How to Avoid Making a Bad Hiring Decision
It is amazing how many executives, at one point or another, feel they have made bad hiring decisions. I'm not talking about hiring an executive who has fraudulently misrepresented their career accomplishments or capabilities either. I'm talking about hiring great executives with well substantiated track record of success that simply did not work out in the present role they were recruited into.
How does this happen?
It happens quite simply as a result of human nature; we like to interact with and work around people we like. This typically leads to disastrous hiring decisions based on simply looking for executives that have the same or relevant industry experience who have held similar scope & scale of responsibilities to the role you're trying to fill with whom you enjoy talking to and as a result like being around.
What typically precedes a bad hiring decision is:
Ultimately, enjoying dynamic, intellectually stimulating or charismatic conversation with a candidate is irrelevant to making a solid hiring decision and combining this solely with the criteria that a candidate simply possesses relevant industry experience and successful track records in similar scope & scale of responsibility roles is insufficient criteria for making a good solid hiring decision.
Why is simply possessing a relevant positive track record of - experience - in similar scope & scale of responsibility roles insufficient criteria?
From a career perspective, your experience is simply - what - you have done. What you have done says absolutely nothing about - how - you got it done (work methodology combined with skills & abilities employed). Two people can produce the same outcome through completely different methods, which effectively translates into each of those individuals having - the same experience. People produce outcomes, results, and achieve objectives by leveraging their skills and abilities. Experience simply provides a context and/or relevant common sense when leveraging your skills and abilities (i.e., it is an either you have it or you don't "check in the box").
What someone has done isn't nearly as important as how they got it done. Experience doesn't necessarily translate in a leveragable way from job to job, or from objective to objective, because the value of experience is context dependant. How someone achieves objectives is highly leveragable and translatable from job to job, and from objective to objective, because the value of how they produced results (work methodology combined with skills & abilities employed) is much less context dependant.
For example, if you drop an executive with the experience of successfully growing a company's revenue from $30M to $70M in 3 years, does that mean the same executive will be able to accomplish the same objective is you drop them into a similar company in a similar industry? Absolutely not. If the objective at their former company required them to leverage their ability to be a "roll up the sleeves hands-on" executive that leads by doing, and who can work with a team of inexperienced managers (i.e., effectively micro-manage them), and the latter company requires the executive to grow revenue from $30M to $70M in 3 years by leveraging a critical ability to "get work done through others" by delegating tactical execution responsibility to experienced managers and leading them in a hands off manner (i.e., be a leader - not a manager), then this executive is potentially at risk of falling on their face in this new role while destroying any hi-performance experienced management team they may be inheriting walking into the role. And the fact that you enjoy dynamic, intellectually stimulating or charismatic conversation during the interview process with the executive won't change the fact you hired a great executive into the wrong role. For that matter, this only gets more difficult when the executive you are interviewing is trying to convince you how perfect they are for the role as a result of having the acquired the exact same - experience - at their previous employer.
Making great hires is difficult. It requires a lot more input and effort than most executive hiring authorities and boards are aware of. It is paradoxical to consider how much effort and energy a company will put into assessing their needs, creating evaluation criteria, and evaluating solutions when looking to invest over $100,000 in a capital equipment or software acquisition, and yet the same company will invest only a fraction of the same time and effort into assessing their needs, creating evaluation criteria, and evaluating executive candidates to ultimately make a much more costly investment in a mission critical executive with the hopes an entire business function will product the results/ROI that in many cases drives the success or failure of the company.
Making great hires is straight forward, but requires the willingness to invest the effort in building the basis for making an objective hiring decision. It is critical to anchor the process in bedrock by defining the specific measurable responsibilities, and business ROI associated with achieving the specific measurable business objectives the role is expected to achieve. Once you've done this, you can define the tools you need to achieve quantified business objectives by defining the specific executive and functional skills and abilities required to achieve each objective. Now you have a blueprint for success and can interview candidates for the presence of each specific skill and ability by forcing them to share specific examples of how they have successfully achieved similar objectives, or at least identifying they leveraged the same requisite skill, ability and experience to drive a different objective.
As a result of following an objective process you dramatically increase the possibility of making a well informed mission critical executive hiring decision that propels your business in the direction you intended.
An expert in mission critical retained executive search, Ron Bates is a Managing Principal with the retained executive search firm Executive Advantage Group, Inc. (http://www.executive-advantage.com).
Ron has also coached former SAP, E&Y, Oracle, WorldCom, et al. executives responsible for multi-billion dollar business units, and co-founded http://www.CV-Advantage.com, a self-guided executive coaching process and resume development toolset.
As a recognized talent assessment, deployment and development expert, Ron has been an invited speaker at venues such as the Marketing Executive Networking Group, British America Business Council, Expert Connections, Business of Success radio, a regular on Netshare's "Ask the Coach", and most recently Ron's interview was included in Leadership Without Borders: Successful Strategies From World-Class Leaders, by Ed Cohen, 2007 John Wiley & Sons. With +34,000 direct on-line professional networking platform contacts, Ron has been referred to as "the most connected man on Earth."
For career info go to: http://www.job-search-campaign.com
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