I’m clear that hiring the right people for the right roles for the right times is crucial to the success of your business, whether you’re starting, scaling, sailing, or selling it.
Yet, we business owners and CEOs too often outsource that function to fee-chasing recruiting houses and internal compliance-driven risk avoiders.
By the way, there are great recruiters out there who do care and are brilliant like Shawn Murphy, James Michael, Andy Stone, Jayde Stokes, Bronwyn Edwards, (I’ve probably missed some – sorry) and also great internal HR recruiters who will remain anonymous for now. But I’m afraid they are a minority.
The result is too many right people in the wrong spots and vice versa.
Simply put, we aren’t investing effectively in choosing our people in the first place, let alone developing them once they’re in place.
- We don’t thoroughly define the role and clearly and specifically know what success in the first 90 days looks like.
- Our recruiting process is dysfunctional.
- Our onboarding process is deficient.
- Their direct supervisors are too busy doing work they can’t delegate, due to the team already being fully loaded, to coach them to be great.
The underlying cause for the above is we’ve been conned into demanding ‘do more with less’ beyond reality.
You can thank cost accounting and wrongly labelling certain investments as costs or overheads, such as payroll and learning and development, for the lack of resourcing all things related to hiring and developing talent.
I believe that the biggest gap in recruiting is identifying the candidate’s true north – their true values aligned to their true interests or passion or purpose, not just their experience and capability.
You won’t get that reliably from their resume or CV.
You’ll get that from appropriate validity-proven profiling, astute, researched, and prepared interviewing, and paid project and stress testing.
The latter paid project testing is where you’ll see them in action, and provided it’s designed effectively and managed and monitored effectively, you’ll get what you and they deserve.
You’ll discover the values they operate from, their self- and situational awareness, adaptability, and resilience, as well as their capability and suitability for the role in that space in the organisation.
The data available from Gallup points to the cost of this deficiency where employee engagement is low, executive selection is too erroneous and performance and productivity lost opportunity is massive.
Where is your business in this picture?
If you don’t want to invest in attracting the best people, why bother with growing or improving your business?
Act now.
I help you the leader, great recruiters, and internal hirers with appropriate profiling, designing interviews and designing the paid project and stress testing. It’s part of my purpose in helping myself and those who ask, to be the best version of ourselves, whether leader or follower. We can’t have one without the other.
