MISS-HIRING CAN IMPACT FUTURE HIRING IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS:
- The hiring manager loses confidence in their ability to make the right decision leading to a lengthy interview process that continues until the ‘right person’ turns up
- They add unnecessary steps to the process, procrastinate and often lose great talent along the way
- The company earns itself an iffy reputation, putting off potential talent
- Existing staff become overstretched due to their increased workload, leading to stress and increased absence and knocking their motivation levels.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM GOOGLE?
CASE STUDY: How Google avoids miss-hiring
As one of the World’s largest companies, Google takes recruiting seriously. An interview with Liane Hornsey (Google’s VP Operations 2006 to 2014) revealed that her main aim was to make it “a place where people want to be”.
How did Liane do this?
- Hiring through consensus. Not relying only on whether a candidate is a good match with the hiring manager, but getting the opinion of their future colleagues, managers and peers. This gives them 360° decisions around every hire.
- Considering each and every hire as the most important people decision they are ever going to make. By doing this, Google is fiercely protecting their environment and ensuring that they don’t dilute their unique culture.
- Developing a cultural balance. While Google is informal in their dress and the way their employees act in the workplace, they remain formal and rigorous when it comes to data and thought. This allows their employees to be comfortable and work at their highest level.
- Encouraging staff mobility. Google encourages its employees to rotate roles and experience other positions. They also bring cross-functional teams together for specific projects. This allows employees to build skills and talents outside their areas of expertise.
- Measuring employees with positives. Google doesn’t track their staff’s sick days or holidays. They measure staff performance on output, not hours put in!
When Liane was asked "why is Google such a great employer?" she answered it's “the people”. And that comes down to hiring. The company only employs candidates who will add to the workplace culture, and who want to work on shared goals, products and things.
Google’s overall objective is simple: to make it “a place where people want to be”. And as Liane Hornsey says in the interview, “that doesn’t happen by accident, it does happen by design”.
HOW CAN YOU RECRUIT BY DESIGN RATHER THAN ACCIDENT?
Each and every Google employee is chosen by design in order to create a special environment and culture. The key ingredient here is that Google’s hiring managers and leadership team know themselves. They are clear on their common values, and collaborate in order to make fully considered 360° decisions on every hire.
To help achieve this consider the following:
- Discover more about yourself as a recruiting manager. What are your blind spots? How do you make decisions and judge others?
- Establish exactly what gaps need to be filled in the team, organisation and write a job brief that accurately reflects that
- Identify what transferable skills your ideal candidate needs to have and critically, how they need to be motivated to work in your organisation.
If you feel you need some help achieving the above, you might find the LAB Profile an invaluable tool. It gives a language to the unconscious triggers we all have that make us do (or not do) things at work. It makes your recruitment more rigorous as you’ll know the right candidate when you hear and see them. And instead of miss-hiring, you'll be attracting, selecting and retaining top performers.