The Effective Hiring Manager

Mark Horstman

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119574347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Essential hiring and team-building lessons from the #1 Podcaster in the world

The Effective Hiring Manager offers an essential guide for managers, team leaders, and HR professionals in organizations large or small. The author's step-by-step approach makes the strategies easy to implement and help to ensure ongoing success.

Hiring effectively is the single greatest long-term contribution to your organization. The only thing worse than having an open position is filling it with the wrong person. The Effective Hiring Manager offers a proven process for solving these problems and helping teams and organizations thrive.

• The fundamental principles of hiring and interviewing
• How to create criteria to hire by
• How to create excellent interview questions
• How to review resumes
• How to conduct phone screens
• How to structure an interview day
• How to conduct each interview
• How to capture interview results
• How to make an offer
• How to decline a candidate
• How to onboard candidates

Written by Mark Horstman, co-founder of Manager Tools and an expert in training managers, The Effective Hiring Manager is an A to Z handbook to the successful hiring process. The book explores, in helpful detail, what it takes to hire the right person, for the right job, and the right team.

SECTION 1
Principles

1
The First Principle of Effective Hiring—Don’t Hire

When you first think you might need to hire, think again.

You don’t have to hire immediately when you have an opening. The strategic-thinking Effective Manager considers other options first. That’s how your CEO wants you to think.

Most managers, when they learn about an opening on their team or are overloaded with work, immediately start thinking about asking for permission to hire. We’re consumed with approval and process thoughts.

The average manager just naturally assumes that when someone leaves, you hire someone else. But that’s one of the ill-considered ideas that drives executive leaders crazy. To an executive, there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone . . . but there is something very wrong with hiring reflexively.

If you work for a smart director [manager of managers], she’s going to ask you a few questions when you ask for permission to hire.

“Did you consider not filling the job?” No. [Huh??]

“Why not?”

This exchange does not make this manager seem like a creative thinker, or a manager who thinks about his role in the organization. This manager is thinking about himself, but the director is thinking: he’s not a big picture guy. He’s just a cog in the system, doing his job. Low likelihood of upward potential.

To an executive, an opening is not “a spot that has to be filled.” To a leader, it’s a cost savings in the form of less salary. You read that right. It’s an opportunity to be creative. It’s an opportunity to reexamine the work that’s being done, and who’s doing it. Maybe there’s a way to get the really important work done without hiring. Maybe we can agree to let some things go and get everyone focused on what really matters.

And no, this is not the time to invoke some hackneyed idea of rapacious executives always expecting fewer and fewer people to do more and more. Yes, that happens, but it is rare. It’s just reported a lot because it’s dramatic. As managers, our first responsibility is to the organization, not to our team. So our first steps should be to get what the organization wants.

Going and asking for hiring approval right away—first—is backwards. Hiring approval will be granted more readily to the manager who can show that he has done the proper due diligence on the work, its value, people, and costs—before he asks to open a requisition.

So let’s start with assuming we can’t fill the slot. That “they” won’t let us. In other words, if you couldn’t get approval, how would you solve THAT problem? The problem is no longer the request to hire, and sourcing, and screening, and interviewing. The problem is how to get the most out of those you have, because whom you have is all you have.

Not being able to hire happens all the time, of course . . . but everybody forgets that too easily. Openings happen during layoffs and downturns. In those times, authority to hire is routinely denied.

A manager who assumes her first action is to hire, because her “problem” is “not enough people all of a sudden,” may not feel terribly creative about solving the other problem: what’s the right way to do our job with the people we HAVE. Because, if the problem really IS not enough people for the work, the work becomes a static force, an immovable object.

So to avoid wasting time thinking about what we can’t have, we assume we will NOT get anyone new. These are the new parameters to our problem and talking to our boss or to HR has nothing to do with them.

If you can’t fill the slot, there are two broad areas to consider: get more work out of the existing team or figure out what work not to do. And the most likely solution includes some of each.

We assume we have all the people we’re going to get. There are “fewer people now” to do “the same amount of work.” That means either that (a) people are going to simply take on the additional work, adding more hours or being more efficient and/or (b) some of the work being done is going to no longer get done.

Think for a moment about a manager with five directs. Assume that compensation is 50% of his operating budget (a general rule of thumb). So the loss of one person—all things being equal, which they never are (ATBEWTNA)—is a savings of 10% of budget. This is a serious savings.

Any manager who was presented the opportunity to “figure out which work to cut back on so that you could cut your budget by 10%,” would jump at the opportunity.

That means some work not getting done. And this is your opportunity to think like a leader. And the best way to get to what’s not going to get done is to follow our guidance for Delegating to the Floor.

How to Solve a Hiring Problem Without Hiring

First, ask your directs to prioritize their work. Ask them to analyze their work based on its value and priority to the organization (them, you, the division, the firm). Tell them to make a list of everything they’re working on and roughly how much time it takes, and then to rank it not by hours but by value. It shouldn’t be more than 20 things, we would guess. If it is, there are going to be a lot of things that take VERY few minutes, and those are probably things that won’t be missed.

It might sound like this: “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Spend an hour, today and/or tomorrow. Make a list of everything, or nearly everything, that you’re working on. You can look at your calendar, your piles of work, etc., anything you can think of to help you. I’m not going to wait, though, for a week, for you to do a time diary of everything you touch in the next week. That’s probably overkill.

“Then, list all your work in order of importance, and next to each item you’re working on, put down the amount of time it takes you each week. It’s okay to estimate.”

Don’t be surprised if they submit something that says they work 80 hours a week. That’s wrong, and it does NOT prove that they’re working feverishly at home. It means they don’t really know how long they spend on things. That’s okay. The point here is that pretty quickly among the items in their lists there will be a drop off in time spent and in value delivered.

Next, ask your directs for a recommendation from them about what won’t get done. After you’ve asked them to create the lists, ask them further to review the lists, think about them, and determine what on those lists could afford to not be done.

Here’s how it might sound: “Once you’ve got your list, review it. Analyze it a bit for me. And come back to me with a recommendation for what work you could get away with not doing, assuming a bunch of new, higher priority work was coming your way. Think about the time you could save, simply not doing some stuff. That’s what I want: a list, with recommendations on it of stuff you could set aside.”

Consider their recommendation, and then make the decision yourself. It’s important you ask for a recommendation, and NOT a decision. That way, they won’t feel as much risk about the analysis. It might sound like this: “Ultimately, I’m going to make the decision. If you’ll do the analysis, I’ll likely follow your recommendation. But this way, I’m responsible. As you get better and more confident at this, I’ll start letting you make the decisions as well, and I’ll still be responsible.”

Then ask them to direct question...