Newsletter: March 2004
Best Candidates vs Best Employees by James Duran
I recently took advantage of an opportunity to attend a webinar
on the subject of identifying Best Candidates and Best Employees.
The program was led by Lou Adler, a knowledgeable and well-known
writer and frequent speaker on the Professional HR & Employment
circuit.
Best candidate and best employee are one and the same... right?
Wrong. In his one hour, interactive online presentation, Mr. Adler
outlines the criteria and the importance of distinguishing between
the two, and why it's so critical to a successful staffing effort.
Needless to say, he advocates we should all be trying to hire and
retain our best employees and guard against the natural tendency
to select the "best candidate."
Lou is a big proponent of developing a systematic and measurable
process for hiring top employees. Here, his basic proposition was:
An interviewee's convincing resume and polished interviewing skills
are not great predictors of a good job fit, motivation to do the
work, or a high performance level over the long term. The ability
to recognize the difference between top employees and top candidates
is a critical skill and an essential component in any systematic
evaluation schema. Confusing the two when making a hiring decision
is on the short list of top hiring mistake.
According to Lou, here are some of the characteristics of each
group:
Top Employees:
- Are highly motivated to do the work
- Extremely Competent
- Strong team players
- More discriminating
- Take longer to decide
- Require more information
- Decide with others
- Value opportunity over compensation
- Won't apply to average jobs
- Look for new job infrequently
Top Candidates:
- Have a good resume
- Good skill
- Are on time and prepared
- Enthusiastic
- Make a great first impression
- Are motivated to get a job
- Have a short term focus
- Are aggressively looking
- Have applied to multiple jobs
Lou's analysis reveals that only about one third of a company's
top candidates turn out to be top employees. And surprisingly, about
2 out of 3 "great employees" do not come across as "great
candidates." In this persistent employers' job market, there
is a glut of "top candidates." The hiring challenge is
to identify and eliminate them from the pool of candidates that
actually have the potential to become top employees.
Some of the core practices Lou suggests to hire top employees fall
into five areas:
1. Job Profiliing - creating performance based
job descriptions and defining the work required vs. the qualifications
of the person
2. Job Branding - Branding the job and employer
by advertising the job as providing challenging work impacting the
company mission or strategy
3. Semi-sourcing - finding the semi active and
semi passive candidates who are also top employees
4. Job Matching - Using proven interview and assessment
processes going beyond ordinary behavioral interviewing techniques
that eliminates hiring competent people who are not motivated, and
5. One on One Recruiting - Implementing a recruitment
intensive consultative selling vs. transactional approach toward
hiring the best employees.
Lou has a whole program called Hiring 2.0, designed to give recruiters
the knowledge and skills necessary to make hiring top talent a systematic
business process.
Don't take this brief summary as the gospel. Instead, use it to
provoke your own thinking and as an impetus to take a closer look
at your current hiring practices. Consider what skills you need
to improve so that you can better identify good employees vs. good
candidates. Use Lou's insight to evaluate and improve your existing
evaluation processes so you don't screen out your best employees.
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of finding, selecting and hiring
people, I can hardly think of anyone better. You can learn more
about Lou Adler at http://www.adlerconcepts.com.
James Duran is the founder and President of Duran Human Capital
Partners Inc., http://www.duranhcp.com
Duran HCP is a staffing, HR consulting and Payroll Service company
catering to high tech companies in the Silicon Valley.
James Duran
Duran Human Capital Partners, Inc.
300 Orchard City Drive, Suite 227
Campbell, CA 95008
D 408 540-0071
C 408 893-4905
F 408 540-0069
jamesd@duranhcp. com
jamesduran44@earthlink. net
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