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Motivated from Day One
January 10, 2008
Hiring smart is just the start to building worker retention
By Karen Leland
With the oldest baby boomers beginning retirement in a few years, the fear of brain drain has gripped the corporate world. It has also left scores of managers quaking at the thought of having to replace lost talent, while simultaneously trying to retain current employees.
Les McKeown, author of Retaining Top Employees (McGraw-Hill), says that part of the panic is driven by the reactive stance most managers take toward hiring.
"The vast majority of managers dislike the hiring process and wait until someone leaves before beginning to look for a new hire," says McKeown. "At this point, they need to find someone fast and often end up grabbing the least bad choice from a poor bunch of candidates." McKeown is convinced that this hire-from-the-hip style leads to poor choices and mismatches right from the start, and ultimately to higher attrition rates.
The 2006/2007 WorkUSA survey of more than 12,000 U.S. workers, conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, found that 59 percent of employees surveyed agree and also feel their companies do a poor job of hiring qualified staff.
Bob McDonald, author of Don't Waste Your Talent (Longstreet Press), says one of the biggest ways in which managers can improve hiring is for managers to start by pinpointing what they are looking for, from the start.
McDonald says most managers "hire based on who they connect with—quickly." He goes on to say, "The problem with this is that the person may or may not be a good fit for the job." Instead, he suggests targeting talent by taking an inventory of which employees within the company are already doing the same (or similar) job, most successfully.
"For example, if you are looking to fulfill a sales position," says McDonald, "dig deeper and evaluate what skills, abilities, attitudes and talents your best salespeople possess."
David Weekley Homes, number 12 on Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For in America 2007 list, has gone one step further and systematized this idea by creating a company-wide talent inventory. The company has also put most of its employees through an assessment process, allowing it to create a detailed talent target for each position for which it hires.
McDonald says that once managers have used standard employee assessment tool to develop a list of target talents, they are better able to evaluate the degree to which a candidate fits the job requirements and company culture.
Herb Greenberg, CEO of Caliper Corporation and coauthor of How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer (McGraw-Hill), agrees that assessment tools play an important role in hiring for retention. In one study conducted by Caliper, exit interviews with employees from a wide range of companies (midsize players to Fortune 500 giants) showed that the majority of workers who leave a company do so because they are not happy with what they're doing and feel that they are essentially in the wrong job.
"The easiest way to retool the hiring process," says Greenberg, "is to use testing in the interview phase that gives you a clue as to the candidate's true abilities, drives, talents and interests." Greenberg, who has researched and written about the attributes of successful people for the past 46 years, says that the highest performers love what they do and feel that their vocations fit who they are.
He also stresses the importance of testing existing staff so the company knows where they might be successfully reassigned, if needed. "In some cases, a mediocre typist might be your best salesperson, or an unhappy salesperson, a star in the customer service department," says Greenberg. He cites one insurance company with which he consulted where, after the staff testing was complete, 30 percent of the employees were shifted into other positions within the company that better fit their talent and interest profiles.
But as important as these tests may be, Greenberg cautions that they don't stand alone, and face-to-face interviewing and debriefing are still critical.
David Goodwin was working as a vice president of operations for a Northern California consumer products company when he got a call asking him to come interview for a similar position with a different company in Phoenix.
As part of his interviewing process Goodwin was asked to complete an online personality profile to insure that he would match with the rest of the company. A day after Goodwin took the test, he, along with his potential employer, got a copy of the results. The report Goodwin received contained 23 pages of detailed information ranging from a checklist of ways his potential employers could best communicate with him to his ideal work environment. The overall note on Goodwin's report stated that he felt under pressure to be an overachiever and might want to consider retaking the test when he was in a more balanced state. This overarching statement irritated and puzzled Goodwin. "In my mind, overachieving is not a bad thing," says Goodwin. "I would like to have discussed the report with someone from the company, but amazingly no one ever followed up with me about the test results." Goodwin goes on to explain that this, in part, contributed to his feeling that the Phoenix company would not be a good fit for him. In the end, Goodwin turned down the job.
Unfortunately, Goodwin's experience is not unusual. "The vast majority of managers have not been trained how to interview and they think that it is going to take too much work and too much time, so they use these assessments as a rubber stamp," McDonald says. He suggests that by educating managers about the importance of the hiring process and teaching them how to conduct interviews, better hiring—leading to long-term retention—could be achieved. The statistics seem to bear him out.
The Human Capital Index Study by Watson Wyatt found that 65 percent of companies with a highly engaged workforce provide interview training for managers, versus 33 percent of companies with a less engaged workforce. According to Ilene Gochman, national practice director, organization effectiveness at Watson Wyatt, a defined process centered on such best practices as behavioral interviewing is essential for long-term retention.
An increasingly popular technique for job interviewing, behavioral interviewing helps evaluate how a candidate will respond in specific situations. "For example," says Gochman, "if you are interviewing someone for a customer service position, instead of asking the typical 'Do you do a good job at dealing with upset customers?' question, instead ask 'Have you ever been in a situation with a difficult customer and can you tell me about how you handled that? What did you do? What did you say?'" Gochman says that by getting beneath the surface questions to the deeper examples of how someone dealt with a real-life situation, the interviewer learns about a person's real skill base and attitudes.
In an emerging trend, these interviews are conducted by panels or teams instead of one-on-one. At 25 of Pella Windows and Doors' distributorships, the hiring process has been refined to include panel interviews. "A number of people within the organization are brought together as a team to meet with and evaluate a candidate," says McKeown, whose company, Predictable Success, worked with Pella to redesign its hiring process. As a result of this and talent targeting, turnover is down from 38 percent to 15 percent. Gochman also supports team interviewing, and says that when peers and subordinates join management and human resources in seeing candidates, a broader perspective is gained and a better fit for the overall culture of the company is achieved.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be an estimated labor shortfall of three million workers by the year 2012. With just four years to go, companies that begin integrating these hiring best practices now can feel more confident about facing the future with a staff of competent and committed workers.
 Sidebar: The Right Fit
Once the right candidate is identified and hired, what happens in those first critical months can lead to long-term employment or short-term tenure.
The Watson Wyatt study reported that those with highly engaged workers spend more time in preparing them for their new jobs—they take an average of 35 weeks to bring a new hire up to speed versus 15 weeks for those with low engagement. According to Ilene Gochman, an organizational effectiveness expert at Watson Wyatt, this preparation includes such things as graduated workload, new hire surveys, peer mentoring and acclimating the employee to the company culture.
At Harvard University, surveys showed that new hires were feeling stressed by the size (15,000 employees) and decentralization (20 colleges in all) of the organization. The simple solution? Handle the problem right up front in the orientation program. To counter this sense of being overwhelmed, a huge, colorful, map of the sprawling university is put up during orientation. Each new employee then places a pin in the place where he will be working, giving him an idea of how it fits into the whole. This, combined with a short, nine-minute video that takes the new hires through a cartoon-like speeded-up tour of the university, went a long way toward ameliorating the sense of dislocation among new hires, while simultaneously building a sense of team and belonging.
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