| | | | | |  | 800-797-6160 | | | Retention | | Recruiting Question: "We are suffering from high employee turnover. What can we do to build retention into the hiring process?" | | | | | | A shockingly low percentage of new hires go on to stay and succeed in their new positions according to Leadership IQ's Global Talent Management Survey. The study assessed 1463 American companies and 972 Chinese companies on a range of topics, including leadership, engagement, retention, recruiting, and culture. Respondents were human resources executives from companies of different sizes from industries including manufacturing, high-tech, hospital/healthcare/insurance, pharma/biotech/medical device, financial services/banking, and services.
Leadership IQ's three year study involved more than 5,000 hiring managers during more than 20,000 hires and found that while hiring managers often focus interviews on skills, lack of technical skills accounts for only 11 percent of new hire failures. The study revealed that only 19 percent of new hires go on to achieve success. Why? Technical Competency is the Wrong Focus
Busy hiring managers and recruiters working to fulfill job requisitions most often fixate on verifying technical skills, whether for lack of time or lack of interviewing ability. Leadership IQ's study found this to be the wrong focus as more than 80 percent of new hires have the technical skills but still fail.
Technical skills are easy to evaluate. There are many skills tests hiring managers can use, including asking candidates to actually perform the work of the position to evaluate it on the spot. But technical skills are not the only or even the most important skills that employers need in their workforce.
The most effective focus during interviews should be on accurately reading and assessing candidates, interviewing skills that most hiring managers don't have and don't understand.
The interview is a key part of the recruiting and hiring process necessary to gain critical insight into candidates, but the majority of interviews are not focused on getting this insight. Top Reasons New Hires Fail
Leadership IQ reviewed hiring tactics, new hires' performance, personality, and potential, and compiled the reasons new hires failed, defined as being terminated, leaving under pressure, receiving disciplinary action, or getting negative performance reviews. See if your new hires left for any of these reasons:
Coachability – Coachability is the number one reason new hires fail, with 26 percent of new hire failures due to their inability to accept feedback from those they work with, including bosses, colleagues, and customers.
Emotional Intelligence – A close second to lack of coachability is lack of emotional intelligence, with 23 percent of new hire failures due to their inability to understand emotions, their own and others.
Motivation – 17 percent of new hires in Leadership IQ's study failed because of lack of motivation, insufficient drive to succeed and excel in the job.
Temperament – 15 percent of new hires failed with attitudes and personalities unsuited to the functions and tasks of the job and conditions of the work environment. Don't Rely on Ineffective Interview Tactics
Forget about interview clichés like "Tell me about yourself" and "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" If you are scripting your interview questions from books like "101Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions," stop it right now.
Don't rely on gimmicky questions like "If you were a tree, what type of tree would you be?" or leading questions like "We have a team environment here. You've worked on teams before, right?"
These are not going to reveal if the candidate is coachable, has emotional intelligence, and is motivated to succeed in the position with your company.
To develop the interview questions that are going to be effective in getting the valuable insight into candidates you need, start by looking at your current employees. Define the high-performer attitudes you want
Look at your best current employees, the ones with outstanding performance and great attitudes that everyone wants to work with and that your customers compliment. Make a list of up to 10 things that make them high-performers in your organization, such as being collaborative, meeting commitments, or any other traits that make them valuable in their jobs to the business. Define the low-performer attitudes you don't want
Look at your current employees again, but this time look for the ones who are "difficult" or "troublemakers" or have some other negative association. List the top things that make them low-performers or less than desirable as employees and co-workers, such as being inflexible, always arguing, or never taking responsibility.
Now you have a valuable framework for interviews from which to craft effective interview questions that will reveal the types of candidates you want to hire and the ones you want to avoid.
How to Spot Coachbility
Do you know how to spot coachability in a candidate? You're looking for candidates who have been open to input and constructive criticism from bosses, peers, and workgroups, and can make appropriate adjustments in their attitudes and work habits for the good of the company as well as their own careers.
Coachability is an important trait in candidates and employees, indicating ability to be flexible and adaptable to your business needs and the requirements of the job. It indicates a willingness to learn, take advice, and control emotions.
Derek Lauber of Lightbox Leadership suggests asking candidates directly if they have been coached, what has their experience with coaching been like, and what they think about coaching.
Leadership IQ suggests a good way to reveal candidate coachability or lack of it is to ask candidates to describe their former boss, as well as what their former boss would say are their strengths and weaknesses.
Open answers from a candidate reveal an ability to accept and appreciate input, while negative or non-answers such as "I don't really know what my former boss would say are my weaknesses" indicate some inflexibility and warrant further questions.
Hire for Attitude to Avoid New Hire Failures
If you don't want your new hire failure rate to be in that 81 percent, change your recruiting and hiring process and hire for attitude instead of technical skills. That doesn't mean you don't pay attention to technical skills. Just don't make technical skills the whole focus of your hiring process.
How can you know if that candidate in the conference room has the "right attitude" for your company culture and open position? They do not come labeled or prepackage with disclaimers saying "right attitude" or "wrong attitude."
In "Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give it Their All, and They'll Give You Even More," Mark Murphy says that unless you have a very well-defined corporate culture like Southwest Airlines (whose culture is "fun"), you'll have to do a little research to figure out what the "right attitude" is that you want to hire.
While Southwest Airlines tests candidates for attitude and adaptability to their culture by asking them to change into brown shorts or clown suits when they come in for interviews, you might not have such a clear cut way to identify the attitudes you want to hire.
Surveying your frontline employees about the high and low performer traits you identified earlier is what Murphy suggests. He says asking employees and management about the high-performer and low-performer issues, situations, and consequences from their on-the-job experiences with them gives valuable insight and a foundation for developing attitude-focused interview questions.
Interview Questions to Hire for Attitude
If you want to get to the heart of candidates' attitudes and how they compare to the high-performer attitudes you want and need in your company, you need to be asking questions about what your high-performers are doing.
For example, if your top-flight salespeople consistently keep in touch with your best customers by phone, email, and in person, ask sales candidates how they build relationships with customers. If they say they send an email when there hasn't been an order in a couple of months, they don't have the same attitude toward customers as your top performers.
If your best engineers are collaborative idea generators, ask engineer candidates how they work on teams, share information, and get new ideas for projects. If they describe working collaboratively within a diverse team to exchange ideas and research what others are doing in similar areas, they would probably be a good fit for how your company's engineers work.
Murphy advises interviewers not to ruin the effectiveness of interview questions by tacking on "…and how you handled it" or "…and what you did" when asking candidates to discuss specific situations. He advises leaving questions open to get better insight.
Some examples of interview questions to hire for attitude that Murphy gives: - Could you tell me about a time you worked on a team to achieve a goal?
- Could you tell me about a time – separate from performance appraisal – when you got feedback?
- Could you tell me about a time you faced competing priorities?
- Could you tell me about a time you lacked the skills or knowledge to complete a job?
NOT "Tell me about a time you missed an important deadline and what you did about it."
Or you could develop something like Southwest Airlines' "Coat of Arms" used during the selection process, which is a questionnaire with attitude questions they give candidates to complete so they can assess attitude.
Peter Carbonara, writing for Fast Company, describes companies who hire for attitude and train for skills.
Companies like Silicon Graphics Inc., with an autonomous and extremely informal culture, whose worldwide staffing director Eric Lane looks for people's passion and fun sides in the selection process.
Or Doubletree Hotels Corporation, whose executive vice president of human resources Ann Rhoades asks candidates "Tell me about the last time you broke the rules" to reveal who will fit within their culture of freedom, informality, and flexibility.
Some companies, like Nucor Steel, hire for attitude not with questions, but with observations from monitoring construction sites, hiring the plumbers and electricians with the best work habits and practices.
However you do it, stop wasting time and start hiring for attitude. Your new hire fail rate will drop and your hiring success rate will increase, and most importantly, you'll build the passionate and engaged workforce your company needs to grow and compete.
| | | | | | | | |  | What's New | | June | | | How | Targeted Advice For HR Generalists
Human resources professionals today do so much more than filing forms and advertising job openings. From recruitment and staffing, to benefits and compensation, to training and employee development, to legal compliance, they need a wide range of skills and expertise to support business
Read more | | |  | Accolades | | | "Although we've never used an hourly fee-based contract recruitment team before, we appreciate that they provide quick and positive results and well-vetted candidates who are educated about our business. " Jim, Cloud Billing Solution | | | | | | | Featured Webinar:
Talent Data & Sourcing with Swoop! Did you miss our latest webinar?
Stacy Chapman, with Swoop Talent, shows us how to find the right talent, mine your ATS, and maximize the value of your recruiting data!  | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment