The case for evidence-based hiring

A campaigning politician recently promised that, if elected, he will employ an “evidence-based decision-making model” to resolve society’s problems. This would contrast with his opponents’ practice of “decision-based evidence-making”—seeking evidence to support decisions that have already been made.

Sounds good. Wouldn’t we all welcome a world where decisions were based on the best available evidence?

Yet, while no one would admit to doing the opposite—using an evidence-making approach—the world is full of examples of decisions that were made without first carefully examining the relevant information.

Often, decisions are made first, then followed by a scramble to find reasons that justify the choices of politicians and business leaders. “Evidence-makers” rely on conspiracy theories, “alternative facts” (thanks to former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway for inventing the term), and the deliberate misinterpretation of credible research findings.

It happens in politics, where solutions that are popular (i.e., what gets you elected) may be at odds with approaches that work elsewhere or are supported by mounds of research. It happens in business, where policies are created to address problems that don’t exist.

Alas, it also happens when hiring, when decisions are driven by factors that may be unconscious, such as gut feelings, biases and first impressions.

Detective Hercule Poirot provides an interesting take on the power of the subconscious near the end of the 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice: “My subconscious mind assembled facts ahead of the rational.” 

A rational approach is essential whether identifying a murderer or identifying the right person to hire. When you have a vacancy to fill, you must use interviews and reference checks to gather pertinent evidence before making your hiring decision.

Before beginning to gather evidence, identify the competencies and attitudes the ideal next addition to your staff should possess. Develop questions that will reveal evidence that candidates have what you are seeking. Create a rubric that enables you to objectively assess responses to each question. What would you expect of a potential top performer? What would be acceptable? And what would be an unsatisfactory response?

During interviews, avoid asking opinion questions. Don’t ask candidates, “What would you do if …?” Ask how they have responded to circumstances similar to those they might encounter if hired. 

Don’t ask if they feel collaboration and customer service are important. Instead, ask them to describe a time when they collaborated with co-workers or how they resolved a customer’s problem.

Don’t ask references if they would hire this candidate again or for their assessment of the individual’s performance. Ask them to describe how the candidate has collaborated with colleagues or how they responded to a customer’s issue.

Keep your questions short to avoid providing hints about what you would prefer to hear from the candidate. 

Decision-first hiring often results when interviewers make a quick judgment about candidates. Once judgments are made, interviewers stop listening for evidence that is contrary to their first impressions. 

Keep an open mind. Resist the urge to make early assessments based on what happens early in interviews. Candidates who perform poorly early on may redeem themselves as the interview progresses, while early “front-runners” will fade in the stretch. Collect as much evidence as you can before making hiring decisions.

When you practise evidence-based decision-making, you are setting yourself up for hiring success. You will be prepared to select the right people to fill your vacancies.

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Want to make evidence-based hiring the norm in your organization? Contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or phone/text 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this and other workshops and programs.

Get Your “Jury” Right When Hiring

I have written previously that the purpose of juries in criminal trials and interview panels are similar. Both are charged with the responsibility to make decisions based on their examination of the facts presented to them.

What juries decide must be unanimous. What interview panels decide should be. Whatever they decide has a profound effect on individuals’ futures.

Selecting who will sit on a jury is an important first step in criminal trials, as is deciding who to invite to join an interview panel in the hiring process. Just as a great amount of investigation occurs before a trial begins its jury selection, interview panels should be assembled early in the recruitment process to assist in identifying the criteria by which applicants will be assessed and in writing questions to be asked during interviews and reference checks.

Both juries and panels require people who are able to keep an open mind, resist making preliminary judgments, set aside biases and focus on the evidence as presented, whether it comes from witnesses during trials or from candidates and their references when hiring.

The challenge of empanelling a jury likely has never been so stark as it will be when jury selection begins on March 25 in the New York trial of Donald Trump.

The former and would-be future American president faces a 34-count indictment related to alleged hush money payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels just weeks before the 2016 election.

Recently published articles on the websites of BBC News and ABC News illustrate how difficult it will be to find 12 jurors, plus six alternatives, for this trial. While the process could wrap up within a day, it could also extend for several days.

Jury selection could take a great deal of time, former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the BBC, because “everyone knows who Donald Trump is. Everyone has an opinion about him.”

“Trying to find a pool of people who don’t know, don’t have a view about Trump or don’t know about the case is going to take time,” former federal prosecutor Josh Naftalis told ABC News.

The BBC article predicts that, “Prospective jurors could face a range of questions when the trial kicks off, from where they get their news to whether they have ever put a political bumper sticker on their car.

“They may also be asked if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, if they have read any of Mr. Trump’s books or if they have listened to anything from [Trump’s former personal attorney Michael] Cohen,” a frequent guest on television news networks.

While the consequences are not as severe as in criminal cases—no one is going to jail—the decisions of interview panels will impact the lives of the people they interview. Take care when selecting who will sit on interview panels.

Do they know some of the candidates, but not others? Do they have opinions about those they know? Are they able to suspend judgment until they have heard what each candidate has said? Are there any biases that might influence their opinions about candidates?

In the ABC article, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who previously served as the chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s trial division, sounds an optimistic note about jurors’ ability to set bias and opinions aside in Trump’s trial and focus on the facts. 

“There’s something very solemn about a courtroom and sitting in judgment of somebody.” 

Interview panels should treat their role just as seriously.

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Considering who to invite to join interview panels and their role on the panel is a topic covered during the daylong workshop Interview Right to Hire Right. Contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or phone/text 780-232-3828) to schedule Interview Right to Hire Right training for your leadership team or to learn more.

Don’t wait until the end to ask for feedback

The way Princess Cruise Lines conducts surveys can be model for collecting staff feedback. 

Three days into our nine-day cruise aboard the Diamond Princess, a brief, half-page survey from the  hotel general manager asking for “First Impressions” was left in the passengers’ cabins.

“Our crew is always looking to share our hearts with you and exceed your expectations. Please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions you’d like to share with us below.”

What Princess is doing that is better than what other organizations do is not waiting until the end before asking for feedback. 

Data collected after the cruise ends, after hotel guests have checked out, or after a service has been completed may assist the organization in improving what it does in the future, but those completing after-the-fact questionnaires won’t feel the impact of their feedback. They won’t benefit from any changes.

When Princess collects feedback just a few days into the cruise, it has an opportunity to make things right for the current guests. There is a potential benefit to the guests for taking time to answer the cruise line’s questions.

This approach to gathering feedback resonates with me. It’s a practice that I encountered years ago and incorporated into my daylong workshops, such as Interview Right to Hire Right, Staff Recognition: One Piece at a Time and Retaining Staff Without Spending Buckets of Money.

Just prior to the lunch break. I distribute a single sheet that asks participants to rate how well their expectations were met during the first half of the day and what mid-course corrections are required to better meet their expectations during the remaining hours.

The feedback I receive is always useful, whether it indicates that the workshop is what participants expected or that adjustments are needed to provide more of what participants really want. Some respond with questions that they wish to have addressed during the afternoon.

While there is still an evaluation form to complete at the end of the workshop, I have found that when participants understand that they could receive an immediate benefit from completing the survey, the quality of the feedback is greater than what I learn from end-of-the-day questionnaires. What I learn from midday assessments allows me to make same-day adjustments and improve the quality of future workshops.

A midpoint check-in is a concept that can be implemented as a tool to collect meaningful feedback from staff. A better approach than relying on annual staff surveys is a series of pulse surveys that ask about a single topic or a limited number of topics.

These brief surveys can be completed quickly. Limiting the number of topics means less time is needed to analyze the results before the organization can act, based on what was learned. 

Like Princess Cruise Lines passengers or workshop participants, staff can feel the impact of their feedback immediately.

Ask for one more example to learn more before hiring

Candidates’ initial responses to interview questions frequently don’t contain enough information. To obtain a better picture of what they have done in the past, it may be necessary to ask one more question. Or several more.

Whether conducting an interview or checking references, your purpose is to find evidence about how the candidate has performed in circumstances similar to what they may encounter in your workplace. You are seeking examples of a candidate’s previous on-the-job performance.

As advocates of behaviour description interviewing (BDI) say, “Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.”

Candidates, who frequently are better prepared for interviews than those asking the questions, anticipate that they will be asked BDI questions about what they have done in the past. They will arrive with well-rehearsed examples that show how innovative they are, their ability to collaborate with others, their organizational skills and their systematic approach to decision making.

In some cases, those well-thought-out examples may not be typical of the candidate’s past performance. You will need to probe to learn more.

The “past performance” principle comes with caveats. The behaviour that the candidate is describing must be relevant, recent and repeated. If the examples the candidate supplies don’t contain information that you need to make your hiring decision, ask for one more example.

If you judge the example is not relevant to your workplace, ask for another that relates to the tasks the candidate will be asked to perform if hired.

If necessary, ask for a more recent example. What a candidate did five or 10 years ago may not fit today’s workplace. Examples from “long ago” are a reason to wonder if the candidate has developed beyond where they were five or 10 years ago.

And if you feel that what the candidate described was a “one off,” ask for another example to determine if this behaviour has been repeated.

All this applies when checking references. If you are not satisfied with the example the reference provides, ask for one more example.

Just like the candidates, references could have messages that they plan to deliver when approached. 

The candidate may have coached their references about what to say, and they may not be familiar enough with the candidate’s performance to be able to come up with another example.

Asking for one more example when interviewing or checking references may produce what you need to decide if this is the right person to hire.

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Participants in Interview Right to Hire Right workshops develop questions to uncover examples of past behaviour that enable them to hire the right people. Please contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this training.

Banish yes and no questions from interviews and reference checks

Could you carry on a conversation for three minutes without using Yes or No?

Responding to this challenge was the essence of the Yes/No Game played by cruise passengers on the Diamond Princess, this past fall.

The game was also a reminder to anyone who is hiring to avoid asking questions during interviews or reference checks that could be answered with a single word.

The cruise director who hosted the game in one of the ship’s lounges invited participants to engage in a three-minute conversation with her, without uttering either word.

The prize: a bottle of wine. And for competitors who failed: an origami crane. Most left the lounge with a paper crane in hand.

Participants tried to avoid the two prohibited words but most fell short. A typical conversation went something like this:

Host: Where are you from?

Participant: Toronto.

Host: Is that a nice place to live?

Participant: Yes. 

Game over! In less than five seconds.

Interviews can go wrong when interviewers ask questions that can be answered with just one word:

“Do you feel teamwork is important?”

“Was ABC Corporation a good place to work?”

“If we were to hire you, how long would you stay?”

And during reference checks: 

“Would you describe Andy as well-organized?”

“Did Anita work well with her colleagues?”

“Would you hire Joe again?”

There are two reasons the above questions don’t work.

First, where do you go next if the candidate replies, “Yes”? 

Even respected media interviewers can fall into the Yes/No question trap, as occurred when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was interviewing U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. 

Warren simply answered, “Yes” when asked if she would accept an invitation to be Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate, followed by silence when the senator didn’t add to her response.

Finally, Maddow was able to escape this awkward moment in a way not available during hiring interviews. She went to a commercial.

The second problem is that all these questions ask for the candidate or reference’s opinion, when you should be using interviews and reference checks to gather evidence. Specifically, you’re looking for evidence about the candidate’s past performance that will enable you to form an opinion about whether the candidate is the right person to hire, or not.

Some of those questions can be fixed, but others are not worth asking in any form.

Asked if teamwork is important, most candidates will assume that if you are asking, teamwork must be important to you. Hence, the “correct” answer is “Yes.” Teamwork is important to them.

Better to ask candidates to “describe a time when you were a member of a work team” or to ask references to “provide an example of a time when Anita collaborated with a colleague or colleagues.”

 By asking candidates for their assessment of their previous employers or how long they would commit to stay if hired, you’ll get answers unlikely to yield any information that will be useful to you when deciding which candidate is the right person to hire.

Finally, there is that question about whether the reference would rehire this individual. There is no reason to ask that question.

References are strangers to you, carefully selected and coached by candidates to portray them in the best light. Even if references provide their honest assessment of the individual’s performance, you don’t know the criteria they use to judge employees. Hiring decisions should not be based on the opinion of strangers.

These is a question that requires only a one-word response to keep in mind when making hiring decisions:

Whose is the only opinion that matters when hiring for your organization?

Answer: YOURS!

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How to ask questions during interviews and reference checks is one of the topics covered during Interview Right to Hire Right workshops. Please contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this training.

How to write interview questions to get evidence you need to identify the right person

Along with resumes and application forms and reference checks, interviews are an important component of the process that will assist you to identify the right person to hire—as distinct from the “best” person.

Interviews are an opportunity to learn more about candidates than what you learned from their resumes or application forms. It’s an opportunity to collect evidence about candidates’ previous on-the-job experience. Have they done the right things in the right way for your workplace?

The questions you ask during interviews determine the quality of the information you gather. Before writing your questions, be clear about what you want to learn from the candidates’ answers.

Questions should be tailored to the vacancy to be filled and to the culture of your organization.

If you ask questions because they are the questions that everyone is asking, you can be assured that those are the questions the candidates have prepared themselves to answer. You will learn little about candidates from their well-rehearsed answers. 

There are three considerations when deciding what you will ask about:

Your top performers—What do they do that makes them successful? Write and ask questions that require candidates to describe how they have responded to circumstances similar to what they will experience if hired. Do the candidates provide evidence of having responded as your top performers would respond?

Your organization’s values—What candidates have done previously tells you about their values related to integrity, collaboration, teamwork, customer services, etc. Ask questions to ascertain if the candidates’ past behaviour corresponds to how you would want them to perform. Has what they have done demonstrated that their integrity or commitment to collaboration aligns with that of your organization?

Your organization’s future—What skills, competencies and values are required of staff members who will help carry your organization to its desired future? Use interviews to determine if candidates possess what you will need from them to move your organization forward.

Use the following guidelines when writing interview questions:

Think past tense: Ask about what candidates have done, not what they will do. You want evidence of how they have acted, not speculation about what they might do. Keep in mind the principle of behaviour description interviews (BDI). It states that, “Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.” People tend to respond to situations in the same ways as they responded to similar circumstances in the past. Does what you hear from the candidate align with what you would expect top performers to do and the values of your organization? Begin your requests for information with phrases such as, “Describe a time when …” or “Recall when you were …”

Keep your questions short: Challenge yourself to write questions that could be tweeted, especially back when tweets were limited to just 140 characters. The longer the question, the more likely you are to provide hints about how you want it answered. Candidates will listen to interviewers’ words for hints about what they want to hear. The more talkative interviewers are, the less effective they become.

Be prepared to ask followup questions: Probe to learn more. The more you learn about candidates, the better prepared you are to decide who is the right person to hire. Ask when and where what they describe occurred. Encourage them with “tell me more.” Seek clarification when required. Point out inconsistencies.

Plan how you will assess candidates: Create an assessment tool that consists of a rubric against which you assess candidates. In this way, you will be prepared to compare candidates against standards you established prior to the interview and not to each other.

Prepare to take notes: Create a note-taking form that includes your initial request for information, followup questions and the assessment rubric. 

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Participants in Interview Right to Hire Right workshops will have opportunities to craft and receive feedback on questions they can use the next time they have a vacancy to file. Contact Nelson to schedule a workshop for your leadership team (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828).

Are You Being Fooled by the People You Interview?

The group of six women at the nearby table in my favourite coffee shop were obviously in high spirits. Loud. Each excitedly speaking over the words of the others. An abundance of laughter.

It was evident that most were recent university graduates who were looking for their first jobs. They regaled each other with tales of their interview experiences, particularly how each had attempted to fool interviewers into believing that she was the right person to hire.

The loudest burst of laughter came when one recalled what she did when asked, “Where do you expect to be in five years?”

“I lied!”

While lying to potential employers is not a practice I condone, it’s not a surprise that it happens. Most people looking for employment search the Internet, attend workshops and scan books on how to conduct a successful job search. 

The wide availability of such resources is why most job seekers are better prepared for interviews than the people who will be asking the questions.

Websites, training and books all include suggestions on how best to respond to common interview questions, such as about the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, why the interviewer should hire them, and career plans (“Where do you expect to be in five years?”).

These are the types of questions I had in mind when I included “asking the wrong questions” in my list of 13 reasons managers are “unlucky” when making hiring decisions. Asking these questions provides opportunities for candidates to recite the words they practised in anticipation of being asked the question. Settling for those well-rehearsed answers is another reason that managers make poor hiring decisions.

Those responses fail to yield valuable information on which to base hiring decisions. There is no evidence of what the candidate has done in previous jobs. Past performance may be the best predictor of future performance, but if you learn nothing about what they have done previously it is impossible to confidently predict what they will do if hired.

When participants in my Interview Right to Hire Right workshops argue that asking about where the candidate expects to be in five years results in useful information about the candidates, I suggest that if they feel they must ask about career plans they should ask a followup question: “What steps have you taken toward reaching your career goal?”

If they have done nothing to move them closer to their goal, does that goal really exist? Or are they just responding to your question in the way they learned to respond during a workshop on conducting a job search? Are they lying in hope of fooling you into believing that they are the right person to hire?

The old saying is, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” 

And if they fool you trice, it’s time to get some training in how to conduct interviews.

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I have previously written that a right time to ask about career goals is after people are hired, with the intent of providing learning opportunities that will help them grow professionally.

Better yet, link their career goals to how you recognize them for their successes and contributions. In my new book, Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff Theme #10: Linking Staff Recognition to Career Goals suggests 24 ways to do this.

An author’s work is never done

“The past, for everyone, is full of missed chances.” 

– Humanitarian, Le Ly Hayslip

While it may not be politically correct, the adage, “A woman’s work is never done,” is a useful starting point for a discussion of what’s not in my new book, Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff.

No sooner than the manuscript is placed in the hands of the publisher, its author begins to discover more information that should be in the book; but it’s too late.

When this happened just after I had signed off on the final version of Thanks, Again!, I recalled the words of the late Dan Poynter, who travelled the world providing advice to would-be authors.

“Your book will never include everything it could,” the guru of self-publishing said, during one of our conversations. “Think of your book as being 85 per cent complete. You will always discover information that could be added. That’s for the second edition.”

Right now, it’s hard to think about a second edition when we are still weeks away from the fall launch of Thanks, Again!

But if someday there is a second edition, one addition will be references to Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life, by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, both of whom teach at Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Their words would be a valuable addition to my book’s Theme #14: Important? Certainly, But Recognition Can Be Fun, Too.

Humour has a place in staff recognition. Fun recognition that generates smiles and laughter has a positive impact on the workplace. It helps build relationships and boost morale. Having fun at work increases engagement.

“Unexpected, playful moments of praise or recognition can often be more meaningful than ‘official’ ones because they signal that someone is not only paying attention to what we’re doing well, but cares enough to go out of their way to celebrate it,” Aaker and Bagdonas write.

In this one sentence, Aaker and Bagdonas indirectly acknowledged that at least three ingredients of meaningful recognition (identified in my acronym GREAT) are part of humorous recognition. 

Fun recognition is meaningful because it is Genuine—motivated by a sincere sense of appreciation for what someone did. By “paying attention” to what people are doing, we are preparing ourselves to provide Explicit (i.e., specific) recognition. Recognition that is Appropriate depends on “caring enough” to find ways to recognize individuals that reflect who they are, their interests and their recognition preferences.

It’s important that you know staff members as individuals when humour is part of your staff recognition practices.

The theme about fun in Thanks, Again! is one of the longest in the book. Yet not everything that’s suggested—much of it depends on puns that make you laugh or groan—will work for everyone.

Referring to workplace humour, Aaker and Bagdonas caution, “What we find funny—or appropriate—is far from universal. There are a whole lot of gray areas when it comes to humor.”

In Thanks, Again!, the theme filled with fun ways to recognize staff ends with three serious points:

• Humour can be risky. What some staff enjoy as a fun award may not be Appropriate for others. Know your staff.
• Humour based on ridicule or bullying has no place in staff recognition.
• Be aware that staff members for whom English is a second language may not understand humour that depends on puns for its effect and could take unintended offence.

When humour fails, you need to do what some people find difficult to do—offer a sincere apology.

“When humor fails or offends, it can be tempting to brush it off as the other person’s problem—‘he didn’t get the joke’ or ‘she’s being too sensitive’—instead of stopping to consider how it might be our problem,” Aaker and Bagdonas write. “In these moments, lean in: trust their reaction, understand and acknowledge your mistake, reflect on your blind spots and make it right.”

If only I had known about Humor, Seriously before I finished writing Thanks, Again!, I might be able to say, “My book is 85.75 per cent complete.”

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Theme #14: Important? Certainly, But Recognition Can Be Fun, Too is just one of 30 themes included in Thanks, Again!. There is alsoa Bonus Section with at least 101 more thoughts, tips, tools and techniques that didn’t fit any of the themes but were too good to leave out.

Click here to discover some of the other themes and how you can be among the first to receive an autographed copy of Thanks, Again! before its official launch in the fall.

A candidate’s decision prompted a rethink of roles on interview panels

A moment of truth in the hiring process comes when a job is offered. Will the candidate accept?

Most say “Yes,” but for a variety of reasons, some don’t.

They may feel that what’s offered is not a significant improvement from what they would be leaving. A better offer may come along. It’s not the right time for a family move. They find that the hours they will be required to work are unattractive.

The reason that surprised me a few years ago was when a candidate turned down the job because he was uncomfortable with how the interview was structured.

“I didn’t accept the offer because I felt that I was unable to connect with the board members because of the way the interview was conducted,” a candidate for a position of CEO said. “I didn’t like the fact that the consultant hired to manage the hiring process was the only one asking the questions.”

I was that consultant.

The board that hired me to manage the recruitment process for them decided the process would go better if they collaborated with me to develop the questions that I would ask on their behalf. They were in the room to take notes and ask followup questions to clarify what the candidates said.

This type of specialization is something that I include in my tips for creating effective interview panels. 

Allowing each panel member to concentrate on a specific task is one of the advantages of forming an interview panel. It can be frustrating when everyone is asking questions and trying to keep track of what candidates say.

From the candidates’perspective, when they don’t know who will pop up to ask the next question, they may feel like they are sitting in front of a carnival arcade Whac-a-Mole game. This adds to the stress already inherent in interviews, even as you are trying to reduce the candidate’s stress so they will be comfortable answering questions.

When freed from the burden of keeping notes, the person assigned responsibility for asking questions can focus on listening to the responses to determine if followup questions are required. Other panel members can concentrate on creating an accurate record of the candidate’s responses when they don’t have to think about the next question they are scheduled to ask.

Since learning why the person declined the interview panel’s offer, I have pondered what could have been done differently that might have changed the outcome. How could I have taken a less prominent role in the process? What different advice would I now offer other interview panels?

Panels could decide that more than one person will ask questions. In that case, panels can avoid the Whac-a-Mole scenario by blocking questions. Instead of jumping from one panel member to the next, each would ask a series of questions before yielding the floor to the next panel member.

Prior to the interview, a representative of the panel should advise the candidate how the interview will be structured.

“Three of us will be asking you a series of questions, beginning with our department head Jacob, who will be followed by our manager Jennifer and finally myself.”

After asking his questions, Jacob will signal the change. “Now, my colleague Jennifer has some questions for you.”

Responsibility for note taking will pass to those not asking questions. When it’s their turn to ask questions, panel members will only focus on listening to what the candidate says and determining if followup questions are required.

Would this approach have led to a different outcome in the interview I described earlier? Would the board’s preferred candidate have said yes to the job offer?

Perhaps, but that doesn’t really matter. What is important, whether it’s one person or more, whoever is asking questions should focus only on that task—listening to the candidate’s answers and making followup inquiries as necessary—and leave it to other panel members to take accurate notes of what is said. Specialization on interview panels results in the right person being hired more often.

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Creating interview panels that are effective and right for your organization is one of the topics explored during my full-day Interview Right to Hire Right workshops. Contact me to schedule a workshop for your leadership team or to learn more. (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828).

The Hiring Manager Did It — Another Moral of the Murder Mystery

A reader picked up the metaphor from my recent article that compared how we hire to the procedures used by fictional detectives in books, film and TV when solving murders. With her tongue firmly lodged in cheek, she inquired, “Are there serial hiring managers?”

Sadly, there are.

The FBI defines serial killings as “a series of three or more killings … having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors.”

By that definition, serial hirings would have the common characteristics of repeated recruitment errors and ineffective onboarding practices. Evidence of this “crime” can be found in the records of managers who hire and rehire for the same position over a relatively short period of time. 

Knowing the presence of a serial killer in a community can be a source of anxiety, which for some can become a paralyzing fear of being killed that psychologists have labelled “foniasophobia.”

The stress of working in an environment with a high turnover rate may not be as extreme as living in dread of becoming the victim of a serial killer but few people want to work where employees leave as quickly as they were hired. 

High turnover rates are rooted in a flawed hiring process, filled with mistakes that could be avoided. These include making hasty hiring decisions, not defining the attitudes and skills required for success in the position, asking the wrong type of questions, relying on gut feelings when making hiring decisions and failing to take advantage of reference checks.

Managers make these and other mistakes because many have not received training on using interviews and reference checks to gather the necessary information on which to base hiring decisions. Candidates are often better prepared to be interviewed than managers are to conduct interviews. 

Managers miss red and yellow flags when reviewing resumes, conducting interviews and checking references.

The 13 most common reasons that poor hiring decisions are made and how to avoid those mistakes are the focus of an e-book you can download for free.

Often, managers feel that once someone has been hired the job is done. In fact, hiring is just the first step. It is not unusual for new hires to begin to feel “buyer’s remorse” and wonder if accepting the job offer was the right decision. 

What happens during the new person’s first few days on the job can make a big difference in terms of how long they stay. There are a number of ways to encourage new employees to commit to the organization rather than to begin a new job search.

One reason that new staff members leave soon after being hired is that managers overpromise and underdeliver. New hires quickly discover that the reality of the workplace does not match what they were told during the recruitment process about what they could expect. Feeling misled, they soon opt to seek employment elsewhere.

New hires, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, decide to make a quick exit as they discover that their new workplace is not a place where they feel they belong. They aren’t comfortable being themselves.

Creating an  inclusive workplace is an important step toward improving staff retention.

When my new book Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff is published later this year, it will include a chapter on how staff recognition can be used to make diverse workplaces inclusive. 

Click here to immediately download sample content—Staff Recognition’s Number One Tool: Thank-You Notes, plus bonus content. You will also 

be able to follow my publishing journey and be among the first to receive an autographed copy of Thanks, Again!