Want to Hire Confidently? Do This One Thing.

There are two cliches that often get tossed around in business — “Time is money” and “You have to spend money to make money.” Unfortunately, and far too often, company’s only pay attention to the first maxim and that can cause issues, especially in hiring.

They rationalize that the longer a position is open, the more money the company will lose. As a result, they hire quickly (and that’s never a good idea). This increases the chances of a bad hire, and that can easily cost the company 10X what the role is worth.

Now what these companies should be doing is combining the two adages. Yes, time is money, but you have to spend some of it to make a successful hire. And what they should be spending their time on, are these Positional Profiles.

What is a Positional Profile?

Essentially, a Positional Profiles is a document made up of 4 sections: Responsibilities, Skills, Organizational Placement, and the Big Why. When done correctly, you’ll have the ability to advertise the new opportunity effectively, and vet any candidate that applies thoroughly — giving you the best chance to hire a remarkable talent. But you have to do them correctly.

The reality is, many companies already take down the responsibilities and skills needed to thrive in a role. Unfortunately, they write vaguely worded descriptions that actually make the hiring process (and beyond) extremely difficult. To highlight this point, I want you to look at this list below.

Weak Responsibility Descriptions

• Making sale calls to potential clients
• Support of an ever expanding customer base
• Manages the financial performance of the business
• Develop and maintain a successful outreach plan with neighborhood businesses
• Consistently exceed client’s expectations

All of these were taken from different job postings on Indeed, and none of them work — especially when you’re striving to attract top talent. The reason these descriptions don’t work is that they contain 3 elements that will be deadly to your hiring decision: The description is either focused on the wrong target, too broad, and/or doesn’t contain any quantifiable criteria. So how do we fix this?

Properly Defining Responsibilities

The first step in properly defining the responsibilities is to recognize them as a goal rather than a task. What I’m saying here is, you want to concentrate on what this position will achieve, rather than focusing on how the hire will achieve it. There’s always more than one way to solve a problem, and you don’t want to miss out on talent because they solve it differently.

Once you’ve developed this mindset, you can move on to the next step — communicating these goals so that both you and the candidate understand what it means to pass or fail in this position. The most effective way to do this is by using the S.M.A.R.T goal system.

S.M.A.R.T Goal stands for …

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time Bound

If we look at bullet number 1 in our list of weak responsibilities descriptions,”making sales calls to potential clients,” you’ll see that while it is specific and achievable, you don’t have all the needed information (How many calls must be made? What’s the deadline for all the calls?). A more effective responsibility, using the S.M.A.R.T goal system, would look more like this — “Make 40 sale calls to potential clients each week.” But is this actually correct? After turning the responsibility into a S.M.A.R.T goal, you have to ask yourself 2 questions…

• Are we actually highlighting a goal?
• Will the right type of candidate be responding to this opening?

I’d answer no to both. This particular responsibility came from a sale’s position listing, and to me, this really feels like a sales task rather than a goal. To correct this, I would shift the focus from making calls to capturing sales, and have the new responsibility read — “Convert 4 new leads into customers by the end of quarter 1.”

By making calculated adjustments like this, you’re going to put those involved with the hiring process, in a great position. You see, when the time comes to promote the opportunity, they’ll be highlighting a specific set of goals that will only be attractive to candidates who believe they can reach these valuable milestones. In this situation, you’ll be appealing to individuals who are confident they could capture sales.

Formerly, when the responsibility was listed as making phone calls, you’d be attracting a wider range of candidates. Some great at sales and others great at talking on the phone (customer service types). There’s no added benefits, only added resumes, and hiring the right person is already a difficult job. Wading through more candidates, many of whom aren’t even qualified, only makes the task that much harder.

Work Backwards

It’s important to note that when you’re defining responsibilities, you want to start as far into the future as realistically possible, and work your way towards the present. A good starting point is at the end of year 1, but you can go further.

Begin by thinking of the big goals you’d like this new hire achieve 365 days after they’ve started. Then ask yourself, what did they accomplish in the first 6 months to put them on pace to reach that goal? What had to happen within 3 months, the first month, a week into it, etc? Taking this approach really helps you prioritize the important responsibilities, find work-related stress points, and understand what skills are truly needed by the hire.

Properly Defining Skills

Similarly to responsibilities, skills are placed on job posts, which means there’s some degree of thought, and that’s great-ish. Unfortunately, again like responsibilities, companies don’t think about them deeply enough, which results in vague descriptions, like the ones below …

Weak Skill Descriptions

• Excel Experience
• Good Management Skills
• Effective Verbal and Written Communication
• Superior Customer Service Skills

Descriptions like these cause nothing but headaches and bad hires. Take the first bullet, “Excel Experience.” Doesn’t get much more vague than that.

To correct this, you have to go a level deeper and ask — what will this hire be doing in excel that’s pivotal to the position? Well since the original skill came from a sales position listing, I would change description to say — “Ability to use Excel’s FORECAST function in order to predict future sales, and inventory requirements.”

By making this more descriptive, you’re going to attract candidates that have this specific skill set. More importantly, if someone without this skill applies, you can easily eliminate him/her because you can quickly test his/her ability to use the FORECAST function. This now makes the process incredibly efficient, and the hiring manager’s life way more enjoyable.

A Step Further on Skills

The example just given was for a hard skill. A hard skill is characterized as a specific, teachable ability that can be defined and measured. In addition to hard skills, there’s also soft skills. Now soft skills are personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. These are mostly innate traits, which is why finding someone with the right soft skills, is more important than finding someone with the right hard skills.

Unfortunately, despite their differences, companies tend to make the same mistake when creating a list of soft skills (Too vague). Let’s us bullet 2 as an example — “Good Management Skills.” This could be interpreted by candidates in a million different ways. As a result, you’re going to get a lot of people applying that do offer “Good Management Skills,” just not necessarily the type you need.

And it’s not just the candidates that can interpret this description in many different ways — it’s the interviewer as well. So on top sifting through unwanted candidates, your own team isn’t on the same page, and that’s just a recipe for disaster.

To fix this, you have to be more specific. In the Positional Profile, I would write something like this, “The ability to train new staff in a sink or swim manner.” This is very specific and will get your entire hiring team on the same page. Now when you list the job, I would simply put “The ability to train new staff.” You do this because you don’t want to tip your hand to candidates. They will prepare misleading answers in advance.

However, by being more specific, you will attract only people that believe they can “train new staff members,” which significantly reduces the number of unwanted applications and pointless interviews. Now during the interview, because you didn’t reveal your stance in the job post, you can ask specific behavioral questions that will reveal whether the candidate’s training style is sink or swim.

Organizational Placement

The next piece of the Positional Profile, is a slight overview of the company’s organizational chart. It’s a great visual to see how this new hire will fit into the company, who he/she will be reporting to, and how many, if any, subordinates he/she will have. This little exercise answers a lot of questions and allows you to see how this position impacts the company. You’ll know if this hire goes bad, it hurts this position, which touches on this person’s tasks, etc. It really puts into perspective, how important it is to get a hire right.

If you decide to place this organizational chart into a job post (something I highly recommend), there will be another benefit — the elimination of unwanted interviews. More often than not, candidates have certain job criteria. Some want subordinates. Others want to report to just one manager. While some want to know that they’ll be part of team which is full of employees that are equal in stature. All this can be answered with one glance of an organizational chart.

It’s better that they see this information right away rather than after a phone interview and/or in-person interview. Hell some candidates won’t notice until after he/she has taken the position, and that’s time the staff could have spent doing something more productive (And time always equals money).

The Big Why

To be honest, this should be the first section you complete when building a Postional Profile. It’s the most powerful question you can ask and it’s, “why does this position matter to your company?” For most people, jobs are a lot more than a way to make money. At its pinnacle, jobs provide people with purpose and meaning. I think, as job creators, we must respect that. We must believe that this position has value beyond producing X amount of widgets.

Maybe it’s to move your company’s mission statement forward. Maybe it’s to connect with your customers on a deeper level. Whatever it is, let your candidates know. Because when they feel like the work is giving them purpose, they’ll produce twice the amount of widgets, fix a problem that wasn’t part of their assignment, and make your company that much stronger.

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