Hiring WINNERS is not that difficult.
It’s a simple 3-step process.
The two most important things you have to do to be a successful manager is hire top producers and avoid hiring the wrong people. Studies show that making a bad hiring decision for an hourly employee will cost you 3 to 4 time their annual pay to replace them. Hiring the wrong person in a salaried position can cost you up to 10 times their annual pay to find and train a replacement.
The virus has skewed all the numbers on hiring (see https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf) on labor turnover in recent months. Bad hiring decisions lead to turnover, stress, and unnecessary expenses. At Keese Consulting our goal is to “Work ourselves out of business—Because if you hire winners you don’t have to hire replacements.” Follow our simple process:
First: Let the job talk to you.
Let the job tell you what kind of person would have the best opportunity to be successful in that position. It’s like letting a chair talk to you. If a chair could talk it would tell you what kind of person could sit there and be comfortable all day. It would tell you how heavy the person should be, how tall, how wide. Then you could go out and find that person and let them sit comfortably in that chair forever. The job will talk to you the same way. Find the person that fits what the job is looking for and you will have greatly increased your odds of HIRING A WINNER, greatly increased the odds of that new hire being successful.
Second: Establish a Top Producer Benchmark.
Look at your best 2 or 3 people in the position. How do they do things? How do they communicate? Do they work well with other people? What causes them stress? Then do the same thing with 2 or 3 of your people who seem to be struggling or “just getting by” in the position.
Now you have constructed a model of the person who would have the best opportunity to be a successful member of your team, a good fit and a winner. You can “clone” your best people and not waste time and resources on strugglers.
Be consistent with your section headers… especially if they are an ordered list.
Third: Use an instrument that will allow you to measure your applicant or candidate.
This will help you to make a sound hiring decision based on how well the applicant “fits” the job and how close he or she is to someone we know to be successful. The right instrument will help you avoid wasting time training, coaxing, and cajoling stragglers who may never become profitable for your team.
The right instrument will help you avoid the three biggest mistakes employers make:
- We sometimes are impressed by how good the applicant is in the interview. The challenge here is that they may interview well because they’ve had a lot of practice interviewing—Not A Good Sign!
- We like to hire people we like. Unfortunately we tend to like people that are just like us. So we hire them and send them off to do a job we’d hate to do—Almost Guaranteeing Their Failure!
- Unfortunately, for way too many employers it all comes down to the proverbial coin toss—Flip that coin—heads we hire him/her……tails we don’t.
A simple three step process To Hire Top Producers:
- Identify the job – establish a word picture of the job that you can use in your “want ad” to make sure you are attracting the right kinds of people
- Identify your top producers – what kind of people do you want to hire and what kind of people do you want to avoid
- Clone your top producers – build a team of top producers and spend your time motivating and rewarding instead of coaxing and cajoling.
Keese Consulting Can Help
At Keese Consulting we offer a variety of services that can help you learn to interview effectively, identify candidate traits to ensure they will be great fits for your team.
