The Hiring Game: Applicant -vs- Employer
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BY CAROL QUINN
It’s a test of skill and it’s hard to say who will win. The big event is the job interview. A lot is at stake in this game. For the applicant…it’s their livelihood, their lifestyle and for some even their self-worth. For the company, it can make the difference between success and failure. We’re past the elimination process of the playoffs…this is the Super Bowl equivalent event. This is where the final winner is decided. It’s down to the wire. The interviewers have made their decision, the job applicant has been selected and the offer has been accepted. Now we get the answer we’ve all been waiting for - who was the best?
Once on board and your new hire starts feeling comfortable - you get to learn whether you actually hired a High Performer…or not. If you did, you, the employer, wins (really everyone wins in this scenario). And if not, it means the applicant’s skill at interviewing was better than the interviewer’s. It means the applicant was better at convincing the interviewer than the interviewer was at getting to the truth. Ohhh…the agony of defeat! Jim Collin’s, author of Good to Great said it so well; “Get the right people on the bus…” because “people aren’t your #1 asset - the RIGHT people are!”
As an interviewer, 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 the answer is probably not. With job loss numbers still in the news almost daily, everyone knows finding a job is tough. For each job opening, the quantity of applicants applying is in record numbers. In Miami, 45 job openings drew media attention as applicants began camping out the night before. In Atlanta, the evening news showed thousands of job fair attendees waiting in a line that wrapped around the exterior of the Convention Center. Many media outlets have jumped in to help by providing job seekers with the latest and greatest advice on how to ace an interview.
The stakes have never been higher for both applicant and company. Contrary to what many believe, 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. Many have prepared and practiced their answers and are ready to respond to the traditional interview questions when asked. These convincing candidates finally reveal themselves after the hire through sales that don’t close, deadlines that pass, customers that walk and the excuses that flow as rationale for dismal results. In this dangerously fragile economy, one bad hire could spell disaster for a company already on the edge. The key to rebounding could be as simple as hiring High Performers.
High Performers are the problem-solvers, not the excuse-makers. Rather than wallow in hardship or defeat, they take positive steps. They are motivated when others aren’t. They stay focused on the desired outcome and creatively work on figuring out a way 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 difficult challenges and the roadblocks in front of them. The economy is not only the biggest obstacle that many companies face, it’s becoming the biggest excuse people use for not achieving…second to “it’s not my fault the work environment demotivates me”. Challenging times reveal a person’s true attitude - and this recession has revealed many people who possess an attitude that’s ineffective for achieving goals. Unless you know how to accurately expose this vital information 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 happen. As a Keynote Speaker, I’m often asked to speak about the process of achievement and on how to create a maximum performance organization. I’m a huge advocate of changing oneself in order to change one’s results. The same applies to companies. To change hiring results and hire more High Performers, the company’s interviewers cannot keep doing what they have always done. The interviewers must improve their interviewing skill for their hiring results to improve. No change means zero improvement. You know the old adage; “You can’t do what you’ve always done and expect better results.” It’s that simple! To alter the outcome, interviewers must step up their game. After all, the applicants have. Due to the recession, many job seekers have been forced to sharpen their skill at being interviewed. What, in the last decade, have companies done to improve the skill of those conducting the interviews?
Interviewing and hiring is an evolutionary process. We have evolved from hypothetical interview questions, hiring based on gut-feelings and behavior-based interviewing. In this millennium, we have advanced our understanding of achievement and success and have applied what we have learned to the employee selection process. We now know it’s more than just the applicant’s job skills that enable them to achieve extraordinary results. We know it also involves an effective attitude for overcoming obstacles as well as a passion for doing the work. It’s the interviewing methodology called Motivation-Based Interviewing, or “MBI”, that takes all 3 of these components into consideration.
There are many holes in the earlier interviewing methodologies that allow marginal and poor performers to slip through. I know this first hand because I’ve unwittingly extended job offers to some of those marginal job performers. I know the pain it causes. The holes in behavior-based interviewing makes the selection process an uneven playing field that more often favors the applicant. I don’t like that fact. As an interviewer, I personally believe the playing field should be level, or better yet, it should be slanted in the interviewer’s favor so they can more often pick the best job performers. I like MBI because it does just that. How? It closes the holes! It teaches interviewers exactly what makes a High Performer tick so they can better identify them. 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 skill only enables a person to do a job. It may mean they can perform the job but it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be highly motivated or a High Performer. MBI includes skill assessment but adds a powerfully effective motivation assessment piece to the hiring formula. There has to be something to MBI…it’s going global. It’s taught in two languages and one Fortune 5 company already has more than one thousand of their interviewers trained to use MBI. Recently, the training was made available in a cutting-edge, interactive web course and has been available in book-format and instructor-led courses for a while now. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be.
If you’re not convinced interviewers need training now, take the time to survey those involved in your company’s employee selection process. Find out exactly how they learned to hire High Performers…that’s if they did. There’s a link below to a free form you can use that you may find helpful. In a survey conducted over the past decade, you also might be amazed to learn that more than 80% of the interviewers polled admitted to having no prior formal training on how to hire even though most had been hiring for years. Those who had received some kind of training typically stated it consisted of one or 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 the High Performers. Many admitted to relying almost solely on their gut-instinct when making a hiring decision because they knew no other way. The well-trained interviewer was few and far between. One interviewer 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 often results in countless hiring mistakes. Practicing doing it wrong can lead both to interviewers falsely believing that they are good at hiring when they aren’t and worse yet, a mediocre-performing organization. Alternately, effective interviewer training can be the powerful game-changer that takes your company from average to being the #1 champion in your industry. The ROI can be incomprehensible. IT IS POSSIBLE to hire only High Performers, those who are highly motivated, who are willing to run through walls to achieve goals and who say “I can’t believe I get paid to do this job” because they love the work that they do that much. Accomplishing this is not that hard, especially right now in this labor market, but interviewers must be taught how first. Learning motivation-based interviewing is the game-changing play. No kidding.
Click here to download the free Interviewer Survey Questionnaire Form.
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LINKS to learn more about motivation-based interviewing:
Book Preview: Don’t Hire Anyone Without Me!
Financial Times article: The cure for ‘have-a-go’ interviewers
Informational Flyer: What Is MBI?
Promotional Discount: $50 OFF MBI Web Course Training
Evan Carmichael article: If Bad Hires Squeaked
The Hire/Higher Attitude Newsletter: Truth in Interview - Part I
PURCHASE MBI training (book, e-book, online training): Hire Authority, Inc.
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