Selecting Top Talent - Luck or Logic?

I reread this today on the Solutions4Hiring Website (one of our strategic partners for Top Sales Performers) Lately, I would believe that the statistics are even less that 14% of traditional hiring processes yielding successful hires. In a bad economy, resumes are stretched and exaggerated more than ever. Read on for the solution.

The story repeats itself over and over again, in every business: "Our new hire had all the right experience, good references, and interviewed like a champ! But here it is six weeks later, and he's not working out. We can't ignore the fact that he's wrong for the job, and we made a hiring mistake. Now, we have to start all over again!"

Better luck next time? Not necessarily - that is, if you continue to select talent the way you always have, hoping that you'll be luckier next time!

According to research by Michigan State University, the typical interviewing process in use by most companies is at best only 14% effective in predicting successful job hires. The remaining 86% keeps your recruiting manager extremely busy managing the proverbial revolving door of resumes, applications, hires, and fires. In turn, your business profits suffer from lapses in staff coverage that equate to lost opportunities, erosion of customer satisfaction, continual training expenses, and burnout for the remaining employees. That's not counting your plummeting business reputation as seen by the outside world. Negative impact is so serious from continual talent churn that studies now show it is a contributing factor to the decline of company stock prices - and a reason for quality employees to carefully avoid working for those companies.

So, now that talent churn has been proven as a serious negative impact on your company's bottom line, what are the options to remedy ineffective hiring practices? Choose one:

1. Interview more people, faster!

2. Throw all your resources at recruitment!

3. Find and implement a more effective process!

If you chose "3" above, then you are on the right track. You are beginning to realize that continuing to hire as you always have will not move your business forward successfully. Today, with intangible assets (intellectual talent) accounting for up to 80% of the total market value of US corporations, something has to change. A new emphasis on identifying and retaining top talent is far overdue.

One such emphasis is on creating a clearer definition of the key jobs your company has to fill. You will have a much better chance of finding the right fit for a job if you DEFINE THE JOB and then HIRE THE MATCHING TALENT to fill it. A logical approach, the concept is still too new for many businesses to comprehend, as they repeatedly practice talent mismanagement through "fire, ready, aim" instead of "ready, aim, fire!" Besides, is it possible to measure a JOB and then apply the SAME measurement to TALENT?

Yes, you can do it. You can define jobs and identify matching talent with factual, unbiased measurements to improve the rating on your company's talent management scorecard. It's a matter of beginning your next hiring process by assessing the JOB first, and quantifying its top 3-5 "key accountabilities." The result will be a template for objectively assessing and hiring MATCHING TALENT.

Add this new assessment methodology to your current hiring process to help prevent poor hires, and the related drain on your business profits. Investments made in selecting the right talent for evolving jobs continue to be the most valuable investments in the future success of any business. You can increase your "luck" in finding the right person for the job by adding a new and measurable "logic" to hiring talent!

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