How do you avoid bad hires?  What three or four steps fo you consistently follow to find the best candidate for a position?

You already know that a "gut feeling" is not enough when it comes to making a hire.  Now it's time to take action on what you know.  You need a clear, quantifiable hiring process, and everyone who hires employees needs to understand it and be able to follow it.  Creating and refining this process is one of the core responsibilities of a leader.  

It makes me think of the winning play in Super Bowl 2017. If you recall, Nate Solder was the only 1st round draft pick (2011) in the Pats offense for that play - MVP and 5X Super Bowl winner, Tom Brady was picked up in the 6th round. So what can business leaders learn from the Pats recruiting method?

The Key To Success Is Not Always About The Talent

Let's say the Patriots need to fill a running back position and Notre Dame has the top running back in the country. There would be reasons why that running back would not be the right fit for our Pats. 1). The Pats may run a particular offense for which this top recruit is not a fit. 2). The salary cap disqualifies the player. 3). Will the recruit mesh with other teammates - will they supplement the team’s strengths or make up for any weaknesses (a.k.a. Team Matrix.)

When companies are recruiting top talent, the first step should be to define the requirements for the position to be filled and develop a Job Profile. The Job Profile should describe the ideal candidate and include these key components:

1. Primary function identifiers

2. The attributes that make the candidate a winner in the role

3. Team matrix considerations.

4. Core competencies that at a minimum your candidate must have. You don’t want to spend resources training these.

Smart managers find candidates whose skills, abilities and experience match the Job Profile. Too many times, due to time pressures, managers take the first person that looks good or seems to have the most success or experience. Just because they look stellar on paper or answer all of the interview questions correctly, does not make them the right fit for YOUR position.

One of the most common examples we see is when companies promote their own top talent to management. The theory is that the top performer’s past success demonstrates that they must have full command of the market, product knowledge and techniques therefore; they would be able to transfer all of that their knowledge and skill onto the team. The danger in this theory is that if you promote for instance your top engineer to management, you may have set them up for failure without matching their core competencies to the job profile. They may not have the motivation to be a manager nor the ability to lead and inspire others nor the skill to transfer their knowledge onto the rest of the team. Sadly, once you realize that, it is often times too late and a very expensive mistake.

Our recommendation is to start with defining the profile and core competencies then assess the candidate against that profile and competencies. We have proven time and again, that this recruiting model offers the best ROI when hiring top talent. There will never be the perfect candidate but the assessment can provide a peek into what will happen weeks and months down the road and give you some expectations on what skills or techniques you will need to help develop in the new hire.

Back in the day, when the pharmaceutical powerhouses were hiring nurses and pharmacists for their sales team, the recruiting model of a small company out of Cranbury, NJ was to find candidates from college business schools with a heavy science background that had a winners attitude, motivation to succeed, and the ability to be taught the product knowledge. They used an assessment to match the candidate against the core competencies for the role. The result was a less expensive sales force that was equally or more effective in the field with a higher retention rate.

Are you ready to simplify your recruiting and hiring process? 

There are 9 key factors that will guide business leaders to achieve their accomplishments. Download the Free Guide to discover the attributes associated with success.