To Hire the Best: Make Them Work! by Urs Koenig, PhD, MBA

One of the most important tasks you have as a leader is to build a great team. Building a great team, of course, means hiring right! You cannot spend too much time or effort on hiring wisely. The alternative to hiring wisely? Managing toughly, which is much more time consuming, costly, and emotionally draining.

I have always been intrigued by how so many of our clients and colleagues agree with this on paper but then keep doing the “same old, same old” when it comes to interviewing.

Interviews are often poor predictors for how the person will perform at their job. Some subpar candidates interview well while some great candidates simply don’t present themselves well at all during an interview.  What to do? Make each candidate perform actual work before you make your final hiring decision!

 Homework

The New York Times recently featured the CEO of Palo Alto Software, Sabrina Parson, who does it this way: “Everyone who interviews with us, no matter what the position, gets homework. We do an initial phone interview, and then they get homework before the in-person interview. It’s two hours of work. The purpose of it is not to find the correct answer, but more to see their thought process. But more than 50 percent of the people you send the homework to never contact you again. It’s great because we don’t want that person.”

So there you have it: Giving candidates homework weeds out half of the people; the half you don’t want to talk to anyway! The money and time you save with this approach needs to be invested into working with those who actually submit their homework.

Once you are further into the process and you are down to your top three candidates, have them spend a day in your business doing actual work.

Actual Work

Yes, you will have to be somewhat creative here and yes, of course it might feel a bit staged and artificial but being able to observe each candidate at work or – even better – working side by side with each candidate, beats the best interview hands down! Not only are you able to observe the candidate at his or her tasks, you are also getting insights on how the candidate show up in a somewhat stressful situation and – maybe most importantly – how the person interact with your team members.

But you ask: What about more managerial positions?

Remember: leaders and managers get stuff done through people. Most of the work any leader or manager does includes interacting with people (vs. doing stuff). How can you simulate the real work of a leader or a manager? Have them interact with our team! Not just by having a nice chat but by actually battling out some real business problems.

Again, you need to be somewhat creative here. Ask yourself: what are some of the most important things you expect them to do during their first six months in the job?

Developing and implementing a new product strategy?

Have them walk you and your team through their thinking on a white board. Engage them in a hard discussion and observe how they show up. How concisely do they communicate? How do they build on other people’s ideas? Are they able to explain their thinking without getting defensive?

Building a team?

Have them outline their hiring process to you. Have them conduct a meeting with your existing team. How about a one-on-one goal setting meeting with one of their potential direct reports?

Remember, no matter what job position you are interviewing for: by having the job candidate do real work in your business you will significantly increase your chances of hiring right vs. having to manage toughly.

 Ask yourself:

• How much has it cost in the past to correct a hiring mistake – in training time, salary costs, and lost energy and opportunities?
• How can my organization improve our hiring by making candidates do real work?
• What is the one step I commit to implementing in order to make our hiring more effective?

For more leadership resources and tools, visit Redpoint Coaching.

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