As businesses look for ways to meet their 2013 goals, business leaders and managers need to look beyond quality control measures and cost-cutting strategies. Business leaders need to go back to the beginning and ensure they have top quality employees on their team, because one of the most important factors in determining your overall business success is your employees. If your employees are hard-working, dedicated and in tune with your overall business goals, you are well on your way to achieving success. But if your employees are less than enthusiastic about their jobs and not clear on the company’s direction, then you may be in for a rough ride in 2013.
But how do you find good employees? What questions should you ask during the interview to weed out the weaker candidates? What qualities should you look for when hiring new team members? Below we will review the three main steps a manager should follow to hire quality talent.
Step 1: Identify Standards
What role will this position fill within the company and how does it fit within your business objectives? What type of person will mesh well with your team? What characteristics must this person possess in order to be successful? As you answer these questions, you will be creating a talent profile for the position.
A talent profile consists of the traits and characteristics that are necessary to succeed in the position you are hiring for. When creating the talent profile, you should also think about what type of personality will fit in with your existing team. Below we have compiled the most commonly found talents along with a short definition of each. You can use these definitions to guide your thinking as you decide which talents you should be selecting for.
Striving Talents
Achiever: A drive that is internal, constant, and self-imposed
Kinesthetic: A need to expend physical energy
Stamina: Capacity for physical endurance
Competition: A need to gauge your success comparatively
Desire: A need to claim significance through independence, excellence, risk, and recognition
Competence: A need for expertise or mastery
Belief: A need to orient your life around certain prevailing values.
Mission: A drive to put your beliefs into action
Service: A drive to be of service to others
Ethics: A clear understanding of right and wrong, which guides your actions
Vision: A drive to paint value-based word pictures about the future
Thinking Talents
Focus: An ability to set goals and to use them every day to guide actions
Discipline: A need to impose structure onto life and work
Arranger: An ability to orchestrate
Work Orientation: A need to mentally rehearse and review
Responsibility: A need to assume personal accountability for your own work
Concept: An ability to develop a framework by which to make sense of things
Performance Orientation: A need to be objective and to measure performance
Strategic Thinking: An ability to play out alternative scenarios in the future .
Business Thinking: The financial application of the strategic thinking talent
Problem Solving: An ability to think things through with incomplete data
Formulation: An ability to find coherent patterns within incoherent data sets
Numerical: An affinity for numbers
Creativity: An ability to break existing configurations in favor of more effective/appealing ones
Relating Talents
Woo: A need to gain the approval of others
Empathy: An ability to identify the feelings and perspectives of others
Relater: A need to build bonds that last
Multirelator: An ability to build an extensive network of acquaintances
Interpersonal: An ability to purposely capitalize upon relationships
Individualized Perception: An awareness of and attentiveness to individual differences
Developer: A need to invest in others and to derive satisfaction in so doing
Stimulator: An ability to create enthusiasm and drama
Team: A need to build feelings of mutual support
Positivity: A need to look on the bright side
Persuasion: An ability to persuade others logically
Command: An ability to take charge
Activator: An impatience to move others to action
Courage: An ability to use emotion to overcome resistance
Step 2: Craft a Solid Job Description and Pay Rate
Your next step is to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the position you are filling. Be sure to also include what traits and experience you require of a candidate. Typically, a good job description includes the following six sections:
Summary: This is an explanation of the main roles of the position. Below is an example of the summary section in a typical field service technician job description:
The Field Service Technician (FST) is an hourly position reporting to the Field Service Manager. This position requires one year of equivalent experience. The primary responsibility of the FST is to maintain the company’s customer printer program. The FST will travel to customer locations, diagnose printer problems and repair printers. In addition, the FST will provide toner cartridge changes at the customer desk when requested by the company’s dispatcher. The FST is responsible to maintain and document an assigned vehicle and inventory.
Primary Responsibilities: In this section, you lay out the main responsibilities for the position. Below are some examples taken from a field service technician job description:
1. Maintain good driving records and valid driver’s license
2. Drive to customer locations as directed by the Dispatcher
3. Diagnose and repair laser printers
4. Complete an accurate and legible Service Ticket for each customer call performed
5. Wear a company provided uniform
6. Manage all inventories assigned
7. Communicate problem resolutions to customers
Essential Duties: In this section you need to detail all duties one is expected to perform. For example, is heavy lifting required for the job? Does one need to use certain equipment or tools regularly?
Qualifications: Under this section you should list what qualifications all candidates must possess in order to apply for this position. For example, what education level is expected? What prior experience is necessary? Are there any other skills required to perform this job?
Profile: This is where you list the talents that you identified above. Are you looking for a self-starter, a good communicator, a strategic thinker, etc.?
Performance Criteria: In this last section of the job description you need to outline how the employee’s performance will be measured. Some examples might include revenue generated, return calls, accurate car inventories, etc.
The above six job description categories need to be well defined and fleshed out before you can move to the interviewing phase. Once you finalize the job description you are ready to start working on your interview questions and strategies.
Step 3: Develop a Thorough Interview Outline
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book, First, Break All the Rules, lays out five steps in the interview process:
1. Make sure that the talent interview stands alone
2. Ask a few open-ended questions and then try to keep quiet
3. Listen for Specifics
4. Clues to Talent
a. Is your candidate a rapid learner?
b. What brings your candidate personal satisfaction?
5. Know what to listen for
Buckingham and Coffman suggest that in order to narrow down the best question/listen-for combinations, you should try them out on your best people and some of your mediocre people. Do the higher caliber employees answer differently than the other employees and are their answers consistent? If the answer is yes, then add that question to your interview repertoire.
Once you are conducting the interview, you should start by putting your applicants at ease. Start with small talk about the weather or something that you may have in common. After that, explain what the position is that he/she is interviewing for. Make sure to review the hours to be worked, explain the job description itself, the starting wage and other company benefits.
Then verbally validate that the applicant has appropriate transportation to and from work and that he/she understands the job responsibilities. Make notes as to the applicant’s appearance and demeanor. You need to make sure that this applicant will represent your company well in front of a customer.
After taking care of the above housekeeping you will go into your open-ended questions that you formulated above. These are the questions that you really need to listen carefully to the answers, because the answers will reveal what the candidate is made up of and will help you determine if he/she possesses the traits and talent you are looking for. Below are some examples of some common open-ended questions:
• Will you please tell me about your hobbies?
• Please talk a little about your personal background and work history.
• How would you describe yourself? Your strengths? Your weaknesses? Your successes? Your failures? Your abilities?
• How would your current/previous boss describe you? How about your friends?
• How do you get along with others? What kind of person rubs you the wrong way? How do peers typically treat you? What kind of person is your current boss?
• Why are you considering this job opportunity?
• Do you prefer working alone or as part of a team?
• What kind of work situations make you uncomfortable?
• What are your career goals?
If there are any disturbing answers to the above questions, simply end the interview and thank the applicant for coming in. If the answers are satisfactory, thank the applicant for coming in and let them know that you will be verifying their past work history and that you will be back in touch soon.
Once you have completed all the interviews, you need to compare all the successful applicant interviews and qualifications and select the most qualified candidate and make him/her a job offer.
Hopefully the above outline will help guide you through setting up your own interviewing process. Hiring quality talent is one of the most critical tasks a manager needs to do in order to succeed. And once that talent is onboard, a manager needs to properly train and develop their employees to ensure that they, too, are successful. It is imperative that your company has a well-documented on-boarding process for all new hires. Without this important piece, the time you have spent finding and hiring the best talent will most likely go to waste.
