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Hiring best practice – filtering out the tire kickers

17-Mar-2011

Companies who are highly effective at strategic execution follow a disciplined hiring methodology.  This ensures you only hire “A” Players for every role in your company, as described in our previous article “Hiring is too important to get wrong”.

By now you should have created 1 page “Role Scorecards” for each key role in your company – and used them as the basis to construct your job postings.  Describing jobs in this way filters out many unsuitable applicants right from the start - which is a good thing.  You only want strong candidates applying.

The next step is to put another filter in place to refine your applicant list still further.  I personally never look at someone’s resume.  Rather than have people send you their CV (a generic document that may be sent to hundreds of other employers) - instead you send them a “Career History Form” to fill out that asks them exactly what you want to know.  This filters out the tire kickers – because only high caliber “A” Player candidates, who are genuinely serious about applying for your role will complete this step.  

In broad terms, the Career History Form asks applicants to provide you with the following:

For each of their previous roles, details of:

• Date started and date finished (to identify any gaps between jobs)
• Starting and ending salary
• Duties they were accountable for
• Results they achieved (quantified with numbers)
• Challenges they overcame
• Failures or mistakes they experienced
• What they would do differently if they had to do it all again
• What they liked most and least about the role
• The name of their immediate supervisor
• What their supervisor would say their strengths were
• What their supervisor would say their weaknesses were
• Permission to contact supervisor and will they assist us in arranging this?

If you are recruiting for a management role, you also want to know for each of their previous managerial roles:

• A description of the performance of the team they inherited
• What changes they made (as a manager) to improve the team’s performance
• What style of manager their employees would say they were
• Permission to contact employees and will they assist us in arranging this?

Imagine how much easier it will be for you as a hiring manager, when you receive this quality of information from your job applicants – and you can compare them side by side.  Now you have a far better basis to decide who is likely to be good “fit” for your role, and with whom you will spend your valuable time interviewing.  

As you can see, this is a very comprehensive process, one that is designed to draw out the real truth - and we haven't even gotten to the interview stage yet! 

The quality of your strategic execution depends greatly on the quality of people you hire.  You take hiring shortcuts at your peril.   Discipline yourself to do it right the first time - and save yourself the time, money, and heartache that comes along with making bad hiring decisions. 

Hiring is too important to get wrong!

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