Hiring Bringing on a 19th Nervous Breakdown?
We’ve all been there. You have an open role to fill. The pressure is on. Someone (maybe you) reviews scads of resumes and sorts them into groups by priority. The most promising resumes get shared with your hiring committee, which convenes to curate further. Someone makes the case to move person X into a higher priority group because X has experience in rocket building. “The job doesn’t have anything to do with rocket building,” a different committee member points out. Person X’s champion rebuts “Yes, but if they can build a rocket, they can certainly do this job!” You know how this goes.
You finally winnow down the resumes to a manageable group and move the process to the next stage. Phone screening, followed by more committee sharing of impressions, subsequent whittling down of the list, and, at last, the invitations to interview with the committee go out to a highly curated group of candidates.
Some individuals have already taken other positions. Some schedule interviews, some actually show up, and some let you know post-interview, that they are no longer interested. You are now down to a small subset of the original pool. The committee reconvenes, wrangles over which candidate should get the offer and finally arrives at a recommendation for hiring. References are checked, and, hopefully, you hear good reviews. Finally, at long last, an offer is extended. By this point everyone involved is hoping that the individual offered the job accepts. If the story has a seemingly happy ending, the offer is accepted and everyone heaves a sigh of relief. Now, at least, someone will begin tackling the stack of initiatives that has been piling up since the previous incumbent moved on!
After all that, what can go wrong? With so many choices, and a lengthy process of screening by a bunch of smart people, you caught the best fish. Right?
Not necessarily. The hiring process is filled with hopes, fears and expectations on all sides. Hiring someone is a challenging process---especially in this labor market---and everyone is eager to get a good person on board. Candidates themselves bring their own dreams and watch-outs to their job searches, and, at least right now, the market is in their favor. What is aligned across all participants in the process (at least in most situations) is that everyone is eager for a positive outcome. Of course, exactly what that vision looks like may not be fully shared by both the candidate and the hiring manager. In many cases, it isn’t even shared across the hiring committee.
So, what happens next? Sometimes, it just all sorts out. In the fairy tale cases, the skills and motivations of the newly hired candidate match up nicely with the expectations for style and substance of performance held by the employer and they go off into the sunset together. But this instant click is not the norm. In many cases, the new hire and the hiring entity do a sort of dance as they try to iron out areas where the fit is not instantly perfect fit. This may take a bit of time---and there may be some bumps in the road--- as both sides continue to try to make the match work.
In reality, the odds are against them. Dr. John Sullivan, professor of human relations and recruiting advisor to some of the world’s largest companies, reported in 2021 that between 40-60% of new management hires fail within 18 months. Seeking unequivocal success? According to the Center for Creative Leadership, only 19%---or around 1 out of 5---managerial hires fall into that category.
Clearly, as the Rolling Stones shared years ago, “You can’t always get what you want.” And that appears to be true on both the employer or employee side of hiring decisions. So why do we keep on doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
In some ways, this scenario is rooted in a common problem-solving conundrum: when you can’t find something, where do you look? Most of us search where we expect the missing item to be. Humans gravitate to making sense of a confusing situation by doubling down on the mental models they already hold---after all, they have worked for us in the past. So, we look for lost items in the places we anticipate they will be; we expect to find things where they “belong.” Of course, the problem is that, if the item was in its “correct” place to begin with, it wouldn’t be lost! So, trying to find it there is an exercise in frustration. But we do it anyway, because it is our default. It is our go-to understanding of where the solution lies.
When facing dilemmas of this sort, SmarterWisdom proposes considering an alternative strategy. Diversifying approaches to problem solving can get you out of the “what do you do when you find yourself in a hole? Dig harder” cycle. It widens the possible range of solutions. A key element of diversifying involves the ability to reframe the problem: by broadening the ways we understand a knotty conundrum, we open ourselves to seeing solutions formerly not under consideration.
Getting out of that same-old loop requires something to disrupt the way we understand the problem. For that, SmarterWisdom found a new idea in the science related to successful job performance. The research is mounting that motivation---not competency---may be the big kahuna of job performance. What if, instead of focusing almost exclusively on candidates presenting evidence that their skills match those specified in the opening’s job description (which almost always translates to looking at candidates who have prior work experience very similar to the position for which they are applying) we consider motivation as well? What if the central question in the search for finding the right candidate was ‘What types of problems they have been super interested in solving?’ or if we asked candidates “What aspects of your prior responsibilities would you have been excited to tackle even if you weren’t being paid to do so?” What we would be going for here is finding out what kind of dance a candidate would do if no one was watching.
Our advice: the next time you have a hire to make, consider creating a list of things to look for outside of previous job titles. Think more expansively about what will really produce a successful performance, and try to build in points in the hiring process that help you better understand what truly drives a candidate. Don’t dump understanding the candidate’s skills, just expand the elements that you dig for. And think about the work to be done in your open role in that light: will this candidate find motivation to deliver in this role?
How about if we change our hiring tune, and go for a different Stones’ ditty? Let’s try for some ”Satisfaction” and, just possibly, net our organization a Grammy-worthy performer in the bargain.