Lou Adler Recap: The Hiring Formula for Success

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It's just a few months until hpl, the High Performance Leadership event where I'll be hosting our special guest, Sir John Key, our former Prime Minister of New Zealand. A huge thanks to our platinum partners Brian and the VVV Group. If you'd like to learn more or come and join us, please head over to jjlochlan.com or get in touch with my team now. In our last session we had the pleasure of bringing on Sherlock Holmes of recruitment, the one and only Lou Adler. Lou has like one and a half million followers on LinkedIn. He's been in the recruitment business for years. He used to be a nuclear missiles engineer, he was a financial analyst for the 37th largest company on the planet and he created the performance based hiring model. And it's just incredibly important, particularly at this time when a lot of people are struggling with retention, holding people in their teams or in their staff. And so I wanted to share the actual four key aspects of his model and that hiring model. It's very simple. Number one, you've got to define the job listing as a series of performance objectives, not a list of required skills and experiences. Number two, you've got to source great semi finalists through a pre qualifying approach. You want a players at that interview and that gets us to point three, you got to facilitate a really powerful two way interview to ensure the candidate is the right fit and that the candidate perceives the job as a great career move, not a lateral transfer. Last but not least, you got to close with conviction. Now there's One question. He determines this as the most important interview question of all time. And here we go. Here's what Lou suggests to do. If you're interviewing someone for your team, your business, your company, here's where you start. Hey, what's your greatest career accomplishment of all time? And then go silent and let the candidate think and let them share that. That's a big one. That will take them from their head to their heart. Your greatest career accomplishment of all time. That's not a list of things you've done. That's something you've done that's truly been impactful for you and for others. And then the idea is that you peel the onion after that. Here's some questions. And if you do hire, or you've got a team who hires for you, or you've got recruiters, I would urge you to write these things down and share it with them. The chances of you getting the person that's the right fit, the right candidate for the role, it goes up tenfold if you use this performance based approach. So when you're peeling the onion, you're going, okay, why did you get assigned to that project? Did you volunteer or were you handpicked? What were the greatest challenges you faced? What problem did you solve and how did you solve it? What was the biggest decision you made? Walk me through how you made that decision. Who was on your team? What was your role in the team and how did you influence others? How did you put the plan together and how did you manage to. The plan.

Hey, walk me through the skills you utilized and how did you learn new skills? Now look, why all the questions? Well, look, it's going to help you understand in great depth what this candidate has accomplished, the environment that they accomplished it in, and the area in which they excelled. And here's the last piece of the puzzle. The last question. What kind of recognition did you get for that accomplishment? Was the recognition appropriate given all the work you did? And look, in the end, you know, the job that you're offering is a series of performance objectives, not a list of skills required, not experience, etc. So now you can compare the candidate's major accomplishments directly to the performance objectives. And that's the heart and soul of a really powerful interview. Look, I hope you enjoyed that and I hope there were some takeaways. You know, you may or may not be the person that's hiring, but that is a really great formula to hire people that are going to be a great fit that can do the job and become a really cohesive part of your team, whether that's a sports team, a business, whatever you're leading. A really powerful way to approach it is the performance based hiring method. So I hope you enjoyed that. And if you get a chance to go back and listen to the full episode, please do. And I'd like to ask for, just for a second, if you could rate and review the podcast, it would be so helpful. I do this from a place of pure love, pure joy, and connecting with you. So if you could take a moment to rate and review, and if you could share an episode with a friend, that'd be hugely helpful. Looking forward to our next podcast, which will be in a few days time. I'll connect with you then, but for now, get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Sam.