You work hard to hire the right people. You have best-in-class hiring assessments, your team always thoroughly interviews and vets candidates through application reviews and background and reference checks – your hiring process is the whole enchilada. You’re doing it all right. As a result, you know that you are bringing on strong employees – they are “eagles” and ready to soar for your company.
But why isn’t turnover lower? Why isn’t the intended customer experience being delivered 100% of the time? Why aren’t profits steadily increasing?
One reason could be that you may be enrolling your eagles in “turkey” school and the strong performers who you’ve hired might get sidetracked right from the start. Perhaps they aren’t being welcomed by team members and leadership, given clear direction or adequately trained. Or maybe it’s as simple as them looking around and seeing that they’re surrounded by poor performers who don’t really care about the job – a bunch of…well…turkeys. Eagles don’t want to flock with turkeys. They eat ’em.
The point is – hiring is just one piece of the puzzle. Once you’ve hired the right people who fit your organization’s culture, there are several other crucial steps that must be taken in order for you to not only be successful, but allow your organization to consistently attract and hire strong performers in the future. The figure below illustrates how the cycle of events occurs…or fails to occur. Each step is impacted by the preceding event, which in turn limits how successful each following step can be. As depicted, the cycle is continuous and can either support eagles or ultimately doom your team to being turkeys.
Once you’ve hired an eagle, you need to ensure that she or he engages in your business. This means making sure that the new hire feels welcome and prepared from the start. Once those basic needs are addressed, leadership and the broader team need to build the new hire’s trust and confidence by keeping the overt promises that have been made, as well as the implicit promise of, “we will support you if you help support the business.” At its core, it’s that simple. But in practice, it means providing training, feedback, coaching, opportunities for advancement and, ultimately, ensuring the employee has been equipped with the right tools and a “license” to succeed. If these things happen, the result will be retention of top performers and stability within your teams. This in turn leads to experience which, with time, becomes expertise. When taken in total, all of these factors create an upward spiral that is critical to sustained success.
However, the opposite can occur as well. Failure to pay proper attention to any one of the steps can make each subsequent step exponentially harder, potentially leading to a downward spiral. If left unaddressed, at some point you may be unable to hire eagles because they won’t be attracted to your organization.
So, are you paying proper attention to ALL of the steps? Do you even know? If you don’t know how your organization is addressing each of the five steps, you are at risk of running a turkey farm instead of an eagle sanctuary. Without an intentional talent management design, combined with methods for gauging its effectiveness, you are leaving the employee experience to chance – which ultimately means leaving the customer experience and future of your business to chance. Are you satisfied with leaving things to chance?
Clearly, having a structured hiring process in place is essential to hiring the right people – but where do you start? We’ve developed an eBook: How to Build a Hiring Process