Who

Who to Hire – and How

Your goal when you hire someone for your organization is to find an “A Player,” a superstar employee who “has at least a 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10% of possible candidates could achieve.” Hiring the wrong person can incur additional expenses and productivity shortfalls that cost, on average, 15 times a faulty hire’s “base salary.” Despite the consequences, organizational leaders often hire the wrong people. Managers can make hiring mistakes if they don’t know what the job really requires, if they work from an inadequate pool of potential hires or if they don’t believe they can chose the right person from the available candidates. The main reason managers make hiring mistakes is that they don’t systematize their hiring process. Instead, they fall back on “voodoo hiring methods.”

Here are some examples:

• “Art critic” – This manager expects to make a good visceral judgment on the basis of a few minutes of conversation with a candidate.
• “Sponge” – This manager gets every member of the relevant team to conduct a separate interview, but the team members do not...