WARNING: Interview-Savvy Applicants!!!
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BY CAROL QUINN
Can you really say you can single out the High Performers from the master performers? If you’ve made your share of hiring mistakes, then it’s unrealistic to think you’ll suddenly start hiring only the best now. With huge job loss numbers in the news daily, everyone knows finding a job is tough. For each job opening, the quantity of applicants applying is in record numbers. Recently in Miami, 45 job openings drew media attention as applicants began camping out the night before. In Atlanta, thousands of job fair attendees waited in a line that wrapped around the exterior of the Convention Center. The stakes have never been higher for both applicant and company. When it comes to hiring the best, an abundance of applicants does not make it easier. Applicants are becoming more educated and are pulling out all the stops to be the ONE selected even when they’re not the best pick. These convincing candidates finally reveal themselves after the hire through sales that don’t close, deadlines that pass and customers that walk. In this dangerously fragile economy, one bad hire could spell disaster for a company already on the edge.
High Performers are the problem-solvers, not the excuse-makers. Rather than wallow, they take positive steps. They get results while others fall short. They focus on and creatively figure how to do it even when everything’s stacked against them. When the going gets tough they get going and it’s not just a cliché! What separates High Performers from the rest is how they respond to obstacles. The economy is not only the biggest obstacle that many companies face, it’s becoming the biggest excuse people use for not achieving. Challenging times reveal a person’s true attitude - be it good or bad. Unless you know how to accurately expose this vital info before hiring, you may end up with employees who produce excuses rather than the results you need to move your company through these tough times.
For those companies who are hiring or will be soon, the time to sharpen your employee selection skills is right now before more hiring mishaps can happen. For those of you who know me personally, you know I’m an advocate for changing oneself in order to change one’s results. The same goes for companies. To hire better employees (the results), the company’s interviewers must change. No change means zero improvement. You know the old adage; “You can’t do what you’ve always done and expect different results.” To hire more High Performers, your company’s interviewers must improve their hiring skills. It’s that simple!
I am also an advocate for Motivation-Based Interviewing or “MBI”, and not because I developed it but because I believe in it! Hiring is my passion. I learned behavior-based interviewing and soon figured out why it doesn’t always work. There are many holes that allow marginal and poor performers to slip through. I know this first hand because I’ve extended job offers to them. I know the pain and I wanted to put a stop to the misery caused by bad hiring. The holes in behavior-based interviewing made the selection process an uneven playing field that typically favored the applicant. I didn’t like that. I not only wanted to level the playing field, I wanted to tilt it in the favor of me - the interviewer. MBI does that. How? It closes the holes! It teaches interviewers what makes a High Performer tick so they can identify them more accurately. It’s simple and common sense once you learn it, and that makes it easy-to-use. It aligns with basic human behavior and principles of motivation. Hiring based on skill level alone is ineffective because skills only enable a person to do a job - not motivate them to do it. MBI includes skill assessment but adds effective motivation assessment to the hiring formula. There has to be something to MBI…it’s going global. It’s now being used in over ten countries. It’s taught in two languages - English and Spanish. One Fortune 5 company with over 100,000 employees has already trained more than one thousand of their interviewers to use MBI. The training is even available in a cutting-edge, interactive web course. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. Contact me personally and I’ll give you FREE access to the web course for a day to check it out.
Interviewers need training. Period! If you don’t believe me, survey those involved in your company who make the hiring decisions. Find out exactly how they learned to hire High Performers…that’s is if they did. I have been teaching MBI workshops for over a decade. In each, I poll the participants. You might be amazed to learn that every time at least 80% admit to having no prior formal training on how to hire yet most have been hiring for years. The remaining 20% who have received some kind of training typically state it consisted of one of more of the following: legal do’s and don’ts, interviewing basics, or behavior-based interviewing - none of which are useful for identifying and hiring High Performers. The well-trained were few and far between. One workshop attendee who held a high-level job stated even though he had been interviewing and making hiring decisions for 19 years, he never felt confident in what he was doing. Years of interviewing experience without the right training is no better. Practicing doing it wrong doesn’t make it right. Instead it can lead interviewers to falsely believe that they are good at hiring when they are really only OK.
Few companies really know what kind of prior training those allowed to bring in new employees have. It’s as if bad hiring is thought to have no ramifications or hiring well requires no special training - and that couldn’t be further from the truth. It would be like an airline ignorantly allowing pilots without training to fly their planes. Bad hiring doesn’t have to happen! Mediocre and average employees can be kept to a minimum. I’ve created an easy-to-use, downloadable survey form you can use (see link below). It’s free and it’s simple. Have your interviewers (HR staff and Managers) complete and return the form to you in 48 hours. It takes less than 5 minutes to complete. The results just may shock you. It will tell you if the interviewers in your organization need training on how to best identify and hire the top job performers. With the abundance of applicants and the obstacles ahead of us, correctly singling out those who will produce the best results from those best at Oscar-winning interviewing will be how your company survives and thrives. Motivation-Based Interviewing can help you distinguish those motivated to get the job from those motivated to do the job. For additional free resources on how to hire High Performers read the Interviewer Tips 1-5 archived on the Hire/Higher Attitude Newsletter. In addition, the Learning Center offers video tutorials, a book excerpt and an interactive practice exercise to learn how to write great interview questions.
For the FREE One-Day access to the MBI Web Course that teaches interviewers how to hire High Performers, click the e-mail address link and complete the form -> Carol@HireAuthority.com. This will also subscribe you to the Hire/Higher Attitude Newsletter if you’re not already receiving it.
Click here to download the free Interviewer Survey Questions.
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