Employees Performance Starts with Hiring Right
Every company wants outstanding performance from their employees. Every year companies spend thousands of dollars and invest huge amounts of time looking for the key to improve their employees’ performance. I understand why and I’d like to suggest that if companies spent more time on hiring effectively they would spend less time managing performance issues. There are hundreds of books on how to interview effectively, and that’s just the first step to hiring right. Hiring right also includes creating performance metrics for the first 30-60-90 days of a new hire’s employment. It means clearly communicating your expectations regularly, sharing with them how you want things done, and pointing out when they aren’t done to your satisfaction. What I see happens most often is a new person is hired and they are put through OJT…of the specific technical aspects of their job. That’s important, for sure, but it’s only part of the process of ensuring a successful hire. Employee performance starts with hiring right, and hiring right happens after they are on your payroll.
Linda, put very well, and accurate. Companies would spend less on conflict resolution, team building, and even coaching if they’d start with the “right people on the bus, and in the right seat” as “Good to Great” suggests. Another element imperative to hiring success is utilizing a DISC profile to be sure you are hiring the correct behavioral style for the position. You wouldn’t want a people person, who loves to chat and thinks out loud, in the back room full of computer analytical types. Nor would you want to put an introvert, who may not care for people at the front desk greeting your customers and being their first impression. You can learn what the position demands by profiling it as well, but you cannot use DISC as the only criteria for hiring, even if it is an essential element, along with everything else Linda so eloquently mentioned!
Best to you,
Sue The “Accidental Leader”
Hi Linda – yes, Right Hiring pre-empts and plans for better Performance on the job. However experience suggests that this is not always the case. The overriding reason many a times is the non-congruence in the expectation setting process. The hiring process tends to overplay the Expectations from the Job rather than relate the same to the individual being hired. Every person gets his/her flavor to a role and it is this flavor that differentiates his/her identity onto the role. This individual flavor is however, not understood or perceived similarly by all stakeholders (the hiring team would possibly have done so) impacted by the role and its performance. So one ends up with a mixed feedback or acceptance of the new hire.
It is always interesting that people are wanting a test to determine if the person being considered is the right person. Over the past 30 years of experience working with all sizes of employers, being a consultant for managment, working with attorneys, one of the key ingredients that needs to be the deciding factor in hiring someone is that of trusting the natural gift of intelligence, that most have, but too often ignore.
From countless interviews of employers describing hiring ‘successes’ and ‘problems’ over this long period of time, it is of critical interest that in almost every case of an employer hiring a ‘problem’ employee was based on a collection of ‘factors’; and without fail, in every case, the one key factor that was the common denominator was that the ‘inner voice of wisdom’ was a “yes,….but’…” and sure enough, time always exposed the new employee for lack of values and virtues that they actually possessed instead of what they portrayed.
Whereas in the cases where a good employee was hired, there was never a shadow of a doubt from the Inner Voice.
I spent some time a couple of years ago discussing this finding with a member of the FBI and, coincidently, this individual actually said that this is along the same line of results that his department was finding in their internal investigations of employer theft cases.
Tests are good, but using that internal gift of intelligence can also be of a tremendous value to make that final decision. Too often we are wanting to give someone that chance, even though we have that doubt. And almost without fail, we end up saying to ourselves, “I should have listened”.
You can teach the right person a skill, but you can not teach values and ethics. And that is precisely the area that is the determining factor in the reasons for exiting a company.
This is also why the ‘right person’ to leave a company lead by leadership that are lacking in this same area.
The one friend we all have and need to learn to trust is that ‘inner voice of intelligence’. It will never lie to us and never rationalize.
And to motivate good employees, once you get them onboard, to keep them striving to do good things and constantly striving to improve, it is imperative to develope a daily report card that should be a 4:1 ratio on noting the good things being done instead of focusing vs only going after the ‘negative’ mark for the ‘report card’. Amazing what can be done with positive environments…!!