The Dream Team

How to Build Your Dream Team

Do you have the right team in place? If not, it's time to create a talent-driven culture. It won't happen by chance; you need a formal process. That's how great companies like GE and Microsoft strengthen themselves and thrive in any stage of the economic cycle.

Over the past 25 years, I've worked with more than 250 companies on their hiring strategies, from startups to the Fortune 100. Although there are exceptions, most handle hiring as a semiformal series of independent activities. An operational review of your company's hiring processes will reveal these flaws. One thing you'll want to ensure is that the best candidates aren't being excluded inadvertently. While HR or the recruiting department will do the up-front work, line managers and senior executives must take responsibility to see that it's done right. Check out the process yourself. Would you apply for your own jobs? Next, be sure that your interview, assessment and closing processes meet the needs of top candidates. As you conduct your review, be on the lookout for these symptoms and problems:

• Hiring competent, but unmotivated people. Don't look for people who need a job, but those who want a better job. Excessive turnover is a clue that you're not hiring people who are motivated to do the work.
  
• Boring ads that are hard to find. Assume you're a candidate. Now try to find one of your postings. Was it easy to find—and was it inspiring? When one of my clients was hiring 20 software developers, it took me an hour to find the 30-day-old ad on the 37th of 40 pages of a dot-com listing. When I finally found the notice, it was boring, exclusionary and demeaning. The top 20 percent of job seekers won't spend the time to search for your ad.

  Skills-based ads turn off and exclude the best. Read one of your ads for a senior manager or staffer. Does it overemphasize skills? It's better to include just a few requirements, giving more attention to the challenges. The best candidates generally have 60 percent to 70 percent of the skills, but 125 percent of the motivation. Don't exclude this audience by demanding 100 percent of the skills.

• Online tests that are negative or exclusionary. Be very careful if you use any online testing, and always try it out yourself first. I recently took an online test for one of my clients. The questions were demeaning: Would I take a drug test? Did I live within 50 miles of the facility? They never asked if I wanted a great job or were willing to relocate for the chance to work with a company creating a leading-edge Six Sigma customer-service application. You might be driving away the best and not even know it.
  
• Emotional assessments. If you're hiring too many friendly and outgoing people who aren't all that competent, you may be measuring presentation skills, rather than performance. You'll never build a diverse team of top people if assessments are filtered through first impressions, personality, prejudices and stereotypes. Studies show that 75 percent of assessments are based on first impressions and biases. This is where training can help.
  
• A flawed voting system. Hiring the best is challenging enough. It's impossible if one "no" vote based on a superficial interview can outweigh three or four "yeses." Make sure that no single interviewer dominates the selection process.
  
• Unprofessional interviewing. You're being evaluated, too. The best can recognize an unprofessional team during the first round of interviews. The clues: Everyone describes a different job, nobody asks challenging questions, everyone's selling—and no one's listening. Top candidates accept offers based on what they'll be doing, learning, accomplishing and becoming, not on the use of their skills.
  
• It's not just about the money. For the best candidates, compensation is third or fourth on the list; a great career opportunity is most important. Ask the best person you've hired why she took the job. This will be an important benchmark to improve your negotiating process.

Putting It All Together

I've found a number of individual managers and a few companies that consistently hired good people. These six principles form the basis of a hiring process designed to attract and keep top people.

• Performance profiles. If you want to hire superior people, enumerate superior performance objectives; for example, "building a team to develop a new software application by year's end." Whom would you rather hire—someone with all of the skills or someone who can deliver the results?
  
• Define the job, not the person. When you focus on results, it's easier to obtain agreement by the interviewing team on what's important. Assessing competency is straightforward when a candidate's accomplishments are compared to the required deliverables.
  
• Objective evaluation. Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. Make sure everyone on the hiring team knows the job's performance objectives and gets examples of comparable past accomplishments.
  
• Wide-ranging sourcing. The first step to effective sourcing is a workforce-hiring plan. Most companies are too reactive, basing their hiring on short-term needs. Instead, every department should summarize its hiring needs for the next four to six months. Regardless of how you find candidates, the best aren't motivated by the same needs as the typical candidate. Capture their attention with want-ad copy that gets at the best's motivating drivers: a challenge and an opportunity to grow, learn and contribute something significant.
  
• Emotional control. More errors are made in the first 30 minutes of an interview than at any other time. To control the impact of first impressions and personality, wait 30 minutes and then measure your first impression again. To stay objective, ask tougher questions of people you like and go easy on those you don't care for. This helps put performance before personality. While true personality is critical to job success, an interviewing personality isn't the same thing. You'll see these differences emerge after about 30 minutes and discover that about a third of the people you thought were very good are really pretty average, and a third you thought were weak are significantly better.
  
• Recruiting right. Top candidates always view a new job from a strategic perspective. Managers need to offer sophisticated career-management advice to their top candidates every step of the way. It's easy to "sell" a candidate who needs a job, but it takes a pro to close a deal with a top performer who has multiple job opportunities.

In sum, hiring should be a process, not an event—the first step in creating a talent-driven culture. Hiring the best shouldn't be left to chance. The cost of one bad hire at the staff level has been estimated at two to three times the employee's annual salary, and it soars to five to 10 times that amount for a manager. This is a tremendous amount when applied across the organization.

A process that seamlessly links people, practices, process and systems can serve as the framework for getting hiring under control. The performance profile is the first step. My suggestion: Never hire another person until every member of the hiring team agrees on what the new hire must do to be considered successful. This step alone will change everything. Defining job success up front gives managers a relevant benchmark to assess competency rather than relying on their own biases and perceptions. The performance profile is what attracts the candidate to the job opening, and why he or she decides to accept an offer. This now represents a career opportunity, not just another job.