Adler - Hire with your head: using performance-based hiring to build great teams

Contents

Copyright 2007 by Lou Adler. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Adler, Lou.

Hire with your head : using performance-based hiring to build great teams / Lou Adler.3rd ed.

P. cm.

ISBN 978-0-470-12835-0 (cloth)

1. Employee selection. 2. EmployeesRecruiting. 3. Employment interviewing. I. Title.

HF5549.5.S38A35 2007

658.3'11dc22

2007012416

Foreword

Since the early 1990s, Ive been advising business leaders in organizations ranging from JC Penney to JP Morgan Chase on how to leverage talent to meet their business objectives. One piece of advice that is a slam dunk is this: Buy a copy of Lou Adlers Hire with Your Head for yourself, read it, and then buy copies for every hiring manager, every recruiter, and every human resources professional in your organization. Why? Because this book offers a systematic approach to Performance-based Hiring and that is the most important thing youll ever do to build your team.

As much as things change in the business world from week to week and year to year, there is one fact that isnt going to change: Talent is the number one asset in every organization. That has always been true, but the value of talent is even more important in the changing economy than ever before.

Organizations in every industry are trying to increase productivity and quality and they cannot rely on technology alone to achieve those objectives. As employers cut waste, introduce new technologies, and streamline operations, they put even more pressure on individuals to add value on a daily basis. Every operation nowadays must be lean, flexible, and high performance. Every supervisor is under pressure to get more and better work out of fewer people. That means those few people had better be really, really good.

High performance under pressure is what the real new economy is really all about. Technology implementation will continue, organizations will become even leaner, the pace of change will get even faster, competition will be even more intense, businesses will become even more customer focused, expected response times will get shorter, and productivity expectations will grow. The whole game is moving to a higher level.

Thats why there is a growing premium on peopleat all ends of the skill spectrumwho can work smarter, faster, and better. You want your people to be innovative (within guidelines), passionate (within reason), and armed with sufficient discretion to make mistakes (as long as they are not too big). In lean, restructured companies, the best employees are handling more responsibility, using greater technical skill, and applying more precious human judgment than ever before. Every individual, like every business, has his or her own value proposition to offer employers in the free market for talent, which really means simply: Heres what I can do. That value proposition is strictly business. One really good person is worth a whole pile of mediocre people. Really good people can do real things (very well and very fast) that add real value to your bottom-line. They know it just as well as managers know it.

Were talking about that senior executive talent who can turn around a division in 18 months. The programmer who can write two lines of code for every one that an ordinary programmer writes. The call-center operator who can dazzle every customer, gather market research on the front lines, and routinely suggest improvements in the whole system. The salesperson in the field who can sell anything to anybody and who also monitors warehouse inventory and the production schedule from his palm computer. The warehouse manager who knows everybody by name and also knows the new database inside and out. The nonphysician health professional who delivers care previously reserved only for doctors. And the soldier operating a laptop computer mounted on a tank in the midst of battle who turns around, as soon as the battle is won, and plays the role of peacekeeper.

Regardless of fluctuations in the labor market, demand for those great people is going to outpace supply for the foreseeable future. And hereafter, in the real new economy, theres going to be a perpetual struggle in the marketplace to leverage the value of labor. How do you go about sourcing, attracting, and selecting the best people?

Business leaders, managers, and hiring professionals who fail to take a long-term strategic approach to hiring in todays rapidly changing business world will face a perpetual staffing crisis. You may be understaffed one day and overstaffed the next; the problem is, you wont be intelligently staffed with the right people in the right places at the right times.

If you want to be intelligently staffed, you have to hire with your head. Seize control of your talent supply chain, just as you have with other critical resources. That means you need the kind of systematic approach Lou Adler offers in this book.

Throughout most of the industrial era and until recently, the dominant staffing model for most employers was based on long-term, full-time, on-site employment relationships. But in todays quickly changing marketplace, where employers can never predict what is just around the corner, the old-fashioned, stable, til-retirement-do-us-part employer-employee relationship just doesnt fit. The key to continued success for companies today is the ability to adapt rapidly to new circumstancesstaffing may have to expand rapidly in one skill area, or contract rapidly in anotheror do both at the same time. Staffing strategy must be geared to face this reality.