As stated in a previous blog, senior leadership creates the primary drivers of company success or failure. The buck stops with them….on many different fronts.

Strategy and vision for hiring top-quality staff ranks at the top, followed by the execution, and proper management/oversight of the strategy and vision. In other words, the leadership team must not only set the hiring strategy and create the vision but also be instrumental in the governance of the actual talent acquisition.

To highlight, here are 5 key actions the company’s leadership team can initiate — through their role in the hiring process — optimizing keys to organizational performance in acquiring high-caliber, proven top-performing talent.

1. Direct the development of a hiring strategy and vision. This may be referred to as a Talent Acquisition Strategy. It needs to cover how each position will be filled, the hiring process, interviewing methods, who participates in interviews with different levels of candidates, communication with the candidates, offer process, and on-boarding are a few examples.
2. Set the pace by taking action in line with the strategy for positions reporting directly to them. They must set the example of executing the strategy and get it right, both by the results achieved and by the process followed to generate the results. Everyone hiring and involved in interviews must have training and follow the designed process.
3. Play major role in determining company success (or lack of) and what the organization becomes, based on the talent acquisition decisions/results. An “A” player in a leadership role will be compelled to build an “A” team, and to that avail, commit the resources and process necessary to accomplish that objective.
4. Determine the values and purposes of the people hired, consciously. Strong leadership will not hire unconsciously. “A” level talent comes packaged in a variety of looks. It is the obligation of leadership to hire consciously. It will be necessary to look past first impressions: Are they like me? Do they interview well? Is their image above average?   They must get to the real “pattern of performance” data and decide based on the data. Can the candidate excel (in the role) based on past performance, depth of experience, and track record of success? Are they motivated to pay the price for success? These are the questions that consciously tuned in leaders will focus on answering.
5. Provide oversight for setting the performance standards. Management with a stick doesn’t create valued performance. Goals depicting desired performance and rewards for achieving accomplished performance go a long way in motivating top-performers. Those not performing to standards must be penalized for their best interest. Leaders developing and governing (non-political) performance management as part of the Talent Acquisition vision will drastically increase the odds of organizational success.

All 5 of these actions enhance organizational performance. At Honer and Associates, we assist our clients in creating and executing powerful talent acquisition strategies. If you need to add additional “A” players to your organization in key areas, please contact us today.

When corporate HR evaluates itself, it does so through the use of metrics that are not tied to the performance of the candidate.  Instead those metrics are tied to the performance of HR and the talent acquisition specialists.

These metrics speak to KPIs that measure “Cost of Hire” and “Time to Fill a Position”. As part of these KPIs, activity must be generated and tracked. From the time positions are opened and posted in today’s world, the following activity is normally measured to make sure the talent acquisition team is on target and has activity on as many positions as possible:

• Resumes generated from referrals and the job postings
• Out of those candidate resumes, how many candidates have been interviewed
• Of the interviews how many offers have been made and accepted
• How many positions have candidates interviewing on them (either one or multiples)
• How many positions have been filled
• How many candidates have been brought in for interviews overall
• What is the average time it takes to fill a position
• What is the cost of hire (with or without recruiting and search firms)

All these metrics are focused on the pre-start process of hiring a candidate or filling a position.  As soon as the hire is made, all metrics focused on the candidate-hired ceases.

It is truly rare to find best-of-breed companies and Human Resource departments that care more about Quality of Hire than Cost or Speed of Hire as KPIs. If that wasn’t true, the metric tracking would look much different than described above?

For one thing, the focus would change. From judging how HR/Talent Acquisition is doing or how one or all Recruiting Firms are doing, the focus would be on how the candidate did after the hire. Those metrics are much different and do change the focus to the evaluation of “Quality of Hire”, which can then be tied to HR, Talent Acquisition, Postings, Employee Referrals, Recruiting Firms, Retained Search Firms, etc. The story then addresses what is working and what isn’t, along with the fact that “Quality of Hire” has a huge impact on the success or failure of a company and provides a huge deviation in ROI.

When we look at the metrics here, they consist of:

• How was employee located
• Performance Rankings of employees at 6 months/1 year/2 years/3 years
• Individual retention and average length of tenure
• % of employee resignations/average retention time
• % of employee terminations/average length of stay
• % of overall turnover
• % of employees retained
• % of employees promoted
• % of employees promoted and how often if multiple promotions.

In tracking these metrics based on after the hire factors, we can now extrapolate and make a positive impact on future hiring. Questions that maybe asked include:

• What are the best sources of candidates?
• Why are we loosing our top/poor employees?
• Are we managing our top performers well?

The important thing to keep in mind is focusing on the right information, allowing overall hiring and candidate/employee quality to improve using the information as a roadmap for success.

At Honer & Associates, we focus on these after-the-hire metrics.  It is one of the ways that we ensure that we are finding our clients the top-tier, productive talent that they need.  Want to know more?  Contact us today. 

Strategies need to be clearly articulated to be successful.

Who, within a company, should decide the selection criteria that a company’s hiring process is based on?  CIO? HR? Hiring manager? Technical staff?

When making information technology (IT) hiring decisions, the CIO is the only one who is able to set hiring standards and lay out the interviewing framework and process. Without CIO sponsorship and support, overall candidate selection becomes splintered and senior- level leaders are left to do their own thing.

Although, this splintered approach occurs in a majority of the information technology departments, it is neither consistent nor effective enterprise-wide.  To put together a consistent, effective, organization-wide approach requires top-down vision adhered to by the entire information technology organization.

By setting the strategy, standards, framework, and processes, the CIO can dictate or influence quality of hiring.  This, in turn, can take an employee referral, skill-based, mediocre candidate selection process and turn it into a well-oiled talent acquisition machine. The goal is simple, to put processes in place to eliminate bad hires, non-hires, and move to performance-based selection. Once the staff figures out how to determine the caliber and past performance of the candidates through effective interviewing, confidence takes over and performance-based hiring becomes contagious.

The fastest way to turn a laggard performing organization into a best-of-breed organization is by changing the caliber of staff and consistently exceeding management’s expectations. And the shortcut to accomplishing this daunting task is to change and fine-tune the talent acquisition and selection strategies and tactics. The quality of staff will quickly change for the better, when staff is hired based on past performance, depth of experience, motivation and supported by data vs. hired because they interviewed well, were likeable, or they were known by another employee. This change alone will allow the CIO to make more impact on the business than any other change in direction or process.

At Honer & Associates, we have focused on finding the best IT professionals for our clients’ hiring needs.  We have refined our process over the last 30 years.  Assisting companies in their candidate selection process is our trademark.  To discuss this topic or others necessary to hiring quality talent, feel free to contact us at your convenience.