The Effective Hiring Manager E-Book

Mark Horstman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Essential hiring and team-building lessons from the #1 Podcaster in the world

The Effective Hiring Manager offers an essential guide for managers, team leaders, and HR professionals in organizations large or small. The author’s step-by-step approach makes the strategies easy to implement and help to ensure ongoing success.

Hiring effectively is the single greatest long-term contribution to your organization. The only thing worse than having an open position is filling it with the wrong person. The Effective Hiring Manager offers a proven process for solving these problems and helping teams and organizations thrive.

• The fundamental principles of hiring and interviewing
• How to create criteria to hire by
• How to create excellent interview questions
• How to review resumes
• How to conduct phone screens
• How to structure an interview day
• How to conduct each interview
• How to capture interview results
• How to make an offer
• How to decline a candidate
• How to onboard candidates

Written by Mark Horstman, co-founder of Manager Tools and an expert in training managers, The Effective Hiring Manager is an A to Z handbook to the successful hiring process. The book explores, in helpful detail, what it takes to hire the right person, for the right job, and the right team.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Effective Hiring Manager

“Throughout my career as an army officer, C-suite executive and board member, I have used oral book reports as an effective method to both develop and synchronize the people I work with. The Effective Hiring Manager is not only a must read it will be our next group ‘book.' The book reinforces everything that is critical to our firm. Don't just do things without thinking, do things that really matter and DO THEM RIGHT.”

—John Hoffman, Chairman and CEO, Pivotal Systems

“Mark and the Manager Tools team changed my life. They gave me the foundational skills I now rely on to be a good manager. The Effective Hiring Manager is another great example of this. If you want to make great hires, you've got to read this book.”

—Ryan Carson, CEO & Founder, Treehouse

“As with The Effective Manager, Mark Horstman strikes gold with practical guidance that can be immediately applied to the most consequential job of a manager—hiring the best people. This book will dramatically change how you view the hiring process and how you do it.”

—Joseph D'Alessandro, Deputy Chief of Grant Compliance and Fiscal Services. School District of Philadelphia

“If you are serious about raising the professional talent standard in your organization, The Effective Hiring Manager should become your official hiring handbook. Every manager should get a copy, absorb the process and then implement the disciplines in the book. Read this, distribute this, practice this, and watch the change take hold.” 

—Daniel McGuire, Managing Partner, Arcturus Advisory Services, LLC

“On Capitol Hill hiring mistakes are not just HR problems, they can also be political nightmares. Mark takes the mystery out of the hiring process by laying out a step-by-step process and anticipating challenges and resistance to change. You can't achieve your objectives and retain the best people if you don't hire the best people in the first place.”

—Mark Strand, President, Congressional Institute

“This book is a wonderful, practical book for all managers. Do not hire just because someone leaves—think about it first. You may have just reduced your costs for free. Get your team to think about what they can stop doing—creative abandonment. A must read for all the managers on my team.”

—Anandha Ponnampalam, Vice President, Delivery & Digital Transformation Lead Publicis Sapient 

“Whether you are a seasoned leader or a first-time manager, with the advice in The Effective Hiring Manager, you will make better hires that strengthen your company. Mark Horstman provides practical guidance for each step of the hiring process.”

—Dirk W van de Bunt, Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel Guthy|Renker Ventures, LLC

MARK HORSTMAN

THEEFFECTIVEHiringMANAGER

Copyright © 2020 by Manager Tools Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 9781119574323 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781119574361 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119574347 (ePub)

Cover image: © LPETTET/iStockphoto

Cover design: Wiley

This is what I tell my friends.

Every Manager Effective. Every Professional Productive.

Dedicated to the Manager Tools community: millions of listeners, all over the world.  

CONTENTS

Cover

Introduction

Section 1: Principles

1 The First Principle of Effective Hiring—Don’t Hire

How to Solve a Hiring Problem Without Hiring

2 The Second Principle of Effective Hiring—Set Your Bar High

3 The First Principle of Effective Interviewing—Say No

Section 2: Preparation

4 Behavioral Interviewing and Preparing Your Hiring Criteria

Looking Beyond Traits and Characteristics

Knowing the Necessary Behaviors for the Job

5 Creating Behavioral Interview Questions

How a Simple Behavioral Interview Question SOUNDS

The Three Parts of a Simple Behavioral Interview Question—And Why

Note

6 Behavioral Interview Question Examples

Section 3: Screening

7 Screening Résumés

Titles—What to Look For

Dates—What to Look For

Companies—What to Look For

Career Progression—What to Look For

Responsibilities—What to Look For

Accomplishments—What to Look For

Education—What to Look For

Accuracy—What to Look For

Density—What to Look For

How to Decide Whom to Screen Further

8 Screening Social Media

9 Conducting Phone Screens

Thirty Minutes Is Enough

You Make the Phone Call

Give Them a Brief Process Overview

Start with “Tell Me About Yourself” (TMAY)

Ask One or Two Behavioral Questions, Time Permitting

No Need to Share Your Decision at the Time

10 Having Human Resources Conduct Phone Screens

Section 4: Conducting Interviews

11 Video and Telephone Interviews

12 Effective Final Interview Process

You Start—(30) Minutes—No Interview—Brief Logistics

(All) of Your Directs Interview

You Interview Last for 90–120 Minutes

13 Physical Interview Setup

14 No Panel Interviews

Reason Why Not #1: The Right Way

Reason Why Not #2: Loss of Multiple Effective Perspectives

Reason Why Not #3: Negative Correlation to Effectiveness

Reason Why Not #4: Candidates

Hate

Them

Reason Why Not #5: They’re Not Safer

15 How to Conduct Technical Interviews

16 Each Interviewer Uses the Same Set of Questions

The Importance of Asking the Same Questions

Preparation Makes for a Productive Interview

17 The Basic Structure of Each Interview

Introductions

Brief Small Talk

Interview Overview

Tell Me About Yourself

Core Behavioral Questions Come Next

Custom/Targeted Questions

Answering Questions

How to Evaluate Candidate Questions

Note

18 How to Take Notes

Pre-Print the Questions on Your Answer Sheet

Handwritten Notes Only

Write Down as Much as You Can

Write Down Exactly What You Hear

Use Abbreviations

19 How to Probe Behavioral Interview Answers

All Good Probes Start with an Apology, and Then Ask for Additional Information

Probing for a Critical Behavior: Communication

Section 5: Deciding and Offering

20 Interview Results Capture Meeting (IRCM)

Meeting Logistics

Use the “What and Why” Method of Reporting

Deciding Whether to Make an Offer

How to Decide When Interviewing Multiple Candidates

21 How to Check References

1. Start with an Admission and Factual Questions

2. “Would you please confirm the dates of employment?”

3. “Could you confirm the job title for me please?”

4. “Please comment on the accuracy of the following job description.”

5. Always Be Thankful to Build Rapport

6. Then Progress to More Substantive Questions

7. “I was told about Project X. Can you confirm his involvement?” followed by, “Can you tell me about the results?”

8. “What was his best contribution?”

9. “What would you say his areas for improvement are?”

10. “We are looking at him for ____ role. How would you assess that fit?”

11. “If you were me/us, any concerns about employing him/her?”

22 How to Offer

Do Some Prep Work

Consider Increasing Parts of the Offer

Make the Offer the Moment You’re Ready and You Can

Don’t Wait to Make an Offer in Writing

It’s Okay to Leave a Voicemail

Be Upbeat; Don’t Forget Praise and Congratulations

The Five Components of an Offer

Ask for Acceptance

Make Yourself Available for Questions

Make HR Available

Keep Other Candidates on Hold

Call Every Three Days for an Update

23 How to Decline

You’re Obligated to Notify a Candidate of a “No” Expeditiously

You Can Wait for an Acceptance Before Notifying a Declined Candidate

You Can Rule Candidates Out Before You Make a Hire

Be Direct and Simple When You Inform Them

You Can Offer Feedback, But You Don’t Have To

24 How to Handle Two Viable Candidates

Communicate Personally and Directly with Both Candidates

Immediately Communicate to Both That the Decision Is Pending

Shortly Thereafter, Offer the Top Candidate

Section 6: Onboarding

25 Onboarding New Hires

The Phases of Onboarding

Discipline Makes Learning Possible

Switch from Weaknesses to Strengths

Communicate and Report

The Manager Tools Onboarding Checklist

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Appendix

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Hiring Matrix

Figure 3.2 A true positive outcome

Figure 3.3 A false negative outcome

Figure 3.4 A true negative outcome

Figure 3.5 A false positive outcome

Figure 3.6 Eliminate the possibility of a bad outcome

Chapter 25

Figure 25.1 The Onboarding Checklist for a new employee

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction

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Introduction

Hiring is the most important managerial practice.

The purpose of this book is to help you become an effective hiring manager. Effective hiring is the most important contribution a manager makes to his or her organization.

Great CEOs are often quoted as spending as much as 30% of their time on people. How are individual managers and executives doing with their responsibilities? Who’s “ready now” for more responsibility? Who will be “ready next”? Who needs different responsibilities? Who is at risk for leaving the firm? Who, external to the firm, may be worthy of recruitment or a relationship?

With all that CEOs have to do—strategy, customer relations, governmental relations, investor relations, structure, finances, internal and external communications—most will say that the area they spend most of their time on is people. Despite the cynicism that accompanies the phrase, “People are our most important asset,” CEO behavior tells us that it’s true—even if the rank and file often don’t feel that way.

CEOs do so because they have learned that every organization’s engine of success is its talent: people. It’s people who create, manage, and improve upon all the systems, processes, and policies that those people use to generate growth, revenue, profit, mission accomplishment.

In the long run, it’s people that make the difference. Every result in every organization comes from people. It’s not algorithms, or equipment, or software, or proprietary trading models, or cost leadership, or high quality that drives success—it’s people.

Those ideas and systems are important, but people create them. Great people create great systems and processes and results. We here at Manager Tools often say that great people can overcome messy systems and processes to still produce great results. But if an organization’s talent isn’t great, there is no amount of great systems that will help average performers create great results.

If an organization’s people are the engine of its success, then the decisions made about which people join the organization are the most important decisions the organization makes. And those decisions are not made at the top; they’re made by individual managers.

My previous book, The Effective Manager, dealt with managing the people you already have. “Managing,” in common usage, typically means the stuff we managers do day to day, with the people we already have. But that’s because we do those managerial things on a daily basis. Hiring, though, most of us do pretty rarely.

And this is where our danger lies.

On our popular Manager Tools podcast, I’ve coined a phrase for tasks managers are responsible for that are both important and rarely practiced: The Horstman Christmas Rule. If you’re someone who celebrates the Christmas season, the festivities are important to you. You look forward to it. Yet, when it’s all over, you’re wiped-out, tired, stressed out, and happy to have a few days off to recover.

That’s because Christmas is important, but it only happens once a year. We don’t get better very fast at things we do rarely. We’re often stuck doing those things poorly and repeatedly.

Hiring is the most important thing we do, but we don’t do it that often. That’s not good.

Think about your organization when it goes through the difficult process of a layoff. It’s bad enough that the concept itself causes fear throughout the organization and your team. Then it gets worse during the process: poor communication, messy mistakes, clumsy meetings, and often, poor decisions. The beginning of the great movie about Wall Street, Margin Call, shows this exceptionally well.

You know why layoffs are so often messy? Because most managers are going through a layoff for the first time. And even if they’ve done it before, it’s been so long since the last one they don’t remember what they told themselves never to forget.

Hiring follows the Christmas Rule. We don’t do it often and it’s important. Hiring well is ensuring that the most important asset of your organization, its people, are of the highest standard you can expect.

Imagine treating hiring in the opposite way, as a necessary but trivial task. You’re super busy on some really important projects, and you really just need one person who has a specific skill.

You find someone; you interview him. You have doubts, and there are areas that will need watching. But he does have the right skills. You don’t have a lot of time, and this isn’t your biggest priority so you pull the trigger.

Unfortunately, your fears are realized. His attitude is poison to your team, he’s thin-skinned, not collaborative, and because he knows he’s necessary, he’s arrogant about his value. After the fourth or fifth incident that your boss finds out about, she takes you aside and says, “What the heck were you doing hiring this guy?”

Seriously, what are you going to say? Are you going to mumble, “I know, I know, but I really needed someone”? That will get you a quick, “Well, now you got him,” from a frustrated boss.

Or maybe she’ll go big picture, and give you some critical career advice. “This is a serious miss. Hiring mistakes are nearly unforgiveable. Hiring poorly sends a message that you can’t set and meet a high standard on the most important thing you’re going to do for this organization long term. I gotta tell you, when we sit around and evaluate managers at your level, lack of ability to hire is a serious impediment to career growth.”

And you’d be lucky if she did say it, because whether she says it or not, that’s what she’s thinking.

Or maybe it’s your first hire, and you’re likely to get a little leeway. Most managers say they could have used a lot of help when they first hired. And yet, there’s probably not a lot of detailed help available in your organization. Maybe HR can tell you some things—but that’s just about the process they use. It won’t be about what questions to ask, or how to set up an interview day, or how to get your people together to talk about candidates after a day of interviews. They’ll probably tell you that you’ll want to schedule a panel interview, which are popular . . . and completely refuted as an effective technique.

Because hiring is so important, and so rarely practiced, we all need a clear, evidence-based, documented process on how to hire. Step by step. In detail. That’s what this book does.

When you follow the guidance in this book, you’ll become an Effective Hiring Manager.

About Manager Tools

My firm, which I co-own with my outstanding business partner Michael Auzenne, is a management consulting and training firm. We coach and train managers and executives at firms all around the world. In 2019, we will provide all-day training sessions to over 1,000 managers at our corporate clients worldwide. We also host training conferences all over the world, where individual managers can be trained. We will conduct over 100 of these training events in 2019.

However, if your company cannot afford to send you to training (we do offer a discount if you want to pay yourself), almost all of the guidance in this book is available for free in our podcast, Manager Tools. You can find the podcast on iTunes and at www.manager -tools.com.

As of this writing, our podcasts are downloaded about three million times a month, in virtually every country in the world. We’ve won many Podcast Awards over the years, thanks to our loyal audience.

Our podcast is free because the mission of our firm is to make every manager in the world effective. Many of them can’t afford to buy this book.

Periodically, we will encourage you to go to our website for more guidance. We can’t put all the podcasts in here—there are, at the time of this publishing, close to 1,000 of them. You’ll see many instances of There’s a Cast for ThatTM throughout this book. They are links to additional free content in our podcasts on our website.

A Note About Data

For the past 25 years, we’ve been testing various managerial behaviors and tools, to see which work and which don’t. I used to hate it when the manager training I received, or the books I read, basically were filled with someone’s opinions, or they proffered an idea and then used a few anecdotes to support their position. We at Manager Tools like the aphorism, “The plural of anecdote is not data.”

We have tested and refined all of the recommendations given in this book. We have viewed thousands of interviews, and tested all of the major recommendations here on population samples that give us high confidence about our recommendations.

That being said, no study can completely predict how any one manager’s hiring will be affected by the tools we recommend. Every situation is different. Often, that’s what many managers say when they come to us for help and explain their situation: “My situation is special/different/unique.”

Almost always, it’s not different at all. But because there’s a chance that a manager’s situation is unique, we will tell you this: Our guidance is for 90 percent of managers, 90 percent of the time.

It’s possible that you’re in a special situation, but I doubt it.

A Note About Gender

You’ll notice that, throughout this book, we will use different genders for managers—sometimes male and sometimes female. All of our content at Manager Tools—all of the audio guidance in podcasts and all the shownotes—use a nearly perfect balance of male and female examples.

The reason for using different genders for managers is that all of our data show that men and women make equally good hiring managers and, for that matter, executives. If you’re a female hiring manager, we’re glad you’re reading this book, and we’re here to help.

Let’s get started.

SECTION 1Principles

1The First Principle of Effective Hiring—Don’t Hire

When you first think you might need to hire, think again.

You don’t have to hire immediately when you have an opening. The strategic-thinking Effective Manager considers other options first. That’s how your CEO wants you to think.

Most managers, when they learn about an opening on their team or are overloaded with work, immediately start thinking about asking for permission to hire. We’re consumed with approval and process thoughts.

The average manager just naturally assumes that when someone leaves, you hire someone else. But that’s one of the ill-considered ideas that drives executive leaders crazy. To an executive, there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone . . . but there is something very wrong with hiring reflexively.

If you work for a smart director [manager of managers], she’s going to ask you a few questions when you ask for permission to hire.

“Did you consider not filling the job?” No. [Huh??]

“Why not?”

This exchange does not make this manager seem like a creative thinker, or a manager who thinks about his role in the organization. This manager is thinking about himself, but the director is thinking: he’s not a big picture guy. He’s just a cog in the system, doing his job. Low likelihood of upward potential.

To an executive, an opening is not “a spot that has to be filled.” To a leader, it’s a cost savings in the form of less salary. You read that right. It’s an opportunity to be creative. It’s an opportunity to reexamine the work that’s being done, and who’s doing it. Maybe there’s a way to get the really important work done without hiring. Maybe we can agree to let some things go and get everyone focused on what really matters.

And no, this is not the time to invoke some hackneyed idea of rapacious executives always expecting fewer and fewer people to do more and more. Yes, that happens, but it is rare. It’s just reported a lot because it’s dramatic. As managers, our first responsibility is to the organization, not to our team. So our first steps should be to get what the organization wants.

Going and asking for hiring approval right away—first—is backwards. Hiring approval will be granted more readily to the manager who can show that he has done the proper due diligence on the work, its value, people, and costs—before he asks to open a requisition.

So let’s start with assuming we can’t fill the slot. That “they” won’t let us. In other words, if you couldn’t get approval, how would you solve THAT problem? The problem is no longer the request to hire, and sourcing, and screening, and interviewing. The problem is how to get the most out of those you have, because whom you have is all you have.

Not being able to hire happens all the time, of course . . . but everybody forgets that too easily. Openings happen during layoffs and downturns. In those times, authority to hire is routinely denied.

A manager who assumes her first action is to hire, because her “problem” is “not enough people all of a sudden,” may not feel terribly creative about solving the other problem: what’s the right way to do our job with the people we HAVE. Because, if the problem really IS not enough people for the work, the work becomes a static force, an immovable object.

So to avoid wasting time thinking about what we can’t have, we assume we will NOT get anyone new. These are the new parameters to our problem and talking to our boss or to HR has nothing to do with them.

If you can’t fill the slot, there are two broad areas to consider: get more work out of the existing team or figure out what work not to do. And the most likely solution includes some of each.

We assume we have all the people we’re going to get. There are “fewer people now” to do “the same amount of work.” That means either that (a) people are going to simply take on the additional work, adding more hours or being more efficient and/or (b) some of the work being done is going to no longer get done.

Think for a moment about a manager with five directs. Assume that compensation is 50% of his operating budget (a general rule of thumb). So the loss of one person—all things being equal, which they never are (ATBEWTNA)—is a savings of 10% of budget. This is a serious savings.

Any manager who was presented the opportunity to “figure out which work to cut back on so that you could cut your budget by 10%,” would jump at the opportunity.

That means some work not getting done. And this is your opportunity to think like a leader. And the best way to get to what’s not going to get done is to follow our guidance for Delegating to the Floor.

How to Solve a Hiring Problem Without Hiring

First, ask your directs to prioritize their work. Ask them to analyze their work based on its value and priority to the organization (them, you, the division, the firm). Tell them to make a list of everything they’re working on and roughly how much time it takes, and then to rank it not by hours but by value. It shouldn’t be more than 20 things, we would guess. If it is, there are going to be a lot of things that take VERY few minutes, and those are probably things that won’t be missed.

It might sound like this: “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Spend an hour, today and/or tomorrow. Make a list of everything, or nearly everything, that you’re working on. You can look at your calendar, your piles of work, etc., anything you can think of to help you. I’m not going to wait, though, for a week, for you to do a time diary of everything you touch in the next week. That’s probably overkill.

“Then, list all your work in order of importance, and next to each item you’re working on, put down the amount of time it takes you each week. It’s okay to estimate.”

Don’t be surprised if they submit something that says they work 80 hours a week. That’s wrong, and it does NOT prove that they’re working feverishly at home. It means they don’t really know how long they spend on things. That’s okay. The point here is that pretty quickly among the items in their lists there will be a drop off in time spent and in value delivered.

Next, ask your directs for a recommendation from them about what won’t get done. After you’ve asked them to create the lists, ask them further to review the lists, think about them, and determine what on those lists could afford to not be done.

Here’s how it might sound: “Once you’ve got your list, review it. Analyze it a bit for me. And come back to me with a recommendation for what work you could get away with not doing, assuming a bunch of new, higher priority work was coming your way. Think about the time you could save, simply not doing some stuff. That’s what I want: a list, with recommendations on it of stuff you could set aside.”

Consider their recommendation, and then make the decision yourself. It’s important you ask for a recommendation, and NOT a decision. That way, they won’t feel as much risk about the analysis. It might sound like this: “Ultimately, I’m going to make the decision. If you’ll do the analysis, I’ll likely follow your recommendation. But this way, I’m responsible. As you get better and more confident at this, I’ll start letting you make the decisions as well, and I’ll still be responsible.”

Then ask them to direct questions to you. The last stage is that, after you make the decision, they stop working on those things they recommended and you decided. When they express concerns, tell them that all questions about what they’re working on come to you. In other words, if they think someone is questioning why something that used to get done is NOT being done, they would tell that person to talk to you, the manager.

If you expect your directs to do the analysis and make the decision themselves, and then deal with the consequences, all at once, learning by trial by fire, they’re not going to do what you ask. They’re going to hide some work and/or try to get everything done, which is a complete contravention of the whole purpose of this effort.

Some caveats: this guidance is largely for managers of individual contributors. If you’re a Director, managing managers, you don’t have to make the decision for them, they can do it themselves. On the other hand, if you lose one of your managers, you may want to also consider reorganizing. It’s not as easy as most companies make it out to be. But Directors have a great deal more leeway than they realize.

There are roles and teams where this kind of analysis is harder. For example, in a customer service contact center (a large bank’s call center), representatives are unlikely to have a list of multiple tasks that have varying levels of value. Their primary role, serving customers by phone, is 90% of their time/value.

If that’s you, you may quickly realize you can skip this step, but don’t lose sight of how a manager thinks, because roles like this are the exception. Your next role may be different.

2The Second Principle of Effective Hiring—Set Your Bar High

If you want to make managing easier, make hiring better.

We believe that the most serious organizational weakness in modern organizations is hiring poorly. Companies and managers routinely hire far below the quality we could find, largely because we don’t set standards, we don’t train, we don’t have measured processes, and we don’t improve.

Our organizations have systems to test the quality of raw materials coming in to our plants. We reject anything that is even a little