Do you know what happens after a decade of historically low unemployment?
We’ve become accustomed to selecting below-average talent and acting like it’s the best talent.
Ouch!
No! I didn’t mean you. I meant all of the other organizations. You were the one who kept super high standards and had a crystal clear vision of what great talent looked like. Everybody else just hired mouth breathers. You were fine…
That’s what we tell ourselves.
In the zeal to hire fast. Lower that time to fill. We hired warm bodies. Sometimes, we hired lukewarm bodies. Sometimes, we hired the walking dead. I mean, if we are being honest.
The ironic part of this is that your CEO is still out there telling the stakeholders, “We only hire the top talent”! Little by little, every time you hear that, a part of you dies inside. Because we know the truth, we know they hired the best of the applicants for the job when it was open, and there’s a greater than zero chance some of those hires were actually the worst talent in our market.
I bet your CEO would have a hard time telling the local news outlet about that!
Want to be better at selecting talent?
There are three things I think we can do to increase the level of talent we hire massively.
- Job samples are the number one predictor of whether or not a person can actually perform the job. Yet, almost none of us do it. It’s hard to do, expensive, and complicated. I have hope. I’ve seen some new Agentic AI tools that can create life-like job samples for things like sales, accounting, etc.
- Hire intelligent people. If all else fails, hire smart people. If you simply had every single applicant take an intelligence test, and you only hired the smartest, you would actually select better talent than almost everyone else in your market. If you add an assessment around agility to learn, you’ll be even better.
- Interview like you’re a military interrogator. We’ve made interviewing too easy. “Hi! How are you? What’s your favorite color? Oh, you feel stressed? How about we just skip this part, and you can have the job!” We need to get back to truly digging in, asking tough questions, and making sure we want this person and that this person wants us. What I’ve found is that the harder you interview, the more interested the high talent gets. Talented people want to be challenged. Low talent people don’t.
I think we took our eyes off the ball.
We started just hiring skills and forgot about the rest. Yes, I need your skills, but I also need you to buy into what we are doing. Does your crazy match our crazy? Do you want to join this funny farm, or is this not right for you? We stopped trying to get people to opt out of our process, believing that everyone with the right skills is the right hire for us. That just isn’t true.
Some of our organizations have been held back because we simply moved too fast on marginal candidates. We weren’t patient. We bought into the narrative that we might not get anyone if we don’t hire this average talented person.
Even in tough talent-times, we have to move with purpose, not pace. We have to have a clear directive around what is great talent, good talent, average talent, and below-average talent. That bar can’t move, but unfortunately, we have let it move for so long that I’m not even sure if most organizations know the difference between good talent and average talent.
When we look at all the AI tech that will help us hire, and I get to dream about all this extra capacity we’ll have to work with, this is what I think about. Now, we can hire great again!