The Perfect Candidate

The Perfect Candidate

HIRING by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Every CEO learns that hiring and retaining talented people is one of his most important and most difficult jobs. But one of the best things a manager can do when interviewing a job candidate is simple: Do nothing.

At least for the first 30 minutes, says Lou Adler, a veteran recruiter for national companies, who has written books and articles on the subject. Don't make any opinions, gather any first impressions or develop any biases. "Measure your first impression at the end of the interview," Adler says, "not in the beginning."

Adler is the head of The Adler Group, an Irvine, Calif.-based hiring firm. He wrote "Hire With Your Head," which focuses on what he calls performance-based hiring and speaks nationally on the subject. He told members of the CEO Council of Tampa Bay at their monthly breakfast March 8 that there are too many variables in the first half-hour of an interview, from a trying-too-hard candidate who might be a great find but isn't showing it, to positive vibes the interviewer might get because the candidate is bubbly and energetic, yet turns out to be a bust.

Adler says most managers don't wait 30 minutes, much less 30 seconds before coming up with an opinion of a prospective hire. Take that mistake, combine it with asking poor questions and doing a bad job of promoting the open position in the first place, and it's easy to see why hiring is so tough, Adler says.

The statistics say a lot. About 40% of employers in 23 countries worldwide said they were having difficulty filling positions due to a lack of talent, according to a survey released last month by Manpower Inc. Another recent survey by Robert Half International Inc. showed 86% of employers think it will be equally or more challenging to find qualified candidates a year from now.

Adler said the perfect candidate is out there; it just takes a rethinking of some well-known practices. Adler induced about 100 executive heads to nod in unison when he talked about how much a drag a bad hire could be on an organization.

"It's a lifetime if you don't like somebody," he said. "It goes by in a flash if you do."

On the margin

Adler worked the room full of CEOs from the Greater Tampa area with anecdotes and war stories about hiring people, from recruiting a daytime, female dominated sales staff in Minneapolis with a newspaper ad under the headline "seeking desperate housewives" to how to hire and retain a staff of young women responsible for passing out free Red Bull drinks.

The point was that to get a candidate in the door to become a good hire, the first step is to draw that person in with the right job description, in the right market, with the right information. That means describing the actual job, not the type of person you are looking for, Adler says. And get the listing in the right spot. If the job is ultra-specific, don't advertise it on mass-consumer Web sites. "Good people don't look for work the way average people do," Adler says.

To illustrate his point, Adler says a good hire is someone who might have a bad day at work and can't shake it on the way home. So after dinner, he's on the Internet, looking for work. He's a potential candidate for that one hour. But then he has time to decompress and realize that his job isn't so bad. By the next day, especially if it's Friday, he likes his job again. He's no longer a candidate.

But he was for that one hour, Adler says.

"The best people have good jobs, but are on the margin," he says. "You could find great people with great advertising, if you cater to their needs."

Once the right job ad is put in place and the candidates arrive, be sure to control the interview, but don't over-do it. Give brief, two-minute highlights of the organization and the job. "Don't start the interview with a long schpeil," Adler says. "Give information in chunks."

Then, the third piece to the hiring puzzle, Adler says, is the key question to ask any candidate. It's better than the usual where do you see yourself in five years or what are your strengths and weaknesses. The question: Of all the things you've accomplished, what stands out as the most significant?

Adler calls it the "single most important question of all time." That's because it gives the candidate a chance to talk about himself and get in a comfort zone. And then it gives the interviewer a chance to ask a bevy of follow-up questions, to find out things like what it taught the person about himself, how he dealt with challenges, how he solved problems and how he dealt with the recognition or lack thereof. Adler says it gives the hiring manager an opportunity to find out what made this person tick in a pressure situation.

HIRING THE RIGHT CANDIDATE

Rank the following on a 1-5 scale:

• Technical competency

• Motivation to do the work

• Team skills

• Problem solving, thinking

• Achieve comparable results

• Planning management

• Trend of growth

• Environment, culture, style

• Character, value fit

• Overall potential, job fit

Scale:

1. Incompetent, unmotivated or uncooperative

2. Competent with added coaching or urging

3. Competent and motivated to meet all objectives

4. Does more, better, faster

5. Outstanding quantity or quality

Source: The Adler Group, www.adlerconcepts.com