Jim Baran's List: RECRUITING

• Throw away the job description. We all know that lists of skills, duties, responsibilities, academics, required experience, and industry background are useless for attracting, screening, or selecting top performers. Hiring managers know this, too. So the next time you take a search assignment, ask the hiring manager what the person needs to do to ace the performance review. Then ask what the best people do differently than the average people in the department. Then ask why a top person would want this job. Then ask the manager if she’d see someone who could do all of this work successfully, even if the person didn’t have all of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. (If the manager says “no,” read this article on how to take the assignment.)

   

  Don’t take the assignment until you know the job. Since you’ve thrown away the job description, you can’t leave the room until you have a complete understanding of what the person taking the job must do to be successful. To do this, take every item on the traditional job description and ask the manager what the person must do with it to prove superior competency. For example, if the manager says the person must have three to five years of industry experience, ask what will the person do with this on the job. This is how you convert job descriptions into performance profiles.
• minimize the impact of first impressions.
• Don’t let managers conduct the first interview alone. Unless it’s structured, pre-planned and focused, the initial one-on-one interview can quickly become an irrelevant or personality-based discussion. Making matters worse, if the candidate makes a positive first impression, the interviewer asks easier questions, and if the candidate falls short on the first impression hurdle, the interviewer asks tougher questions
• • Good articulated points - step-by-step....doesn't include resume review. Like the assessment of technical vs. soft skills.
• untrained interviewers — like most hiring managers — are unlikely to glean much insight into the candidate’s ability to do the real work required for job success.
• While technical competency is part of this, it doesn’t represent a complete assessment.
• when new employees underperform, it’s typically not due to technical weakness; rather, it’s because of weak team skills, lack of motivation to do the work, or a problem with the hiring manager’s style.
• Taming hiring managers is the big 500-pound gorilla in the room.

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• Good articulated points on assessment technical vs soft skills. - Jim Baran on 2009-05-29