Mark Murphy argues 89% of new-hire failures come from bad attitudes, not lack of skill. He walks through a four-step framework: define the attitudes that matter in your culture, ask interview questions that don't telegraph the right answer, listen for trigger words and pronoun patterns in responses, and bake those attitudes into your job ads. He offers five ways to implement it, from custom consulting to self-study.
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, author of Hiring for Attitude, and one of the reasons why this book has achieved the status it has achieved and won the awards it's won is that we made a very simple yet profound point, and that is, if you look at why new hires fail, and let's face it, almost 50% of them will, if you look at why they fail, 11% of the time when they fail, it's for a lack of technical skill. Skills. 89% of the time when a new hire does not work out, it is for attitudinal reasons—coachability, motivation, temperament, cultural fit, etc. It is not because of a lack of technical skills. The shocker is that it's pretty easy to assess whether or not somebody can weld, work a fetal monitor, code in Java. It's much harder to assess whether or not they're going to be a great fit for your organization. The cool thing is, though, that if you hire for attitude, not only do you get great hires, but as you can see from some of our client organizations, you actually transform your culture. People love working at organizations where, you know, people have the right attitude, where there aren't narcissists and dramatics and negatives and jerks and all the rest. So how do you hire for attitude? There are really 4 things you have to do. Define the attitudes you're looking for, and I don't mean theoretically, I mean the attitudes that actually separate your high performers from everybody else. You need attitudinal interview questions. You need interview questions that are going to reveal attitude, not the warmed-over stuff that we normally ask in interviews. Then critically, and something that nobody had ever done before we wrote this book, was you got to know how to assess a candidate's responses. You actually need answer guidelines. You need to know what good and bad answers sound like. And then, of course, once you've done all that work, well, you need to build your attitudes into your recruiting messages so you're only attracting the right people in the first place. When it comes to finding the attitudes, as I mentioned, you got to find the attitudes that truly differentiate your high performers from everybody else. And that will be different in every single organization. Your culture is unique. The unique characteristics that separate "Get your best from everybody else" are going to be different company to company, and you need to spot and prioritize which ones you're really going to focus on. You cannot go assess 20 different attitudes. That won't work. You'll go too wide, not deep enough. You need to go deep in an interview process. When it comes to interview questions, we need questions that are smarter than what normally gets asked. If you look at that first question, "Tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a difficult situation. What did you do?" There are literally 5 words in that interview question that absolutely ruin it. They give away the right answer to the question and thus kill off your ability to actually discern if somebody has the right or the wrong attitude. Words like "adapt," "what did you do," all terrible in interview questions if you actually want to hire for attitude. When it comes to answer guidelines, we need to know exactly what good and bad answers sound like. We need to know with real-life example answers, this is what a bad answer sounds like and why. This is what a good answer sounds like and why. Sometimes it is as simple as listening for key trigger words: the always, never, impossible, can't, not, things like that. Sometimes it's as simple as listening for first-person pronouns versus second-person pronouns. I did versus you should. And sometimes it's a lot more detailed and subtle than that, but as interviewers learn to discern and pick up on these clues, all of a sudden they can spot bad attitudes a mile away. Once you've done all of that work, then you really need to build these attitudes directly into your recruiting messages. We cannot have the bland generic things that everybody else has. If you look at your job ad and you go look at your nearest competitor's job ads, You need to look at, are you using the same words that they use? Because if you're using the same words, there's no way your company is going to stand out, and your unique culture won't matter in a recruiting sense. So you actually need to rewrite the job ads. So how do you implement all of these 4 steps to find the right attitudes, build a library of interview questions that will work for you, build answer guidelines so you can actually reveal good and bad answers, and then build all of this into your recruiting messages? There's a number of approaches, a number of implementation options that we have when we're working with organizations. On the far end, there is the full custom done-for-you. We analyze your culture, find those attitudes, build your interview questions, build you custom answer guidelines, teach all of your leaders how to use it, and rewrite your job ads for you. There's other options though where we can simply come to your organization and train your leaders. And teach them how to do all of this and walk them through a day of training where they're going to become absolutely spot-on master interviewers. Then we have our turnkey solution. The turnkey solution is sort of a quick done-for-you designed for smaller organizations. It is a library of the key attitudes, the 15 top attitudes you're most likely going to hire for, attitudinal interview questions that match up to each of those attitudes, and then good and bad answers for each of those. It comes with also a bout of online online training so everybody learns how to do this effectively. And then of course there are the simpler options, or the less expensive options. There's a 4-week course that we have that you can send 10, 20, 50, 100 managers through and give them the foundations of hiring for attitude. Or you can go the old school way and literally read the book. But in any case, we work with organizations to find the solution that best meets meets their timing, their needs, their budget, and finds a way to get them started with Hiring for Attitude. As I said, if you implement this, not only is it going to get rid of and eliminate bad hires, like, instantly, you can actually get an organization up and running on Hiring for Attitude. You can eliminate some bad interview questions and start learning how to spot bad candidates in a day. So you can make a huge impact really quickly. But also, as I mentioned, if you look at some of our organizations that have worked with us on this, they also start to improve the culture. It's not just about hiring, it's about what hiring does downstream for your organization. If you want to learn more, if you want to have a chat with us about all of the possibilities here and talk about what might work best for your organization, just reach out, shoot me an email directly. I will respond. So just shoot an email to mark@leadershipiq.com and we'll hop on the phone for a quick chat and let you know what we can do. Thanks for watching and hope to talk to you soon. Bye.
