CEO, best-selling author, created Performance-based Hiring. Recent book: The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired
The Future of Hiring and Recruiting, Circa 2020-2025
"Maximizing
personal growth and job satisfaction in the short term will maximize
compensation in the long term."
In
1998 I took a snapshot of the hiring process used at most companies. (It was a
special camera.) The image shown was drawn in 1998. Does it look familiar to
what's going on today? Since things in HR move in slow motion, I’ve decided to
take a picture of the hiring landscape 10 years into the future. I’m pretty sure
I’ll be retired by then, so I’ll use this post to reminisce about the future
that could be.
Talent
becomes a business strategy, not just a mission statement.
Company leaders will finally realize that if hiring great people is the most
important thing hiring managers need to do, they’ll actually be measured on how
well they do it.
The
elimination of skills-infested job descriptions. Skills,
academics and experiences don’t predict on-the-job performance. By proving that
candidates are competent and motivated to do the actual work required under the
actual circumstance, you’ll discover they have the exact level of skills,
experiences and academics required. This shift will also open the pool of
prospects to diverse candidates of all types regardless of age, race, gender or
physical challenges. (Here'sa
legal brief you can download describing this process as not only
superior, but more legally defensible.)
Performance-based
matching becomes fully effective.
Rather than matching people on key words, the ability to use artificial
intelligence to match a person based on their past performance becomes
available. This allows anyone who has a track record of comparable
accomplishments to be considered. This will instantly open the door to more top
candidates in different industries, including and especially, returning military
veterans. Comparability will be based on job complexity, types of decisions
made, underlying business conditions and job pressures, organizational structure
and sophistication, and breadth of team responsibility.
Companies
finally realize that the best people are not interested in lateral
transfers. It’s
pretty obvious that if a company wants to hire a great person, they need to
offer a great career opportunity. The posting of traditional job descriptions
will be banned as archaic, and recruitment advertising will be story-based,
emphasizing what the person can do, learn and become, not the skills they must
have. Here’s
a sample of this type of futuristic ad we used for a real
job.
Auto-engage
high probability prospects with career opportunities.
People give lots of clues whenever they’re thinking of switching jobs. For
example, they buy
this book on job-hunting secrets or watch
this video, they update their LinkedIn profile, they expand their
professional network, they attend more industry events, they Google for jobs to
see what’s available, and they check out salary.com. Since their LinkedIn
profile is public, it’s pretty easy to push jobs directly to these people when
these job-hunting activities reach a certain level. They’ll actually respond if
these jobs represent career moves, not lateral transfers.
Assessment
accuracy emerges from the dark ages.
Competency models and behavioral interviewing will be tossed out as far better
tools emerge. These outdated tools are as bad as relying on the continued use of
skills-infested job descriptions to attract people. I’m going with Performance-based
Interviewing, objective
evidence-based assessments using talent
scorecards, Career
Zone analysis, and AI-based fit assessments.
People
will become an investment to be nurtured, not a cost to be
controlled.
Robust public and private knowledge databases will be available (think LinkedIn
on steroids), that fully describe a person’s performance and potential. As new
jobs open up, companies will be able to instantly target their current and
former employees who are best suited for these roles. This will enable a company
to finally leverage its human capital.
Hiring
becomes a legitimate business process. If
the demand for top talent is greater than the supply, you can’t use a process
designed to weed out the weak; you need one designed to attract the best. Real
time feedback metrics will ensure the process is in control and functioning
properly. This shift is now underway at companies in highly competitive talent
markets, like Silicon Valley. Some are using Performance-based
Hiring as the
foundation.
The
emergence of the hiring manager self-service model driven by the ERP and
VTC. With
all of the above taking place, it will become increasingly easier for a hiring
manager to tap into his or her company Employee Referral Program (ERP) and
instantly obtain a list of pre-qualified, warm referrals. Candidate pipelines
will become a thing of the past as Virtual Talent Communities (VTC) became the
primary means to connect people with opportunities. VTCs are the sum total of a
company's employees' first degree connections.
1 Candidates
make rigorous and balanced career decisions.
The Career
Zone model presented in an
earlier post offers job-seekers a sophisticated means to evaluate any career
opportunity by considering all of the long- and short-term factors in balance.
It starts by figuring out where the person is positioned on the career curve and
selecting new opportunities that maximize job stretch and job growth, not
compensation. Maximizing personal growth and job satisfaction in the short term
will maximize compensation in the long term.
Imagine
the impact of improved workforce mobility as described. There'd be better jobs
for everyone, more satisfied people, a more productive economy and a big drop in
unemployment as jobs are filled more quickly and more accurately. But hold on.
About 10 years ago, I put together another list of hiring predications for circa
2010-2015. Funny, they looked a lot like the above. I guess I’m not very good at
predicting.
__________________________________________
Lou
Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler
Group, a consulting firm helping companies implement
Performance-based Hiring. His latest book, The Essential Guide
for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench,
2013), covers the performance-based process described in this article in more
depth. For more hiring advice, join Lou's LinkedIn
group and
follow his Wisdom About
Work series
on Facebook.
