.
Hiring—and
Keeping—the Best
You’ve heard it often: employees are your organization’s most important
assets. Their skills, institutional knowledge, and motivation to work are
the key factors differentiating your company from the competition.
As a manager, your role is to bring the best, most promising talent into
the organization. To some extent, this is work you must do daily—help-
ing team members fi nd their place and creating opportunities for them to
shine. But it also requires some big-picture thinking about how you fi nd
the right people, design satisfying jobs for them, and maintain their mo-
tivation through the ebb and fl ow of daily work life, particularly when you
have the opportunity to make a new hire.
Crafting a role
Before you can make a good hire, you need to know what you’re hiring
for. You also need to determine which skills and personal attributes will
make a candidate a good fi t with the requirements of the job and the
234Managing Teams
organization—and with the culture of your team. It’s the difference be-
tween hiring an accountant and hiring an accountant with the technical
knowledge, creative mindset, and leadership skills to lead the overhaul of
the billing systems you have planned.
This isn’t just a matter of fi lling vacancies. Your team can and should
evolve, depending on the people who join it. A new team member who’s
highly disciplined and driven may push the group to streamline its work
processes, while someone with strong interpersonal skills can strengthen
collaborative relationships. To get the most value from the recruitment
process, approach it as a practical and an aspirational exercise. Let your
guiding concerns be “Who can do this job the best?” and “Who will help
our team continue to grow?”
To answer these questions, gather information about the job itself, the
kind of person who can do it well, and the environment in which they be
working.
Step 1: Defi ne the job’s primary responsibilities and tasks
If you’re rehiring for an existing role, look at what the incumbent is doing
and evaluate that person’s job description. Is it still accurate and relevant?
To fi nd out, talk to other team members who work closely with this person:
“How would you describe this role? What are the most important things
this person does, from your perspective?” Also talk to your own boss:
“Going forward, what strategic objectives would you really like to see this
role support? What responsibilities do you put the most emphasis on?”
Finally, read through old performance evaluations. When past em-
ployees performed well in this role, what accomplishments were most im-
portant? What failures had the worst impact on the rest of the team?
Step 2: Describe the ideal candidate
Education and experience are two of the most critical pieces of information
you’ll consider when evaluating candidates. In the case of education, you
may wish to specify a certain type of degree or a certain level. Ask yourself
when these specifi cations are truly necessary. Can you be fl exible in this
area, or is industry or functional experience an adequate substitute?
Hiring—and Keeping—the Best235
Establishing criteria for personal characteristics is more diffi cult. It
may help to talk to your coworkers and review your own fi les. What traits
and abilities made past employees successful? What weaknesses were the
most diffi cult to compensate for or to reform? Think about analytic and
creative abilities, decision-making style, interpersonal skills, and motiva-
tion. The right characteristics aren’t absolute; they depend on the rest of
the team members and how they work. Consider following up with a group
session, in which you all can reach a consensus about the ideal candidate.
Step 3: Evaluate the environment: team culture
Naturally, you want to hire someone who can get along with the group—
who will understand its sense of humor, fall in line with its norms, and
share in its identity. But you also want someone who fi lls any gaps on your
team in behaviors or competencies. Maybe you’re all creative problem
solvers, but you don’t have strong communication habits. See chapter 12,
“Leading Teams,” for more on identifying competency and cultural gaps
on your team.
Step 4: Write the job description
Once you’ve studied these three categories—the job’s responsibilities, the
ideal candidate, and the cultural fi t—you’re ready to create a job descrip-
tion. This is a profi le of the job, its essential functions, reporting relation-
ships, hours, and required credentials. Having all this information in one
succinct description will make it possible for you to explain the job both
to potential candidates and to any recruiters you may be using to identify
candidates.
In some cases, your organization may have a required format or stan-
dard job description you can use as a model. If you’re writing one from
scratch, include the following information:
• Job title, business unit, and the name of the organization
• Job responsibilities and tasks
• Hiring manager and reporting manager
236Managing Teams
• Summary of the job tasks, responsibilities, and objectives
• Hours, location, and any information about compensation that you
can provide
• Experience and training required
Your description should not be discriminatory and should comply with
all relevant legal restrictions. In the United States, for example, stated job
requirements must clearly relate to getting the job done and must not un-
fairly prevent racial minorities, women, people with disabilities, or other
protected classes from being hired.
Many of these items will probably have to be cleared with your HR
department before you’re ready to move on to the next stage: recruitment.
Recruiting for potential
Recruiting actually works best when you aren’t hunting too strictly for
competency and experience, but rather for potential, according to Clau-
dio Fernández-Aráoz.
Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at the global executive search fi rm
Egon Zehnder, has spent thirty years evaluating and tracking executive
performance. He explains:
In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment,
competency-based appraisals and appointments are increasingly
insuffi cient. What makes someone successful in a particular role
today might not tomorrow if the competitive environment shifts,
the company’s strategy changes, or he or she must collaborate
with or manage a diff erent group of colleagues. So the question is
not whether your company’s employees and leaders have the right
skills; it’s whether they have the potential to learn new ones.
Hiring—and Keeping—the Best237
To identify high-potential candidates, Fernández-Aráoz looks at fi ve traits:
• Motivation—a fi erce commitment to excel in the pursuit of unself-
ish goals
• Curiosity—a penchant for seeking out new experiences, knowl-
edge, and candid feedback and an openness to learning and change
• Insight—the ability to gather and make sense of information that
suggests new possibilities
• Engagement—a knack for using emotion and logic to communicate
a persuasive vision and connect with people
• Determination—the wherewithal to fi ght for diffi cult goals despite
challenges and to bounce back from adversity
If you emphasize these intrinsic qualities in your search, you’ll priori-
tize candidates who have the internal resources to succeed in unfamiliar
and rapidly changing environments
Source: Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, “21st-Century Talent Spotting,” Harvard Business Review,
June 2014.
Recruiting world-class talent
You’ve determined the competencies and experience that candidates
should bring to the position you’re trying to fi ll. Now that information will
help recruiters, applicants, and everyone else involved in the hiring process
understand, “What is this job?”
The purpose of the recruitment process is to fi nd a candidate who em-
bodies the traits you defi ned earlier and who meets the basic requirements
outlined in your job description. Beware, however, of focusing too narrowly
on the description (see the box “Recruiting for potential”).
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.