Make the Right Hire

Key tips on benchmarking, interviewing and performance planning

By Evan Pattak

For every manufacturer, its workforce is its heart and soul – keeping the shop floor humming, the front office streamlined and overall operations well oiled.

Accordingly, manufacturers have intensified their scrutiny of job candidates by probing attitude and behavior, as well as experience. They’re benchmarking, too, by developing profiles of what successful employees should look like, then hiring people who match those profiles. They’re also polishing their interviewing techniques to elicit the most predictive information. And once they hire, they’re implementing performance planning models to ensure that the individual goals of employees are aligned with the company’s primary objectives.

Here’s a look at the local state of the art in hiring and team-building, along with advice from some of the leaders in these disciplines.

Make a mark with benchmarking

“How many times have you heard an employer say, ‘I wish I had 10 of that guy?’” Sanford Kulkin muses. “That’s what we do for our clients. We get 10 of those guys.”

Kulkin isn’t into cloning. Rather, he’s the Founder and President of PeopleKeys™, a New Castle-based firm that, through benchmarking, helps companies zero in on just the right candidates for their needs and cut significant time from the interviewing/hiring process. PeopleKeys is marketed by the firm Giant Insights from offices in Punxsutawney, Pa.

Advertise for a position in today’s market and you’ll likely receive hundreds of resumes, each more glowing than the next. Interview your top candidates and they all seem sharp. So how can you select the best candidates in the shortest amount of time?

That’s where PeopleKeys comes in with a three-phase process to consummate the perfect match. First, Kulkin and his team benchmark the position, interviewing the incumbent who is about to leave as well as those who worked most closely with the departing staffer. That helps Kulkin fashion a list of attributes that the replacement should have — attributes that go well beyond the career stops that usually dominate resumes.

“We benchmark qualities, traits, thinking styles, personality styles and skill sets of successful people in a workforce, then develop hiring models to match a person to the criteria we’re modeling,” Kulkin says.

Once the profile is established, applicants respond to a series of questions that PeopleKeys, through a software tool, uses for screening. The exercise is brief and can be done on-line. By analyzing responses, PeopleKeys can characterize candidates by personal style — theorists, executors, analyzers, managers or strategists. Applicants’ answers may reveal the need for a great deal of personal freedom or perhaps strong inclinations to loyalty, characteristics that Kulkin calls “hidden motivators.”

By matching prospects’ styles to the position models, PeopleKeys can winnow the applicant pool quickly.

Then it’s time for the final stage of PeopleKeys — interviews with those top candidates. But these won’t be your standard sessions, as PeopleKeys provides its clients with interview questions based on information gathered in the screening process.

“When people are interviewed, it’s their job to get the job,” Kulkin says. “They’ll tell you anything. In the technology world, it’s not just about experience. There are too many places for a tech system to go wrong. You need to know candidates’ values as well. You can observe a person’s personality, you can observe how that person thinks. But you cannot observe the hidden motivators.”

Such major clients as Manpower Inc., American Water Works Company, Inc. and the United States Air Force Academy have used PeopleKeys, although Kulkin suggests that organizations of any size can benefit.

“The smaller the shop, the more critical the hire,” Kulkin says. “As long as somebody knows how to retrieve information from a computer system, PeopleKeys will work for that company.”

Prepare thoroughly for interviews, then prepare some more

Whether or not you utilize benchmarking to help you craft precise questions, the interview remains one of your most important selection tools. Even this traditional feature of the hiring process has evolved. Just as benchmarking can uncover hidden motivators, contemporary interviewing at tech companies often focuses on behavior rather than job titles and responsibilities alone. Says Joe Kennedy, office leader for Mercer Human Resource Consulting:

“You ask somebody, ‘Tell me about a specific situation and how you handled it,’ rather than, ‘What do you think you would do?’ It’s meant to get at how somebody has behaved historically with the idea that they’re likely to behave similarly going forward. This is a change. I don’t think you would have seen that type of behavior question 15 years ago.”

For all that, the most important element in successful interviews — preparation on the company’s part — hasn’t changed. Certainly, the burden of readiness falls on candidates. But hiring managers who back-burner applications until candidates are sitting across the table likely won’t unearth the most telling information.

“Detailed preparation is absolutely critical, yet you see this precept violated all the time — even in the most sophisticated organizations,” Kennedy says. “For example, it’s important that folks involved in the process look at the job description, understand the qualifications for the job and understand what makes the difference between someone who’s really good at this job and someone who’s mediocre or not good at it.

“Thinking this through is not trivial. Folks often go into this situation with a gut sense without giving adequate thought to the critical competencies and experiences you need to do a really good job. Gut plays a role, but you don’t want it to be your only guide. You just don’t get it right 100 percent of the time. To go in with the handicap of not being prepared and not analyzing the situation is just inexcusable.”

Implement performance planning

Benchmarking and crackerjack interviewing will help you assemble your team, but your job isn’t done. Still another vital task is grounding your team in the proper goals and operating style. If employees follow their own game plans, they may charge headlong into pursuits that don’t advance the company’s primary objectives. Through performance planning, all employees understand the company’s vision, mission and goals — and set their personal agendas accordingly.

That’s not an uncommon starting point, but in the rush to get products to market or secure financing, many young tech firms neglect to reinforce their expectations of employees. Their performance plans fail as a result.

“Follow-through — that’s the piece where we see a lot of people fall down,” says Fiore Londino, Partner and CoFounder of Pareto Consulting LLC. “Anybody can make a great plan, but if you don’t pay attention to it, your business reverts to what it was before.”

Performance planning typically begins with the senior leadership team enumerating and disseminating throughout the company the most important business goals — and the behaviors most likely to lead to goal achievement. A typical list would include such behaviors or qualities as teamwork, adaptability, initiative, and integrity.

“It’s not a laundry list,” Londino says. “Choose a handful of behaviors for which everyone will be accountable, behaviors that say: ‘This is who we are, and these are the behaviors that we want to see manifest in our people.’ Think of a sales person who opens many doors but leaves a lot of broken glass. He did what he was supposed to do but not in the right manner, and that ends up costing more in time and effort than if he hadn’t opened any doors. Performance planning helps assure that behavior is aligned with goals.”

Developing a performance planning model won’t require a heavy investment of your time, at least initially.

“A company should be able to develop a plan within 15 to 20 hours, assuming they’re getting outside help in plan design,” Londino says. “That’s not a lot of time. But sticking to it requires discipline.”

A good plan will be as restrictive or as flexible as your company’s predominant management style. A solid performance plan also can assist you in recruiting and hiring; the behaviors you’ve identified as primary for current staff can inform your search for new employees. Much like benchmarking, performance planning stresses behavior and style, Sandy Kulkin’s hidden motivators that some employers might not consider as crucial as the requisite experience and skills. But the cost of hiring mismatches or poorly communicated objectives can be great; companies that undervalue style and goal alignment may be courting disaster.

“The research is pretty emphatic that companies that focus on these types of processes will outperform their competitors,” Londino says. “Companies will always have excuses. Over the last couple years, it’s been: ‘We’re short of people.’ The counter to that is, you have so few people now that you really have to make sure you’re performing at a high level.”