We’ve all heard it said that a company’s most important asset is its people. When we say we love a company, what we’re really saying is we love the work being done by the people in that company. People are the reason why Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon.com, and Starbucks remain some of the world’s most admired companies.1 That’s why hiring the right employees is so important. Good employees who do outstanding work make their companies great.
Because of this extreme importance of people, hiring has long been rooted in fear—fear of getting it wrong. Making a mistake can be costly. A bad hire can undermine a department, delay a project, and damage the reputation of the hiring manager. The damage doesn’t stop there.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a hiring mistake could cost up to five times the bad hire’s annual salary.2 Also, a majority of chief financial officers surveyed by global staffing firm Robert Half suggests the biggest cost of a bad hire might not be financial. They ranked degraded staff morale and a drop in productivity as more significant issues.3
To ensure they have the right people, leaders have been encouraged to be “slow to hire and quick to fire.” They’ve adopted interviewing techniques that look at past behavior as a predictor of future performance. They’ve also employed testing and technologies to measure skills, analyze personalities, and assess honesty and integrity. One or two rounds of interviews with prospective job candidates have expanded into three, four, or even five rounds. As a result of these intensive and expanded efforts, filling one job can take weeks or months—all in an effort to get it right the first time.
This standard approach (keeping a job open until the right person shows up) has a big downside. In an organization, an empty seat is like an open wound. It’s a painful distraction that interferes with the business’s core mission. The department manager has to manage the extra workload. HR has to add one more task to its already overflowing plate. The talent acquisition team has to scramble to fill one more open job, made harder because of a skills shortage. With every passing day, overtime pay builds up, as do hiring costs.
Finding enough qualified candidates to interview can take weeks or months. Once they begin, the multiple rounds of interviews are often followed by testing, reference checking, and background checks. Finally, if all goes well, an offer is made to the most qualified person. However, if that offer is rejected and the second choice candidate has already moved on, the process starts all over again, adding more time, more effort, more expense, more overtime, more interviews.
Has slow to hire and quick to fire worked? Not if you’re a leader with an unfilled job. Certainly not if you’re in HR and can’t find enough qualified people. Definitely not if you’re in talent acquisition, and your best candidate was hired by a faster competitor. Time-to-fill (the length of time it takes to fill a job) is at an all-time high (Figure Intro.1),4 and there’s been no improvement to employee turnover.5
FIGURE INTRO.1 Time-to-Fill (dhihiringindicators.com)
The world operates on a faulty premise: People equate time and effort spent on hiring with making a quality hire. The more time they take, the more energy they expend, the better the hire will be. It gives them a false sense of control. Taking lots of time to hire doesn’t save companies from bad hires; it only saves people from making a decision they’re afraid may be wrong. It’s not that these are bad people. They simply have bought into a bad idea. The old way of hiring is to keep a job open until the right person shows up. It’s created long time-to-fill, lots of open seats, higher expenses, added effort, and frustrated leaders.
Hiring is broken, and that’s why I wrote this book. There’s a new way to hire that’s faster, efficient, and effective. Instead of waiting for the right person to show up, the new way to hire is to wait for the right job to show up. Instead of waiting until a seat is empty to search for talent, the new way of hiring starts the talent search before that job opens. Rather than recruiting from behind, it requires that leaders plan ahead, lining up talented people before they are needed.
The importance of having talented people in each role exactly when they’re needed makes the new way of hiring a strategic imperative. Everyone involved in employee selection—executives, hiring managers, HR, and recruiters—is part of an efficient process that fills jobs the day they become open.
If you’re thinking this sounds too simple or too good to be true, you’re not alone. That’s a common reaction—that is, until you look at how the rest of the world has gotten much faster, and how those lessons apply to hiring.
It wasn’t that long ago that simple, everyday tasks took an hour, a day, or longer. The process of booking a trip began with calling a travel agent, who researched options, called us back, and then booked the trip for us. Today, we can book that flight ourselves in a matter of minutes. Depositing checks meant getting in the car, driving to bank, waiting in line, and handing those checks to a bank teller. With mobile banking, we can make those same deposits from our desk in a matter of seconds. Developing photos used to require mailing the roll of film to a processor or dropping it off at the one-hour photo store. Now, we can instantly view those photos on our cameras or smartphones and immediately print them at home.
Being faster than competitors, without sacrificing quality and accuracy, has given a growing number of companies a distinct, competitive edge. Take for example sandwich shops, arguably one of the most oversaturated segments of the restaurant trade. In 1983, then 19-year-old Jimmy John Liautaud opened his first sandwich shop in Charleston, Illinois. Offering delivery of his sandwiches made his shop popular. As the company grew, Jimmy John’s made a choice not just to deliver but to do so faster than competitors, what they refer to as “freaky fast delivery.”6 Their commitment to providing a quality product with speed has paid off, elevating Jimmy John’s to the number-one spot on Entrepreneur magazine’s list of top 500 franchises.7
Getting something fast used to mean sacrificing quality. Accuracy once required time and lots of patience. Today, more of what we need or want can be acquired right now or just minutes from now. From downloads to deliveries to services on command, the rise of the on-demand economy has made speed a requirement for doing business, not just a competitive advantage. The development of the process that drives the on-demand economy demonstrates that speed, quality, and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.
This brings us to an important question: What happens when you apply the process for the on-demand delivery of products and services to hiring? The answer: You get organizations that can fill their jobs in less than an hour. Throughout the book, you’ll learn how companies across the globe have applied the principles of the on-demand economy to hiring. You’ll gain a step-by-step process for implementing fast and accurate hiring of quality employees in your company. Also, you’ll discover consequences that many find surprising: Hiring faster creates better employees and improved working relationships.
My involvement with High Velocity Hiring started when I was 16 years old and looking for my first job. I went door to door, visiting the businesses all around my Canton, Ohio, neighborhood. I asked for a job at a florist, a dry cleaner, a car dealer, and a few convenience stores. I even asked for a job at a funeral home. I heard variations of the same “no.” It wasn’t until I got to a little mom-and-pop restaurant, The Sandwich and Waffle Shop, that I was hired as a busboy on the spot. I, of course, was thrilled and assumed that this was how all businesses hired—quickly and decisively. This belief was reinforced in my first year of college, when I applied to work in a manufacturing plant and was hired that same day.
A few years later, I began my career as a recruiter. That wasn’t my original plan. In college, I was a music major who wanted to become a high school band director. I learned about recruiting when I went to an employment agency, looking to earn extra money. During the interview, the office manager asked if I’d ever considered a job in the staffing industry. I didn’t know there was such an industry. While I didn’t accept her offer, it did plant a seed. That I could earn a living matching people and jobs seemed like a meaningful career. Within a few months, I sought out my first staffing job. It came with what I thought was a highly impressive title—executive search consultant.
As I began my tenure in recruiting, I discovered that the instantaneous hiring I had experienced was far from the norm. At the employers I contacted, jobs had frequently been open for weeks, months, and sometimes years. Often, these jobs weren’t open because of a lack of candidates. The companies had already interviewed dozens of people, some of whom were well qualified. However, they weren’t hired, even though that empty seat was delaying projects, creating missed opportunities, and costing lots of overtime. These companies allowed the process to drag on and on.
These hiring delays were also affecting job candidates. Many were already working full-time jobs and had little time to deal with a drawn-out hiring process. In some cases, I watched qualified candidates grow so frustrated that they abandoned their search. Rather than tolerate an inefficient, prolonged job search that may or may not improve their circumstances, they chose to stick it out with their current employers—even when their current jobs were not meeting their needs.
I saw this as an opportunity. Yes, this was about doing the greater good and facilitating a process where the needs of all parties were met quickly. Just as important, I felt like I had found my purpose. I had always wanted to make a difference, which is one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher. What I never expected is that I would be teaching people a new way of hiring. Was this easy? Heavens no! I was working against the status quo. I had to have talent ready to go, encourage hiring managers to act quickly, and then keep the process moving forward.
The payoff of being an on-demand provider of talent became clear quickly. One of my favorite examples is that of a manufacturer in North Carolina. Their information technology department needed a leader. Based upon their previous experiences with recruiters, they thought it would take months to find the correct person. However, since I had cultivated a Talent Inventory, my “warehouse” of people that were ready to go, that wasn’t the case. I told them about Mark, a candidate in my warehouse, who they hired the very next day. That was more than two decades ago, and Mark is still there, reinforcing for me that rapid hiring can be done immediately and accurately. In fact, he was promoted to chief technology officer and plans on retiring there—unless he gets an unexpected call from NASA.
Watching the ongoing, positive impact that this approach was having in the companies I led inspired me to share this with a broader audience. That is why I became a business advisor and consultant, creating the Wintrip Consulting Group in 1999. Since then, I’ve been honored to work with companies across the globe, helping them to implement a process that allows them to hire in an instant: The very same process you’ll learn about, in detail, in this book.
You’ll also read about the impact an on-demand approach to hiring has had for companies both large and small, including:
• Why a financial institution was able to recruit more top talent than they could ever hire
• How a technology company improved new-hire success by over 90 percent
• Why a hospital could fill open nursing jobs in less than an hour
• How a manufacturer eliminated turnover for its most critical roles
Having now shared this expertise with thousands of companies, and tens of thousands of their employees, I know that, together, we have impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have gone to work faster, improving their lives and circumstances along the way. All the while, those companies have become better organizations that achieved improved revenue, higher employer retention, and greater market share, just to name a few of the many positive results.
In Chapter 1 we’ll explore the primary cause of open jobs and long time-to-fill, along with beliefs and common recruiting and hiring methods that keep people stuck in the status quo. Chapter 2 begins our focus on eliminating these causes of inefficient hiring. We’ll look at the rise of the on-demand economy and how we can apply its core principles to filling jobs. Chapters 3 through 8 detail the steps of the Talent Accelerator Process (TAP), the method you’ll use to engage in High Velocity Hiring:
• Step #1—Create Hire-Right Profiles: You’ll learn how to create detailed blueprints of who’s the best fit for a job.
• Step #2—Improve Candidate Gravity: To draw a better flow of top talent that matches each Hire-Right Profile, you’ll discover how to assess and improve the attractive force your company has on potential employees.
• Step #3—Maximize Hiring Styles: To counteract hiring blindness, a psychological phenomenon that narrows perceptive ability and causes hiring mistakes, I’ll illustrate how to create hiring teams comprised of four complementary hiring styles.
• Step #4—Conduct Experiential Interviews: You’ll learn how to conduct experiential interviews, allowing you to gain absolute proof that a candidate either does or does not fit the needs of your company.
• Step #5—Maintain a Talent Inventory: To ensure that jobs can be filled the instant they open, you’ll discover how to build and maintain a supply of people ready to be hired the moment they are needed.
• Step #6—Keep the TAP Flowing: You’ll learn what can interfere with the new way of hiring, and gain methods to ensure you can always hire in an instant.
Chapter 9 explains how to improve hiring efficiency using automation. In Chapter 10, you’ll learn how to partner with the best external talent scouts. Chapter 11 shows you how to use the Talent Accelerator Process to sustain a diverse workforce.
Throughout the book, I’ve included stories about leaders and organizations across the globe. In many instances, I mention the leader by first name only, and I describe their organization without identifying it explicitly. This was done either at their request or to protect confidentiality.
At the end of every chapter, you’ll find a list of suggested action steps. These will help you implement the ideas you’ll be reading. I recommend bookmarking these pages, as they will serve as a ready reference that you’ll want to review often.
Before we begin, I want to say “thank you,” but not just for buying this book. How your organization finds and selects people is the most important part of your business strategy. Your involvement in the hiring process impacts the most important asset of your company and is a very important part of people’s lives. Thank you for the work you do each day. By making the hiring process faster and more accurate, your organization will have talented people instead of empty seats. The people in those seats will have faster access to the resources they need to live their lives and support their families. Now, together, let’s get started so you can hire in an instant.