7 Mistakes Hiring Managers Make & End-Up Failing to Hire Top Talent
Retaining Top Talent During the Global Pandemic
The COVID-19 global pandemic creates an increasingly competitive market for top talent, as candidates consider multiple opportunities in specific industry segments. While most of the employment picture is bleak, particularly among the working poor, disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanics, women, and others, many hiring managers need to woo top talent and future leaders more so today than just a year in the past. Some reluctance to depart one great employer for another might be attributable to American employees’ rising engagement, or it might arise from the fear of change in the current environment. The present conditions only exacerbate seven classic mistakes hiring managers make and thereby fail to hire the best.
Leadership is fundamental to creating effective cultures that achieve important results for stakeholders. While much of Jim Collins’ early advice in Good to Great now seems incomplete, we can’t escape the value of having great colleagues with whom to work. Collins described it as getting the right people on the bus. While that language doesn’t seem right for today, to the extent that it helps hiring managers to identify with and describe the values of their company seems paramount in importance today, just as it did then.
We also know from the Great Place to Work Institute, that a sustaining characteristic of a great place to work is camaraderie, or, in other words, having great colleagues with whom to work. A CEO of a company familiar to me had a mantra regarding talent selection, “A talent hires A talent, B talent hires B talent, and it all goes down from there.” While the effect may be harsh, the critical takeaway is to obsess in finding talent to outperform and contribute, with your encouragement.
If you want to avoid losing future leaders for your company, avoid these seven mistakes.
1. Finding the Right Candidate Begins Long Before the Search
Great managers attract talented followers and enable the development of groups into teams. High-performing teams aren’t common in organizations, and, because of their scarcity, top talent naturally gravitates to leaders with compelling visions and records of achievement. In small talent markets, leaders are known by professional reputations and standings. Inside of teams and organizations, the informal networks of communication carry messages about desirable leaders and teams. Because talent has the drive to lead and contribute to a better version of the status quo, the best are attracted to others engaged in meaningful work.
2. Failing to Cast a Wide and Affirmative Net
Back to the first failure, if your team isn’t diverse, it’s a barrier to attracting future leaders. People want to be included and welcomed. Your ability to attract top talent, again, begins long before the search. Influential leaders establish professional identifies beyond the limits and confines of their organization. They take leadership roles in professional associations and networks. They contribute to others’ development. It’s helpful to have an established network when you are ready to recruit. You will not have the time to begin building a credible and up-to-date network when you need to recruit fast. Effective networks are both broad and affirmative. If everyone at your meeting looks and thinks like you, it’s a great time to break out, change behaviors, and set new improvement goals that will benefit you and your organization.
3. Conforming to Arbitrary Measures
As a hiring manager, I do shudder when an area executive asks, “Why is your search going on for nine months?” As a former global Talent Acquisition leader in hi-tech, I encouraged my team leaders around the world to cancel aging requisitions! Effective hiring managers are clear on candidate expectations and listen carefully to how candidates intend to contribute. The outcome great hiring managers want is an employee who hits the ground running while displaying great curiosity in the people and systems with which they interact and shape. Top talent shows curiosity in fundamental ways, including teaching and mentoring others, consistently displaying an ability to learn. It’s essential to begin with a plan to get to the desired outcome and to do it in a way that will not shortchange the candidate or your growing team.
4. Fixing Blame on the Recruiter
I received sage advice early in my biotech career to avoid blaming a recruiting coordinator, talent sourcing professional, or recruiter. It doesn’t help to encounter serious conflict with a retained search firm when you’re in the marketplace for talent. Successful managers and leaders take accountability for the search. They appreciate and seek to understand the value that many bring to the employment process. Accountability for success in selecting and hiring top talent rests squarely at the feet and on the hiring manager’s shoulders. Recruiters do their best when involved and respected for the experience and insight they bring to each situation.
5. An Unattractive or Unclear Role
Sometimes, at initial stages in the interview process, role requirements become clear. It doesn’t often happen this way, but diligent screening processes yield information that may cause subtle shaping to achieve your goals and benefit your team and company. While networks are increasingly flat, many remain pyramidical. The effect of increasingly narrowing progression accompanies increasing distance from enterprise-wide managers. New paradigms that foster leading from anywhere and images of an organization that promotes the same are required to banish work that reduces opportunities for democracy and participation, characteristics of employers of choice.
6. Hyper-Focus on Qualifications Over Experiences
Credentials are important to career advancement and growth. It’s smart to acquire highly-trained talent in highly technical fields — for example, those who have survived four years of undergraduate education, at least six years in higher education, and another few years in postdoctoral programs. Most corporations are unwilling to take a long-term educational risk on aspiring talent, yet, there are examples of philanthropy taking smart risks at creating systemic economic change and influence based on education. The managers most successful in acquiring talent select candidates who demonstrate outcomes and accomplishments based on situations fraught with anxiety, challenge, and failure, bringing balance to qualification and learning agility.
7. A Six-Month Success Plan
Any risk on talent must be reasonable, and that is a matter of experience and judgment. Early failures in employment correlate to expectations. In social psychology and organization development, it might be described as how we contact a system, working with an awareness of the people, systems, and structures that create the internal environment. More importantly, great managers enlist the new hire in the vision and provide a wide berth for expression and goal accomplishment. We need more ideas to innovate, the ultimate measure of sustainable enterprise.
Your ability to attract the best in today’s environment requires approaches and choices that value the inherent worth of the individual and recognize that each of us is in the process of growing and developing. We are accustomed to the joy of most infant to young-adult development, and yet, our expectations of others as adults often remains fixed and unchanging. Great managers will leverage their insights into the selection process by connecting with exemplars and gaining alignment among important organizational stakeholders. The cost of poor selection choices is well-documented. You can turn to this list at any point when your attention turns to building, developing, and leading great teams.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
