Hiring is the most important managerial practice.
The purpose of this book is to help you become an effective hiring manager. Effective hiring is the most important contribution a manager makes to his or her organization.
Great CEOs are often quoted as spending as much as 30% of their time on people. How are individual managers and executives doing with their responsibilities? Who’s “ready now” for more responsibility? Who will be “ready next”? Who needs different responsibilities? Who is at risk for leaving the firm? Who, external to the firm, may be worthy of recruitment or a relationship?
With all that CEOs have to do—strategy, customer relations, governmental relations, investor relations, structure, finances, internal and external communications—most will say that the area they spend most of their time on is people. Despite the cynicism that accompanies the phrase, “People are our most important asset,” CEO behavior tells us that it’s true—even if the rank and file often don’t feel that way.
CEOs do so because they have learned that every organization’s engine of success is its talent: people. It’s people who create, manage, and improve upon all the systems, processes, and policies that those people use to generate growth, revenue, profit, mission accomplishment.
In the long run, it’s people that make the difference. Every result in every organization comes from people. It’s not algorithms, or equipment, or software, or proprietary trading models, or cost leadership, or high quality that drives success—it’s people.
Those ideas and systems are important, but people create them. Great people create great systems and processes and results. We here at Manager Tools often say that great people can overcome messy systems and processes to still produce great results. But if an organization’s talent isn’t great, there is no amount of great systems that will help average performers create great results.
If an organization’s people are the engine of its success, then the decisions made about which people join the organization are the most important decisions the organization makes. And those decisions are not made at the top; they’re made by individual managers.
My previous book, The Effective Manager, dealt with managing the people you already have. “Managing,” in common usage, typically means the stuff we managers do day to day, with the people we already have. But that’s because we do those managerial things on a daily basis. Hiring, though, most of us do pretty rarely.
And this is where our danger lies.
On our popular Manager Tools podcast, I’ve coined a phrase for tasks managers are responsible for that are both important and rarely practiced: The Horstman Christmas Rule. If you’re someone who celebrates the Christmas season, the festivities are important to you. You look forward to it. Yet, when it’s all over, you’re wiped-out, tired, stressed out, and happy to have a few days off to recover.
That’s because Christmas is important, but it only happens once a year. We don’t get better very fast at things we do rarely. We’re often stuck doing those things poorly and repeatedly.
Hiring is the most important thing we do, but we don’t do it that often. That’s not good.
Think about your organization when it goes through the difficult process of a layoff. It’s bad enough that the concept itself causes fear throughout the organization and your team. Then it gets worse during the process: poor communication, messy mistakes, clumsy meetings, and often, poor decisions. The beginning of the great movie about Wall Street, Margin Call, shows this exceptionally well.
You know why layoffs are so often messy? Because most managers are going through a layoff for the first time. And even if they’ve done it before, it’s been so long since the last one they don’t remember what they told themselves never to forget.
Hiring follows the Christmas Rule. We don’t do it often and it’s important. Hiring well is ensuring that the most important asset of your organization, its people, are of the highest standard you can expect.
Imagine treating hiring in the opposite way, as a necessary but trivial task. You’re super busy on some really important projects, and you really just need one person who has a specific skill.
You find someone; you interview him. You have doubts, and there are areas that will need watching. But he does have the right skills. You don’t have a lot of time, and this isn’t your biggest priority so you pull the trigger.
Unfortunately, your fears are realized. His attitude is poison to your team, he’s thin-skinned, not collaborative, and because he knows he’s necessary, he’s arrogant about his value. After the fourth or fifth incident that your boss finds out about, she takes you aside and says, “What the heck were you doing hiring this guy?”
Seriously, what are you going to say? Are you going to mumble, “I know, I know, but I really needed someone”? That will get you a quick, “Well, now you got him,” from a frustrated boss.
Or maybe she’ll go big picture, and give you some critical career advice. “This is a serious miss. Hiring mistakes are nearly unforgiveable. Hiring poorly sends a message that you can’t set and meet a high standard on the most important thing you’re going to do for this organization long term. I gotta tell you, when we sit around and evaluate managers at your level, lack of ability to hire is a serious impediment to career growth.”
And you’d be lucky if she did say it, because whether she says it or not, that’s what she’s thinking.
Or maybe it’s your first hire, and you’re likely to get a little leeway. Most managers say they could have used a lot of help when they first hired. And yet, there’s probably not a lot of detailed help available in your organization. Maybe HR can tell you some things—but that’s just about the process they use. It won’t be about what questions to ask, or how to set up an interview day, or how to get your people together to talk about candidates after a day of interviews. They’ll probably tell you that you’ll want to schedule a panel interview, which are popular . . . and completely refuted as an effective technique.
Because hiring is so important, and so rarely practiced, we all need a clear, evidence-based, documented process on how to hire. Step by step. In detail. That’s what this book does.
When you follow the guidance in this book, you’ll become an Effective Hiring Manager.
My firm, which I co-own with my outstanding business partner Michael Auzenne, is a management consulting and training firm. We coach and train managers and executives at firms all around the world. In 2019, we will provide all-day training sessions to over 1,000 managers at our corporate clients worldwide. We also host training conferences all over the world, where individual managers can be trained. We will conduct over 100 of these training events in 2019.
However, if your company cannot afford to send you to training (we do offer a discount if you want to pay yourself), almost all of the guidance in this book is available for free in our podcast, Manager Tools. You can find the podcast on iTunes and at www.manager -tools.com.
As of this writing, our podcasts are downloaded about three million times a month, in virtually every country in the world. We’ve won many Podcast Awards over the years, thanks to our loyal audience.
Our podcast is free because the mission of our firm is to make every manager in the world effective. Many of them can’t afford to buy this book.
Periodically, we will encourage you to go to our website for more guidance. We can’t put all the podcasts in here—there are, at the time of this publishing, close to 1,000 of them. You’ll see many instances of There’s a Cast for ThatTM throughout this book. They are links to additional free content in our podcasts on our website.
For the past 25 years, we’ve been testing various managerial behaviors and tools, to see which work and which don’t. I used to hate it when the manager training I received, or the books I read, basically were filled with someone’s opinions, or they proffered an idea and then used a few anecdotes to support their position. We at Manager Tools like the aphorism, “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
We have tested and refined all of the recommendations given in this book. We have viewed thousands of interviews, and tested all of the major recommendations here on population samples that give us high confidence about our recommendations.
That being said, no study can completely predict how any one manager’s hiring will be affected by the tools we recommend. Every situation is different. Often, that’s what many managers say when they come to us for help and explain their situation: “My situation is special/different/unique.”
Almost always, it’s not different at all. But because there’s a chance that a manager’s situation is unique, we will tell you this: Our guidance is for 90 percent of managers, 90 percent of the time.
It’s possible that you’re in a special situation, but I doubt it.
You’ll notice that, throughout this book, we will use different genders for managers—sometimes male and sometimes female. All of our content at Manager Tools—all of the audio guidance in podcasts and all the shownotes—use a nearly perfect balance of male and female examples.
The reason for using different genders for managers is that all of our data show that men and women make equally good hiring managers and, for that matter, executives. If you’re a female hiring manager, we’re glad you’re reading this book, and we’re here to help.
Let’s get started.