HR - Hiring:- 10 Great Ways to Make Bad Hiring Decisions.

The underlying purpose was to demonstrate the point that many important decisions, especially hiring decisions, are based on invalid assumptions, false impressions, personal beliefs, and lack of objective data.

With this article as a starting point, let me offer some expert advice on how to make really bad hiring decisions:

1. Make Emotional Decisions and Justify them with Facts. 

Most interviewers make quick judgments about a candidate based on the four “A’s” – how attractive, articulate, assertive, and affable the candidate is. Candidates who pass the test are asked easier questions, with the interviewer looking for information to justify the positive impression. Contradictory and negative information is ignored. Candidates who don’t meet the appropriate first impression standard are assumed incompetent, with the interviewer asking tougher questions and seeking only information to prove their initial emotional judgment. Why waste your valuable time? Instead, just conduct a five-minute interview and forget collecting any facts. It won’t make any difference in your final decision, anyway.

Do Not Seek Out Objective Data if it Contradicts Your Beliefs Or Ignore it if You Find Some. 

I remember meeting a very attractive and seemingly quite competent candidate for a VP HR spot, who gave a superficial answer to an HR strategy question. I had to fight with myself about whether to ask a challenging follow-up question which would prove she was unqualified on this important job criteria. After some soul searching, I asked the question, which she flubbed, and she was not presented. The point of this is that it’s very tough to eliminate a candidate you like, and even tougher to seek out positive information for candidates you don’t initially think would fit. So rather than get to the truth, go the easy route, and trust your gut feelings and first impressions.

2. Make Sure No One Knows the Real Job. 

The purpose of the interview is to determine competency and motivation to do the actual work required. If you don’t know what work the candidate is actually going to be doing it’s impossible to assess motivation. Competency, on the other hand, is pretty easy to figure out with just a rough understanding of job needs. Unfortunately, when you look at the underperformers in your company, you’ll discover most of them are quite competent to do the work, they just don’t find the work they’re doing very satisfying. These are the people that need to be over-managed and pushed to achieve average results. So to make sure you hire more of these people, go out of your way to not tell the person you’re hiring anything about the job until the day she starts. What a surprise that will be.

Use Skills-Based Job Descriptions to Find, Screen, and Assess Candidates. 

The best candidates tend to have a track record of achievement, comparable (but not identical) skills, and are quick-learners. This is how the best talent is promoted within an organization. Yet, when hiring from outside we use a criteria that eliminates these top performers from consideration, seeking only those candidates who have exactly the right skills doing exactly the same work. The only people who fit this criteria are average candidates. So keep up the average work. While you won’t get promoted, you will get hired.

3. Make Sure Your Ads are Hard to Find. 

When top people begin the job-hunting process they tend to seek out former associates, Google for jobs (e.g., “software sales jobs Dallas”), use social networking sites, or conduct some top-down industry research looking for the best industries and companies that meet their needs. If your jobs can’t be easily found by candidates using these techniques, you’ll never see the best people. To continue not seeing any good people make sure you continue to post your ads on the major boards, where the best people look last.

Write Boring Ads that Start with the Req Number. If your ads are found, make sure they’re so boring that they preclude a good person from even applying. You can do this by leading off with the req number, a dumb title, telling the person whether the job is full-time or not, and if you’ll pay for relocation. Then go into a boring description of the job. Then make sure you clearly state that the candidate must not apply unless the person possess a laundry list of skills and experiences that was lifted from some job description written a few years ago.

Make Sure that Interviewers are Untrained and Can Ask Any Questions They Want. 

Hiring mistakes are no big deal, so why not let anyone interview the candidate, ask any questions they want, and then ask them whether you should hire the person using whatever criteria they think appropriate. To make matters worse, only let untrained interviewers meet your candidates. This will certainly impress those top candidates you see regarding your company’s level of professionalism.

Add Up the Yes and No Votes. Here’s a sure-fire way to get the hiring decision wrong…let each untrained, biased, emotional, and superficial interviewer have a full yes/no vote on who should get hired. Then to even out these errors, give a no vote more power than a yes vote, give unprepared interviewers the same voting rights as prepared interviewers, and then add up the votes. To make sure this process works as described, do not challenge anyone’s assessment, just in case the person might get offended. This is more important than the right answer.

Force Candidates to Formally Apply before You Can Even Chat With Them. Top people, when they just enter into the job-hunting process, have lots of questions and are comparing different companies and situations. One good way to prevent seeing or hiring any of these people is to not let them just talk with a recruiter or hiring manager unless they formally apply first. Most won’t, but if you have some persistent person who still decides to apply anyway, make sure you have him complete a rigorous application process, submit a resume and a statement that everything stated is true. Of course, to make sure a good person doesn’t sneak through this bureaucratic blockade, be sure not to contact the person for a least a week. Collectively, this will show the person you mean business.

Focus On Compensation and Skills Rather than Career Opportunities. Since the best people are more concerned with career growth, the opportunity to make an impact and want to know the broad details about the job before getting serious, we don’t want to give them any of this information. Who knows, somebody good might actually be interested in and qualified for one of our open jobs. Instead, to prevent this from happening, don’t discuss the job at all, first screen candidates only on their skills and then tell them what your comp range is. If there isn’t a fit here, don’t waste your time, just go on to another candidate. You certainly wouldn’t want to ask candidates about some of their major achievements first and see if any of your other openings better match their needs. They actually might be interested in one of these jobs, despite the comp range. Wouldn’t that mess things up?

You can see why these are my favorites rules for not hiring good people. What amazes me is that so many companies follow them and expect different results.

Don’t fire them, fire them up!!

Don’t fire them, fire them up!

Startup Hiring Checklist

RECRUITING IS MARKETING

More often than not, the best employees are the ones that find you, not the ones you go out and look for. The problem a lot of startups have is, how do I get more people to find me? Simple — think of it as a marketing exercise. Just as you would explain the product features to a potential customer, explain to a candidate what it's like to work for you (in real language, no HR platitudes thanks), what you look for in people and then make sure people find out about it. You can even post a Web page on life at your company. It's a small investment to make but an effective tool in getting a vast audience to read about the work experience under your roof.

TRUST YOUR TEAM

You’ve hired smart people already right? You think your team is the best on the planet. So put them in front of candidates! Don’t hide them in a back room. Too many people have their HR people do most of the interviewing. Let the candidates get to know the people they'll be working with, if they join your company.

YOU DON’T WIN WITH MONEY

Many entrepreneurs think that the simple way to hire a good team is to throw money at the problem. In choosing a place to work, people look at the company, the role, the people, the environment and the money. Pretty much in that order, but it's important to keep the balance among all the variables. As long as the money is competitive (and this is key), the other factors should decide the final outcome. Money doesn’t win people over, money prevents you from losing them. It gets you in the game. People value their time and while you might be able to ‘buy it’ with an outrageous salary, that’s a temporary measure. They’ll eventually realise that doing a boring job 10 hours a day for huge dollars isn’t the way they want to spend their life. It's not a way to build a company, it’s a short-term band aid strategy. You don’t win people with a lot of money and I’d say you don’t want to. People who chose a job purely on the larger salary are probably people you don’t want on your team anyway. That said, the corollary here is that you can definitely lose people with money. If you're not paying what the market is or your firm just pays really low salaries, people will go elsewhere. It's all about balance.

MAKE SPACE FOR SMART PEOPLE

Sometimes people come along who don’t fit into any existing role. You can consider hiring really smart people, even if you don’t have a defined role for them. At the same time, don’t be afraid to redirect a candidate if you feel they’re interviewing for the wrong job. If you have a roadmap for your company’s progress, you would have created titles and jobs that you would require in the next two or three years. Many smart people will fit into these roles, current or future, but others create the job profile for themselves. Have the flexibility to include both groups in your team.

TO HIRE OR NOT TO HIRE

The hire-or-don’t-hire decision is critical. Why is this decision so important? The damage a wrong choice can do to morale, to your product, to your company should never be overstated. It’s a little like poker, the most important and hardest skill to learn is when to fold a hand not when to bet. Not hiring a few good people is far better in the long term than hiring a few bad ones. Err on the side of caution.

NO KEYWORD HIRING

This mostly applies to software developers, but the principle is important for all. Don’t hire based on keywords in a resume. Too many companies look for “JMS”, “EJB 3” and “J2EE” and assume someone is a good developer. Look for people who are good at learning new technologies, rather than stacking up acronyms.

Wooing a Smart Employee?

Trap the Ocean in your Puddle.

Wooing a smart employee away from a large company to join your startup can be tough, challenging but rewarding. This is how you should go about it.

In the early 80s, Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, the then president of PepsiCo, whether he wanted to continue selling sugared water all his life or change the world. Jobs was looking for a man to run his little computer company. He saw a man with the skill set needed to market his dream and he went all out to get him bite the Apple. All big companies are full of people who are firmly ensconced in fancy positions but are thirsty for a bigger challenge. The extreme comfort at the top of the corporate ladder can sometimes be suffocating to entrepreneurial people. They are looking for one chance, one compelling argument and one opportunity to create something from the ground up and they’ll quit their jobs.

On the other side, is the startup business that has a wonderful idea that is beginning to work. Now is the time to scale up and manage growth. It needs top-notch managers who will own the company’s fate and show enough dedication to stay with it irrespective of the modest initial benefits.

Put the two together and a success story unveils itself. But a startup has to be careful not to bite what it can’t chew. Done carefully, the hiring can be rewarding to both sides. The very first precaution, of course, is not to choose the wrong guy. An unfit candidate who can’t adjust to a startup environment can actually prove downright fatal for the small company. A venture capitalist, who did not wish to be named, drew from his experience and said, “We once hired a highly qualified and extremely focused CIO for one of our companies. In fact, he was so focused that he was a bad team player. He would end up working alone a lot. A lot of people started quitting because they just couldn’t work in that environment. And they would tell us, during the exit interview, very candidly that it was the CIO’s fault. So not only do you have a senior person who is not performing, but you also have performers who stop performing.”

Sanjay Anandaram, a founding member of Jumpstartup and adjunct professor at INSEAD, Singapore, points out that there are certain attributes needed for any position — team spirit, integrity and relevant skill sets. However, a small company identifying a candidate in a large company must check if the person has the self-confidence to give up the comforts of the large organisation. S/he also must cherish the operational freedom the small organisation allows and s/he has to be able to make do with less as the smaller organisation will have a lot less resources at their disposal.

A person who recently made the move from handling a large-scale operation to a company with revenues a tenth its size, is Manoj Dawane, the current CEO of Mauj. Until earlier this year, he was handling Bharti‘s telecom operations in western Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal. In that region, over 2,000 people reported to him in some way or the other, while in Mauj, the number tightens to a mere 150. He says, “The biggest comfort that you leave behind in a large well-oiled company is the systems that are in place. Here the systems need to be created.” The comforts of the club privileges that his former employer provided were also left behind.

He says he gave these up for a fresh dose of adrenaline that can come only from growing a small company. He got his first fix of this earlier this decade when he ran a company called Net Decisions. He adds, “Even if it is a general managerial role with a large breadth of operations, in a large organisation you are put into a matrix-like structure.” He says that with a company like this, he gets to run a business end-to-end.

Given that the smaller company would have far fewer people than the previous employer, the candidate needs to ready take on jobs that one performed at the beginning of the career. As s/he grew within the organisation, s/he will have to take on work that got delegated to juniors. “It is important that the candidate fits into the ‘execution’ mindset as opposed to the ‘managerial’ mindset. They now have to take on a contributor role more than the managerial role,” says Manik Arora, managing director of IDG Ventures India.

This means that the candidate needs to be ready to work the 15 hours a day that they did when they started out, as that is the attention a start-up needs. Considering the high stress-levels of the start-up, very few who have crossed age 40 take it up. VCs and entrepreneurs say that the ideal age for a potential core team member is from their late 20s to their mid 30s. “Sometimes we do hire people with over 20 years of work experience. In this case we need to see if they are okay with reporting to a CEO who is younger than them,” says Alok Mittal, managing director of Canaan Partners. In the 40s, the average Indian usually has a family to tend to and is coasting in their careers. There is a need for stability at this point of their lives.

“Sometimes we find a senior person who has nothing to lose as they are in a secure place,” says Rahul Khanna of Clearstone Ventures, adding, “This person is in such a high position that they simply have to oversee the operations. They are not really doing much. These people want to make a difference. For instance, the rush of going from 0 to 40 million users of a cellular operator is high. The rush of taking it from 50 million to 100 million is far less. There are people that you can tip over, but they need to be near that tipping point themselves. It is difficult to approach a person who is in the thick of a battle and woo them out of that.”

People who have always been steeped in a large organisation as an employee are highly unlikely to leave their current set up for a start-up. These sort of people are also lower down on the preference list of VCs and headhunters. “In my experience, we look for people who have worked in large as well as small companies. It is preferred if they have been part of a start-up before. If they’ve come from a large company it needn’t have been a start-up, but they should have been part of growing the company significantly,” says Mr Mittal.

Increasingly venture capitalists want to see the potential candidates show their belief in the venture. “One way to test if a person is in line with the vision of the company is to give them equity and have them settle for a lower salary. It is a signal that the person is interested with the long-term success of the company,” says Mr Arora. When a candidate is willing to do this, it is almost a sure shot that he believes his role growing the company, can pay him back greater than a salary could afford.

Mr Khanna says: “The DNA we are looking for is someone who understands the trade-off between cash and a stake.” These sort of people see money as a derivative of their work, and not the other way around says Mr Anandaram.

Seeking out these sort of people can be done through referrals, head hunters, or through ones own phone book. Mr Khanna cautions that many times startups move so fast that “people hastily pull people out of their network of contacts. That’s one way of going about it. The other way, which I feel is the better option, is to write out a detailed job description and look for the person accordingly.” The ideal option is to get someone who has worked with the current team before.

Article Resource:

Jacob Cherian is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".