By John Grom
It's a rare organization that does not proudly proclaim that "Our
People Are Our Most Important Asset." The statement is on the
headquarters lobby wall, in the annual report, in speeches made by
senior executives and anywhere else the PR people think it sounds good.
The fact is it's true, even if top management doesn't always believe it.
The most important key to the success of any organization is having the
right people in the right positions, properly trained, equipped, led
and motivated to meet or exceed the goals of the organization. Sometimes
I shake my head when I see how the leadership of some organizations go
about the task of putting the right people in the right job. Staffing is
often treated as an incidental detail to finish quickly with very
little effort. Some of the ways I have seen this task approached
include:
- Run an ad in a newspaper or trade journals and hire the best of those who respond.
- Get a bunch of resumes from an internet service and pick the one who comes closest to meeting the job specification.
- Hire someone because they have good connections or through nepotism.
- Interview a long string of poorly screened candidates. Then at some point when interview fatigue sets in on the selection team, hire the next person in the door who comes close to the specification.
- Hire someone everybody personally likes, even though they don't exactly fit the specification. Watch out for the word chemistry during interviewer debriefing.
- Hire someone with outstanding credentials, albeit the wrong credentials for the job at hand and try to reshape the job to fit the person.
- Pick a strong selection team made up of the four or five people with the most intimate knowledge of the job.
- Conduct a detailed job analysis.
- Develop a detailed job description based on the analysis.
- Develop a hiring specification based on the job description.
- Use an appropriate candidate sourcing method for the job.
- Carefully screen all potential candidates prior to interviewing, learning of all knockout factors as early in the process as possible.
- Have a carefully planned interview process spelled out with each interviewers assignment clearly understood. Don't waste valuable interview time with each interviewer asking the same questions.
- Debrief the selection team on the points of the job description and the hiring specification and not irrelevant information.
Please visit my website, http://www.cjohngrom.com
for access to my commentaries on employee selection and personal job
search techniques developed over a thirty year career as an executive
recruiter and staffing manager. My career included over ten years on the
corporate staff of Rubbermaid, Inc., as Manager of Executive
Recruiting. During that time, Rubbermaid, Inc., quadrupled in size and
was twice named by Fortune Magazine as "The Most Admired US
Corporation". My contribution was to personally recruit over one hundred
executives, including seven Division Presidents and four of the eight
members of the Corporate Executive Committee.