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| » June 2006 |
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| Survival of the Fittest |
| By Bill Holland |
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There can be only one World Cup Champ. The winner holds that honour for four glorious years. In today's dynamic job market, holding a Champ for four years in your organization is indeed a triumph. Just like the World Cup, it might take a grueling round-robin tournament to establish the Champ – but the victory is well worth the effort.
Fitness is defined as the “condition of being suitable”. In a world-class soccer player, fitness implies a certain level of athletic prowess and physical stamina. What does fitness imply in a world-class corporate employee? What constitutes “best talent”? It depends on the game – and the position – you expect them to play.
“I’ll know it when I find it”. Sure we all have instincts about people, and there’s something to be said for listening to your gut. But why wander aimlessly when a little bit of prudence and planning can help you reach your target? Take the time to articulate what “best talent” means to you, to your organization, and to the specific role which you are looking to fill. If you can identify the “best talent DNA” in advance, then the serendipitous I’ll-know-it-when-I-find-it approach will be much more effective. Louis Pasteur had it right when he said: “Chance favours the prepared mind”.
So what do you do to prepare? Start by defining the job and crafting a carefully thought out position profile. Identify the roles and responsibilities of the job, and define the must-have as well as the nice-to-have qualities, skills, experience and behaviours of the ideal candidate. For instance, how important is having a certain type of accreditation? How important is detail orientation? Creativity? People skills? Check out the wisdom@wwwork! section of this month’s newsletter to get some ideas about attribute identification in the job profiling process to ensure a smooth organizational fit. You might also consider hiring a professional organization such as The McQuaig Institute® which provides an online job profiling and assessment tool (The McQuaig Job Survey®) to help you benchmark the requirements for the position.
Involve key stakeholders in the profiling process, including current employees and customers, especially for strategic hires and customer-facing roles. Although getting this diverse perspective can help build a more robust profile, it’s important to recognize any biases and vested interests. For instance, you like to think that your entire organization is aligned in wanting only the best talent, but some managers may well feel threatened by brilliant and ambitious newcomers. Soliciting and assimilating everybody’s input to create a precise job profile can be a tremendous learning experience.
So you’ve got it all down on paper now. You know exactly the kind of person you want. Great! That is, if you know where to find them and how to bring them on board. (Stay tuned for next month’s Best Hire Wins! article exploring the finer points of recruitment).
Moreover, how do you know if such a person even exists in the marketplace? If you’re ready to look for a needle in a haystack, then go for it. What if you find that needle, only to learn that they are satisfied in their current role and reluctant to leap into your organization?
Having high standards and doing your best to remain faithful to them is admirable. But if your recruitment resources are restricted, if no such talent exists, or if the smoothest persuasion isn’t enough to lure them your way, then it’s time to rethink your strategy. There’s nothing wrong with having to calibrate and recalibrate your expectations and approach along the way. Consider this to be flexibility, rather than compromise.
No doubt you may need to navigate through some tricky dilemmas. For instance, an intense pressure to hire may result in candidate overcompensation, and ultimately, internal equity issues in your organization. Or, you may find an exceptional candidate who may have a perfect behavioural and educational profile but falls short of some important technical (but trainable) skills. How willing are you to take on a candidate who’s not quite ready to hit the ground running? Do you subscribe to the “hire for fit, train for skills” recruitment philosophy? |
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Is the jury still out on the cultural fit vs. skills debate? A recent wwwork! poll indicates that 40% of respondents consider hiring for fit to be equally as important as skills, education and experience. 37% of respondents consider fit to be not at all important, and about 18% consider it to be the most important. Other sources indicate that cultural fitness is by far the hottest decisive factor in the current hiring climate. |
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But what exactly is this elusive “fit factor”? People often tease apart the “skills" from "fitness”, as we ourselves did in the wwwork! poll described above. But isn’t it possible that skills are simply one element of an overall good fit? If fitness is the condition of being suitable, then a fit candidate has to be aligned with the nature of the work (do they have the skills?), the work environment (can they work effectively in an open concept space?), the management style (do they need to be micromanaged?), and the company culture. Ah, the company culture. Another elusive concept? Not really. According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.”
There are a number of tools available to help you assess any or all of these fitness elements. You can easily find a whole range of easy to administer online skills tests including language, computing and finance. The McQuaig® System on the other hand, offers a number of online analytic tools to help you assess behavioural and cultural fit. These are just two examples of many simple to sophisticated diagnostic instruments available to help you make a more informed hiring decision.
Most candidates wouldn’t be surprised if part of your hiring process included a testing component. According to a current wwwork! survey, 70% of respondents experienced some sort of formal testing during the interview process; 25% indicated they had skills testing; 20% had psychometric testing; and 25% were exposed to both skills and psychometric testing. So rather than take a chance, why not validate your assumptions about a candidate’s skills and behaviour by including formal testing as part of the hiring process?
While hiring someone who doesn’t stack up to your standards can certainly lead to problems, there’s also no guarantee that hiring high will work out in the long run. If someone is overqualified, they may get easily bored and move on to something more challenging if opportunities don’t exist in your organization. In the end, the best you can do is make informed decisions along the way with a mind to long term success rather than short term gain. With no guarantee, you still want to reduce the chances of bringing a mis-fit on board, which can end up costing you time, money, aggravation and perhaps even some avoidable organizational upheaval.
Organizations are not unlike nature. Nature selects individuals and species with favourable traits that will adapt and thrive in new environments. Is your organization any different? It’s survival of the fittest.
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