6 Proven Hiring Tactics That Will Upgrade Your Entire Team

Episode #343 6 Proven Hiring Tactics That Will Upgrade Your Entire Team

HIGH PERFORMING TEAMS ARE BUILT ON TOP TALENT

I was preparing a resource for a group of CEOs who are currently undertaking our Business Accelerator Program, when one part of the content just jumped out at me: How do you improve your odds of bringing outstanding talent into your team?

You’ve probably heard me say that high performing teams start with high performing individuals—and that is so true. It’s almost impossible to take a team of mediocre people and drag them kicking and screaming to something that resembles high performance.

It’d be like me lining up at the start of the Olympic 100-meter final. The outcome is predetermined, and nothing that I could do would change that.

Just remember why No Bullsh!t Leadership is here. We’re reconnecting the process of leadership with the need to get results. It’s all about achieving high performance and getting superior outcomes.

I decided to compose this newsletter, because I want to help you through that treacherous terrain of securing top talent. The higher the quality of your people, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to leverage that talent to produce extraordinary performance.

I start by exploring the natural limitations of your current situation, and how it affects your potential candidate pool; I then look at how to attract the best talent from that pool by having a clear employee value proposition; and I wrap up with six practical tips to help you sort out the dogs from the fleas in the talent acquisition process.

EVERY COMPANY FACES LIMITATIONS

Every company faces natural limitations when they’re trying to attract and retain the best talent. Some of these limitations are within your power to influence and others aren’t. But the path to victory starts with being realistic about the limitations, and understanding why they exist.

Some of them are just cold, hard facts, but it’s really important to know what you’re dealing with. There are four key factors that I’d really encourage you to have a think about:

1. Your Industry

Different industries attract different types of people and, at the risk of using sweeping generalizations, let me give you an example.

People who are extroverted and communicate well often go into sales. Less outgoing people may be attracted to professions like accountancy.

People who are at the pointy end of the bell curve for intellect often end up in a profession like medicine, or an industry where you can make a lot of money, like investment banking.

Your industry may either attract or repel the top candidates. For example, there are loads of industries that require engineering skills, but the top engineering graduates coming out of universities are much more likely to seek out jobs in robotics or renewable energy—industries that are the future of where we’re going.

They’re much less likely to seek out jobs in mining, or gas exploration, or coal-fired power stations.

Your industry matters, not just because of the supply and demand dynamics in today’s labor market, but also due to the ease or difficulty with which you’re going to be able to access a broad pool of talent in the future.

2. Your Location

If your business operates in a major city centre, happy days. You’ve got ready access to a deep pool of talent. But if you’re running, say, a copper mine in the mountains of Argentina, you have to import your talent, which makes it a lot harder.

Some countries rely on the resources sector, as Australia does, and so many towns in remote areas were built specifically to support a local mine or a power station. This provides you with a natural (but, let’s face it, somewhat limited) talent pool.

3. Mobility of Talent

How mobile is your talent pool? And can you use mobility to mitigate some of the other constraints, like industry and location?

For some jobs, you can draw on a pool of talent that’s very mobile. So, for example, if you’re hiring skills in finance or IT, these skills move easily between industries and locations.

The mining sector has solved its location problem, at least to some extent, by leveraging worker mobility. They use fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers. This enables them to bring workers in from a major city centre, like Perth or Sydney, to work a block of shifts in a remote location with an otherwise shallow pool of talent.

This can work out pretty well for everyone involved, too. For example, a truck driver or an electrician earning, say, $120,000 in the city can easily earn double that as a FIFO worker at a remote mine site.

4. Your Brand

Everyone wants to work for Google. If your brand isn’t highly recognisable and sought after, you’ll have to move to the back of the queue for talent with everyone else. It’s important to be realistic about how positively or negatively your brand might be perceived in the market. This can affect your applicant pool significantly.

Once you understand these four types of limitations, it’s best to think of the concept of talent in relative terms. You’re looking to hire the best possible people from your available talent pool.

YOUR EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION

Once you’ve worked out what the pool of available candidates looks like for your business, the next question is: How do you scoop the cream from the top of that pool?

It starts with the face you put out into the world—your brand.

Interestingly, the brand alone may not attract people. You need to give potential talent a few clues about what your brand stands for. Enter, the employee value proposition (EVP). The EVP is designed to answer a critical question. Why would someone want to work for you? What’s in it for them, other than the opportunity to exchange their time for your money?

The EVP is a statement that simply says: These are the reasons why you might want to come and work for our company. It can cover any aspect of working for you that people might find attractive, whether it’s tangible or intangible. It’s going to help you to differentiate your benefits, and your future talent to make a better decision about which job to take.

There’s really only one rule for an EVP: Any claims you make in your EVP have to be true!

I got some excellent first-hand experience of this when I was CEO at CS Energy. We were facing a dwindling supply of critical skills. Our engineers collectively had hundreds, possibly thousands of years’ experience in how to build, maintain, and operate coal-fired power stations… but they were emptying the benches.

They were sailing off into retirement – and to make matters worse, very few engineering graduates from university were keen to get into coal-fired power generation (I can’t for the life of me imagine why that would be the case!).

Our aging workforce problem was just like every other business, except that our situation had been given a shot of steroids: not only were we losing critical skills, but we fundamentally weren’t able to replace those skills at the front end.

That’s when we realized how important it is to put together an employee value proposition.

Rather than relying on our own (possibly misguided) impressions of what the company offered, we started to think about what it was really like for our employees.

We started surveying all potential talent that we had access to. We gathered data about the people’s impressions of CS Energy right across the recruitment lifecycle – what they thought it would be like to work there, and how it evolved into what it was really like to work there.

We asked them some survey questions at various points:

• When they applied for a job;
• After they were interviewed for the job;
• After they were appointed to the job; and
• At the end of their probationary period.

We also interviewed a wide range of existing employees about what they thought the benefits of working at CS Energy actually were. All this fed into our EVP.

We were able to use this to bridge the gap between people’s ill-informed impressions of the company at the application stage, and their much better-formed impressions after working there for a period of time.

Think about how you might develop an EVP for your business. It doesn’t have to be overly elaborate or comprehensive. It just has to showcase the benefits of working for your company. You can use the EVP in job ads, in social media posts, in client testimonials.

Once you know, with a high degree of confidence, the benefits that working for your company offers, you’ll be able to communicate that in a compelling way. And that is going to get the attention of the top talent in your potential candidate pool.

SIX STEPS TO BETTER TALENT

By now, you should understand your limitations as an employer a little better. This is going to help you to be more realistic about the talent pool you’re able to tap into. But remember, securing top talent is an imprecise science, and when you hire the wrong person, it can be incredibly expensive (and I don’t just mean in a financial sense).

There are steps you can take to reduce your risk of making a poor hire. I’m going to walk you through six of these steps. By the end of this newsletter, you’re going to be much better placed to secure top talent.

1. Job ads and brand awareness.

Getting the talent to turn up at your front door is the first big challenge. Every piece of information you put into the public domain should consider your company’s broad array of stakeholders.

Who are your stakeholders? Investors, customers, regulators, the communities you operate in. But also think about your employees, both current and future.

When most companies advertise a role, they completely fail to grab the attention of the talent pool. Most job ads are written from the company’s perspective. “Here’s what we’re looking for”; “Here’s what we need”; “Here’s the skills you need to be able to demonstrate to be considered a genuine candidate”.

There’s rarely a clear articulation of what’s in it for them. In all our job ads we lead out with: “Here’s the opportunity we’re offering you”; “Here’s why this role could be good for you”; “Here’s why our company is a great place to work”.

Doesn’t that just have a completely different feel to it?

2. Resume filtering.

Once you work out how to attract the right talent, you’ll need to get really good at sifting through multiple resumes. Some roles attract dozens or even hundreds of applicants.

You should be looking for green lights, things like:

• Do they have the necessary skills and experience to do the job?
• Have they taken effort preparing the resume and cover letter to show they understand the job spec?
• Have they previously worked for reputable companies in roles that are either equivalent to or a precursor to this role?

You should also be looking for red flags. For example,

• Do they have a series of short stay tenures – 12 months or less?
• Do they talk about what they achieved in their previous roles or just the duties assigned to the positions they held?

A few simple criteria like these should give you a basis for including or eliminating applicants before you spend a lot of time on them. Then you can get down to the real work of differentiating between them, so that you can isolate the top talent.

3. Interviewing.

Many interviewers miss the opportunity to go really deep to work out what the applicant knows, what they’ve done, and what they’re likely to do if you hire them.

A huge shout-out here to John Brereton, who was a Chief HR Officer at NTI when I was there 20 years or so ago. He taught me a great interviewing technique that I’ve used ever since. And let me tell you, it really separates the dogs from the fleas.

The interview questions are structured around the key accountabilities of the role you’re hiring. Each question seeks specific evidence of the interviewee having successfully achieved a similar outcome to what you’re seeking, in one of their previous roles:

These questions are designed to test the applicant’s ability to do the job. For example, I’d ask the questions:

• “Describe for me in detail a time in the last two years when you did ‘X’.”
• “What role did you play specifically in achieving that outcome?”

And, if it’s something they haven’t done yet, no problem… the follow-up question becomes:

• “Given you haven’t yet had the opportunity to do that, could you please walk me through the steps you take if you did have to achieve that outcome?”

With each answer, you look to probe, and to drill, and to redirect. So, they might give you an answer that you’re not quite happy with and you say, “Yes, but please explain to me specifically what you did.”

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide…

You’re going to find out pretty quickly who knows their sh!t and who’s just talking a good game.

4. Aptitude and psych testing.

Now, I actually covered off on this in more detail in an old episode, Ep.237: Hiring Better People. It took a slightly different spin on the hiring process, so it’s definitely worth revisiting that episode and listening to it in conjunction with this one.

For your final candidate (or perhaps to separate a couple of close candidates), aptitude and psych testing is a highly valuable tool. It isn’t the be-all-and-end-all, but it’s an important tool to give you additional data points about the individual.

There are a range of different tests you can put applicants through, depending on the seniority and criticality of the role. For the big executive roles I used to hire, I’d give them the full battery – four hours of gruelling testing:

• Aptitude tests (verbal, numerical, and abstract reasoning, at a minimum);
• Critical thinking skills;
• Personality profiling; and
• Emotional intelligence assessment.

These tests are well-established, they’re reliable, and they are highly valuable. In the best case, the tests will confirm what you’ve already observed in other parts of the process, but they also provide a backstop. They can identify things that you can’t necessarily observe in an interview or in a formal reference check.

And that is worth its weight in gold.

5. Reference checks.

The number one rule about reference checking is… don’t delegate it to anyone else.

If you leave it to a recruiter, they’re just going to tick the boxes on the way through to telling you why you should appoint the candidate. Their incentive is to place that candidate, earn their fee, and move on to the next assignment.

Your objective in reference checking is to reduce your hiring risk by uncovering any potential problems that may exist with that candidate. So, you should consider using the following protocols, because they served me well over the years:

• Take a keen personal interest in any direct report role that you’re hiring;
• Insist that the candidate provides their last two direct managers as referees (if they don’t want to do that, fine – it’s their prerogative, but that’s a huge red flag);
• Drill down on any inconsistencies that you might have found at interview: for example, “When we interviewed Marty, he didn’t seem confident when he was explaining how he built peer relationships and used them to influence corporate outcomes… What’s your experience of him in this regard?”
• Drill down on any weak areas that were exposed in the psych and aptitude testing (without divulging the specific results, of course): for example, “We have a minor concern that Marty may have difficulty with very complex or ambiguous situations. Did you have the opportunity to evaluate him in these scenarios?”; and
• Ask about the exact contribution of the individual to the team’s achievements: for example, “Marty talked quite eloquently about the implementation of the new structure, but it sounded like it was more driven by your chief HR officer. Can you please give us your assessment of Marty’s personal impact in that situation?”.

And just to be clear, there’s nothing better than an informal opinion. If you can find someone to talk to who you respect and trust, who has worked closely with the individual in the past, that is unbeatable. A totally confidential off-the-record chat is going to give you the real story.

6. Employment contracts.

Let me say again, hiring is an imprecise science, so you need contractual clarity just in case it all goes to custard. In the event of a bad hire, you shouldn’t be locked into contractual provisions that make it really hard to terminate the relationship.

I know in some countries (like New Zealand and France), industrial relations law is incredibly restrictive for employers. But as a minimum, you should ensure you have contract clauses that clearly outline:

• Exactly what compensation and benefits the individual is entitled to;
• The probationary period (which, by the way, should be as long as the employment law in your jurisdiction allows – maximize your optionality!);
• The conditions governing termination, both for cause (which is termination on the grounds of unacceptable conduct or inadequate performance), or for convenience (which is like a no-fault divorce – when the love is gone).

When we’re just about to hire someone, we are at peak positivity and optimism. And that’s when our talent has the most leverage. We have no doubt that they’re going to be total game changers for our team, so this is where we need to be really mindful of Zig Ziglar’s mantra: Expect the best, but prepare for the worst.

ALL THIS… AND TRUST YOUR GUT!

I hope this practical step-by-step guide helps you to take a more structured approach to finding and securing top talent. It’s important to understand your talent pool, that you know what you can offer to potential employees via the employee value proposition, and that you use all the tools at your disposal to help you identify and secure top talent.

Just one other thing that no one really talks about: don’t be afraid to listen to your gut.

If someone ‘doesn’t feel right’, they’re probably not… even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. When all else fails, listen to your gut. It might not be quantifiable, but you’d be surprised how accurate it is. It saved me from many disasters over my time as a corporate executive. And anytime I ignored it, I paid a hefty price.