Recruiting – Decide what you want them to do

Too many search assignments, both internally & externally sourced, begin without a clear understanding of true needs of the job. This only adds frustration, wasted time, and inaccuracy to an already difficult process. Under these circumstances there's little likelihood of finding a top candidate. In an economy when every hiring decision suddenly becomes very important, it's critical to get it right at the start.

Throw out the job description!

Misunderstanding job needs is a classic recruiting problem. Ninety percent of most hiring assignments begin with only the traditional job description as a guide.

These job descriptions should be thrown away. Never again should they be discussed, viewed, or used as a template to define a job or to find a candidate to fill the role. This list of skills, duties, responsibilities, academics and required experience at best describes basic competency. It certainly doesn't describe what a person taking the job is expected to do.

If you want to hire competent people, describe what they have to do every day to achieve average performance. If you want to hire superior people, describe what superior people do every day to achieve superior performance.

Traditional job descriptions are over-weighted with too much emphasis on having skills, experience, and academic training.

The best candidates generally have less experience than the traditionalists require – but balance this with an overabundance of traits like insight, leadership skills, desire, potential and ability to learn.

While using traditional skills and experienced-based job descriptions will eliminate the bottom-third of the candidate pool, they also unfortunately often eliminate the top-third in the process.

Actually recruiters know this, but few do much about it. Line managers are a little better, but most still suffer using outdated hiring techniques.

Some recruiters try in vain to convince their line manager clients that the best candidates don't need the pedigree described in the job spec, but offer nothing as a substitute. The pleadings then go unheard, and the typical recruiter settles in for a war of attrition – knowing that no candidate will really ever meet the spec as advertised. Then it's just more and more resumes, with the goal of tiring the manager out long enough to eventually settle upon a candidate. The recruiter is thus viewed as a necessary evil – an expensive resource providing a service that is slow, frustrating, ineffective, yet vitally important.

A better way

There is a better way. It involves asking clients a simple question: "What does the person taking this job need to do in order to be considered successful?"

Let's take some examples:

• Average performance for a telemarketing person at a call centre is 50 calls per day: convincing 30% to sign-up for the catalogue, and getting 10% to purchase at least £100 in goods or services. Superior performance is 50% above this. It's not 2-3 years of telemarketing experience, good communication skills, and at least 2 years of college.
• For a developer it's writing efficient code to create a spider in six weeks – not 3 years of Java.
• For a CEO, it's turn around a troubled division to generate profit in 12 months – not an MBA and five years as a GM or COO in the consumer products industry.

Sound simple? It is. But it's also revolutionary. Give it a try. Who knows – you might just find yourself knocking down more of those moving targets .

Michael Skirving

Michael Skirving is a precision recruiter, and is the MD and founder of Whitewater Executive Search as well as Whitewater Training Ltd, a recruitment-training and consulting company. Whitewater is an organisation who practice and teach ?POWER Hiring?. Michael has worked world-wide with Blue Chip organisations such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Shell Caribbean and Central America (working in Caribbean and Americas), BT, Prudential Assurance, Galileo, Eagle Star, Dowding & Mills and is a presenter for Institute for International Research in the Gulf as well as many other smaller organisations.