IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting the hiring manager involved

Developing a position success profile

Being thoughtful about the job title

Determining core competencies for success

If you’ve determined that the needs in your workforce plan are best addressed by hiring additional full-time employees, it’s time to find this talent! This chapter outlines the foundations of a successful hiring process — engaging the right people in the process and ensuring that you (and everyone involved) are clear on what success looks like.

Nearly everything else you do with respect to HR policies and practices becomes easier if you’re making good hiring decisions. If you don’t have to spend the bulk of your time each day helping leaders resolve people issues, you can concentrate on the big picture: where you or your senior management want the organization to go in the years ahead.

That’s the benefit of good hiring decisions. A bad hiring decision produces just the opposite result. You spend more time as a firefighter and less time as a leader and strategic planner.

Engaging the Hiring Manager

Ensuring the right talent is a team sport, so when the organization needs to source talent for an open position, the first step is to involve the hiring manager, the individual who will lead this new team member. The quality of a recruiter’s relationship with the hiring manager makes a world of difference.

When a recruiter and hiring manager aren’t aligned, the process will take longer than it should. The recruiter will bring in candidates whom the hiring manager doesn’t think are a fit; candidates may suffer from a poor, unorganized interview experience; and chances are decent that the search will end back at square one. So the first step is a well-run intake meeting with the hiring manager. This meeting sets the stage for collaboration and clear communication between the recruiter and the hiring manager throughout the process.

All intake meetings should include conversation on the following:

• Position success profile: Also known as the job description, the position success profile is a document that outlines success in the position that you’re hiring for. It encourages maximum fit between the employee and the expected outcomes of the role and allows you as the employer to quickly and accurately identify the competencies and motivations needed for successful job performance. Ensure that it’s current and reflects the outcomes that define success in the position (see the next section).
• Time to fill:Time to fill measures the time between when a job is opened and when a candidate accepts the offer. It’s the most common recruiting metric because it indicates how much time is needed to hire for the role and how long it takes to find the right candidate.
• Time to hire: This metric indicates how fast you’re moving candidates through the hiring process. Just like time to fill, it’s an important metric, but more indicative of the recruiting team’s ability to move qualified candidates through the process after they’ve been identified.
• Recruitment and interview process: Your recruitment process can be broken down into several stages: screening, phone/virtual interview, assessment, in-person interview, and so forth. By breaking down your time to hire, you can also find out how long it takes for an average candidate to move from one stage to the next.
• Logistics: Save yourself huge headaches down the line by sorting out logistics like compensation, equity, and target start date at the very first hiring manager intake session.
• Assessment tests:Assessment tests, also known as pre-employment tests, help hiring managers determine whether a candidate has the skills, work style, knowledge, or personality to succeed in a job. Companies use assessment tests to make good hiring decisions, often during the early parts of the interview process. Before using any assessment in the recruiting process, ensure reliability and validity for selection. Any assessment used should yield consistent results that predict success on the job without any unintended discriminatory impact.
• Sourcing strategies: Ask your hiring manager to help you build a list of sourcing channels where your ideal candidates may have a presence and a list of role-specific keywords to search.

Consider the environment/culture. Remember that the recruiting process is a sales experience, but it’s also important to provide the candidate with a realistic preview of the role and your organization. It’s important to consider the aspects of the role that will be most important to candidates, which includes the people and the environment they will be working in. Consider how people work to ensure that you’re prepared to talk to candidates about the environment and help them determine whether it will be a good fit.

Creating the Position Success Profile

An important outcome of the intake meeting is the development of a success profile for the position you’re recruiting for. Traditionally and often still referred to as a job description, the updated terminology of the success profile reflects what it does: defines success in the position.

Job descriptions merely focus on tasks, whereas position success profiles focus on the outcomes that are most important for this position. In addition to outcomes, a position success profile also includes the core competencies necessary to accomplish the desired outcomes of the position. The goal is to shift your recruiting conversations away from just the job duties to provide specific, measurable goals that tie back to your business needs and company objectives. The position success profile helps to ensure that connection.

The position success profile is where your hiring criteria are first formally set forth, so it should be airtight. Why? Because the position success profile eventually drives the communication of the position, the candidate selection process, and a new employee’s first performance check-in or review.

Think of the position success profile as your blueprint. Do a good job of constructing it, and all the subsequent pieces of the hiring process will more easily fall into place.

The following sections dive deeper into creating the position success profile and ensuring the correct elements. Because it’s the foundation of many of your Talent and HR processes, it must be done thoughtfully.

Being Clear When Writing Job Titles

Job titles are meant to be meaningful, relevant, and clarifying. If you want to attract and retain the best talent, be thoughtful about naming the job carefully and appropriately whenever possible.

The goal of a job title is to describe in a few words what the position entails in terms of responsibilities or expectations. Job titles can also indicate where a particular position fits into the overall work hierarchy (you can check out Indeed’s advice on making this determination at www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/establishing-a-company-hierarchy?hl=en&co=US). C-level job titles, such as CEO and CFO, indicate that the individual is part of senior management, while titles with words such as assistant or junior may indicate that the job is an entry-level position.

An inaccurate or overblown job title can create false expectations and lead to resentment, disappointment, or worse. Now that the majority of positions in most companies involve multitasking, some job titles are probably outdated. If your office manager left, for example, does “office manager” accurately describe the job they were doing, and is that the title you should still use for your opening? Or is “operations manager” now more accurate for the position as it has evolved?

Consider the following guidelines when determining the right job title:

• Choose a job title that is industry-relevant. Make it clear from the title what the specific job requires based on industry norms and language. Ask yourself, “Does this job title clearly indicate this person’s role at the organization and level of industry-relevant expertise?”
• Avoid industry jargon and uncommon abbreviations. Because not every job seeker uses the same abbreviations or knows specific industry terms, steer clear of jargon and such in job titles unless they’re extremely well known. Commonly used acronyms, such as RN, HR, or VP, are okay because most job seekers already know what they mean.
• Indicate the level of seniority required, as appropriate. Words such as senior, junior, and assistant help target your job posting so people who aren’t qualified, or who are overqualified, don’t waste their or your time. If the position works externally with vendors, partners, or customers, the title should be aligned with their level of influence to ensure credibility.
• Be wary of informal wording. Informal or creative wording in a job title can bring out your brand personality but wreak havoc when it comes to fitting your job description or position success profile into a search engine. A job title that seeks a “director of first impressions” or “IT rock star” may seem to present a fun vibe that supports the culture you’re trying to create, but it also keeps your listing hidden when people search for marketing consultant or IT analyst positions. If the ideal job candidate never sees your posting, you may miss out on good talent. Informal or creative titles can also create organization confusion, unintended sexism, and ambiguity regarding both responsibilities and compensation.
• Leave out unnecessary information. Job titles have two main functions: to appear in job searches and to attract high-quality applicants. Extraneous details such as numerical job codes, salary information, and location can be conveyed in other parts of your posting instead of in the job title.
• Avoid outdated job titles. Many common job titles have changed over the years to reflect changing attitudes. As an example, the job title of “clerk” is now “office assistant” or “clerical associate.” Modern job titles also tend to avoid gendered terms, such as using “server” instead of “waitress” and “camera operator” instead of “cameraman.”
• Match the job title to salary expectations. To keep your applicant pool properly qualified, avoid mismatching job titles and salary expectations. Title inflation creates career trajectory problems and salary confusion. You’ll waste time interviewing candidates who have the wrong impression about the job and likely will turn down an offer during negotiations.

Job titles are helpful beyond the hiring process, so it’s important to be thoughtful and get it right. They can help others within your organization understand a particular employee’s role, and a change in title can indicate when an employee has taken on more responsibility. Outside contacts, such as vendors and clients, use job titles to determine who they need to talk to when they have specific questions or needs.

Defining Core Competencies for Success

Every job has a set of technical requirements, but a success profile isn’t complete without those broad-but-telling aspects of a candidate known as core competencies, which are the soft skills, interpersonal abilities, or simply qualities and attributes that support success in the position.

These include an aptitude for communicating with people at all levels, abilities, and backgrounds; the capacity to work well in teams (as both a leader and a team member and both in person and virtually); and other factors, such as a strong sense of ethics and a talent for efficient and creative problem-solving. Candidates who are weak in these areas — even while having solid hard skills and work experience — may prove unable to grow as your organization goes through changes that are part of today’s work environment.

For example, if you’re recruiting an outbound sales rep for your home security business, one way to market your service is to solicit potential customers by phone. The basic job of an outbound sales leader is, of course, to generate leads by calling people on the phone. Some sales leaders, however, are clearly much better at this than others. They have a knack for engaging the interest of the people they call. They don’t allow repeated rejections to wear them down.

Some consulting companies specialize in helping businesses identify core competencies or success drivers for key functions or positions. The following can help you gain insights on success drivers for your organization’s positions:

• Interview your own top performers. Assuming you have a group of people who perform the same job — and assuming one or two of those people are clearly the “stars” of the group — sitting down with your key people or their immediate supervisors to determine what makes them so successful at what they do is certainly worth your time.

  Try to answer the following questions:

  • What special skills, if any, do these outstanding performers possess that others don’t?
  • What type of personality traits do they share?
  • What common attitudes and values do they bring to their jobs?
• Talk to your customers. One of the best — and easiest — ways to find out which employees in your company can provide the basis for determining your desired soft skills is to talk to people with whom your staff interact on a regular basis: your customers. Find out which employees your customers enjoy dealing with the most, and, more important, what those employees do to routinely win the affection of these customers.

Hiring decisions that rely on subjective criteria are particularly susceptible to being challenged as discriminatory. Applicants may argue that unconscious stereotypes can be injected into the decision via subjective criteria. If subjective criteria are used, be sure that your company’s hiring decision-makers can articulate a clear and reasonably specific factual basis for assessing whether a candidate possesses those criteria. For example, to support a conclusion as to whether a candidate “exercises initiative,” ask them to describe times when they’ve spearheaded work projects and record how they respond to that question. Base your conclusion about whether the candidate exercises initiative from the examples they provide.

See the online tools for a blank Position Success Profile and Sample Position Success Profiles that you can use as a starting point and modify to align with your particular jobs.