The Brilliant Disaster: How Do You Avoid Hiring the Wrong Leader?
2/20/2020
The Brilliant Disaster [Part one}
Resumes were strewn all over the floor and couches of the living room. My father was desperately searching for a new senior executive in his organization. I was in college at the time and had no idea about executive selection. I struggled seeing his desperation and confusion with all the hundreds of resumes he had received. After reading resumes and talking to hundreds of candidates my father made his selection.
The final candidate, Angela, was a brilliant attorney in the main division of the organization. She seemed wise and knew the system well. Looking good on paper made Angela look like the best of many candidates. Interviews with her seemed to go well.
She was a disaster! Rigid and uncompromising Angela didn’t last for more than a year. She knew the rules all right and she could spew them back to you verbatim. She loved the book and she went by it. She was a poor fit for an organization that went more with the spirit of law than the letter of the law.
What had gone wrong? My dad had worked so hard on those hundreds of resumes. He had hired by gut instinct mostly but not by design really at all. Later I would find out about hiring by design through some excellent teaching by one of my mentors in executive coaching.
Hiring By Design
The Benefits
It’s objective, cost-effective, legal, and it works.
Candidates are uniformly impressed that the organization takes its mission so seriously that it uses such a systematic and thorough approach to the acquisition of human resources.
Testing significantly reduces turnover and the high costs associated with it.
When the best-fit applicants are hired, they settle into the new position more quickly and travel the learning curve faster.
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“Poor hiring shows up not merely in poor decisions but also in poor morale. When the less competent employees reach critical mass, their low performance standards become the de facto standards of the organization. The longer established employees who are well equipped for the job abandon their old high standards and conform to the new, lower ones.”
– Frank Schmidt, Ph.D. University of Iowa
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The hiring evaluation report becomes a working document for the individual and their manager. With the evaluation report in hand, the manager has a much clearer understanding of how to motivate, develop, and coach the new hire.
When correctly matched to a job, individuals perform for the satisfaction of mastery and achievement.
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The last applicant seen is three times more likely to be hired when testing is not used
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[See part two]
