Making Great Hiring Decisions

Managers want to hire the Best*. This much is understood. The real question is how many managers make great hiring decisions – where expectations match reality. Let’s refer to this as the managers’ hiring effectiveness score and define it as the proportion of great hires within their overall hiring pool. Over the years, I have polled numerous managers of varying hiring tenure across diverse disciplines to get a sense for this metric. The results are intriguing. For instance, a majority of managers claim to make the right hiring decision only half the time, which translates into an effectiveness score of 50%. Think about that for a second; they might as well flip a coin. Moreover, less than 10% of the managers surveyed claimed an effectiveness score of 70% or higher. Bottom line is that while there does not appear to be direct correlation between a manager’s tenure and their quality of hiring decisions, a small subset (top 10%) seems to have figured it out. These are the managers we want to study and draw insight from. This post shares four common best practices that allow these top hiring managers to make great decisions. I hope you benefit from them.

Commit Yourself: Top hiring managers commit themselves to the hiring process; to match a great candidate with a great role. To achieve this outcome, they first, themselves, prepare rigorously to interview. They understand the requirements of the role and are able to clearly articulate it in terms of goals, success criteria, and the skill sets necessary to excel in it. Additionally, these managers compel themselves to bringing out the best in the candidate. This is easier said than done and it takes both experience and preparation. They do not try to trick the candidate or “get them”. Instead they ask insightful, open-ended yet high impact and well-prepared questions that allow them to have two-way conversations with candidates. In doing so, they are able to look beyond the superficial, rehearsed answers and instead engage with candidates to get a true sense of their abilities and personality.
Hire into the Culture: There is an old Irish proverb, “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” In corporate terms, “feet” defines an organization’s capability and “heart,” its culture. The best hiring managers understand that even the most able candidate will fail if they do not fit with the culture of the organization. They actively assess for the right fit between the candidate and team by evaluating a

candidate’s “how” behaviors and fit with organization during the interview process. The exception to this general rule is if the candidate is a Senior Leader or CEO who the company is deliberately hiring to change or to formulate the culture of the team or organization.

Set up a high quality interview panel: These managers not only insist that more heads are better than one (their own), but they also put a premium on getting high quality interviewers on the panel – with a few of them specifically chosen for having strengths that complement the manager’s. This practice generates two specific benefits for the hiring manager. First, the diversity of interviewers allows for a thorough assessment of the interviewee’s candidature across multiple dimensions. Second, it protects the hiring manager from self-induced biases and draws from the collective wisdom of others.
Go back and evaluate yourself: This is straightforward, yet very few managers actually do it. These star managers document both the expectations of the role and the qualities on which they hired the candidate. Then they consistently evaluate themselves on their decisions and incorporate learnings into future interviews. In this way, they constantly calibrate themselves against their own hiring effectiveness score. Moreover, this closed loop setup acts as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy by which these managers continue to strengthen their hiring muscle that in turn allows them to make great hiring decisions.

The one thing I did not touch upon in this article is a manager’s intuition. In my opinion, reliable intuition is a byproduct of the above practices. Good luck.

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* Lets define “Best” as the employees that fit organizational DNA and who deliver results. Image courtesy of Master isolated images at FreeDigitalPhotos.net