Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Lou Adler for LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.
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As the economy starts to recover in 2014, expect an acceleration in new hiring and a parallel increase in the quit rate. This double-whammy will force managers to take shortcuts, hiring people without proper vetting. This is the root cause of hiring 90-day wonders. These are the people who 90 days later you wonder why they were hired. There are some easy solutions. They all start by redefining the job.
This past year I wrote about 60 hiring-related posts for LinkedIn and Inc. Magazine, and conducted a bunch of webcasts for recruiters. I even wrote another book on interviewing and recruiting for hiring managers. Following is a quick summary of everything.
[Here are the first four of 12 Tips for] Turning 90-Day Wonders into All-star Hiring Decisions
o Define the job before defining the person. Top performers tend to have a different mix of skills than those listed on the traditional job description. To get around this problem, start by defining successful performance. By hiring people who have achieved comparable results, you’ll discover they have exactly the skills required. Here’s the short version on how to prepare these types of performance-based job descriptions. Here’s the complete version and a webcast and legal brief by one of the top labor attorneys in the U.S. He contends this approach is not only more legally sound and a better predictor of success, but also a means to see and hire more diverse candidates, including returning military veterans.
o Use the 30-minute rule to eliminate 50% of hiring mistakes. More hiring mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than any other time. Here are some ideas on how to avoid instant decisions based on first impressions. Big idea: use the interview to prove your instant decision is wrong.
o Ask the most important interview question of all time to assess performance. Ask a person to describe their crowning achievement for each of their past few jobs. Here’s the link to a post describing how to conduct the fact-finding associated with this question and how to assess the answer.
o Ask the second most important interview question of all time to assess potential. Job-related problem-solving is a great predictor of thinking skills, planning, creativity, insight and potential. Here’s how this can be used in tandem with the most significant accomplishment question to better predict on-the-job performance.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He’s also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine and BusinessInsider. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), covers the performance-based process described in this article in more depth.