11/25/2020
How to hire the next Tom Brady in engineering, sales and all other area of your company.
Remember, every team in the NFL had 5 chances to draft Tom Brady before New England picked him in the 6’th round. How do we avoid being one of the 31 teams that failed to hire him after being given 5 chances to do so?
The answer is simple, implement a “performance minded” hiring strategy.
When we implement a “performance based” mindset when screening candidates. What is performance based hiring and why is it so central to the building of successful teams in engineering, sales and every other division of your company?
Because these are the people who will grow your company, but hiring them is far more difficult than you would ever imagine and the problem is not them the problem is us. Recruiting high performers is not very difficult, but getting hiring managers and recruiters to recognize these people is where these candidates get lost in the shuffle, and we miss out on hiring game-changing talent.
Often, the “firewall” against performance based hiring is the hiring managers themselves. Where is the glitch? Very often with the hiring managers themselves. More often than not, these people have a phenomenal record of getting things done, but their talents to not "jump out"at you when you are looking at their resume or online profile.
What is the solution? Short interviews with a much larger number of applicants by a qualified screener who then has the power to recommend bringing these seemingly "mediocre"candidates to the next level, which is often an onsite meeting. If we don’t take the time to talk to these candidates, even if it is only a 5-minute call, they will almost always slip through our fingers and unfortunately, get hired by our competitors.
“Recruiters believe that more than 65% of the problems associated with hiring top people are directly attributed to the
hiring manager. Hiring managers believe that recruiters don’t understand real job needs and send them too many
unqualified candidates. Both groups are right.” - Lou Adler
“The key is to focus on hiring people who are smart and get things done.” – Joel Sposky, co-founder of GitHub.
The solution: how do we implement and industry leading performance based hiring plan?
Pay 10X more attention to candidate references, especially internal referrals when they say things like “this person is the best (fill in the blank) that I have ever worked with”. And if the person making the recommendation is themselves a high performing employee, that is almost a sure telling guarantee that the person they are recommending is as well.
Remember, 80% of your great hires are usually talented people who are far better in the real-world than their resume indicates, and it takes a special mindset to hire the “diamond in the rough” who may be the next Tom Brady to help your company win the business equivalent of 6 superbowls.
Any good hiring manager or recruiter has the screening and intuitive abilities to know a great candidate within 2 minutes of talking to them. The hiring team needs to understand that when a talented screener pushes a seemingly mediocre candidate to the next-steps by recommending an onsite meeting after talking to this person, follow their advice, because this person may have identified the next Tom Brady.
Hiring A-level recruiters that have the intrinsic ability to know great people simply by talking to them is essential, but even this skill is rendered meaningless if the hiring team does not respond to their recommendations promptly.
So the answer is surprisingly simple, great screeners conducting short conversations with a much larger number of candidates and then pushing the top 10-20% of those candidates immediately to the next hiring stage.
