Situation: The CEO is moving a key employee from head of engineering to a more customer development focus. To support this, she will have to bring in or promote another employee to fill the position of leader/supervisor/manager of the engineering group. The CEO seeks advice on the best way to approach finding a replacement for this key job. How do you replace a key position?
Advice from the CEOs:
• First, it is necessary to develop a timeline for finding and transitioning the replacement. Realistically, count on 6 months to find a replacement and transition the responsibilities to a new person.
• Keep in mind that anybody you find or promote will be different from the individual who currently occupies the position, and will not handle their new responsibilities the same way as the current individual. Their motivation and their approach to their new responsibilities will be different, at least at the outset, and they will not handle their responsibilities the same way that the current individual does.
• Seek an individual, either currently within the company or an outside hire with strengths that, over time, will add significant value to the organization. Prepare for this by brainstorming and developing a profile of the ideal candidate.
• If you have qualified candidates, the ideal person will come from within the organization. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to other employees that they, also, may become candidates for future positions to grow both their skills and income.
Tag Archives: Candidate
How Do You Interview for New Hires and Promotions? Part 2, Eight Points
Situation: A CEO seeks advice on interviewing both for new hires and promotions. What advice and guidelines do others suggest to improve interviews? How do you interview for new hires and promotions?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Use an interview process that is consistent with the company’s plan and culture.
- Start with the company’s mission statement.
- Next develop the value system.
- Draft a hiring plan that is consistent with the company’s mission and values and develop a process to support this.
- Monitor the process over time and improve it through experience.
- Assure that position descriptions reflect the individual(s) that the company wants to hire.
- Before starting the hiring process, ask “What problem am I solving?” The answer will help to define the talents and attitudes desired in candidates.
- Utilize “listening with a plan”.
- Be clear on how the person being interviewed is delivering their message. Is their language positive, proactive, energized, or lethargic? Do they take responsibility for their own actions? Do they look at positive aspects of the company they work for and the people they work with? The objective is to make sure that the individuals sought for the job display these characteristics.
- Hire for growth potential, not just to fill the current slot.
- Hire consistent with the values and culture that the company wants to create and foster.
- Hire to skills needed rather than value to yourself and the firm.
- Don’t just hire on cultural aspects. Evaluate and check the skill set against what this person is supposed to accomplish. Getting the skills set right is just as important as getting the culture right.
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How Do You Interview New Tech Hires? Four Necessities
Situation: A CEO wants advice on hiring new technical staff. Important considerations are cultural fit, identifying the characteristics of effective people, assuring that the right people are hired, and evaluating people for specifics tasks. In the past hiring technical people has proven challenging and poor hires have inhibited company growth. How do you interview new tech hires?
Advice from the CEOs:
- It is critical to be clear on the factors necessary to be successful in the enterprise. Once these have been identified, align the factors with existing individuals in the organization as role models. Also align these factors with those who will be involved in candidate selection. This facilitates identification of good candidates.
- Develop clarity on candidate evaluation. Identify and develop questions that will allow candidates to describe what is important to them and what they want to get out of their career choice. In addition to specific knowledge, candidates should demonstrate a personal value system compatible with the company’s culture. They must also demonstrate a high energy level.
- Once there is clear articulation of desired characteristics of candidates work with others such as college placement organizations, friends of the firm, Craig’s list, and so on to assist with candidate identification. A well written position description not only describes the type of individual desired, but also why someone would want to join the firm.
- It’s imperative to be able to give a sales presentation on the company including specific reasons why people should join it. Avoid getting so wrapped up in the selection mode that you fail to recruit. Some who have done this were stunned to find that after they have made their selection the candidate was no longer interested.
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What are Best Practices for Interviewing and Hiring? Three Points
Situation: A company typically interviews candidates for open positions in a two-day process. The candidate talks to four or more people. The total time with a candidate is about 6 hours, and the hiring process, once a good candidate is identified, takes about 1 week. Is this typical of other companies? What are best practices for interviewing and hiring?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Extend the process – add some pressure to it.
- All companies deal with pressure and stress from time to time. The team is frequently under pressure. Artificially create a pressure situation for a candidate – preferably later in the day when they are tired. This will help to identify whether they are cool under pressure, irritable or sloppy.
- For example, put an engineering candidate in front of a computer and give them 30 minutes to do a job that you know would normally take 60 minutes. Don’t mention the mismatch to the candidate. The point is NOT whether they can complete the task, but to watch how they respond under high pressure.
- This is not unfair to the candidate. It puts them precisely in a situation that they will find while working at the company. Give them the opportunity to demonstrate through their behavior that they either respond positively or really don’t want to be put into these situations.
- Conduct thorough reference checks – including past employers or clients.
- DISC profiles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) are used to improve teamwork and understand different communication styles
- Identify an experienced local resource who can help to assess the DISC profile of the company.
- This individual can advise human resources and hiring managers on the use and interpretation of DISC profiles of candidates to help assure good company fit.
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How Do You Hire the Right Person? Three Points
Situation: A CEO is in the process of hiring a new employee for a key position. The company is now writing the position description to post for candidates. What can they do to improve on past hiring experiences? How do you hire the right person?
Advice of the Forum:
- Two of the members of the Forum have worked with a skilled consultant who taught them a system for improving employee selection. Both companies have experienced excellent results from this system.
- Key points of this system include:
- Screening applicants for appropriate skills and inviting for interviews those who have the right background. The interview process is a 2-day affair. Day 1 focuses principally on behavior and culture.
- Day 1 Interviews: the focus is behavior and adaptability. This involves 2-4 hours of tightly scheduled 15-minute interviews. These are scripted with standardized questions. Several candidates are run through this process simultaneously. The objective is to create the same type of pressure that an employee normally face when the company is chasing a tight deadline. Interviewers are instructed to observe how the individuals being interviewed respond to this pressure. Those who are not right for your culture quickly screen themselves out of the process. Those who pass Day 1 are invited back for Day 2
- Day 2 Interviews: the focus is on a skill drill down. This includes real-time tests of the key skills that are typical of the position for which the interviewees are interviewing. The objective is to assess the familiarity of the interviewees with the required skills, and to determine who reacts both competently and creatively.
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How Do You Get the Right People on the Bus? Six Points
Situation: A small company is growing nicely and needs more people. However, the CEO is struggling to find the time to properly interview and hire additional people. In addition, he is not comfortable in this role. Hiring the right people will be critical to the future success of the company. How do you get the right people on the bus?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Particularly if the CEO does not feel that hiring is a strength, hire an outside HR firm or consultant to screen and select candidates for interviews.
- It is critical to decide, in advance of any search, exactly what the company needs in the individuals that are hired. A good HR consultant can help the company work through this.
- Structure the agreement with the HR professional so that they are paid based on successful integration of the individual into the company. It may cost more on the back end for this type of agreement, however, it will save the CEO and the company valuable time and money far in excess of what the company will pay for this assurance.
- Plan to only see the final candidates.
- What does the company look for in an HR consultant relationship?
- Generation of a job description and the key traits of the individual that the company seeks. This helps the HR consultant to select the right candidates for the business and situation.
- Candidate recruitment, screening, and selection of final candidate(s) for company review.
- The HR consultant will also prep the candidates to succeed in the company’s environment.
- Assistance in identifying the key objectives and metrics that will be used to assess the success of the individuals hired during the first quarters or year in the company. If the HR consultant’s compensation is structured so that they are paid well for long-term success, it may cost the company more for the successful hires, however the company will only pay for success and will save considerable cash by averting failures.
- In addition to making sure that the right people are put on the bus, work diligently to assure that they are also in the right seats, and that they change seats as necessary to complement the company’s growth.
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What’s the Next Version of Our Business Solution? Four Ideas
Situation: A company that provides personnel services wants to adjust their business model to make it more appealing to employers. They are unique in that they focus on social issues, rather than purely on business services. From the perspective of a hiring Manager, what would you want to see? What’s the next version of our business solution?
Advice from the CEOs:
- The idea of a social issues-based brand is unique. To some employers this may have appeal.
- Your obvious differentiator is the tie between existing communities and social networking. Emphasize this.
- As an employer, the focus is on finding quality employees for the right price. This will always take precedence over other factors for most businesses. In fact, over-emphasis on social issue-based hiring could subject an employer to discrimination issues. It also will not appeal to everyone. How can you address quality employee for the right price through your service? Here are some things to consider:
- The employers’ challenge is finding good candidates. How do you solve this problem?
- Employers have specific needs to fill. Help them by identifying and screening candidates so that it makes their job easier.
- The question for the employer is whether your helper audience can crowd source the screening function. Screening is the challenge of the employer. Solve this and I as an employer want to talk to you!
- Within your model, instead of asking for monetary contributions from your helper audience ask them to donate time to screen candidates. Not being a recruiter is a plus.
- Pitch your new ideas to your company insiders – see what they say.
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How Do You Evaluate Marketing Partners? Six Observations
Situation: A company is interested in partnering with a larger company to market a suite of services. They have identified two good candidates. They haven’t worked with partners in the past and are curious about how other companies work with marketing partners. How do you evaluate marketing partners?
Advice from the CEOs:
- The danger of working with a single marketing partner is that all of your eggs are in one basket. Your success in this relationship will depend upon the success of the marketing partner. This, in turn, will depend on the amount of attention that they pay to marketing your services, and on how actively their sales department sells your services. The danger to you is loss of control over the marketing and sales process.
- Another company had a similar situation several years ago. At that time, the advice of the CEOs was to not select an exclusive partner, but instead to work with two different marketing partners, even though they are competitors. The company followed this advice, and it has worked like a charm.
- Start with a position that you want a non-exclusive relationship. If a potential partner insists on exclusivity then ask for fixed guarantees of business and fixed minimums.
- Other companies around the table work in partnership with competing companies all of the time. All of the partners value the services that these companies provide, and the relationships are harmonious.
- If a possible partner insists on an exclusive relationship, another alternative is to split territories and supplement your agreements with most favored nation clauses.
- Going back to the original question, provided that the terms offered by the marketing partner/partners are favorable, you won’t really know how they will perform until you establish a relationship and monitor it over time. Exit clauses and conditions will be an important part of any marketing agreement.
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How Do You Recruit an Outside Director? Five Suggestions
Situation: A company’s current directors are all insiders. The CEO wants to bring in an outside director for greater perspective, someone who can help the company grow to the next level. What should they look for? How do you recruit an outside director?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Look for an individual at a company in a similar market segment that is the revenue size that you want to be and which is selling to the same customers that you do. You want their sales process to be similar in type and complexity of sale but non-competitive with your company.
- This can be an inactive founder or past employee who has been in GM role with P&L responsibility.
- Write a list of the needs that you want this person to fulfill. Use this to evaluate prospective candidates.
- Is it OK to hire a stranger?
- Before you speak with a candidate, research their background and reputation.
- You want someone who can provide information and a perspective that you don’t have now. During the selection process you will get to know the person.
- Consider a high level individual from a company that has been a top customer. This individual can help you understand how you are viewed in the market, and how you can enhance your positioning and competitiveness.
- Have lunch with a local recruiter who regularly recruits directors for companies. Get their perspective on how to select an outside director and what to look for in a candidate.
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How Do You Define Your Sales Offering? Four Recommendations
Situation: A company is having difficulty finding the right sales candidates for the opportunity that they offer. They have had good conversations with prospects, but once they present their offering the candidates reply that they’re not interested. How do they define their offer to attract good candidates? How do they adjust the conversation to produce better results? How do you define your sales offering?
Advice from the CEOs:
- This is the same conversation that you have with your biggest client prospects.
- Good people have options. If you have not convinced yourself that you have a great opportunity, you will never convince them that your offer is better than other options.
- You are selling YOU.
- Change early process.
- Be sure that you are as passionate about your opportunity as you are about positioning your services with clients.
- Divorce the conversation about the opportunity from the general screening interview.
- Here’s the process:
- Your recruiter does not sell.
- Just ask the recruiter to identify potential; not to initiate the sale.
- Do this sale yourself.
- Aspects of the story – much of this is the same story that you present to your clients:
- Your performance within your industry.
- Strength of your people and brand name.
- The quality of your clients.
- The unique opportunity that the prospect has joining you at this stage of your business growth.
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