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Hiring the Best: The First Step in Integrated Talent Management

Leslie W. Joyce

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
—Lao Tzu

I’ve been teaching leaders to recruit and select people for 25 years. Since my first real job in human resources, I’ve been passionate about the first step in the talent value chain, hiring the right people, which makes developing the right skill sets so much easier.

Hiring the right person sets the foundation for every talent activity that follows. Get the foundation wrong—pick the wrong person—and you will be living with it for a long time. As the head of learning and leadership development, I’ve been in the unenviable position of having responsibility for training all the “right” people that others hired—turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse is just as hard as it sounds—and it is terribly expensive.

For an industrial psychologist, “selection,” as we call it, may be the hardest discipline to master. It is highly technical, using statistics that are as hard to pronounce as they are to calculate. The impact of error is enormous and can result in spending a lot of money on expert witnesses if you, yourself, do not relish the idea of spending countless hours in a little wooden box at the front of a courtroom explaining the reasons your hiring managers made the decisions they made. Because of this, we psychologists have spent years and years and years designing incredibly complex and completely predictable processes and systems to circumvent the one thing we hate most: the individual opinion and judgment of the hiring manager. Individual opinion is terribly unpredictable, and worse, it’s often wrong. Often, in our opinions, if “they” would “just let the system do what it was designed to do,” everything would be all right. However, there is this pesky and consistent expectation that leaders should actually get to choose the people who work for them. How selfish is that?

I learned this lesson very early in my career. Despite my great education in the science and practice of employee selection, managers consistently ruined my handiwork by choosing the person they “liked best”—sometimes despite the clear evidence that there were other equally qualified candidates with a far higher likelihood of being successful.

So once I gave in to the reality that personal choice is actually a good thing, I decided that maybe I could help hiring managers make better decisions about whom they chose and why. If I could help them appreciate the magnitude of the decision they were making, and thus really consider the importance of what they were doing, maybe my processes would have more value in the overall decision-making scenario.

Among other things, I came up with a brilliant (my opinion only!) exercise—shown in the sidebar—that I thought did a good job of demonstrating the magnitude of the decisions they were making. I often found this exercise quite helpful in setting the tone at the beginning of a training class or as a spontaneous table exercise when making presentations on talent management to big groups. It can also be reduced to just the most salient questions to make your points. Take a few minutes and try it.

The first few times I did this exercise, I was amazed at how successful it was, and I have used it ever since. It has continued to hold true

even as the prices of cars have increased. Sometimes, this is the only comparison I have had to provide to change a person’s behavior. It is easy to see that in the long run, an ill-considered hiring decision costs the company, and the manager, a carload of cash. However, before you get to the point of making the decision of whom to choose, you need a pool from which to choose. The exercise emphasizes both the creation of the pool (candidates and sources) as well as the decision-making process. The quality of your talent pool is both your first hurdle and your first accomplishment. Recruit effectively and you increase your chances for success.

Fish Where the Fish Are—Six Steps in Effective Recruitment

As my mother always said, there are lots of fish in the sea, so be a good fisherman and find the best that the sea has to offer. The question is: Where are the best fish? During the last few years, I’ve determined that there six key steps in creating and communicating a compelling argument that top talent (“fish”) cannot ignore and that will thus enable you to effectively recruit them.

The first step in effective recruitment is to identify the talent acquisition strategy that best supports your business strategy. Your talent strategy is a conscious decision regarding what methods and approaches will most effectively enable you to identify, source, and secure the best talent in the market. Organizations face many choices, but they can be distilled down to four fundamental strategies to get the talent you need to realize your business strategy:

Will you buy—hire externally?

Will you build—develop internally?

Will you borrow—hire for a defined timeframe?

Will you bind—provide incentives to attract key talent to stay?

Each of these four talent strategies works best in certain business conditions, and each has its particular pros and cons. Perhaps the best news is that each strategy complements the others, enabling an employer to use multiple strategies at once, or in succession, as business conditions and business strategies evolve.

The second step in effective recruitment is to create a compelling employment value proposition that clearly states what is different about your organization versus others that top talent might consider. Successful companies have a compelling customer value proposition—a proposition that clearly articulates what makes it a better place to shop at or invest in than its competitors. Increasingly, a successful company also has a compelling employment value proposition that clearly represents the benefits of working for it versus its competitors—a proposition that has three key elements: differentiation, credibility, and sustainability.

The third step in effective recruitment is to capture the employment value proposition in a memorable employment brand that simply states what makes your organization a great choice. In its simplest form, an employment brand is a “tag line” that grabs the job seeker’s attention and compels him or her to consider your company. The employment value proposition, the employment brand, and all the supporting recruiting material are the foundation of an employment marketing campaign, whose purpose is to put the employer front and center with the talent it seeks.

The fourth step in effective recruitment is to translate the employment brand into a talent brand that clearly articulates the caliber of talent working for your organization. The “talent brand” is a description that simply and efficiently describes the kinds of people who work for the organization, the kinds of talent the organization seeks, and the kinds of talent that succeed there. This brand is an essential element of attracting, recruiting, and hiring superior talent.

The fifth step in effective recruitment is to determine the most productive channels to the talent you want. The 21st-century job seeker’s options are bigger and brighter than ever before. There are more “channels to market”—that is, ways to contact, connect, and interact with potential employees and employers—than ever before. These channels take a variety of forms, ranging from traditional processes (advertising, search firms, and referrals) to more innovative web-based processes (job boards, communities of practice, and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook) to truly cutting-edge channels such as virtual worlds and multiplayer games (SecondLife, America’s Army, and the like). Channels are available to job seekers 24/7, and they allow employers to connect to local talent or global talent. With just the click of a mouse, an organization can become a major force in the war for talent.

The sixth step in effective recruitment is to measure your success. “If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t matter,” “You get what you measure,” and other similar common sayings underscore the importance of measurement and metrics. Metrics can be split into two categories: tactical metrics, which tell you how you’ve done or are doing (for example, time to fill and applicants per position), and strategic metrics, which tell you what is coming and what you should prepare for (for example, workforce demographics, seasonality, and anticipated job growth).

So you’ve followed these six steps and have them on the hook. Now how do you get the best fish into the boat? By using the best bait, of course. And in this case, the best “bait” consists of well-designed selection tools and processes.

Good Selection Tools Are Critical

If your goal is to hire the best, you must spend time, energy, and money to develop selection tools that differentiate the good from the very good and the very good from the best. Let’s go back to the car-buying exercise in the sidebar: If you don’t find and apply rigorous standards to the choices you face, you’ll end up with a suboptimal automobile that you’ll soon be looking to sell or trade. Unfortunately, however, if you choose suboptimal talent, selling or trading them is often not an option.

My advice is: First, always develop and implement well-designed and easy-to-use selection tools that fit the position for which you are hiring. Second, use a combination of tools to get the best result. What do I mean by tools? Here are a few examples:

Screening tools—which include telephone, online, or in-person questionnaires designed to quickly identify those who do not meet key criteria.

Interview tools—which include structured interviews, behav ioral questions, and situational judgment scenarios to help uncover past successes and suggest future successes.

Behavioral tools—which include assessment centers, work samples, and job simulations to give great insight into work-related behaviors.

Job fit tools—which include assessments that focus on the extent to which a person fits with the company and team they would be joining and the position they would be accepting.

These are just a few examples, and of course, there are plenty more where these came from. If you do a lot of hiring, it is in your best interest to ensure that you have an industrial/organizational psychologist available to you to design great selection processes. It will save money in the long run.

As you can see, an effective talent acquisition strategy has many moving parts. All these parts need to work together seamlessly to send a consistent and compelling message to your talent targets. Working together is not limited to integrating the various components of talent management and/or HR. The secret sauce, if you will, is the total integration and alignment of all the talent management efforts within the organization— and this includes employee and candidate touch points both within and outside HR. Each has the potential to impart important information to recruits and candidates.

Alignment Is the Secret Sauce

There are two critical areas of alignment. The first critical area is the alignment between the organization brand and talent brand. It’s said that if the reputation of an organization’s products and services is its face, the talent brand is its heart and soul. If the talent brand and the organization brand are inconsistent, even slightly, then the credibility of both is at risk. To ensure that alignment is created and sustained, it is useful to work closely with the marketing and public relations departments. These include professionals who craft and protect the organization’s brand, and they can be an enormous help in creating and protecting the talent brand.

The second critical area is the alignment between the talent brand and the organization’s selection and development processes. Alignment starts with ensuring that the parties responsible for staffing, training and development, and talent management are fully aware of the organization’s existing or desired talent brand. And alignment depends on partnering with others to ensure that

Job descriptions and position postings reflect the characteristics 7 of the talent brand.

The applicant tracking system is optimally configured and 7 functional to ensure that candidate management is proactive and comprehensive.

Website information reinforces both the organization’s brand 7 and the talent brand.

Onboarding and assimilation processes reflect and make real 7 the promises of opportunity made by the value proposition and the brand.

Training and development tools and programs are clear and 7 support career development and growth.

Confidence that “what you see is what you get” is critical to building sound relationships with talent prospects. In today’s highly connected world, it takes very little time for the failure to deliver on a promise to be shared with others. And once trust is lost, it is very hard to rebuild.

The most talented people expect to get better, and they want the company for which they work to share this responsibility. So once you hire them, make sure you invest in their development and reengage them at every opportunity.

Invest in the Best

I’ve been doing engagement survey work for a long time, and it seems that three areas always need improvement—compensation, communication, and development. I have yet to find a survey that shows that employees have enough money, know all they want to know about what’s going on in the company, and have too many training and learning opportunities. I’m not certain it is possible to pay enough or communicate enough, but I know we can develop talent enough.

We all know that formal talent development processes are the easiest way for employees to see that these development opportunities exist. We also know that informal, experience-based development is the most productive and effective. So it is up to us to provide both formal and informal opportunities. And it is up to us to build organizations that use all the tools available to invest in the great talent they hire. The best way to keep great talent is to enable them to become even better.

Summary

Today’s top talent has an unprecedented variety of employment opportunities. And at their fingertips, they have extraordinarily thorough and quick tools for job searches. In this highly competitive and fast-paced climate, a one-size-size-fits-all strategy to attract and recruit talent will not attract the best. Therefore, to be successful, employers need to

Have a clear talent strategy—whom do they need, and where will this talent come from?

Know and understand what is important to today’s workforce and reflect that in the employment value proposition.

Be educated consumers about the pros and cons of every talent channel.

Use terrific tools for selecting the best in the talent pool, and structure your interview processes to focus on skills and organizational fit.

Invest in developing the talent that you worked so hard to hire.

Talent is the great differentiator—the one thing that cannot be copied quickly by other organizations. The winners in the talent war have sound talent strategies and rich productive talent channels. They ensure that excellence in attracting and recruiting talent continues into their selection and development processes. Having the right talent in the right place at the right time is the ultimate goal. Sourcing the right talent is only the beginning of the equation—the first step in the journey.

About the Author

Leslie W. Joyce is chief talent officer at Novelis, Inc., the world’s leading provider of rolled aluminum products used to create sustainable containers, building materials, and automobile parts for many of the premiere brands around the globe. Before joining Novelis, she spent almost seven years leading the organizational effectiveness function and serving as the chief learning officer for The Home Depot. Previously, she led the global organization research and development function for GlaxoSmithKline. As an active member of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, she has numerous publications and presentations to her credit. She is the founder of the Leslie W. Joyce and Paul W. Thayer Fellowship in Industrial Psychology, which provides financial assistance to graduate students interested in an applied career in training and leadership development. She received a PhD in industrial psychology from North Carolina State University.