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Focus on Assessment – Persuasiveness

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Persuasiveness is using appropriate interpersonal styles and communication methods to gain exceptions of an idea, plan, activity, service, or product from prospects and clientele. This dimension has a “outward” orientation within or outside an organization. It can replace the concept of individual leadership for many positions and, of course, for sales positions. It is important to recognize that taking orders and selling/persuading are not the same thing. When assessing persuasiveness, you should be listening for evidence that the candidate has actually caused someone to change his/her mind.

When evaluating persuasiveness, you must realize there are several competencies that should be evaluated. Competencies such as how one works with different types of buyers; how one uses different sales approaches in order to address a problem; or how one uses training to improve their own persuasiveness is very important. It’s also important but a person understands failure and appreciates winds when persuasiveness is being assessed.

Be sure to think about the type of function or servicing, and what the end goal would be on how to use persuasiveness. Someone can persuade somebody to buy a product may not be as good as persuading someone to buy an idea.

About Rounded Assessment and its Value to Recruiting

Assessment comes in many forms. Our contention is that competencies need to be identified for each position at an organization, and a level of mastery for some or all of those competencies needs to be identified for each candidate that has applied for the role – whether they are internal or external.

It is the hiring manager’s responsibility to then understand which competencies to leverage, which to develop, and which to avoid in order to have the new employee reach desired productivity in the desired timeline. Competence needs to be assessed, but assessing experience, work habits, cognition, intelligence, and other areas are also critical. We believe that the advocacy of a combined assessment, or “Rounded Assessment” is the job of every recruiter. It is not necessarily their job to assess everything, but rather make sure that the assessment is performed and documented so a hiring manager or business leader can make sound decisions.

This blog post is part of a series of posts that are set to release over a long period of time. In each, Aspen provides insight on the elements and assets within Rounded Assessment.

Linking Interviews with Performance

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Take out one of your team member’s last performance review or their development plan. Now go ahead and pull out the screening questions and interview questions that you used to hire one of your team members.

Is there ANY linkage whatsoever? Well their should be. Interesting how we tend to measure performance after we hire someone but we tend not to directly ask or measure performance capability during the interview process.

When you hire, you are not only measuring the ability for the candidate to perform against the tasks, you are measuring the gaps they have so you can build a strong development plan for them so they can be a strong performer for your team. That builds a stronger ROI on the hire, and better retention of the employee.

Try Problem Solving as a competence. You know your team should be able to solve problems for business leaders, and create strong solutions for their needs. As such, see if you can list the following:

  • What interview question (and follow up deep dives) would you ask to determine if the potential employee has mastered problem solving?
  • What development tools or techniques would you use to increase the competence of your team member regarding problem solving?
  • How do you measure their ability to problem solve, and will you grade it objectively come performance review?
Of course this linkage needs to be done across dozens of competencies – but its straight forward – and important to the development of strong players and future leaders.

Are you a Recruiting Samurai? Then identify your “Keiretsu culture”…

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Great interview this week with the head of US HR for a major Japanese automobile company. We were talking about what makes their business unique, what they look for in leadership, and so on. We got to assessment, and I learned that during their interview processes that every leader in the organization in the California office has to interview the final candidate. All 12 officers.

My response?  I asked her if a Keiretsu-like culture was alive and well in her organization. She said “Absolutely!” Her tone changed after that because she realized I was in on a secret. Keiretsu is a corporate relationship and governance structure that has been used in Japanese business for quite some time. Its not publicized as it was back in the 1980s/90s, and globalization of companies have severely decimated the actual corporate alignment it used – but the cultural aspects associated with that business model can still linger – even here in the States. Its not everywhere in Japan – please don’t make that leap. Lots of books and data on this, but if you think Fedex or Facebook has a culture…you should do some reading on Keiretsu.

She continued to tell me that assessing candidates to fit into their culture is done by making sure that all the players agree that the person belongs. Its a careful sell across the organization top down that allows for support and exposure all at once. Culture is their greatest asset, and its primarily how they invest in their recruiting and assessment efforts.

That is where the lesson is…allocating time to what is important in assessment. They spend over 80% of assessment on ONE THING. But at least they know what that is…culture.

What are the primary drivers in YOUR business? Technology? Innovation? Culture? Leadership? You probably already know, but the question is have you invested your resources in such a way  that you are really vetting against those significant assets?

If its “leadership”, are you asking questions in interviews about leading teams? Developing them? Addressing conflict? Are you presenting cases regarding leadership and having them work out the problems? Are they interviewing with not only the hiring manager but well regarded leaders in the organization? Are the leaders designated certain questions about leading teams, and are they debriefing specifically on those topics? Are you having top individual contributors ask about leadership and management techniques and comment if those candidates can lead people like them?

If you don’t know what makes your company tick – you better ask. If they don’t know – guess. But at least take your assessment resources and strategize how you are really measuring those really important assets.

By the way – retention in this company is tremendous if you think it doesn’t work. And for the record, I don’t have a patent on Recruiting Samurai. I am sure I saw that somewhere else.

Seth and Amy say “One Approach Across all Recruiting….Really!?!”

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I love that bit that Seth Myers does. Its even better when Amy Poehler gets in the act. If you are not Saturday Night Live fans, there is a skit that is done during the Weekend Update (a spoof on the nightly news) where the anchors review the news of the week by calling out the intentions or actions of celebrities, politicians and leaders that were broadcast that week, and by asking “Really!?!”

Its good comedy, because it points fun at how people tend to say things, do things, or attempt to do things that are either impossible, not really viable, a waste of time, or have little return.

Its budget season already, and there are talks of companies on the push for enterprise wide change – again. But before you go down the road with the great conversation “we have to do recruiting one way, and have one process” – I suggest you do a vision analysis.

Answer each of these using a traffic light
NO = RED
MAYBE/SOMEWHAT = AMBER
YES = GREEN 

Q1: have you performed a risk analysis?

Q2: does management really know the hiring manager problem and can define it?

Q3: was a worst case analysis on vision achievement, adoption, and realization performed?

Q4: have you developed a prototype within your proposed constraints, and made adjustments such that it can be replicated within those constraints?

Q5: will the vision take less than 12 months to fully install, realize, and adopt?

Q6: do you have an exit strategy from the vision if failure occurs or is imminent?

Q7: does the firm have a success rate of 67% or more with similar projects at an enterprise level? Remember failure means over budget, too many resources, or behind schedule (getting it done is assumed).

Q8: did you revisit similar attempts for enterprise wide HR change, and analyze the holes in those plans, and recalibrate this vision?

The Vision should go through these questions (plus another 40) without having red all over the board. There are over hundreds of assets like this in a well planned project, but if you can’t get past just these 8 during your vision stage without having red all over the paper, then all I can say to you is “Really!?!”

Actually – its just means you need to mitigate risks and make some changes before you move forward, but still…really!?!

Sourcing and the Great Assumption

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First to admit that I am not a sourcing guru. For one reason or another, that is assumed by people I meet, and at first I was not sure why that followed me around. Don’t get me wrong, on the daily grind of recruiting I was able to cold call and hunt down the folks, but no better than many recruiters – I just made tons of phone calls 🙂 I will admit, dropping about 150 voice mails before 9am each morning always helped.

As the world becomes socially smaller though, I really admire all the sourcing folks out there that really spend time and effort understanding the methodology of cutting through all the networks, groups, media sites, and of course those who gate crash and get the names. I have not honed this skill over the years, primarily because I have to focus on other competencies to hone, and have advised many to outsource this work to experts who hone those competencies daily.

I still stand firm on my belief that for positions where you need to recruit, as in you really need to sell it, you need to PLAN on having at least 50 conversations in the bag before you make the hire, give or take a few. These include the interviews and back and forth with the managers/candidates, so assume that about 15 of them are already off the table for sourcing.  You need to have 35 strong, detailed conversations about the job, people in the marketplace, their qualifications / interest / motivations / experience, and then some secondary validation in order to feel really good about the 3 to 5 people you are putting in mix. If you can’t count the 35, I think you are making some really big assumptions when stating “this is the best talent”.

Of course you may want to double count previous conversations you have had in the space, but I just call that knowledge. Maybe you can cut out a few, but don’t you think that you should at least have 25 good conversations with either people you trust will know the right people OR the actual prospects themselves in order to find a slate of 4 or 5? If not, what are you using as your decision engine…the resume or LinkedIn profile that they produced themselves?

So back to the Great Assumption – Managers think recruiters / sourcers are actually doing this work (or more) to find the talent that is needed AND we also think that in order to be successful, we need to have this amount of effort.

BOGUS.

Sourcing is not about math. Sourcing is about results. We know the matching can just happen. This is not a manufacturing process. There are people who just gel with the recruiters, leaders, and managers. Chaos happens, and we break through the math all the time. Maybe “great” recruiters are lucky, or the brand works, or maybe they are just highly skilled and tuned to the managers, so their research is solid.

Besides – I can prove that sourcing at this level is unlikely to happen all the time anyway:

  • 2100 hours in a year for a person to work
  • assume 20% for non-recruiting meetings, training, water cooler time (1680 hours left)
  • assume all meaningful convos + notes captured are 30 minutes (3360 sessions)
  • 50 sessions per hire (67 positions filled a year)
  • Meanwhile – you forgot scheduling, research, document prep, offer letters, admin, and a bunch of other stuff.

Maybe your team does less – maybe they do more. But even IF they are doing less or more, you can’t deny the numbers…so what are you giving up? I appreciate if you team is really good at finding 2 people and selling it hard to the managers who buy it when you tell them “this is the best talent” and a great hire happens. Be honest – did you REALLY source to 35 to 50 conversations or just get people who match.

And it is AWESOME to get people who match. That is the goal. Just don’t tell the managers you busted 100 hours of sourcing and hard selling when you made three phone calls and got three great candidates.

We need to be cautious about the Great Assumption – that we sourced “all the talent”. 1 – it is difficult to prove, 2 – it is difficult to have it happen consistently, and most importantly – 3 – it does not really matter if you have a great hire and the person is productive.

Take Action and Translate to Everyday:
Let your managers in on the secret. Let them know that you will plan to have 35 to 50 conversations with the likely suspects after research and knowledge is gathered, meaning it could take X amount of time. You may be able to shortcut and get results early by finding people in the first 10 conversations, rather than the last 10. But if that happens, you will not talk to the other 40 on the list.

It’s now on them to close the deal, and you will assist as needed. Remember – results are not a measure of effort, and you have other managers looking for results.