"The Future Ain't What It Used To Be"

Predicting the future is hard. As the great philosopher and baseball player, Yogi Berra, once put it: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

A new hire is a prediction of the future. Over at Employment Group, a recent post of theirs put it this way in terms of predicting how would be successful as a new hire:

"At its core, hiring is a signal detection challenge.

You’re trying to answer one question:

Who is most likely to succeed in this role, in this environment?

But most hiring processes rely on weak proxies:

• Resumes as indicators of performance 
• Interviews as indicators of fit 
• Experience as a substitute for capability 

Without stronger signal, speed becomes dangerous—and slowness becomes inefficient.

Neither solves the problem."

It seems that it should be easier to find your new best hire. The answer to this problem is that it this is a problem on your end. Bottom line, you're the one who's making it difficult.

But you also be the one who can improve it and make it easier!

Let's ask three hard questions to get to the answers you need:

1. Are you using the same talent identification approach you have always used? Why? 

If the answer is "That's how we do things" or "We know how to do this" or "Everyone does this," well, there's your problem.

2. Are you filling a position using, essentially, the same position description that you used to hire the previous incumbent?

You're hiring for a position in cybersecurity where the nature of the problems faced change maybe daily, and you're using a position description from...5 years ago?

3. Have you audited your hiring process in terms of what's essential, what's optional, and what's a bonus? 

It's likely that your time-to-hire number is longer than you'd like because you "need" to give staff time to execute its functions, or because you schedule five different interviews (apparently on five different days), or something else speaking to a discretionary 'we've got all the time in the world' approach.

Many companies we work with get overwhelmed by the signals out there among potential candidates and are hoping that by holding out longer they will find the perfect candidate. They do not audit their processes to determine what's working and what's optional. They do not give candidates a valid signal of what talents are needed because updating position descriptions is boring or "everyone knows what this job requires" or something like that.

Remember that many candidates might be a quality hire for you, but quality candidates have options and you're only one of those options. 

Three hard questions lead to three hard answers.

• Your first goal is to boost your employment value proposition signal so that your better candidates find you, faster
• Your second goal is to determine the talent those candidates have, faster and more accurately (buh-bye resumes!) 
• Your third and final goal is to actively review each quality candidate relative to the current business problems they would face, not against minimum qualifications.

And then once you get them on board you need to build their capabilities.

Explaining the past can be tricky. Predicting the future can seem impossible. Reduce your hiring challenges by amplifying the talent signals you send.

Ask us how you can increase your rate of high-quality new hires, faster.

(image credit: Cloud200, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)