When it comes to recruiting new members for your team or a pivotal leadership or governance role, what does winning look like for your business? No doubt everyone involved in the recruitment process has a different interpretation of what success looks like but a proven method to hiring high-performing candidates, is to focus on the problems to be solved by the role, in the short and long term.
Position or job descriptions tend to be lengthy tomes, outlining a whole range of responsibilities, duties and required technical and behavioural skills. When recruiting, rather than focussing on the job description, ask yourself what you want the person to accomplish during their first year?
What this means is that you’ll be searching for someone who has demonstrable experience achieving these goals and they’ll be more likely to not fall short, in terms of performance. Ultimately, you’ll attract stronger people and more accurately predict their on-the-job performance. It’s a powerful technique to recruit talent and in some ways, a complete rethink of how to approach potential job candidates.
When taking a performance-based approach to hiring, you outline at least one or two major projects, tasks or accomplishments that the new hire will need to tackle in the role – basically, defining the job, not the person.
There are other parts of this technique to consider, like for example including an end timeline for the task/s to be completed as well as tying the challenge back to a major project or company-wide strategy.
You can use this content to help create your job advert as well as your approach, when searching for candidates. At various points throughout the screening and recruitment process, reflect on the challenges/tasks and ask candidates to describe a major accomplishment, most related to the biggest job challenge.
It goes without saying that other attributes, like technical skills/competencies and work history is also important but adopting a performance-based approach to the selection process adds a new dimension and thought process to the mix.
Next time you find yourself writing a lengthy position description, take a moment to sit back and ask, other that the necessary skills and prerequisites, what are the major problems that need fixing relative to this role?
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If you are looking for direction and assistance on unearthing and retaining the right talent for your business, get in touch with us. We’d love to chat.
The Decipher Team
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