Lou Adler presents a 30-minute mini-lesson (packaged as a smartphone-friendly program) on performance-based hiring. He argues that focusing on skills, experience, immediate compensation and first impressions often fails to predict top performance; instead hiring should start with a 'great job' defined by 5–6 key performance objectives (KPOs) plus an employee value proposition. Sourcing should be outbound, relationship-based, and referral-driven to attract multiple performance-qualified candidates (top third achievers). Interviews should probe accomplishments and performance trends, and recruiting should emphasize career-based benefits (role stretch, impact, growth) over just start-date comp/title. Adler references an online learning platform called the Hiring Machine that teaches this end-to-end process.
Chapters
Hey. Hi everyone, this is Lou Adler. In this mini lesson, I want to introduce you to performance based hiring and how we've embedded it into an online learning platform called the Hiring Machine. In fact, I also want to indicate that we have a pretty cool app. We've compressed this entire course into a 30 minute program that you can watch and learn on your smartphone. The key though is I make the statement that great candidates rarely become great hires. The reason is that we focus too much on skills and experiences. If we like a person who meets that criteria, we determine if they're interested in the job and would be willing to take the salary we're offering. And if they meet those two criteria, we meet them in person and we judge them on first impression. But I'm going to contend you can have all the skills, meet the compensation requirements up front and have a great first impression and not be a top performer. Worse, I can contend you can be a top performer with a different mix of skills, be someone who's willing to negotiate the compensation and make an average first impression, or be a little bit nervous in the interview. So none of those things are predictable. A great hire meets the performance objectives of the job. A great hire meets the team objectives of the job. A great hire is a strong manager, both managing him or herself as well as a team. And when you really start thinking about it, the factors on the left don't predict the factors on the right. Worse, they frequently exclude the people who could become grade hires. This course is about hiring great people. But if you want to hire a great person, you have to start with a great job. And a great job is not a laundry list of skills and experiences. Instead, it's five or six key performance objectives that clarify true job needs wrapped around an employee value proposition to attract someone in. Our focus on sourcing is not to weed people out, but attract 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 great people who are performance qualified, meaning they can do the work and they possess the achiever pattern, meaning they're in the top third of their peer group doing similar work. That ensures the hiring manager would want to see the person and possibly hire the person. And the job represents an obvious career move to the candidate. High probability the person would respond to your message under this basis. High touch, small batch process, relationship based. That's how you find great people. It's an outbound sourcing process, meaning we're reaching out to people, not an inbound process where we're weeding out people. Of course we have to interview the people, but our performance based interview Process is digging deep into the person's accomplishments, looking at the trend of the person's performance over time, and recognizing that our job has to put that person on a faster growth track. We'll never have enough money in the budget, so recruiting has to be embedded at step by step throughout the process. Our focus is hey, let's not emphasize what the person gets on the start date, a comp, a title and location. Let's emphasize what the person will be doing and becoming if they're successful. That's called career based recruiting. To hire great people, you got to start with a great job and be strong at finding these people, interviewing these people, and closing these people. Here's the four questions I always suggest to recruiters and hiring managers together when they're starting to open a new requisition. First ask what does a person need to do to be successful? Define the 5 or 6 KPOs, the task, the action, and some measurable result. Then say, why would a top person want this job? Let's assume the person is a top player, will have competing offers or gets a counter offer. Why would the person want this job even if the compensation was a modest increase or the same? You have to answer both of those questions if you want to hire great people. As you start looking for these people, start off by thinking of who can I find who knows this person? Look at LinkedIn as a network of 500 million people, not a database of them. How can you network with the right person to get a great referral? Those are recruiter's gold. Then when you get a good person on the phone, ask this question. Would you be open to explore a situation if it were clearly superior to what you're doing today? Some candidates will say, I might be, but what's the money? And you're going to say something like it doesn't matter what the money is. If the job's not a career move, let's first see if it's a career move and and then proactively say in my mind, a career move requires you to get at least a 30% non monetary increase. That consists of some job stretch, meaning a bigger job, job impact, a more important job, a mix of more satisfying work and continuing growth rate. If we can get those things, I think we should get serious about this opportunity. That's how you begin the recruiting process. But it starts with a great job and recognizing sourcing starts by fishing where the big fish hang out. Why would you want a bunch of people and hope a good one applies? Let's go out and find great people and find people who know those great people. You do those things, you will be seeing and hiring great people very soon. And we've captured that entire process in the hiring machine learning platform, and we put that entire process on your phone. Let's go find some great people.
