Knock Em Dead—Hiring The Best

Proven Tactics for Employee Selection

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780991270477
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione
• Index: Business

Knock Em Dead—Hiring The Best, Proven Tactics For Employee Selection & How To Build winning Teams. Management requires getting work done successfully through others and if you cannot first hire the right people, you can never manage productively. Hiring The Best has been in print for 25 years and continues evolve as the leading resource for to employee selection and productivity oriented team building.

PART I

THE SECRETS OF
EFFECTIVE HIRING

In this section, we’ll talk about the connectivity between hiring effectively and managing productively, plus look at how to create a customized Job Description, read a resume in six seconds, save time by screening with phone interviews, and structure and conduct face-to-face interview sequences.

ONE

MANAGEMENT—
THE PATH TO SUCCESS

There’s no question that management, with its combination of financial reward and social respect, is still the traditional icon of success. Yet there’s a myth in the corporate world that can snatch that success away: the myth that on promotion into management you become mysteriously endowed with all the skills of a manager. That’s magical thinking.

Successful management is an ongoing, all-too-often overlooked learning experience. This is your life and your career, and it’s your responsibility to develop the skills that lead to survival and prosperity on the management ladder.

Getting Work Done Through Others

Management skills cover a wide range of proficiencies, but they all boil down into one simple phrase: getting work done through others. This is the essence of your job: You are responsible for the individual performance and collective productivity of your reports. This holds true whether you are in your first management job with just a few reports, or you’re a senior manager with thousands under your guidance and command.

The Secret to Successful Management

The secret is that in order to manage productively, you must first hire effectively. If you make poor hires, the odds are that those hires will not be productive individuals or team players willing to work for the success of your department (and therefore your success). Hiring effectively is at the core of getting work done through others—it is the foundational skill of successful management. If you cannot hire effectively, you will never be able to manage productively, and you will fail as a manager.

The focus of Knock ’em Dead: Hiring the Best is to help you learn to hire effectively so that you can manage productively and have a long and successful management career. We’ve all heard about people whose excellent engineering or accounting or sales skills weren’t enough to make them good managers. There is a big difference between the technical skills needed to be good at your work (the very skills that often short-list you for greater opportunity) and the managerial skills you need to survive and prosper on the management track.

In Knock ’em Dead: Hiring the Best, you will learn that employee selection isn’t brain surgery. It is a series of logical steps, using the sensible strategies and practical tactics that will enable you to make consistently good hires—while simultaneously giving you skills that have ready application in other areas of your professional life where “reading people” and persuasive communication skills are paramount.

How to Avoid Bad Hires

U.S. Labor Department studies have consistently shown over the years that only 50 percent of new hires last more than six months in their new jobs. What happened to the other 50 percent? Even if we assume that a few of these hires were rapidly promoted, that still means a large proportion either quit or were fired. This is good news: At least decisions were made in all these instances.

What about the 50 percent who weren’t promoted, and didn’t quit or get fired: the 50 percent who stayed in the job more than six months? No doubt some of them were dedicated and productive professionals, but common sense tells us that their number also includes a percentage of plodders and, worse, the troubled workers who scrape by over the years, missing deadlines, getting sick, spreading discontent, or coming in two hours late in the morning and then leaving two hours early to make up for it. Every manager has made bad hires, and the cause of that bad hire can always be traced back to one of these reasons:

•Poor analysis of job functions, leading to inappropriate recruitment criteria

•Poor analysis of the necessary skill sets and behaviors, leading to inappropriate selection criteria

•Inadequate initial screening, leading to wasted time and the wrong candidates on the short list

•Inadequate interviewing techniques, resulting in poorer access to the facts

•Poor utilization of “second opinions,” compounding all of the above errors

•Overselling of company and career/money expectations, leading to frustrated and unmotivated staff

•Not checking references, leading to troublemakers sneaking onto your payroll

What You’ll Find in These Pages

You will learn a practical approach to employee selection that you can read today and use tomorrow; there’s actionable advice on every page. While recruitment is probably not in your job description, every hire puts your job on the line, so in the first part of the book, we’ll define the real deliverables of the jobs you fill (Chapter 2). Then we’ll look beneath the surface of those shiny resumes (Chapter 3), and learn how and when to use the telephone as an awesomely effective time-management tool for screening candidates (Chapter 4).

After that, we’ll move on to the carefully short-listed candidates you meet in person, develop the best ways to structure in-person interviews, learn how to use the most effective interviewing strategies and questioning tactics (Chapter 5), and discover how to get the maximum insight from second opinions (Chapter 6). In Chapters 8 through 15, you’ll find more than 500 questions for many different situations to help you gather insights into a wide range of skills, behaviors, and values. In Chapters 16 and 17, we’ll discuss final decisions, making new hires productive quickly, and how to turn around troubled workers, encourage your plodders, and keep your superstars, well … reaching for the stars; and you’ll learn how to do all of this while staying on the right side of the law (Appendix).

Management and Your Long-Term Goals

If you’ve read other Knock ’em Dead career management books, you’ll recognize the consistency and continuity with the strategies and professional advice you’ll find in Knock ’em Dead: Hiring the Best. It is a natural extension of the overall Knock ’em Dead career management philosophy, which is built to support your changing needs as you navigate the twists and turns of a long career.

You might be reading Knock ’em Dead: Hiring the Best as a senior or midlevel manager staying on top of your game; you might have had management recently thrust upon you with no explanation of what on earth you’re supposed to do next; or you may have the desire to break into management down the road and are intent on building the necessary skills. Whatever your situation, when it comes to the real guts of management—getting work done through others—Knock ’em Dead: Hiring the Best will help you develop a set of skills that will empower your career for many years to come.

TWO

DEFINING THE JOB

In Chapter 1 we talked about how important good hires are to your long-term success as a manager; but you can’t make those hires without understanding the needs of each individual job. This chapter helps you develop that understanding by breaking down the job into its component deliverables, so that you can reassemble them into a practical Job Description (JD) that delivers a three-dimensional picture of the professional you want to hire. Put it this way: You’ll never find Waldo if you don’t know what he looks like.

Defining the Job

Most of the time you will have an existing JD that everyone is used to working with, but leaving your future in the hands of anonymous managers or HR recruiters would not be a smart move, as their JD could be outdated and might result in bad hires. The successful manager always uses the legally approved written JD as at least a starting point, but only as a starting point. Fifty percent of the success of any project is in the planning, so the first step you should take when filling a position is to generate your own JD. This will help you get the proper focus on the relative weight you should attach to education, experience, responsibilities, deliverables, and what I call the transferable skills and professional values, the foundational skills that power success in any job. Your success as a manager is rooted in the selection process and depends on how carefully you define the job in the beginning.

Responsibilities, Experience, and Deliverables

It is common sense to identify responsibilities, experience, and deliverables for the jobs you need to fill. These are the basic building blocks out of which any good JD is made.

To understand this clearly, we need to identify the three terms:

1.Responsibility: You want, for example, an accountant to deal with Accounts Receivable (A/R).

2.Experience: You determine that five years’ experience dealing with A/R would be desirable. This is often as far as many job descriptions go: “Someone with X years’ experience doing Y.”

But an accountant with five years’ experience in Accounts Receivable who is hopeless at getting money in the door will cause his manager nothing but problems. Such an accountant’s responsibilities and experience are only part of the picture; if the position’s deliverables haven’t been clearly defined as a separate issue, the performance of the chosen candidate may fall short of expectations.

3.Deliverables: What an employer expects as the tangible result of work done: The A/R accountant brought in __________ of receivables this week, representing __________ percent of outstanding receivables.

A clear-headed analysis of a job’s responsibilities, experience, and deliverables (the tangible results of work done) gives you an objective way to rule out duds quickly and efficiently.

As a successful manager, defining responsibilities, experience, and deliverables helps you hire candidates based on their real credentials, not their potential—and that makes for better hires.

The Transferable Skills and Professional Values

Every job has a similar foundational skill set on which success is built. Whatever the job, whatever the level, in whatever profession, industry, city, and country, there are a handful of transferable skills and professional values that help every worker do what she does well; in other words, fulfill the job’s deliverables. These transferable skills and professional values include, amongst others, communication, critical thinking, and multitasking skills, determination, motivation, and integrity; they are the key to your employees’ success, and therefore to yours as well.

The Foundational Skills and Values That Make for Superior Employees

From that first day on your first job, when you noticed how different the world of work was from the relatively cozy life at home or school, you began to observe and emulate the more successful professionals around you.

You developed a whole slate of transferable skills and professional values that have helped you succeed in your professional life. These behaviors didn’t always come naturally, but when you’re at work, they help you do whatever it is you do well, for they are the foundation of professional success in all jobs at all levels. Now that you are responsible for hiring, you need to look for these same skills in the people you hire. You should also continue to develop them yourself for your own professional benefit.

Breakdown of the Transferable Skills and Professional Values

The following transferable skills and professional values are common to all professionals in the successful execution of jobs at all levels and in all professions. Read through the following outline of each and ask yourself how each one might contribute to the performance you get from your next hire.

You will become very familiar with these skills and values throughout this book and your career in management more generally: They will form the basis of job descriptions, interview questions, and performance reviews. But you need to keep in mind at a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Part I: The Secrets of Effective Hiring
• Part II: Practical Strategies for Effective Selection
• Part III: Different Jobs, Different Questions
• Part IV: The Big Picture: Hiring Effectively and Managing Productively
• Appendix: Interviewing Within the Law
• Index