Government Executive - Authors - Lou Adler

Why That Person You Really Liked in the Interview Is Probably a Bad Hire

Lou Adler — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 09:54:18 -0500

Sometimes the people with the best team skills are quiet, reserved and introspective when you first meet them.

Sometimes the people with the worst team skills are friendly, warm, outgoing and affable when you first meet them.

And sometimes people on-the-job are just how they seem when you first meet them.

Unfortunately, when we overvalue our initial reaction to a person we tend to hire the wrong person 50 percent of the time: those with good first impressions who underperform. The other mistake is not hiring the right person the same 50 percent of the time: those with weak first impressions who are top performers. This is shown in the grid below.

Here’s a simple approach for improving your hiring success rate by 100 percent by replacing luck with logic.

Script the opening of the interview to increase objectivity. When starting an interview, don’t make any yes or no hiring decision for at least 30 minutes. We tend to ask people we like questions to confirm their ability and people we don’t like questions to confirm their incompetence. The Appendix to The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired has a complete set of sample scripts that cover the first 30-60 minutes of the interview.

Measure first impressions at the end of the interview. Whether the impact of first impressions is important for on-the-job success or not, it’s important to assess it when you’re not being seduced or biased by it. At the end of the interview ask yourself objectively whether the person’s first impression will help or hinder on-the-job performance. If you wait, you’ll discover that 50 percent of those with the best first impressions aren’t necessarily the best performers and 50 percent of those with the not-so-great first impressions are great performers.

Shift your point of view 180 degrees. Assessing team skills before individual strengths is another way to minimize the impact of first impression bias. You can do this by first conducting a work history review looking for the Achiever pattern and then asking this team question:

Can you please describe a major recent team accomplishment?

Role playing this question will help to better understand its value. Start by describing one of your major team accomplishment then answer the following clarifying questions:

Who was on the team and what roles did they play?
When did it occur and what was your assigned role? Did this change at all during the project?
How did you get on the team and did you select any of the team members?
What were the objectives of the team and were they met?
Describe the plan or project and how the team was managed. Were you part of this?
What was your biggest contribution to the team? How were you recognized formally for this?
Who did you influence the most? Did you coach anyone? Did anyone coach you?
What did you like most about the team? Least?
What would you change if you could about the team makeup?
Who were the executives on the team and did you influence them in any way?
What was the biggest team problem or conflict you faced and how did you handle it?

By itself, this type of question and fact-finding reveals a lot about the team skills of the person being interviewed. Now imagine I ask the same questions about two other major team accomplishments within different timeframes. The purpose is to see if the candidate’s team roles are growing in importance.

The trend of a person’s team accomplishments provides tremendous insight about the candidate. Growth in the size, scope, scale and importance of the teams indicates the candidate is respected and trusted by senior people in the company. How and why the person got selected confirms work quality, reliability, cultural fit, the ability to deal with customers, vendors and executives and if the person has developed a cross-functional and strategic perspective.

Focusing on team skills this way is vital, especially since too many interviewers overvalue a candidate’s first impressions and his/her individual contribution and technical skills when deciding whether to hire someone or not.

You can improve your hiring success rate by more than 100 percent by putting your first impression bias in the parking lot for 30-60 minutes and focusing on the person’s team skills and team growth. If you can wait, you’ll discover some of the best people in the world aren’t great interviewers and some of the least best are.

Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping organizations implement Performance-based Hiring. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people.

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How to Hire for Problem-Solving

Lou Adler — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 12:42:55 -0400

This post is part four in a continuing series on how to hire extraordinary people using the performance-based hiring and interviewing process I advocate. Following is the Lydna.com version of the program and a quick summary of the process.

Here's a quick summary of performance-based Interviewing:

Prepare a performance-based job description. Eliminate the use of skills-laden job descriptions by defining the work as a series of time-phased performance objectives.
Conduct a detailed work history. Spend at least 30 minutes reviewing the candidate’s work history looking for progression, impact and recognition. Find out why the person changed jobs and if the purpose for changing was achieved.
Ask the most significant job accomplishment question. For each performance objective ask the candidate to describe a related accomplishment to determine if the candidate is both competent and motivated to do the actual work required.
Ask the most significant team accomplishment question. This is the most important of all of the interview questions since it confirms all of the individual accomplishments.
Determine culture fit. A great hire is someone who is competent to do the actual work and motivated to do the actual work and fits the culture.
Ask the problem-solving question to assess thinking skills. Ask the person to solve a realistic job-related problem to determine thinking skills.

My Favorite Interview Question

Ask about a major job-related problem. While all of the questions are important, the problem-solving question is my favorite. It reveals job-specific problem-solving, insight, intelligence, potential, vision, and leadership. The question is:

"One of the biggest challenges in our job is (provide 30 second description). If you were to get the job, how would you go about solving it?”

For example, if you're hiring a sales manager, the form of the question might be, “How would you go about ensuring the team met quota every month?” For an engineer, it might be, “How would you design and test this product to ensure it's in production by next March?”

I asked something similar for a Senior Director of Tax search I just completed. “Given the changing U.S. tax rules how would you modify or develop the company’s global tax strategy?” I then spent 20 minutes in a give-and-take discussion making sure the candidate understood the problem and had a logical approach for developing a solution.

The best candidates out of thousands I've met in my 35 years in executive search not only have the ability to understand the needs of the job before starting it, they also ask the right types of questions to figure out the underlying problem. The quality of these questions provides the interviewer another dimension to assess the candidate's understanding and competency.

During this segment of the interview shift to a more natural give-and-take discussion about real job needs. When you focus more on the person's process of figuring out a solution rather than a specific answer this approach reveals the following five dimensions of thinking and problem-solving:

Depth. Determine if the reasoning is complex, advanced or superficial. The best candidates demonstrate a good understanding of the cause and effect of a problem and can determine how to find the root cause. Superficial reasoning is evidenced by a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideas.
Focus. Is the focus technical, tactical, or strategic? Candidates with a pure technical focus get into process details. Those with a tactical bent address the results of the process more. A strategic focus is represented by a longer time horizon with consideration of the implications and the unintended consequences.
Team or individual emphasis. Understand if the candidate's ideas and approaches involve others or if the ideas are more individual or self-focused. This is an important consideration if the person will be managing others or involved in a number of team projects.
Functional or multifunctional perspective. The best candidates understand the implications of their job on other people and other functions. Listen for this as the candidate plans out a task and asks questions.
Breadth and potential. As you make the problem more complex note where the candidate’s problem-solving insight shifts from specific to general to vague. This represents the person’s current ability to take on a bigger role.

While this approach reveals strong problem-solving and thinking skills, it's not enough. You also need to ensure the person can deliver the required results. To determine this, ask the candidate to describe something he/she has accomplished that’s most related to the problem under discussion. This two-question combination is called the Anchor and Visualize approach. A track record of comparable past performance and the ability to visualize the future is a great predictor of future performance. When combined with a clear understanding of real job needs using a performance-based job description, the problem-solving question might soon become your favorite question, too.

Lou Adler is the CEO of the Adler Group, a recruitment and hiring firm. He is the author of The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired (Workbench Media, 2013). This is the fourth article in a four-part series.

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How to Hire for Team Skills

Lou Adler — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:00:00 -0400

So far in this “How to Hire for . . .” series, we’ve covered how to hire for motivation and how to hire for a cultural fit. The question below on assessing team skills is the most important interview question of all time. You'll agree once you try it.

First, some background is in order as you validate these techniques for yourself. Harvard Professor Todd Rose, the author of the new bestseller, The End of Average (HarperOne, 2016), contacted me last year heaping praise on the performance-based hiring process underlying this interviewing methodology. He contended it mapped directly to the new science of maximizing individual performance. (Todd is also now the senior education director for the Muppets so when your kids start asking you these questions you’ll know where they came from.) I told him I developed the methodology over 20 years of trial-and-error interviewing thousands of candidates and tracking their performance over a few years.

The big, seemingly obvious finding was that job descriptions listing skills, experience, competencies and behavioral traits were not great predictors of future success. While measuring these things could reduce interviewing errors due to bias, there were too many other factors that could cause a person to underperform. However, by defining the job as a series of performance objectives and defining the context of the job it was possible to accurately predict on-the-job success. In this case context refers to the company culture, the pace and intensity of the company, the importance of the job, the resources available, the hiring manager’s style and, most importantly, ensuring the actual work maps closely to the candidate’s ability and intrinsic motivation.

The “How to Hire” series provides the interviewing techniques needed to assess candidates using this type of performance-based job description as the criteria for success.

The Most Important Interview Question

Can you please describe your most significant team accomplishment of your entire career?

While asking the right questions is important, one point most interviewers miss is evaluating the congruity of all of the person’s answers—ensuring all of the information ties together in some logical way. The team accomplishment question meets this need. That’s why I consider it the most important question of all time. If the teams are meaningful and growing in scope, scale and impact, it confirms everything else about the person’s track record.

Let’s try it out by role playing the question. Imagine I’m interviewing you and I ask you to describe the most significant team accomplishment of your entire career. This could be managing a team or a project or being on an important team. What team accomplishment would you pick and how would you describe it?

After providing a quick overview how would you answer the following clarifying questions?

Who was on the team and what roles did they play?
When did it occur and what was your assigned role? Did this change at all during the project?
How did you get on the team?
What were the objectives of the team and were they met?
Describe the plan or project and how the team was managed. Were you part of this?
What was your biggest contribution to the team? How were you recognized formally for this?
Who did you influence the most? Did you coach anyone? Did anyone coach you?
What did you like most about the team? Least?
What would you change if you could about the team makeup?
Who were the executives on the team and did you influence them in any way?
What was the biggest team problem or conflict you faced and how did you handle it?

By itself, this type of question and fact-finding would reveal a lot about the team skills of the person being interviewed. What did they reveal about you?

Now imagine I ask about two other major team accomplishments at different time frames but ask the same questions. The purpose is to see if the candidate’s team roles are growing in importance.

Focusing on team skills this way is vital, especially since so many interviewers overvalue a candidate’s individual strengths when deciding whether to hire someone or not. This type of team assessment is a strong confirming indicator of everything else you’ve learned about the candidate, that’s why I like it so much. After you try it, I suspect you will, too.

Lou Adler is the CEO of the Adler Group, a recruitment and hiring firm. He is the author of "The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired." This is the third column in a four-part series.

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How to Hire for a Cultural Fit

Lou Adler — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:22:15 -0400

In a recent post, “How to Hire for Motivation,”I suggested interviewers need to break through the veneer of presentation skills to accurately assess both competency and motivation. It’s important to recognize that motivation to get a job and social assertiveness is not motivation to do the job.

Uncovering the source of the candidate’s intrinsic motivation is essential for increasing interviewing accuracy. Most often this is something about the work itself in combination with the team involved, the person’s manager, and the mission of the company or its culture. So before hiring someone you need to understand not only what’s driving the person to excel but also the circumstances involved. Once this is done you then need to assess cultural fit. This technique is covered in Lynda's Performance-based Hiring training program summarized in the video.

Here are the factors involved in determining a company’s true culture. As you'll see it's a bit different than the one described on their website.

The Factors Defining a Company's Real Culture

The pace of the organization and its position on the corporate growth curve. Fast-growing start-ups are different from their more mature and slow moving adults.
The depth and quality of the resources available. Doing everything yourself or with a small team is different than having a support staff that expects you to leverage its ability.
The quality and leadership style of the hiring manager. For purposes of determining managerial fit, this factor relates to the manager’s approach to managing the new hire in comparison to how the new hire wants and needs to be managed and developed.
The quality of the people the person works with on a daily basis. The best people want to work with the best people and don’t do well when they don’t. And vice versa.
The company’s financial performance, its competition and its industry. Underperforming companies (and departments) have a lot more stress than those hitting their targets.
The company’s mission, value system and ethics. Whether set on high or at the local level having them is less important than how their implemented.
Clarity of the individual and team expectations. If a person isn’t clear about his/her expectations, the company culture won’t matter much.

For accurately determining job and culture fit I suggest the use of a performance-based interviewing process. This involves painting a detailed word picture of the candidate’s major accomplishments and then comparing them to the actual work the person needs to do to be successful. The process starts by describing a major objective (e.g., lead a project team to redesign and build the dashboard for customer satisfaction by product line) and asking the candidate to describe something he/she has done that’s most similar.

The first phase of the fact-finding involves understanding the person’s accomplishments from a scope, scale and impact basis. Getting at motivation involves finding out where the person went the extra mile. If there’s a reasonable fit on these factors the fact-finding shifts to determining cultural fit.

Here are some fact-finding probes you can use as part of understanding the same accomplishment from a cultural fit standpoint:

How fast was your company growing? Did you like that pace? Why or what would you have preferred?
How were decisions made? Were you comfortable with this process? Give me an example of a decision you made using this approach. How would you have rather made that decision?
What was your manager like? What did you like most about your manager? Least? How do you like to be managed? How does this approach impact your performance?
Who was on your project team? How did you get assigned to the team? How did you impact the team? Who did you prefer to work with and why? Who didn’t you like to work with and why? Who did you influence the most? Who influenced you the most? Did you coach anyone? Did anyone coach you?
Were you aligned with the company’s mission and values? What was most important to you and least important? Did you have any mismatches here that caused problems? What would you change if you could?

You can’t measure cultural fit in a vacuum. Past performance doing comparable work matters the most. Even if the person can do the work but is not intrinsically motivated to do it, the person will likely become bored quickly. However, if the person is competent and motivated to do the work required AND fits the culture you should of course hire the person. All three factors are essential. Any one factor without the other two will result in the person underperforming, yet that’s exactly why so many good people wind up getting hired for the wrong job.

Lou Adler is the CEO of the Adler Group, a recruitment and hiring firm. He is the author of "The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired." This is the second column in a four-part series.

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How to Hire for Motivation

Lou Adler — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:53:20 -0400

Early in my recruiting experience I placed a highly motivated and experienced candidate for a logistics position. He made a great first impression and was confident, affable and articulate. He had all the boxes checked, too. Unfortunately, he turned out to be the worst placement I ever made – he was more confident than competent. He started changing things before he knew what to change. He was fired a week after starting and I lost a big fee. However, I learned a number of lessons from this situation that I never repeated:

Interviewing personality has nothing to do with motivation.
Box-checking skills has nothing to do with competency or motivation.
Never hire anyone who is more motivated than competent. These are the people who change the wrong things too fast

Yet every competency model in the world starts with driven to excel, results-driven or highly motivated. And every hiring manager wants to hire motivated people. These are people who don’t need a lot of direction and get things done, on time and on budget.

Interviewers assume a prepared, affable, assertive and extroverted person is highly motivated, and those who aren’t, aren’t. However, they’re wrong.

Ten years after the incident described above, I placed a VP Finance at a well-known fast food restaurant chain on the west coast. The CEO wanted a highly motivated person who wouldn’t change things for at least six months. The person hired was low key. For six months he built relationships and learned everything he could about the company. Then in the course of one year he led the rebuilding of the company’s entire accounting and financial reporting systems, setting the stage for the company to grow at a rate of 30-50 percent over the next five years.

Interestingly, the person hired had no industry experience although he was a CPA and had been the No. 1 financial person at a similarly-sized multi-unit company. Unless you dug into the person’s past performance you never would have discovered the person was driven to excel, results-driven and highly motivated. During my 90-minute interview, I asked how he implemented financial reporting systems at his then current and prior company. When he described this work you could observe his drive, energy, organizational skills and motivation emerge. I also asked how he hired and developed his staff and he named names and how he helped each person become a better person. In fact, he was referred to me by someone who wanted to work for him again. Yet, none of this was apparent in the first 30 minutes of the interview.

About the same time I was trying to place a senior cost manager with a well-known medical products company in southern California. After a 15-minute interview, the CFO concluded my candidate was too low key and not technical enough to lead the implementation of a global manufacturing cost system. But I fought back and described how my candidate successfully led the implementation of a state-of-the-art cost system at a Fortune 100 manufacturer. Due to the evidence I presented, the CFO agreed to meet him again and dig into the project in detail. He was hired that afternoon. We placed five other senior executives at the company over the next two years using the same process. All were promoted within 18 months after starting.

So if you want to hire for motivation don’t give some assessment test or trust your intuition. Instead do the following:

Define the work you need done before you start interviewing candidates to do the work. The bulk of any job can be summarized in 5-6 performance objectives describing the task, the deliverable, the timeframe and some measure of success.

For each performance objective listed in the performance-based job description ask the candidate The Most Important Interview Question of All Time. By digging into the person’s past performance doing comparable work you’ll find out if the person is both competent and motivated to do the actual work required.

For each accomplishment, get 3-4 examples of when the candidate took the initiative to do more than required without being asked. Everyone can come up with one or two examples; few can come up three or more at each job. Look for a pattern of where the person went the extra mile. This represents the type of work the person finds most motivating. Then compare this to what you need done.

This information is all you need to determine both competency and motivation to excel in the job you want done. You won’t figure it out by the quality of the candidate’s presentation skills, how socially assertive the person is or by the person’s affability or appearance or by some assessment test. Taking shortcuts is how you hire the wrong people and miss hiring the right ones.

Lou Adler is the CEO of the Adler Group, a recruitment and hiring firm. He is the author of The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired (Workbench Media, 2013). This is the first column in a four-part series..

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10 Things HR Departments Don’t Understand About Hiring

Lou Adler, Quartz — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:00:00 -0400

There was an interesting story on Harvard Business Review’s blog about corporate board members giving most of their companies an “F” for talent acquisition and development, blaming the HR department for the failure. Since my company helps companies around the world improve their grades on the hiring side, we have good visibility in where they both excel and underperform. Based on this, here’s what we’ve seen it take to make the “Dean’s List” for talent acquisition, and why most companies miss the mark.

What it takes to get an “A” for hiring great people

A clearly communicated and comprehensive talent acquisition strategy that’s understood, supported and tracked at all levels of the organizations. Most CEOs and companies give this lip service, without the proper support, focus, resources or controls.
Hiring managers are ranked on how well they improve the quality of their team. If hiring top talent is number one, this needs to be the primary topic of every manager’s performance review. If it isn’t, it suggests that the mantra “talent is #1″ is all talk and no walk.
The hiring decision is too important to leave solely in the hiring manager’s hands. Hiring managers tend to focus on their short term needs to fill a position, rather than giving emphasis to developing future leaders for the company.

Read the complete list at Quartz.

Image via Aaron Amat/Shutterstock.com

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