Bloomberg Businessweek
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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
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8. They interview ineffectively
Every course on interviewing says to the manager, “Don’t do all the talking.” Yet managers get nervous, they get distracted, and pretty soon they’re motor-mouthing their way to the end of the interview without learning squat about the person sitting in front of them. They ask horrendous questions, such as “Where do you see yourself in five years?” (who cares?) and “Of all the talented people in this process, why should we hire you?” They don’t prepare; they’ve never seen the candidate’s résumé and have no questions ready to ask about it. They ramble. They forget and can’t distinguish one candidate from the other. On the other extreme, they line up five people to fire questions at an applicant and then wonder why they gained so little insight.
9. They don’t understand candidates’ needs
To compete in the 21st century, we can’t hire drones. Talented people need to be sold, just like customers. Giving job seekers higher and higher hurdles to clear won’t upgrade the quality of hires in our shops. Marketing and selling our opportunities to the talented people in our networks very well could. When we bring a job seeker through our selection process, we can’t just be looking at whether this person is good enough for us. We have to know the candidate’s needs and motivations, too.
For example: We have two candidates for our sales manager job. Since we’ve spent every second of our interview time asking them about their experience in skills areas A, B, and C, we know almost nothing about these two folks’ interests, motivations, or goals. We don’t know why they’re interested in us or what they hope to learn by taking this job if it’s offered. We don’t know their long-term career aspirations. One of them might have a year less of experience but be passionate about working in a company like ours (for the international exposure, or the chance to mentor people virtually, or some other reason), and the other candidate may be looking at our opportunity principally because it’s 10 minutes from his house. If we dug into our candidates’ needs, eventually our trust instincts would tell us, “Candidate B has no mojo for this job, but Candidate A has tons of it.” Salespeople continue to sell prospects while they’re qualifying them, and we can do the same with job candidates, vetting and wooing at the same time.
Here is the crux: If we aren’t selling opportunities because we believe we don’t need to (believing, for instance, that employees should be lucky to work for us), we are aiming too low for talent. We can make our hiring a competitive advantage, but only if we transform it into a shared leadership goal to find the sharpest people in our industries and reel them in. That’s a new mindset. Can your organization get good at it—in time?
Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive.
