The podcast for project managers by project managers. Hiring

the best is a significant undertaking. Our guests Don Lang and Laura Butcher

offer excellent advice on how to approach filling a critical position, and

choosing a candidate who is a right fit for your organization.

Table of Contents

00:48 … Meet Don and Laura

02:03 … Understanding the Whole Person

03:21 … Job Description vs Job Specification

07:00 … Measurable Job Specs

08:12 … Candidate Specification

11:03 … Deal Breakers

11:55 … Talent Brand

13:35 … Being Transparent and the Cost of a Bad Hire

19:23 … Planning for the Interview

21:08 … Building Rapport

23:12 … Laying out the Interview Plan

24:40 … Non-Verbal Cues

25:48 … Note Taking

28:46 … Roles of Multiple Interviewers

32:12 … When No Candidates are a 100% Match

35:10 … Assessing Capability

37:04 … “Hire The Best” Insite Course

38:23 … Closing

DON LANG: Oftentimes companies will spend more time

investing in a new piece of software or a photocopy machine in terms of doing research

and scouring prices and so forth.  And

they’ll do a couple of quick interviews and think you’ve made the right

decision. 

NICK WALKER:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we meet to discuss what’s

important to you and to all professional project managers.  We try to talk with the best of the best,

drawing on their experience and seeing what has worked for them.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me is the true voice of

experience, Bill Yates.  And today, Bill,

we have another full house here in the studio.

Meet Don and Laura

BILL YATES:  Yes, we

do.  It’s great to have Laura and Don in

the room with us.  And I cannot wait to

dig into this topic because they are experts when it comes to hiring the best.

NICK WALKER:  So let’s talk about hiring.  As we all know in today’s economy, hiring the best people is more critical than ever.  It costs a lot to find and interview candidates and to train new employees.  No one can afford to lose time and money from a bad hiring choice.  Employees are an investment, and we want a good return on that investment.  That’s why Don Lang and Laura Butcher are here with us.  They are the founders of Blue Key Partners, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations develop their leadership talent through learning and executive coaching.

Don and Laura wrote a course titled “Hire the Best” for Velociteach’s InSite Mobile Learning Platform.  Laura has a background as an HR leader, supporting hiring and talent decisions across multiple industries; and Don has experience as an assessor of talent and in helping leaders apply skills and techniques to get the right person in the right job at the right time.  Don, welcome to Manage This.  Laura, great to see you again.  Welcome back.

LAURA BUTCHER:  Thank

you.

DON LANG:  Thank you.

Understanding the Whole Person

NICK WALKER:  Let’s

just start with the basics; all right? 

First, getting to know a job candidate. 

To what extent is it important to learn more than just the person’s job

skills?

DON LANG:  Well, it’s

certainly important to understand the whole person because that’s who shows up

at work.  Oftentimes in an effort to try

and get the best person we focus on some technical competency, some experience,

some skills, at the exclusion of really understanding how is this person going

to fit in the organization?

And I was reminded of that the other day when I was talking

to a hiring manager who hired a construction estimator.  Lots of great experience in estimating significant

construction projects.  But when they got

to work, immediately they started looking at different ways of changing the

work environment in their office.  They

wanted to move to a different floor because it was too noisy where the other

estimators were.  They wanted a microwave

brought in.  They wanted someone to help

do some of the tasks that typically the other estimators would routinely do.  So very quickly they’re finding out, even

though he’s very skilled, he’s not a good fit for that organization.  And they’re thinking at 90 days now that they

may have to let him go.

Job Description vs Job Specification

NICK WALKER:  Oh,

my.  How do you sort of judge that,

assess that before?

LAURA BUTCHER:  Having

a thorough plan for how you’re going to approach filling this critical position

is an important aspect of hiring the best and hiring the right fit.  So understanding very specifically what’s

required in the role and what are the specifications of the candidate that will

be best suited for the position.  We

often discuss the difference between a job description, typically, and what we

refer to as a “job specification.”  So

when you think about a job description, job descriptions were created largely

in organizations to grade jobs, to benchmark them with the marketplace for

compensation purposes.  Job descriptions

weren’t created to fill the job or to staff the job appropriately.

BILL YATES:  But we

use that all the time, don’t we.

LAURA BUTCHER:  We do.

BILL YATES:  I mean,

that’s kind of our first – that’s like our introduction to somebody.  Hey, are you interested in this

position?  Let me show you a job

description.

LAURA BUTCHER:  And

what we distinguish when we talk about a job specification is really focusing

in on what are the results that this role needs to produce for the

organization?  What outcomes  will this person be responsible for creating

for the organization?  So that drives a

deeper level of understanding of what you’re really looking for in this

candidate, what outcomes they need to produce.

BILL YATES:  When I

was looking through the content for this course, excellent content, I was

hanging out on that because I’ve been guilty of that, just showing candidates a

job description and not really talking about what my expectations are, what

kind of results I want them to hit.  So

give some examples.  For instance, I was

thinking, you know, maybe somebody’s responsible for first response to a

customer, if there’s a change request. 

And then I was thinking, okay, that could be in a job description.

But maybe going deeper in the spec it’s, you know, what

should that thing look like?  What should

that response look like?  What’s an

acceptable email or phone call or whatever, the kind of communication that we

expect, and then the timeliness of it. 

You know, I don’t want to be having a performance review with somebody

later and go, yeah, you are responding. 

You’re doing what’s on the job description.  But it’s not of the quality I expect, or it’s

not timely.  What are some other examples

that you guys have helped people with?

DON LANG:  Well,

certainly, back to the example you’re mentioning, Bill, in terms of activities,

really, around the job, right, oftentimes we have in mind certain outcomes that

we’re looking for.  Like we want to raise

the bar on customer excellence.  We want

to raise the bar on our responsiveness. 

We want to raise the bar on innovation in the changing work processes to

be better at it, as opposed to we’re just satisfied with what has gone on over

the past several years.

So it’s helpful to give the extra thought before going to

the marketplace to figure out, so who do I want, to figure out what do I really

want to accomplish over the next 18-24 months that is going to have an impact

on our business.  And once I can put some

clarity to that, then I’m in a better position to actually start to break down,

so what are the behaviors and competencies that are necessary in order to be

able to achieve that?  That’s where we

would generate a candidate specification.

Measurable Job Specs

BILL YATES:  Got

it.  So in the job spec are you driving

some metrics there?  Are you trying to

make that measurable?

DON LANG:  Absolutely, that’s what you would share with the candidate along the way, so there’s no surprises.

BILL YATES:  No surprise.

DON LANG:  They know what you’re expecting, and so they can perhaps even self-select out, if those are not something that they want to achieve or don’t believe they could achieve, that kind of thing.  So it isn’t a surprise when they come onboard that now we’re asking them to achieve certain levels of results. And so that’s, wow, that’s news to me, I didn’t hear that in the interview process.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

right.

DON LANG:  We were

just talking about activities.

BILL YATES:   So thinking about this specification, are we talking about like a 10-page document here?  Is this something short?  A briefer one-pager?  What does it look like?

DON LANG:  If it’s

more than a page, it’s probably too long.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

DON LANG:  We’re really looking at I would say somewhere in the three to six priorities, the outcomes, more than that, you’re not actually going to be able to assess the candidate around.  And more than that they’re probably not going to be able to accomplish.

BILL YATES: 

Yeah.  They won’t have clarity on

what really is job one for them.

DON LANG:  What

matters.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

Candidate Specification

NICK WALKER:  So we’re talking about two separate specifications here:  the job specification, the candidate specification, what exactly is that difference?

LAURA BUTCHER:   So the candidate specification actually flows directly from the position specification.  So when we talk about a candidate specification, we’re trying to identify very specifically what are the technical competencies, experiences that are required to be successful in the role, but also those qualitative attributes, those things that really are the X factor, the things that will make the person fit with the culture, with the leadership, with the values of the organization. And so those qualitative attributes become part of the candidate specification.  And driving those to some degree of specificity,