New Year’s resolutions for hiring managers
Here we are twelve months into this year, and nine into a pandemic that pretty much wiped out any sense of control we might have had over the global economy, business P&Ls, or our personal finances.
Some of my daring entrepreneurial friends put a spin on things and even came up with a term for what we’ve been facing: “troublettunities.” I have a deep respect for anyone able to naturally take anything thrown at them and spin it in something they use to create something useful.
As we look to 2021 with the intent to plan and set out new resolutions, we can’t ignore that some of this year’s resolutions have become irrelevant. However, in the spirit of “troublettunities,” I encourage managers planning to hire in 2021 to establish a series of resolutions.
Start by making sure you have the right process to attract top talent
Hiring has never been easy. Done right, it’s a complex yet reliable process that will deliver results. If anything, now’s the time to set different expectations for recruiters whether you work with an in-house team or with a recruiting partner.
Here are some questions to help you in the process: How do you know who your best performers are? Can you isolate the traits, skills, or experience that helped them be successful?
With the answers in mind, you can start creating tangible ways to measure hiring decisions’ effectiveness, and since you are measuring, you can then improve. You’d think that budgets are more important than the recruiting process?!
Once you connect objectives to outcomes and then evaluate candidates’ ability to do the same, you are setting your team up for success.
Emphasize for candidates the importance of boundaries
Recognize the realities of fatigue, burnout, and work-from-home inefficiencies, but also let candidates know what you’re doing as a business to support your people.
One way is to make it clear they can’t take their work into their personal time. With a high percentage of professionals working from home, boundaries between work and their own time and space have started to dissipate. People skip lunch, forget about healthy breaks, and respond to emails half-asleep evening or morning.
My recommendation is to determine specific ways you and your managers will address the increased ambiguity in communication, stress factors, and lack of productivity caused by what I call a “continuous work environment.” Harvard Business Review published a recent article about “8 ways managers should support employees’ mental health”. It presents some practical ideas for modeling healthy behaviors, becoming vulnerable (be human!), or merely eliminating any barriers for employees to ask for help.
Hire around objectives, not job descriptions
Too often, managers will design elaborate job descriptions that rarely attract the right candidates. Instead, create performance-based job ads that set the objectives for the role, prior experience that will be relevant to meet them effectively, and the numbers that reflect what success looks like in their first 3, 6, and 9 months on the job.
If you’ve been hiring through this pandemic, you might have experienced what it means to sift through hundreds of applications for one job opening. Especially through the pandemic, it’s very likely that many candidates are unfortunately in a “desperate” mode; they will read the job description and apply without serious consideration for the long-term implications for them or their new employer.
The clearer you are upfront about the level of performance you expect, the less hassle you and your new hires will have down the line.
Purpose-driven, much?
Seriously now: do you know your organization’s mission/purpose and vision statements? If you do, when is the last time you used them to assess candidates? Does the mission align with the candidates’ purpose?
It’s not soft talk, but rather one of the most powerful instruments in a manager’s arsenal to build a high-performing organization. The mission statement is the answer to the question: “why do we exist as a business?” In other words, meaning. When your employees have meaningful work, their job is much more than a paycheck, and motivation is no longer a challenge.
Whenever I get to the subject of meaning, I can’t but think about Ikigai. The purpose of professionals is at the intersection between what they love doing and what the world needs. Sure, your candidates need to be paid fairly for what your organization perceives they can do well. But what about aligning what they love doing and what your clients need with their own mission? For some, it’s making people’s lives better or about the environment, while for others, it could be about social impact initiatives.
You’ll probably feel you’re taking on more than you can handle
And you wouldn’t be wrong. These are dramatic changes, even for year-long resolutions. You will not be able to implement them alone or immediately.
If you are hiring, you should consider them seriously to positively impact your hiring outcomes, the team(s)’, and organizational performance.
