hire more ugly people - kinetix€¦ · hire more ugly people | performance is more than skin deep...

| PERFORMANCE IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP |

hire moreugly people

CALL US : 770.390.8370 EMAIL US : [email protected] RESEARCH US : www.kinetixhr.com

hire more ugly people| PERFORMANCE IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP |

That’s right, we said it. You need to hire more ugly people. Or at least lower the overall attractiveness level of your company by a few percentage points with the hires you make in the coming year.

Why would we say that? Because deep down, you know you’re not hiring the right candidate as often as you could at your company. The reasons, as always, are complicated. The reality is the same for almost every company in your industry. Your hiring process is more art than it is science, more gut feel than database. We’re all bad at digging in with candidates to really determine if they can be successful in the job we’re trying to fill.

As a result, we subconsciously overvalue things like attractiveness and smooth talking skills in the hiring process.We’re busy, so we hire what looks and sounds good.

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Your hiring managers all think their hiring instincts are great, even when they’re not.

• Your hiring managers all think their hiring instincts are great, even when they’re not. It’s true, just ask them. If your hiring manager has 2-3 years of experience in hiring, they’ve become so comfortable with their conversational style of interviewing, they actually think they’re good at it. They probably think they’re as good at it as you are, which we both know is crazy talk.

• Your HR and recruiting team don’t know the jobs being filled like the hiring managers do. Nor should they. Your recruiter has 63 open positions to staff for and didn’t graduate from MIT. It stands to reason that a hiring

By now, you’re alarmed, mainly because you’re one of the beautiful people. We get that and we were thinking the same thing. But if you really think about it, you’ll agree that your company’s hiring skill is limited by the following realities:

SAY WHAT?

manager should know more about their single open position than your recruiter. As a result, you defer to the autonomy of the hiring manager, which means hiring mistakes happen more often than they have to.

• Attractive people are easy to hire. Science says we attribute a higher level of professional competence to attractive people in a subconscious way. Why grill the attractive candidate in the interview process? Just look at them – it’s obvious they can do the job!

• Attractive people who are also strong communicators are almost impossible for average hiring managers to decline. Without question, higher than average attractiveness + slick verbal skills = some bad hires over time. Look at your past 100 hires and you’ll see what we’re talking about. You’ve had giant misses and hires you thought would be stars turning out to be average players. What happened? You hired based on the look and the sound – not a hard reading of what they could actually do. Whoops.



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Translation: We like things that look and sound good. Research, investigation and digging in? That sounds like a lot of work. Did we mention your managers think they’re great interviewers and don’t need your help? All they have to do is go to their trusty bag of favorite hiring manager interview questions, which include the following time-tested gems:

• “What’s your five year plan, Susie?” (“I’d like to get this job,work hard and progress in your company, Marge.”)

• “Tell me about your last couple of positions.” (Not a question, more of an invitation to talk.)

• “What do you think your weaknesses are?” (“I struggle to stop caring about things I can’t control, Bob.”)

Nice. It’s not that your hiring managers set out to make bad hires as a result of this situation. They want to make great hires that help them get great results. Unfortunately, they’re fighting caveman (and cavewoman) instincts that can’t help but overvalue the shiny allure of a candidate with above average attractiveness and smooth communication skills.

On the quest for more information, organizations usually bring in garden-variety assessment programs like the DISC or Myers-Briggs to drive conversations on the merits of the candidate. This will give you some directional, behavioral data to drive conversation on who’s the best fit for the team and the manager, but assessments like DISC or Myers-Briggs are too light when it comes to using them to determine whether someone can be successful in a specific job. Here’s what usually happens when you use these tools: You get the information and look up a year later and no one has ever been rejected as a result of their profile. Ugh.

That’s where you come in. If you’re reading this, odds are you’re responsible for the quality of hire at your company in some capacity. You’re either the leader of a division, or an HR/Recruiting pro who is responsible for fighting everything I’ve just described and getting better hires for your company.

So like Lebron James, you’re now asking the hundred thousand dollar question: “What should I do?”

Standard candidate answer: “I struggle to stop caring about things I can’t control, Bob.”

NOW PLAYING: YOUR HIRING MANAGER’S FAVORITE WEAK INTERVIEW QUESTIONS



To fight the natural instinct of your hiring managers to hire the best looking/ sounding candidate, you can stage an intervention by doing one or all of the following:

• You can teach your hiring managers to really grill people during interviews in an attempt to get to what’s real. Regardless of the system you use, this involves training hiring managers to be unwilling to accept hypothetical answers from candidates. That means they have to ask real questions that uncover actual experience, attitude and behavior. Good matches for this goal are systems like behavioral interviewing and Topgrading. Be warned however: It’s a tough road attempting to make hundreds of hiring managers look like the Mike Wallace or Anderson Cooper of interviewing at your company.

• You can make consensus in the hiring process harder to reach for the

Every candidate has a set combination of brains, behaviors and processing speed that doesn’t change much, if ever.

hiring manager. If you’re less than confident in your ability to make your hiring managers great interviewers, a typical hedge is to make sure they have to build consensus with other interviewers regarding who the best candidate is. Some firms do this effectively with group interviews, some simply force individual interviewers of the same candidate to compare notes extensively. One thing is certain: Force conversation and fewer mistakes occur.

• You can invest in a tool or system designed to evaluate whether a candidate’s natural Talent DNA will lead to success in a specific job. Every candidate has a set combination of brains, behaviors and processing speed that doesn’t change much, if ever. A few tools exist to help you really dig in to these factors beyond generic personality tools like the DISC or MBTI, first by allowing you to access the raw data points for the candidate, then applying that data to the specific requirements of a job.

Apply one or all of these strategies to your hiring process, and over time you’ll end up with fewer misses and a higher overall quality of hire.

Odds are, you’ll also end up with a less attractive company. Hire more ugly people this year. As it turns out, it’s good for performance.

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INTERVIEW BLINDFOLDED: INTERVENTION STRATEGIES TO BREAK THE CYCLE



Kinetix is a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm for growth companies. We exist to help you become the biggest thing that ever walked the planet. Your company is good at what you do – and you know it. But you also know you can’t hire good people fast enough to keep up with your growth. That’s why you downloaded this article.

And that’s what we do. You’ve got the product or service. We’ll bring you the people. Our clients never need to worry that their growth will be slowed by an inability to acquire and retain the best talent.

Kinetix is different because we include HR Consulting hours with every RPO engagement we do. That means you get to choose cool services to address the selection problem identified by this article as part of your deal with us. We can help your company’s managers become better interviewers, and we can show you how to eliminate bad hires by securing brains/behavior/processing speed data on every candidate through our Talent DNA program.

We don’t just slam candidates to you. We help your organization learn how to determine who the best candidate is for the job. For real.

What a concept, right? Visit our website and learn more about what we do and how we do it. Check out the profiles of what makes our team tick. If you want to keep growing, you’ve come to the right place.

Call us today at 770.390.8370 to kick it around and learn more about how we can help you look like a star.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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http://www.kinetixhr.com/about-us/faces

http://www.kinetixhr.com

hire more ugly people - kinetix€¦ · hire more ugly people | performance is more than skin deep...

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