When I go and meet a client to take a new brief for a role it’s not unusual for them to say, “I would like to see a range of candidates; that will help me shape my thinking and identify the right person for the role.”
This may sound like a reasonable way forward, particularly for a new role. Hiring managers often tell me that they will shape or design a role for a great candidate. For me however, it sets alarm bells ringing…but why?
A company should only ever hire anyone to improve their business results. If you can’t define the improved business results that you want to achieve by making the hire, I would seriously question why the hire is being made at all. This may seem obvious but sometimes hiring managers hire because they have allocated headcount or because they are replacing someone who has left the business. It may be perfectly valid to hire but you really must look at what you want to achieve before you reach out to the market or start interviewing candidates.
When you understand what business results you want to achieve, you can then start shaping the role. This should form the basis of your job specification. Too many job specifications quickly get into a list of ‘wants’ that the candidate should posses when the first step should be defining what success in the role looks like, the key objectives for the role and the key challenges to be overcome to achieve success in the role. Also, it is vital that the objectives for a role are linked to departmental and company objectives, otherwise achievement of the objectives will count for nothing, i.e. they won’t actually contribute to the overall success of the department or company.
I find when I take my clients through a process of looking at the improved business results they want by making the hire, the penny often drops. The shape and design of the role becomes much more obvious and as a result it becomes far easier to identify the type of candidates that are capable of achieving the key objectives. The LBA Hiring Management System™ provides templates for sourcing profiles, actually looking at a number of scenarios of where the person might be working now and what they may have accomplished to date in their career. The point is to understand and get very specific about a limited number of people who could achieve success in the role and then consider why the role would be attractive to them.
Top performers don’t go along for interviews for the experience, only job hunters do that and it’s waste of time for everyone. To get top performers to the table, you must excite them about the challenges of the role, clearly lay out what success in the role looks like and outline the opportunities that being successful in the role could open up.
My advice to hiring managers is: don’t spend time interviewing candidates to help shape your thinking about a role. Invest time in what you want to achieve by making the hire and this will help you get very specific about the people you should be interviewing. The interview should be used to assess the propensity of the candidate to achieve the key objectives of the role and be successful, not to shape or design the role.
