Guerilla Hiring Guide 2014 for Hiring Managers

... aka, how to stop hiring "90-day wonders"

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.

Turning 90-Day Wonders into All-star Hiring Decisions

• 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.
• 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 avoid instant decisions based on first impressions. Big idea: use the interview to prove your instant decision is wrong.
• 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.
• 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.
• Use a talent scorecard to organize the interview and evaluate the candidate. Rather than giving everyone a full yes/no vote, it's best to have each interviewer focus on just a few factors that best predict success. By sharing their narrower but in-depth evidence the collective wisdom of the team is then used to make an unbiased and more accurate hiring decision. Here's a sample of a talent scorecard you can use to assign the factors and collect the evidence. Here's the complete instruction manual.
• Attract the best by implementing a talent scarcity strategy. Unknowingly, most companies design their hiring processes to maintain the status quo. To raise the talent bar, hiring processes need to be designed to attract people who aren't looking. This post describes the strategy and this 10-minute video shows how to implement it.
• Learn how to assess soft skills. It’s hard to believe preparing plans, tracking projects, overcoming challenges, collaborating with others, and meeting deadlines are collectively called "soft skills." "Non-technical skills" is a better name. Regardless of what you call them, this post shows how to assess them.
• Avoid these 10 common hiring manager bloopers and blunders. The big one: everyone on the hiring team is looking for something different. This post describes what you need to do to get everyone on the same page.
• Assessing leadership skills starts by understanding leadership. The short definition of leadership is "vision plus execution." This post covers the longer version and what you need to do to assess it using the two-question interview described above.
• Quickly spot high achievers. The early part of the interview needs to be focused on determining if the candidate is in the top quartile of his or her peer group. These are the people you must hire in order to raise the talent bar at your company. This post shows what to look for and this one covers what you need to do to get the person interested in what you have to offer.
• Offer careers, not jobs. The best people are not interested in lateral transfers, yet that’s what companies are describing when they advertise skills-infested job descriptions. This article describes how to rethink the job posting by describing what the person will learn, do and become, not what they need to have.
• Hire the best person available, not just the best person who applies. This post covers everything else you need to do (or stop doing) to see and hire more top talent. The big one: write job postings that tell stories. The little one: don’t write individual job postings.

Hiring the best person available is not the same as filling jobs with the best person who applies. As the economy recovers, understanding this distinction will represent the difference between hiring 90-day wonders or all-stars.

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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. For more hiring advice join Lou's LinkedIn group or follow his Wisdom at Work series on Facebook.