parties are trying to sell to each other. The interviewer sells the idea that working in that organization is a dream while the interviewee sells the idea that they are the perfect match for that position. It’s pretty ludicrous when you think about it. Rather than have an open and honest dialogue about the organization, the candidate and the fit or unfit, interviewers to flaunt about how great the organization is in, rejoicing in the schadenfreude experienced by the candidates who so desperately want to make it through and be accepted by the all-powerful interviewer. It boils down to power-tripping that adds very little value to a meticulous selection process.

That’s why I try to deconstruct this framework. Hiring is not about us evaluating candidates. It’s about trying to establish whether or not fundamentally there is a cultural and behavioral fit. We will also consider past experience and skills but as secondary to the decision making the process. The primary driver is the fit and both the candidate and the interviewer are discovering together whether the fit is there or not.

Even though it’s straight-forward, deconstructing the current paradigm is not easy given how ingrained it is in our thought-process. Deconstruction is a multi-pronged process and it involves the following elements:

1. Get out of the Evaluator chair. You are no different, no better than the person you are interviewing. Be normal, be human and make others feel comfortable. This gives people the chance to disarm and to forget about having to prove themselves. Having the chance to see people in their natural state is the greatest revelation you can attain from an interview. No one I know can work in interview mode all the time. It’s not sustainable. Work is stressful and the hours are long. That’s why we want an interview process that leads us to find people who feel naturally comfortable in our culture.

2. Focus on the behavioral aspects. We tend to be very impressed with big names and big titles on people’s resumes. But we are not hiring their education nor their work experience. We are hiring a person. And that’s what we want to get to know. How do they react when feeling examined? How do they feel when we are smiling? How do they feel about being confronted? How do they deal with pressure? And you don’t find out these behavioral trends from asking about them. You find out about these things by getting to know a candidate. Go beyond your own biases and use your senses.

3. I strongly advise candidates not to work with us. Why should we try to pretend that it’s great working here? It’s not. It’s work. Most people would not choose to work here if they had 50 billion dollars in the bank. That’s just a fact of life. We don’t want people choosing us for the wrong reasons. Paying bills, needing a job, wanting to advance a career. Those are all legitimate pursuits that most of us share. But we want to hire people based on the deeper motivational drivers. We want to find people who want to be a part of something bigger than their own selves, who do not mind getting into constructive conflicts and will stand by their opinion. We understand that people that we bring into the company are the very fabric of the company’s soul, which most of us refer to as culture.

So we deconstruct the traditional hiring paradigm by forgetting about skills and focusing on the person. We deconstruct the interview paradigm by not positioning ourselves as interviewers but as partners who are working together to find out whether or not this is indeed a good fit for all of us. We find out more about people when they get a chance to speak more honestly and when we truly hear what is being said. We forget about the labels and the brands that are pegged to resumes and we look at the intersection of values and goals. Those are the pillars for a solid and prosperous relationship. And that’s what hiring is in the end. A relationship.

About the Author

Gabriel Fairman, Founder and CEO of BureauWorks, has been working on transforming localization business processes into technology over the past 15 years. Over the past 5 years he has focused on developing algorithms that make sense of bigger data patterns in order to predict translator performance based on data obtained through peer reviews. The challenge on building AI towards that end is that translations can be great and still be significantly changed by reviewers. As changes are for the most pasty subjective, there is no direct correlation that can be established to easily determine the quality of translations based on simple data sets. The challenge requires digging deeper into more complex correlations that allow translation quality to be managed through algorithms that can reliably pair the right linguists to any given document. Gabriel’s focus is to think systemically as opposed to through a causality framework in order to solve these harder problems through AI.

How To Make Sure You Hire The Right Person For The Job

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | How To Make Sure You Hire The Right Person For The JobHiring the wrong person can be a costly mistake and leave you feeling frustrated that you have no one to complete the work that needs to be done. Therefore, it’s extremely important that if you want your organization to succeed, that you hire the right person for the job each and every time.

There are steps you can take to help ensure you achieve this goal and aren’t wasting your time or anyone else’s. Remember that it’s never a bad idea to reach out to current employees when you’re on the hunt to fill positions to see if they have any suggestions before you go out looking elsewhere.

Work with A Specialist

There are companies such as Devonshire recruitment whose job and desire it is to help you fill positions at your workplace. They have a pool of candidates who are prepared to speak with you and will be a good fit right from the start. You can make sure you hire the right person for the job by being specific and transparent with your job description, and only bringing people in for interviews who align with your objectives and specific position requirements.

Invite Candidates to Take Psychometric Tests

There are dozens of psychometric tests such as The PI Behavioral Assessment Test, which help employers to filter out the best candidates for the benefit of their business.

These kinds of tests measure a candidate’s skill level in relation to problem-solving, ability to do the work, behavioral traits, and patterns and etc.

Contact References

It’s good practice to ask for several references from candidates on your final job application. Not only should you look to see who they are, but you should also take the extra step and time to contact them. You can learn a lot about an individual by how they’ve previously performed and what their strengths and weaknesses have been in the past. Ask the right questions and encourage the other person to be as candid and open as possible in their responses.

Hold Multiple Interviews

One interview isn’t going to give you enough time to figure out if the person you’re speaking with is right for the job. Therefore, it’s important to hold multiple interviews and in many different forms before hiring someone. For instance:

  • On the phone
  • Face-to-face
  • Interviews held by different leadership members
  • Interviews held by different department heads
  • Verbal and written tests

These are a few ways for how you can mix up the interview process and evaluate a candidate on their various skills and abilities to make sure they’re a good fit at your workplace. It’ll be helpful to get feedback from other people at your company as well to hear what they have to say about a potential candidate so you can compare notes.

Take Your Time

What’s going to help you out the most in your search to find the right candidate for the job is to go slow and take your time. Rushing through the interview process and failing to write a detailed job description is only going to hurt you and your company in the long run. Instead, take advantage of these suggestions for how you can make sure you’re hiring the right person for the job, and this way, they should also be more likely to stick around for the long-term.

How Educators Can Accommodate Varied Learning Styles

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Those who are educators will know that there are varied different learning styles and that to reach the understanding of your whole group; you need to be able to tap into each style equally. Whether working as a teacher, learning assistant, tutor, or a training provider in a workplace setting, it’s vital to consider how you can accommodate different learning styles.

Auditory Based Learners

Some of those in your learning setting will be auditory based learners. For these individuals, it’s essential that you put in place plenty of instances whereby they can listen to themselves and others. Such methods could include listening to task directions instead of reading them. For educators to accommodate these learners, it’s also a good idea to implement the use of podcasts in your sessions. You can use recording devices to have learners record themselves retelling vital information and then play it back. Provide audiotapes of your classes or training sessions for the same reason. Ensure that you read your students the learning material aloud and also have them read it out loud to one another. When auditory based learners have too much to read in their heads, it’s difficult for them to take it all in.

Kinesthetic Based Learners

Those who are kinesthetic based learners will absorb information better with a hands-on approach. Kinesthetic learners prefer to hold or touch to learn new things. Kinesthetic learners enjoy the principle of jumping in and trying things first! To aid these kinds of learners, you can help them to understand an idea with the use of physical objects. You could also make use of art supplies and allow students to move around and act things out. School Furniture and its layout, can help you to accommodate these types of learners. You might be able to use your furniture in a way that creates a great environment for kinesthetic learners. For example, by positioning the chairs in a circular shape facing each other or creating an open space to stand, move or create art on the floor.

Visual Based Learners

Visual learners gain the best understanding when they can observe and see things. They will produce their best work when they can look at demonstrations, diagrams, videos or pictures. If these learners can watch someone else complete the task at hand first; they will be able to absorb the information and produce their own results quickly. To accommodate visual-based learners, it’s a good idea to use flashcards, photographs, maps, flowcharts or video content. You can ask students to act out demonstrations for each other to watch and in this way, you’ll be catering to kinesthetic learners too.

When you are providing a class or a training session, you’ll always want to incorporate methods that appeal to every different learning style. By doing so, you’ll extend your reach and allow everyone in the group to reach their full potential. When your training session or class is complete, you can always ask your students for feedback so that you can make improvements ongoing. Training and education in the workplace or classroom, is best achieved by catering to every individual personally.

How to Keep Your Team Agile and Aligned Under Pressure

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article | How to Keep Your Team Agile and Aligned Under Pressure
 
As a leader, you are constantly trying to maximize the magical effort to effectiveness equation (a.k.a. efficiency). You can see this play out in your daily operations and ultimately in the P&L. However, there is an intangible asset that is very difficult to quantify — but without it you cannot ultimately succeed. This asset is, of course, alignment.

Alignment matters because it is an amalgamation of understanding, agreement, buy-in, engagement, empowerment, and accountability.

It amazes me how few leaders understand how to harness, measure, leverage, and ultimately achieve true alignment behind their strategies and objectives. Too many leaders assume that just because they have spoken, their teams are all on the same page with them — and everything will proceed from there. Achieving true alignment takes a significant allocation of effort. But there is a direct correlation between the extent of alignment and the results achieved.

Therefore, it is in your best interest as a leader to focus more on achieving, gauging, and calibrating alignment than almost any other executional activity. The good news is that achieving alignment is more science than art — meaning that there are tools that work nearly every time in getting people behind an idea, strategy, or mission. Below, allow me to present three of my favorites:

1. Define and Drive organizational culture. Culture is the glue that holds an organization together. It’s often the reason behind why people choose to stay with your company over jumping ship to a competitor. As a leader, it is your role to create, foster, and harness culture against organizational objectives. Conduct focus groups, one on one’s, and surveys to get a strong grip on the current state of your business culture. Then define a desired state for the values and behavior you expect to see on display daily, and embody them in everything you do.

Once you are well on your way towards your desired cultural state, you need to then define your business’s hedgehog concept. This is time very well spent because it takes your underlying culture and applies it to specific business problems. By deriving the intersection of three key questions: what are we wildly passionate about, what can we do better than anyone else, and what drives our economic engine, you set a direction for people that is easy to align with. Ask the three questions at all levels of the organization, calibrate the responses, and then package the inputs into an easily digestible reason for organizational being that relates to the majority of your enterprise. Then you can focus organizational attention on how you are doing, not on what you are doing — or even worse, why you are doing it.

2. Don’t just communicate, connect. When you give a presentation on your business strategy, key priorities, and other initiatives, how often do you check (either via polls, surveys, show of hands) what people understood from your communication, what they are taking away, and whether or not they agree? Many leaders are scared to ask these types of questions because they don’t like being second-guessed. Still, it’s better to be second-guessed than to be zero-followed! Taking the time to gauge the degree to which key messages are landing, as well as whether the audience is aligned, is probably the most important investment you can make as a leader.

Once you know where your participants are on a given issue, the next step is to connect the dots for them. Do the hard work of helping them see what you see and understand why you are making these choices. Allow them to question, build on, and enhance your ideas. And finally, move forward, together.

3. Keep it very simple. It is relatively easy to stick to one road, drive the speed limit, buckle up for safety, and arrive at your destination both on time and with all passengers on board. Once you start introducing shortcuts, detours, scenic routes, and bypasses into the mix, you are almost destined to lose some people along the way. No one (besides Forrest Gump maybe) meanders their way to success. You pick a destination based on the best available information (expected weather, road conditions, permitted speed), calculate the mileage, gas expense, and time to arrival, and then start driving in as straight a line as possible until you reach your desired location, or in this case desired mission, goal, or objective.

Leaders who jump from highway to highway, seemingly without rationale, are leaders who lose the power of an organization primed and focused on achieving results. You have to know when to forge ahead, when to change course, and when to abandon ship — but at each inflection point, the more important concept to remember is that you need to reengage the enterprise when change is afoot, and never assume that people know the key why’s and what’s and how’s behind the new direction.

About the Author

Omar L. Harris is Associate Vice-President and Country Manager for Allergan PLC in Brazil. He is the author of Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams available for purchase in ebook or print on Amazon.com. Please follow him on instagram, twitter, LinkedIn, and/or his website for more information and engagement.

How to hire the best talent

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Recruiting Talent|How to hire the best talentMost business leaders understand they need great people working for them to make their business a success. People are an organisations most valuable asset. Build a workplace where people are valued and you have a much greater chance of attracting talent.

In the current economic climate, if you want to hire the best talent you also have to understand these four things.

  • It’s an employees’ market
  • Salary isn’t the only thing employees care about
  • It’s hard to hire great people
  • The B word (Brexit)

So why do these things matter in the world of recruitment? Let’s take a closer look.

It’s an employees’ market

Unemployment is at an all-time low, which means today’s job market is tough …. for employers! Successful recruitment isn’t easy at the best of times, but with record levels of employment, the search for talent and retention are a huge challenge for businesses large and small.

So, what can businesses do to entice people who are already settled in another job? Well “If the mountain will not come to Muhammed, then Muhammad must go to the mountain”!

Businesses looking for talent can no longer rely on job boards to attract people (these forums only reach those actively seeking jobs). Businesses must understand they need to connect with passive job-seekers. Businesses need to begin by broadening their search. Using social media marketing and LinkedIn to publicise opportunities is a good place to start.

Ultimately, it’s about improving online branding to publicise the fact that you are a great employer (Glassdoor reviews matter). Old-school recruitment methods just don’t work in the current business climate.

It’s now critical that businesses adopt more modern recruitment strategies. Study your competitors so you can figure out what makes you different. You want to be able to tell prospective employees why they should work for you.

Salary isn’t everything

A report by The Psychology of Business on what people really want from their job says that culture is the new salary. While the report refers to American businesses, this shift in company culture appeal also applies to the UK. Business culture in the UK is an important currency for prospective recruits.

According to the Government’s business statistics there were 5.7 million SMEs in the UK in 2018, which accounted for over 99 per cent of all businesses. This is an important fact to consider when it comes to recruitment because most organisations competing for talent are small businesses that don’t have big budgets for large salaries. It’s where culture comes in.

For start-ups and small businesses, talent is an incredibly important asset. Culture is the answer as to how smaller businesses can compete for top talent. A report on workplace culture by LinkedIn says 71 per cent of individuals would consider taking a pay cut to work at a company whose mission and values align with their own. Professionals today just won’t work for leading companies if they have a bad workplace culture.

But what is a good culture? It certainly isn’t bean bags and bowls of fruit. Positive culture is all about giving employees a sense of purpose, providing opportunities for growth, supporting people but holding them accountable, offering flexibility, fostering trust, acknowledging achievements, showing appreciation and more. It takes effort and investment.

However, culture alone won’t cut it. People need to be able to live with financial security. Poor pay is a problem and a fair salary is still important. Small business expert Gene Marks reflects on why SMEs are struggling to find good people. The solution he says is simple – “we just aren’t paying enough.

“Some say that small businesses can’t afford to pay their employees more. I’m not so sure about that. I have clients that insist on paying low hourly wages to warehouse workers and below-market salaries to administrative and support professionals because that’s what they’ve been used to doing for the past decade. These clients are profitable and have the money to pay more. But they don’t.”
Salary isn’t everything, but it needs to be competitive and fair.

Talent scarcity

A recent survey by global business consultancy PwC, found that 72 per cent of CEOs are worried about the availability of key skills, stating that it’s not a lack of people that is the problem, but a lack of people with the RIGHT skills and abilities.

Millennials will soon make up over 50 per cent of the global workforce. They put training at the top of their list when starting a new job or evaluating an existing employer. SMEs have to acknowledge this fact. For the SME, training staff is critical. Millennials want to be in learning cultures. The SMEs grasping this fact will ultimately gain from growing their talent from within.

Brexit and recruitment

Brexit uncertainty has, according to James Stewart of KPMG, “been sapping business confidence for months, and now it is causing the jobs market to grind to a halt. With unclear trading conditions ahead, many companies have decided to hit the pause button on new hires.”

As a result, there has been a sharp increase in the use of temps and contract workers, with businesses choosing temporary recruitment solutions rather than taking on permanent employees until the Brexit dust has settled.

There is a fear amongst businesses around recruitment, particularly in sectors where there is a reliance on EU workers. When (if?) we eventually leave the EU, skill scarcity could potentially be exacerbated once free movement comes to an end.

So how can businesses mitigate against the effects of Brexit?

Aviation recruitment specialist, Ryan Abbott, advises on the UK skills shortage “In a globally connected world where students are bombarded with choices, we need to shout louder to reach potential talent who are unaware of what our industries can offer. Business leaders and recruiters can partner with colleges and schools to directly engage with students and show them the variety of successful careers open to them across UK industries.”

UK businesses need to widen their search and open their eyes to new ways of attracting talent into their organisations, as well as invest more in training from within.