Companies everywhere are experiencing labour and skills shortages due in part to the mass retirement of baby boomers and the global competition for talent. Time to fill cycles are getting longer and vacancy rates are increasing.

So one has to ask: Is this a good time for employers to take a more rigorous talent acquisition approach?

Some forward thinking companies believe now is the time to refine their selection process. As boomers retire at a rate of one every 8 seconds over the next decade backfilling them won't be easy. Armed with this knowledge and experiencing current talent shortages these companies have taken a novel approach which they call quality of hire. Their approach is to hire only the very best applicants who have a lot of headroom and then grow their skills from within. This is a strategy that will help ensure they are hiring their leaders of tomorrow when the tsunami comes ashore.

"We are moving aggressively toward measuring "Quality of Hire" as part of our talent acquisition strategy. Employee attrition is a big issue facing us. We need to address it in a way that ensures that we are not just filling vacancies but we are hiring the very best. So we are implementing programs that will allow us to better identify job candidates that will fit well with our culture." said the Vice President of Human Resources, $500 M + web services company.

Aberdeen Report 2007 Report - "The Global War for Talent: Getting What You Want Won't Be Easy

The strategic shift to quality hiring programs is in part fuelled by wake up calls from management gurus like Jim Collins author of Good to Great- "Get the right people on the bus and in the right seat" and Peter Drucker - "66% of hiring decisions will prove to be a mistake."

As the war for talent intensifies companies can no longer afford to hire or keep marginal performing employees.

A global competition for talent, boomer retirement, and an abundance of skill shortages is a perfect storm. So what can you do now to ensure your organization survives unscathed?

A 300 bed hospital has implemented an innovative nurse grad placement strategy in their effort to reduce turnover and optimise talent.They take a unique approach at matching the grad to their new department.

When new grads arrive they know very little about them. They don't know anything about their working style. Do they like to work quickly and assertively, or do they prefer to work methodically and at a slower pace? Do they prefer to make independent decisions or prefer to be closely directed? These working behaviours and many others are evaluated and matched with the department's culture to ensure a good fit.

For example the working culture in emergency is different from intensive care which is different from paediatrics etc. Placing nurse grads in the right seat on the bus goes a long way toward reducing turnover and improving performance especially at this most critical step of the young nurse's career.

Studies and research confirm that technical skills are important but they are only part of the success equation. Equally important is the way in which the technical skills get applied which is referred to as contextual skills. Selecting a person based on their contextual skills is taking on more importance in the selection process and is best illustrated in the example below.

A fortune 100 company, a global manufacturing leader has a program for identifying and measuring the skills of prospective team leaders on their assembly lines. As part of their six sigma continuous improvement process they set out to hire and promote only team leaders with the right technical skills and the right contextual skills such as perseverance, self confidence, problem solving, and more.

"In order to optimise our process improvement initiatives we must have the right people on board and that means people who have a combination of skills" said the Director of Human Resources, $36 Billion Global Manufacturing Company.

What can you start doing now?

* Review your company's time to fill cycles and vacancy rates. Do you see alarming trends?
* Forecast boomer retirement. How many, when, what departments will be hardest hit.
* Inventory the skill sets of the impending retirees. What special talents and skills do these people have.

Catalogue them, or measure them now. These are the people you are looking to replace. Capture their high performance DNA so to speak before they leave.

Now is the time to act with deliberate purpose and a clear strategic plan.

- DeTimes

An excellent lawyer may not be rich, they probably will not have the reputation of being a sharp practitioner and may even have a moral reputation. To survive in a tough environment where success is generally the only medium for measuring success, some of the qualities all amazing lawyers possess are:

1. Creativity
2. Perseverance
3. Excellent Communication Skills
4. Logical Thinking Skills
5. Always delivers value for money
6. Champions the interests of the client
7. Always Acts in accordance with their duty to the court
8. Is Reliable, Consistent and Ethical
9. Has an excellent knowledge of the law
10. Accepts their own weaknesses and asks help from others.

Note that knowledge of the law is only a tenth of these qualities. I find it intriguing that law school spends at least ninety percent % of its time honing legal skills and neglects fostering the majority of these traits.

Now you are aware of what makes an amazing lawyer, I will contrast this; exposing the traits of financially successful but ethically dubious lawyers. The sorts of attorney that sound attractive but whose only interests they serve are their own.

Primary Concerns to watch out for:
1. Inefficiency, the ability to send 3 letters when 1 will do.
2. Perseverance, will continually bill for more hours than could possibly have been worked
3. Excellent Communication Skills, the only similarity with excellent lawyers
4. Lateral Thinking Skills, Will always find a lawsuit for clients wanting advice
5. Never delivers value for money, money is the the reason for practicing
6. Always Champions their own interests, ahead of their clients
7. The Duty to the Court and Society is a secondary consideration, unless remaining registered is taken into account
8. Disrespect, Only respects those with the same Moral Calibre as themselves
9. Is an Excellent Judge of Character, can see the customers who were born yesterday
10. Overconfident, refuses to ask for help and thinks they always know best

These are the qualities of rich, successful but so amazing (great) lawyers. Definitely watch out for them.

- DeTimes

Ridiculous question, right? Hardly. If you think you know what a CEO does, you're probably wrong. Basic premise: many entrepreneurs believe that CEOs are über-administrators who handle all the details of running a business. (If you share that belief, examine your own tendency to micro-manage your company.) What a CEO really does, is lead, not manage.

"The quintessential entrepreneur is someone who wants to put his hands around the whole ball of wax." At a certain point in a company's growth, the entrepreneur who wants to control everything can no longer keep up. And so he or she mistakenly looks for a better manager and calls that person a CEO. "They look around and say either 'My company is failing' or 'It's not achieving growth'." "They are getting overwhelmed because they don't know how to manage a sales force or understand a balance sheet. They say, 'I need a CEO.' They think that means they need someone to handle all the administrative tasks, but that's incorrect. It's a cry for help. What they're really saying is, 'I no longer know how to lead the company.' The basic job of a CEO is a leadership job. By leadership, I mean the pursuit of a coherent strategy and the marshaling of all resources to be able to pursue that strategy.

"A CEO is someone who's good at prioritisation, who can handle complex environments. There are lots of different tasks: you need an individual who is capable of strategic thinking, who can encompass that into team building, and who understands the language of business and how it works from an economic, legal, and managerial point of view. It's someone who can marshal all those things.

"The number one job qualification is prior experience. It overrides everything else. You want someone who has run a company successfully before and has a track record. I wouldn't put an age bracket on it, but there's a hell of a lot of scrutiny. You have to ask the hard question to someone who's 28. How many years of experience could they have had?"

- DeTimes

You need to hire the best employees. You undoubtedly hired some employees who were losers.

Oops! Well, let’s be more diplomatic. Let’s just say you hired some “underachievers” you would have been better without.

Or maybe you have the curse of hiring only “average” employees – people who are average in productivity and average in producing profits.

Question: Who wants to hire “average” (or “below average”) employees?

Answer: No one!

To hire the best, you need to avoid the problems that plagued your previous hiring decisions. So, let me reveal seven horrible hiring blunders or mistakes you may have made.

1st Horrible Mistake: Interviewers typically do a lousy job at predicting job success.

This is a proven fact, verified by a lot of research. Statistically, most interviewers do about as well as flipping a coin!

2nd Horrible Mistake: Reference checks fail to tell you what you really need to know.

Most employers are so freaked out about giving reference checks that they tell you nothing or barely anything useful about how an applicant performed on-the-job. Another way to put that is most reference checks are about as non-useful as simultaneously (a) flipping a coin while (b) rubbing a rabbit’s foot!!

3rd Horrible Mistake: You just relied on your “gut feel” or “intuition” & you were WRONG.

Later, as you moaned about the mistake you made by hiring the wrong person, you asked yourself, “I knew what I was feeling. But, what was I thinking?”

4th Horrible Mistake: You used subjective prediction methods to make hiring decisions.

For example, you relied on subjective interviews, subjective reference checks, and objective ‘impressions’ of the applicant. Wow! Were you ever off-base? And then you and your company needed to pay for your incorrect hiring decisions. That is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating.

5th Horrible Mistake: You used NO objective AND customized prediction method.

Important: Research shows pre-employment tests are the most objective method to make predictions. But, make sure you use a test customized for specific jobs in your company!

If you have not used tests customized for specific jobs in your company, then you really have missed out on the most objective and customized prediction method you could use.

6th Horrible Mistake: You [stupidly] told the applicant what you were looking for!!

Then, lo & behold, the applicant spent your entire interview telling you s/he just happens to possess all the skills, talents and qualities you – stupidly – told the applicant you want in an employee.

For example, let’s say you – stupidly – told the applicant you need to hire an employee who excels at teamwork, customer-service, and correctly handling small details. I bet I can predict what that applicant told you in the interview: The applicant told you – with a serious yet pleasant expression – that s/he excels at teamwork, customer-service, and correctly handling small details.

And then, when you hired the person who gave you all the answers you – stupidly – told the applicant you want, you pay the price of having an employee who may not REALLY be talented at teamwork, customer-service, or handling small details. You got fooled – and you have only yourself to blame.

7th Horrible Mistake: You terribly harm any person you should not have hired.

Let’s be humanistic about it. If you hire the wrong person, the applicant also loses.

People crave to work in a job where they will do well and enjoy it. People hate a job where they will perform only average or below average, and not enjoy the work. So, you actually benefit the applicant you carefully evaluated using customized, objective hiring methods.

Summary: When you hire . . .

1. High-achieving “superstar” employees, both you and your company win.

2. Underachieving employees, (a) you lose and (b) your company loses.

So, make sure you use customized and objective prediction methods, like pre-employment tests, biodata and more, to make sure you hire employees who are: Productive, Profitable, and Low Turnover

-  DeTimes

Why are some hiring decisions successful while others are a disaster?

The amount time, effort and money spent in the hiring process often hits the roof because hiring managers make some inevitable mistakes.

It is true, that the recruitment process is more complex, than meets the eye or is realised to be; and it is this inability to identify subtle factors of the system that leads to a wrong hiring decision, which most often becomes a disaster for the company; especially when decisions go wrong for a leadership position.

In times when change is so rapid and radical, what makes the hiring process even more complex is the need of meeting ground between short-term, medium-term and long-term priorities.

Why is it necessary for the recruitment process to be focused? Finding out whether the person is the “RIGHT FIT” in the organisation culturally is as important as testing his/her skill sets. Most of the times, more important. A cultural misfit only leads to a disaster while a compromise on skills can be overcome by training and over time.

Building a talent pool even before it is required is critical today. The lookout should be for a person who had an exact job, in the same industry, in the particular business climate, and from a company with a very similar culture. Failure to identify the exact company needs is one of the reasons that leads to wrong hiring decisions. Assessment of skills is one of the reasons. Assessment of cultural fitment is another and definitely more critical. Assessment of responsiveness to change is the winning factor.

The paper profile of a person is, in fact, the most common blind spot as it often exaggerates the truth and can be misleading in the selection process. I warn that keeping this in mind becomes essential for HR personnel to get an accurate picture of the candidate. Furthermore, often it is the good communication skills of the candidate that help him/her succeed in the interview without the necessary domain knowledge or skill.

One has to check where the candidate comes from—from the perspective of suitability to work in the new culture, which could be different from the earlier organisation; and from the perspective of ability to work in teams, customer-facing skills, ability to work under pressure, etc.

At times organisations hire out of desperation and consequently land up paying the price of inducting a candidate who is not suitably qualified to take care of the responsibilities. Blindly promoting from within and hiring because the candidate was referred by a friend are the other mistakes that are often repeated.

The “COST” perspective

Hiring an over-qualified candidate is one of the main reasons for the cost of hiring shoots up, at times beyond the roof. It is very easy to get swayed or unnecessarily impressed by degrees from IITs and IIMs and such premiere institutions, globally.

Hiring such candidates when not needed, only results in marked up costs for hiring as well as inappropriate retention costs. Recruitment is a very strategic area, since, a company is only known by the people it keeps. It has a definite impact on any company’s balance sheet and brand positioning. It is also commonly seen that candidates, who don’t get reasonably desired salaries, join a company only for a short term. He is always on the lookout, and leaves when he gets, what he feels is deserving salary.

The SUPERMAN Paradigm

We all have accepted the fact that all hiring managers are always on the lookout for a SUPERMAN, who is as good as his predecessor. Instead, a valid thought must go in to eliminating known faults at this stage, compared to the predecessor. Every organization, today, is looking at attracting such super-heroes. Agreed that it is necessary, but defining this “SUPER” is more critical since it must be realistic and not idealistic.

While it is easy to verify the skills of any candidature, the softer skills must be deeply investigated. An assessment by a team of experienced professionals across functions of the employer organization is important. This also gives the candidate a chance to get a feel of the organization and a good check on compatibility. Adaptability scores over technical skills in today’s times.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin.

 - DeTimes