Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Hiring Mistakes...

The NUMBER ONE made by the vast majority of hiring managers is not defining SUCCESS for a role – before beginning the recruiting and hiring process.
When you don’t define success up-front, you’re setting yourself up for missing your desired outcomes, success, results, and plans. NOT defining success is a recipe for disaster in hiring – not to mention company performance.
This number one mistake is the primary cause of hiring failure that occurs in over 50% of all executive and management hires.
Those who have seen our speaker/workshop presentation know that we recommend defining success through a structured process called SOAR and the end product is a one-page simple success definition called a Success Factor Snapshot. This success definition has absolutely NOTHING to do with the traditional job description.
I created a video from a powerpoint slide deck on Hiring Mistake #1: Inadequate Job Descriptions (Why Your Job Descriptions is Worthless). If you can tolerate a 5 minute YouTube Video, you might enjoy this voice-over narrated version in addition to this post.
The traditional job description is worthless as a tool for measuring and predicting future success through an interview. Let’s consider for a moment what is on a typical job description:
  • Minimum years of experience
  • Minimum educational expectations
  • Minimum listing of duties, responsibilities, activities and tasks
  • Minimum skills and knowledge
  • Ambiguous definitions of behaviors and personality traits
When we look at this list, are we defining top talent or high performance? NO! Instead, we’re defining minimum, average, and mediocre. I’d like to suggest that most companies hiring processes (if we could even call them a process) are geared to hire MINIMUM – AVERAGE – MEDIOCRE employees.
When the listing of minimums are used – as they are in most traditional job descriptions – everything you do in hiring is geared to attract and select a minimum, average, and mediocre employee. The traditional job description of minimums drives how you write the ad, where you place the ad, what ponds you fish in, how deeply you fish, what questions you ask the candidate, how you measure their motivation, and what you do with them after you make a hire.
The traditional job description forces you into tribal hiring practices that have been perpetuated for centuries that focus on trying to hire minimally qualified candidates. It typically takes a few hours to define success for a particular position. The key steps include:
  • Connecting outcomes to the company objectives.
  • Listing all the obstacles involved in achieving the desired results.
  • Developing a time-phased, quantifiable plan of action items.
  • Defining a future expected result – such as increase sales by 12% for the home health care market.
Why do most companies not invest the time and energy to develop success-based definitions of work – because it’s hard work and takes time. However, if you’re not willing to invest the time and energy in defining success – are you prepared to accept minimal, average, and mediocre results from your team or company? I compare the process of developing job descriptions/definitions around success instead of minimums to the old FRAM Filter commercials – remember the famous tagline: You can pay now and pay me later.
If you could raise hiring accuracy by a factor of 4-10X over your current level (I’m assuming you measure whether the people you hire achieve your desired results), would you be willing to invest a little time up-front to create better job descriptions that are success-based?
Your investment of time in building a one-page Success Factor Snapshot will dramatically raise hiring accuracy by:
  • Focusing your search in which ponds to fish for the best talent.
  • Eliminating the embellishment and exaggeration common in interviews.
  • Leveraging a success-based management tool to keep your new hire on track after they join your team.
When are you going to change your hiring process from using traditional and tribal (that’s the way we’ve always done it and we’ve never considered something different for the past 3 generations) job descriptions listing minimums to a process that is success-based?

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Corporate News Update for the Day:


·          Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) reported a standalone net profit of Rs 5.39 crore in the December quarter as against a net loss of Rs 38.51 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous financial year. Net sales, however, declined 14.7% to Rs 870.37 crore from Rs 1,020.75 crore. The company had an order backlog of Rs 13,388 crore in December, including Rs 2,040 crore of contracts bagged in the last quarter.
 ·          Siemens Ltd posted a modest 2.3% growth in net profit for quarter ending December at Rs 65.1 crore. Order growth was flat and sales was down 4% in the period.
 ·          Hero MotoCorp has reported a net profit of Rs 524 crore for the third quarter , up 7% compared with Rs 487 crore YoY. Net income from operations also rose three per cent to Rs 6,376 crore during the quarter against Rs 6,187 crore during the October-December quarter in 2012. The company sold 16.61 lakh units of two-wheelers during the last quarter compared with 15.73 lakh units in the same quarter of the previous year
 ·          Ashok Leyland launched two new Light Commercial Vehicles (LCVs) - PARTNER truck and MiTR, a LCV bus. The two products are expected to take on Tata and Eicher products in their respective segments. To strengthen the LCV portfolio further, it is planning to launch 3-4 variants of the current LCV products in the coming months. Localisation of these products are 97% and will be manufactured at Nissan and Ashok Leyland factories at Oragadam and Hosur respectively.
 ·          Bank of India's (BoI) net profit declined 27.08% to Rs 585.82 crore on 21.27% growth in total income to Rs 10866.29 crore in Q3 December 2013 over Q3 December 2012. BoI's ratio of gross NPAs to gross advances stood at 2.81% as on 31 December 2013. The ratio of net NPAs to net advances stood at 1.75% as on 31 December 2013. BoI's provisions and contingencies jumped 53.28% to Rs 1403.74 crore .

About Me

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Rajkot, Gujarat, India
Experienced and proven management professional with record of significant accomplishments and contributions. Demonstrated ability to galvanize teams to achieve ambitious results. Established effectiveness in providing vision and counsel in steering organizations through accelerated growth. Diversified background includes working in one of the Big-4 company in the areas of US Taxation, Risk management, Behavioural training and Business development.COMPETENCIES : Behavioural Training,Risk Management, Strategic Planning and implementation, Equity and Derivatives analysis,Project Management,Financial Statement Analysis; Contact at: nishantcmehta@hotmail.com