The Importance of Employee Retention: Insights from a Veteran Recruiter

As a recruiter with over a decade of experience in the construction industry as well as 7 years of running my own company, I’ve gained unique insights into employee retention. While my focus has been on construction, these lessons apply broadly across industries. Let me share what I’ve learned about keeping your best talent and building a thriving workforce.

Understanding Exit Interviews: The Value of a Hard Conversation

Exit interviews are a goldmine of information, yet often underutilized. They provide crucial insights into why employees leave and can highlight systemic issues within your company. It’s essential to approach these interviews with an open mind, even if the feedback is harsh. Remember, a soured relationship developed under your watch, and there’s always something to learn from that.

Setting Clear Expectations: The Foundation of Retention

Clear communication about roles, responsibilities, and performance standards is essential. I’ve seen countless cases where misalignment of expectations led to unnecessary turnover. Regular feedback and performance reviews are crucial, but it goes beyond that. You need to understand each employee’s unique goals and ambitions and find ways to align them with your organization’s needs.

Boosting Morale: More Than Just Perks

High morale is a key factor in retention. It’s not just about offering competitive salaries or fancy perks. Employees want to feel valued, appreciated, and see a clear path for growth. Recognition of achievements, opportunities for professional development, and fostering a culture of respect can significantly enhance employee morale.

The Power of One-on-One Meetings

Regular one-on-one meetings with employees are incredibly effective. Think of these as “stay interviews.” They provide an opportunity to check in with your employee, find out what challenges they’re facing, and how you can support their growth. These meetings are crucial for maintaining alignment and catching potential issues before they lead to turnover.

Emotional Intelligence: The Key to Effective Leadership

Leaders with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to navigate the complexities of human relationships in the workplace. They can meet people where they’re at, understand individual needs, and create an environment where employees feel valued and understood. This skill is crucial for building trust, fostering loyalty, and ultimately, retaining top talent. Invest in yourself so that you can invest in others. 

Flexibility and Work-Life Balance

In today’s work environment, offering flexibility is a significant advantage. To the extent that your business allows, provide options for remote work or flexible hours. This demonstrates respect for employees’ personal lives and can significantly boost job satisfaction and loyalty.

Creating Meaningful Work and Impact

Employees want to feel that their work matters. As a leader, it’s crucial to help your team understand the impact of their work on the company, customers, and even society at large. This sense of purpose can be a powerful motivator and retention tool.

Conclusion: Retention as a Continuous Process

Employee retention isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing process that requires constant attention and care. As a leader, your job is to cultivate and curate alignment with your team members continuously. Remember, people change, their goals shift, and what once worked may not always work. Stay connected, stay aware, and be ready to adapt.

By focusing on these strategies, you can create a work environment that not only retains top talent but also attracts it. In my years of recruiting, I’ve seen firsthand how organizations that prioritize these aspects build stronger, more stable, and ultimately more successful teams.

We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

You or your team hired someone who failed. They may not have had the skills, character, personality, or perspective that the position required.

It’s easy to write the failure off completely to the candidate, setting yourself up to make your mistakes over again.

But great companies don’t make mistakes repetitively. And if we really believe that our people are our greatest asset, a failed hiring process is a big deal. We must not squander those lessons!

Imagine how much more effective your company is if its turnover rate is 1 in 4 hires versus a competitor who may have an average 1 in 2 turnover rate! Over time, that’s a massive difference in energy allocation that is better spent on securing new business and improving product quality.

Companies who build teams better tend to grow at greater sustainable and healthy stress levels. A quick learning pace is key.

H2 heading: LET’S GET THE EXCUSES OUT OF THE WAY

Often the unproductive internal conversation sounds like…
“They didn’t tell us about that in the interview.”
“Their performance was lackluster.”
“They required too much hand-holding.”
“They didn’t fit our culture.”
“They didn’t do the job properly.”
Etc, etc, etc…
Does your team abdicate ownership to the failed employee, and thus fail to learn for the next hire?
When a teammate fails, does the team look retrospectively at the ways it may have failed its teammate? Communication? Training? Encouragement? Accountability?

H3 Heading: STEPS TO ACQUIRING ACTIONABLE INSIGHT

Conduct separate manager and employee exit interviews by a non-biased party. They can be internal or external. Ambassador Search Group can conduct these for you at a nominal charge if you like.
Review both exit interviews sequentially to recognize differences in perceptions and experience. It’s important to ask the same questions for comparable results.
For managers who know how the exit interview will be used, this puts pressure on them to account for the employee’s perspective. Otherwise, they will be seen to be clearly out of touch. Accountability without blame is healthy.

H4 heading: QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELVES

Bullet list:

Numbered list:

  1. What did we fail to understand in the interview?
  2. What expectations did we not set clearly enough and achieve mutual understanding on? Setting and saying expectations is not the same thing.
  3. What skills did we not validate well enough? Asking about skills and seeing them borne out in answers to behavioral questions or sample problems is not the same thing.
  4. How could our culture value and expectations been made more clear?

Companies who quickly and cheerfully diagnose and change based on hiring lessons learned have a serious cultural and team-building competitive advantage.

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We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

You or your team hired someone who failed. They may not have had the skills, character, personality, or perspective that the position required.

Hello I’m a title

It’s easy to write the failure off completely to the candidate, setting yourself up to make your mistakes over again.

But great companies don’t make mistakes repetitively. And if we really believe that our people are our greatest asset, a failed hiring process is a big deal. We must not squander those lessons!

Imagine how much more effective your company is if its turnover rate is 1 in 4 hires versus a competitor who may have an average 1 in 2 turnover rate! Over time, that’s a massive difference in energy allocation that is better spent on securing new business and improving product quality.

Companies who build teams better tend to grow at greater sustainable and healthy stress levels. A quick learning pace is key.

H2 heading: LET’S GET THE EXCUSES OUT OF THE WAY

Often the unproductive internal conversation sounds like…
“They didn’t tell us about that in the interview.”
“Their performance was lackluster.”
“They required too much hand-holding.”
“They didn’t fit our culture.”
“They didn’t do the job properly.”
Etc, etc, etc…
Does your team abdicate ownership to the failed employee, and thus fail to learn for the next hire?
When a teammate fails, does the team look retrospectively at the ways it may have failed its teammate? Communication? Training? Encouragement? Accountability?

H3 Heading: STEPS TO ACQUIRING ACTIONABLE INSIGHT

Conduct separate manager and employee exit interviews by a non-biased party. They can be internal or external. Ambassador Search Group can conduct these for you at a nominal charge if you like.
Review both exit interviews sequentially to recognize differences in perceptions and experience. It’s important to ask the same questions for comparable results.
For managers who know how the exit interview will be used, this puts pressure on them to account for the employee’s perspective. Otherwise, they will be seen to be clearly out of touch. Accountability without blame is healthy.

H4 heading: QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELVES

Bullet list:

Numbered list:

  1. What did we fail to understand in the interview?
  2. What expectations did we not set clearly enough and achieve mutual understanding on? Setting and saying expectations is not the same thing.
  3. What skills did we not validate well enough? Asking about skills and seeing them borne out in answers to behavioral questions or sample problems is not the same thing.
  4. How could our culture value and expectations been made more clear?

Companies who quickly and cheerfully diagnose and change based on hiring lessons learned have a serious cultural and team-building competitive advantage.

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“Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.”

— Lionel Shriver

No one hires someone they expect to fail, so why do they?

HIRING SUCCESS

Success is properly set expectations. Ergo, be specific about sharing and understanding expectations in an interview to give everyone the best chance at success in the role. In other words, success is a hire that meets everyone’s expectations.

Both interviewing parties can apply these expectation categories. Complacency from either side can destine the process to failure because each has the responsibility to set expectations appropriately.

We recommend starting interviewing conversations off by recognizing how important properly set expectations are for both sides and making a mutual commitment to setting and understanding the other’s expectations so a long-term relationship is possible. Understanding and setting expectations should be naturally, and skillfully, woven into the interview.

The interview should seek to inform the candidate as much as they are questioning them, and same with the interviewee.

CATEGORIES OF EXPECTATIONS

These categories should be covered with questions and specific explanations to provide more contextual understanding.

This list is not a template, it is a mental guide to recognizing which expectations are most important for you to set and understand as you interview.

  1. Candidate goals; personal and professional
  2. Why is the role open
  3. Potential challenges in the role
  4. Training and onboarding process
  5. Current problems in the company and ideal solutions
  6. Company growth goals (career, revenue, projects, etc)
  7. A clearly defined role
    • A common source of misunderstanding is how fundamentally and subtlety different role definitions can be. The expectation is HOW and WHY the role is performed. Assuming you share the same definitions is dangerous.
  8. Cultural Expectations
    • How is conflict handled? (debate, with clients, and interpersonal)
    • Examples of strong and weak performance and how they are handled (each company/leader is different)
    • Expressed and aspirational cultural values
  9. Work/life balance
    • How does the company and team reconcile personal life and work responsibilities without placing these responsibilities at odds? If they are irreversibly at odds, how should those priorities be negotiated to find a sustainable solution?
  10. Company mission (the collective ‘why’)
  11. Hiring Speed
    • What expectations should the candidate have for the interview process and length and what expectations should they have? Is there agreement and buy-in?
  12. Career Growth
    • What trajectory does the candidate see themselves on? How do they define ‘growth’?
  13. Compensation
    • What kind of compensation is important to the candidate?
    • How entrepreneurial are they? Do they prefer more salary or more aggressive bonus?
    • Are there any benefits that are not important to them so you can compensate with more salary?

HOW

It’s important to cover topics naturally. If you ask leading questions, then you will hear what you want to hear. It’s important to ask these questions as behavioral or situational questions so you understand how the other party thinks through the subject.

Ask lots of follow-up questions.

WISDOM REQUIRED

While having a robust interview conversation that sets and understands expectations is important, so is evaluating how similarly committed to the right expectations the other side is. Even if you do a great job asking the right questions, It can go to waste if the other side fails to match with similar introspective transparency.

AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This article does not oversimplify expectation setting or interviewing. Relationships are complicated and cannot be fully systematized, which is often what we try to make hiring into, systematized relationships. We cannot get it right 100% of the time, either. Much about relationships is easier said than done.

“Don’t blame people for disappointing you; blame yourself for expecting too much from them.”

— Anonymous

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

— Richard Branson

You cannot solve all your company’s problems but you can hire all the right people to solve them and then your company will be successful.

ACCURIZE YOUR HIRING

1. Understand your expectations and communicate them in the hiring process. Build organizational key performance indicators (KPIs) for roles, teams, managers, and the company. Don’t hire someone unless you understand how their past teams have understood ‘success’, how they do, and how your team understands ‘success’. It’s different in each company.

DO NOT HIRE THEM UNLESS YOU CAN COMMUNICATE WHAT THEY NEED TO DO TO BE SUCCESSFUL. Otherwise, it’s your fault when you fire them or they quit.

2. Remove muddy interview subjectivity with a disciplined process. If four people interview a candidate, you should not get four different answers on hiring them. Each interviewer should understand the criteria candidates are being evaluated against.

A conversation about KPIs past and future are helpful here. Personality assessments can also provide useful insight to develop specific and nuanced interview questions to understand this person relative to the responsibilities and team you may give them.

3. Develop real relationships through the interview process. This means interviewing them in different places, for different durations, with different people, all while asking different questions driven by assessments, company culture, KPIs, and understanding what the candidate believes ‘success’ is.

Some hiring authorities have an immense advantage because their relationship-building skills attract the candidate while providing useful insight on the candidate. Caring about the candidate as a unique and valuable person, regardless of if they get the job, is practically cheating. So cheat away.

4. Hire candidates whose natural inclinations, values, and ambition align with those of your company. If you are sure you can provide a work ecosystem where the candidate can feel accomplished, it is time to make a competitive offer.

It may not matter that they were successful before if you do not share values.

5. Do not haggle on compensation. You will reap what you sow. Ask the candidate about their expectations early and decide if you can give them what they are asking through the interview process. Do not negotiate before developing their respect and trust.

There are many variables in hiring situations and the most important constant is transparency and fairness. Do not ruin a good process with a cheap offer as if you are bartering at a garage sale. Good offers well delivered create loyalty. Loyalty starts with demonstrating your care for their success.

Good hiring is relationship building, engenders mutual respect, objective, disciplined, transparent and fair.

“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.”

— Steve Jobs

WE CAN ALL GROW

If you want to hire an experienced recruiter who cares about the proper process for better results, we should talk about how Ambassador Search Group may serve you. We look for thoughtful companies who care about people.

THESE HIRING MISTAKES ASSUME WE SHARE A FEW BELIEFS.

  1. Your team is your most valuable asset.
  2. Successfully hiring the wrong person is still a failure.
  3. Mutual employee/employer success is the only form of success.

LET’S GET INTO IT.

  1. Focus too much on personality and likability, not enough on respect, competence, and trust.
  2. The assumption that the candidate shares their definitions and standards for processes, standards, and skills, not enough on defining the nitty-gritty terms so key differences can be mutually identified.
  3. Let immediate business demands drive the hiring speed too fast, instead of letting the mutual confidence level specify the speed.
  4. Spend too much time between interviews in an otherwise healthy in-depth interview process, as opposed to meeting several times in a single week.
  5. Allow an assertive candidate to drive the interview process, instead of a mutual give and take.
  6. Over-focus on the resume, instead of recognizing resumes are a small part of the hiring equation.
  7. Fail to involve key stakeholders in the interview and hiring decision, as opposed to involving those who will be responsible for the hire’s success.
  8. Not defining company culture and therefore not defining cultural expectations for candidates.
  9. Over-focus on candidate fit for the company, instead of mutually exploring company fit for the candidate.
  10. Failing to run robust references because of confidence or laziness.

“Dating and hiring have a lot in common.”

– Scott Wintrip

A challenge our clients face in a candidate-driven market (fall of 2021) is spending copious time and energy with a promising candidate, only to have that candidate unexpectedly take an offer with another firm, or worse, explicitly leverage the offer to secure a better offer elsewhere.

If it was a modest interview let’s say you meet three times for an hour and a half. Several team members join through the process. Cumulatively the company has invested 12 hours. Let’s say company time bills out at $150/hr. The interview cost the company $1,800 and it has nothing to show for it. To add insult to injury, if the offer is blatantly leveraged, it violates the social contract of mutual goodwill that should be established through the interview. So it was expensive and insulting. The hiring team starts over, frustrated.

TWO WAYS WE SET OURSELVES UP FOR THIS PROBLEM

  1. Talk about compensation expectations up-front without continuing to reference compensation expectations as the candidate’s objectives and job expectations are discussed. Certain expectations are set early and few measures are installed relationally to understand how those expectations may shift through the process as more information on both sides is uncovered.
  2. Talk about compensation at the very end, often after the hire decision is made as an after-thought. Sometimes the expectations are out of alignment, sometimes rapport is unraveled because the interviewing parties move from a friendly rapport-building mindset to a shrewd self-interested negotiating mindset. We’ve literally seen companies roll out the red carpet for candidates, building a foundation for a strong relationship, only to talk about negging them in a counter-offer. This is emotionally manipulative and counter to quality leadership.

What’s wrong here? Compensation was discussed in both examples.

THE MISSING INGREDIENT: CONCEPTUAL AGREEMENT

Conceptual agreement refers to a shared pool of understanding between parties about what the commonly held goals and methods should be between them. Interviews that focus on compensation as a market transaction lack conceptual agreement on what everyone is trying to accomplish.

Succinctly, achieving conceptual agreement means both parties are aligned in terms, goals and methods.

Think about how varied interview objectives can be. Some companies interview without having a real hiring need, some candidates interview for practice, some interviews are bureaucratic formalities to satisfy a selection process protocol, more interviews were never truly employment options but entirely intended to generate offers to create negotiating leverage.

Point is, many people don’t mind wasting other people’s time if they gain some advantage. Many people do not know how to negotiate based on value justification and ONLY rely on creating adversarial leverage between offers.

“Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.”

– Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott

DON’T PLAY THE TRANSACTIONAL INTERVIEW GAME

Instead of trusting that each party is properly aligned with terms, methods and goals, these can be made explicit through questions and transparency to create a shared pool of meaning, which creates more trust. Sincere clarity is very important!

A FEW PRACTICAL EXAMPLES

  1. Start the interview by framing it as a collaboration. After all, if it doesn’t work for one party, it won’t work for either.
  2. Welcome any/all questions important to the other party. If they choose to ask obviously improper questions, disqualify them. If you cannot answer, provide a clear justification.
  3. Propose a plan on how the interview should proceed and ask for their perspective and buy-in. Together, create a shared agenda of important topics to cover. A good interviewer recognizes the unique interview paths required for the inherently unique people they interview.
  4. Define terms. Ask a lot of questions around how a counter-party defines industry terms, acceptable methods, problem solve, etc to find explicit examples showing congruence or incongruence.
  5. Set expectations around how this offer process is collaborative and tailored to them. All the offers you make are good-faith offers and bad-faith leverage negotiation will prompt the offer to be retracted.

CONCEPTUAL AGREEMENT BUILDS ON SHARED UNDERSTANDING

Build conceptual agreement with questions and clarity – a key foundation for this is understanding why they do what they do.

Motivations come in layers. Often you can continue asking ‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘what’ questions to find a deeper layer to that motivation. As a hiring authority, your priority should be to hire the best-qualified candidate that you are prepared to invest heavily in. Hiring candidates you are not fully prepared to invest in is a failure on the horizon.

Asking persistent questions that uncover the individualized layers to your candidate’s motivations helps you understand if you can meet their needs. Now you can explain to them how they can meet their goals here, or not, effectively selling the role in an entirely integrous way with their best interest at heart.

CONCEPTUAL AGREEMENT REQUIRES RECIPROCATION

Understanding the other party is not enough. They must understand you. This is where real relationship starts. No trust is developed without vulnerability. Yes, you can be too vulnerable. You can also not be vulnerable enough. Point is, we must show up as a real human.

Recognize the temptation to ‘look good’ is human nature but counter-productive to building trust. The real motivation should be to ‘be good’ which requires honesty about deficits so we can improve.

This vulnerability requires judgement and the stomach to lose candidates who do not want to accept the specific expectations or limitations you’ve been honest about. But better to lose them now then later. It’s okay to lose the candidate for good reasons.

MAKE NO ASSUMPTIONS

Assumptions often come in the form of goodwill or the benefit of the doubt. However, they are costly to everyone. Just because someone has been successful elsewhere does not mean they will be successful with you. Examine everything. Worst case you will screen out candidate who look good on paper, best case is they will respect your careful scrutiny as it positively reflects your professional standards.

Hiring mistakes are rooted in a lack of open collaboration between the parties. Sometimes the idea of collaborating in a compensation negotiation concerns a hiring manager or candidate. No one wants to be taken advantage of.

The beauty of collaborative negotiations is you get to see adversarial negotiation tactics for what they are. If one side is more transparent and the other side does not reciprocate, that is an excellent indicator of that party’s perspective and indicates their future collaboration/negotiation performance.

CAVEAT: THIS IS NO PANACEA AND PROPER INTERVIEWING TAKES A LOT OF TIME

Some of the best hires I’ve made were snap decisions. Some of the worst were long conversations. There are no procedures that guarantee hiring effectiveness. We can move the success percentage.

We date for months or years before we marry and the divorce rate is still 50%. We trust friends slowly over time. We hire and trust people with substantial legal, financial, and reputation risk in the space of hours.

Sometimes you just lose out to a competitor fair and square. It takes keen judgement to diagnose and prescribe new interviewing behvior unemotionally.

While no one can afford to make every hire exhaustive, it’s important how impactful hiring is and how quickly we do it. Frankly, it’s a recipe for disaster to hire quickly. It’s insane to trust people with so much so quickly. Nonetheless, it is the way we do things.

If you’re not proactively managing your online reputation, someone else is. In 2021, it is impossible to grow and succeed as a company with a bad online reputation. For those that aren’t actively online expressing their culture and values, the story gets told for you by unhappy employees and customers. Below is the full scoop on why online reputations are so important and how to maintain a positive one no matter what. 

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO MAINTAIN YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION 

Typically, before a potential employee even applies for a job, they will look online for job reviews. There are unfortunate statistics out there that can devastate company reputations. According to Social Media Today, 92% of consumers read online reviews to learn more about a company. 

Inc.com also states that of all company reviews, 10% of employees will lie about the company in their Google, Facebook, or Glassdoor reviews. 

Thankfully, this is a small percentage of a company’s overall reviews, and most people don’t set out to directly hurt a brand or company they previously worked for. 

There are also ways the company can actively combat these types of reviews to maintain a positive and honest representation of themselves online. One avenue to take is to develop AI with a detailed human element to sweep for negativity and help create a more positive environment. 

Working with AI can be expensive and risky because the public can easily spot the difference between actual human reviews and bot reviews. 

HERE’S HOW TO MAINTAIN YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION

There are many ways you can impact your online reputation without the use of AI. You have to be confident in your culture and values as a company. If you’re not, work on that first! 

Then, follow these steps to ensure you always receive truthful feedback that helps your company’s online reputation:

  1. Ask positive employees but never ask for positive feedback!

You want your reviews to be as organic as possible. If you ask your employees to leave positive feedback specifically, they will undoubtedly become suspicious and potentially resentful. 

Instead, be present on the floor. Get to know your employees as personally as possible. Those that love their job will stick out. Ask those employees to leave an honest review of their experience with the company but leave the choice up to them.

Those that aren’t happy with their job work on their happiness first and foremost. Get to the root of the problem. Show you care and want to make sure their experience with the company is a positive one. 

2. Strategically time when you ask for employee reviews.

Timing your reviews requests around optimistic company and employee milestones is paramount. Positivity is contagious. Use those positive moments to your advantage. 

Here are a few examples: 

Try not to go overboard with a flood of positive reviews all at once, though. Algorithms are inclined to flag positive feedback floods as suspicious. The most important thing is to monitor the ongoing changes in the company’s reputation and respond naturally. Stakeholders realize you are human, and sometimes reputations fluctuate. If yours is overly optimistic, this too can come back to bite you. 

3. Be sure to respond to negative reviews.

Entrepreneur states that when a stakeholder first hears about a brand or company, they almost always resort to Google for more information. Potential customers, employees, investors, and partners all do this. 

It’s common knowledge that you can’t always please everybody. Negative reviews aren’t necessarily life or death for a company, but how the company responds to those reviews can be. Potential stakeholders want to see how the company handles inevitable negativity. 

Communication is critical, especially in adverse situations. 

Your online reputation is the lifeblood of your company. Invest in it organically, and you’ll be pleased with the outcome. 

Everyone who is honest with themselves finds interviewing, job-seeker or employer, challenging; infuriatingly, bewilderingly, and expensively challenging. There are so many unknowns. Personalities, performance expectations, relationship dynamics, cultural standards, and more. The fact is, and I speak from extensive experience, everyone finds interviewing extremely challenging. The best companies I know with phenomenal leadership, top-tier work, and very engaged teams often get it wrong, despite very sincere efforts. Good companies tell me all the time they can’t tell if they made a good hire for three to six months. But here’s the hard truth: turnover is expensive, hurts morale, creates instability, challenges client relationships, and now you have to do all that work over again. It’s not worth it. Don’t make the hire unless you have a high degree of certainty, for your sake and theirs!

We all want loyal long-term employees yet the most consistent mistake I see being made is we spend a minimum amount of time in a rigid one-sided conversation to assess them and then pull the trigger, hoping it works out. Sure, you validated they don’t drool in meetings, but now you have to find out their struggles when they are managing your company resources. Is this wise?

For those looking to find their next level of proficiency, I have two recommendations. None of which are fancy interviewing tactics. This is about the fundamentals.

BUILD MUTUAL RESPECT

Hospitality, trust, clarity, promptness, professionalism, communication, compassion, high standards, humility, and competent curiosity, to name a few ways. It’s not unusual for a hiring authority to invest less than the candidate into an interview or conversation because their position has given them a false sense of supremacy and authority, crushing whatever hope of sincerity and curiosity could have produced a better result and relationship.

SPEND MORE TIME WITH THE CANDIDATE

Time has a way of revealing things. This doesn’t mean extend the hiring period, it means you allocate more time to getting to know candidates, professionally and personally. If you cannot commit your resources to make that candidate successful, you should not hire them. If they leave, unsuccessful, that’s on them, sure, and it is also on you. You hired them. So get to know them well. The beautiful fact is, people like it when you get to know them as more than a resume or candidate, great relationships have grown from deep interviewing and candidates deeply respect a company who takes hiring seriously. Hiring someone WILL change your company in perceptible and imperceptible ways. It is the MOST crucial skill for a manager to develop. This is how the recipe for success is made, the magic of cultural chemistry, for those managers who struggle with interviewing (that’s me, too); consider it your job to hire people who are successful and don’t go easy on yourself when they are not. That’s our failure as much as theirs. If this advice does not resonate with you, keep on the learning path. Experience has a way of making us value the fundamentals more and more. There are no shortcuts. All good advice is simple and hard.

P.S.

You can cripple the hiring process by over-outsourcing to technology (job boards and AI) or assign this holy task to an underpaid and overworked HR generalist a few years out of college, but that’s a couple more articles for another time.

The beginning of any employment is inherently an evaluation period and some companies embrace this with a probationary time, trial period, or some such language. The intent is to communicate the extra scrutiny the employee will experience to establish trust, learn the company, and contribute acceptably. By making the period explicit it reinforces the need for the person to be on their best behavior which theoretically enhances retention.

There is no right or wrong on this issue, just skillful or clumsy implementation. Success depends on setting expectations properly.

A few principals…

  1. Employees should not feel that you are just trying them out. If they do not sense commitment from the firm to them then the point of the trial period has backfired. Set the expectation that the company is in their own trial period as well to prove themselves a worthy employer.
  2. Trial periods should not be used with candidates you are on the fence about hiring. Commit or don’t. Hire or don’t. Don’t ask people to take a risk you are not willing to commensurately commit to.
  3. Employees should receive encouragement and structured criticism during the trial period intended to make them successful. This is not pointing out their failures like a disappointed overbearing parent.
  4. Define what a successful trial or probationary period looks like. Give them a goal. Reinforce the goal. Coach to the goal.
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