How to hire high achievers

Recruitment is all about minimising the risk of hiring the wrong person. Because hiring an unsuitable employee is expensive. So with that in mind, what is the most expensive employee you can hire? Well it's what we call a category three employee. Essentially there are four types of candidates that we can recruit.

There are the unsuitables. They are easy to eliminate in the recruitment process. An entry-level junior recruiter can do this for you.

And then there's the second category, the maybes. They may have the right personality but not quite the right experience, or vice versa. You may be able to stretch them, train them, over time, but there is a higher risk associated with taking them on board. We really only consider these candidates if we cannot find what we're looking for in the pile of better looking candidates.

And then there are the ones that look potentially great. Resume and their experience is of interest. We interview them, impressive. We test them and reference check them, fantastic. We hire them. And then we realise that we wish we had not. And I bet we have all hired some of those at one point.

Then there are the candidates that looks fantastic. We hire them and they are truly sensational. And they excel and they stay. And these are the people who are all looking for.

The difficulty in recruitment is to identify a category three candidate that looks great but is not, and separate them from the category four candidates, the ones that look great and are truly great. The category three candidates are the really expensive employees because they're often not so bad that we let them go, even knowing that their performance is not satisfactory. We just hope that they will get there eventually. They have a high opportunity cost and it's constant and ongoing because they keep hanging around the organisation for years. They can easily cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At 11, we use an assessment matrix to minimise the risk of appointing a category three candidate. The assessment matrix is our recruitment blueprint. All the selection criteria are listed on the left side. This is what should be used to assess the candidate's suitability for the role. That will be education, experience, all the way down to KPIs, risks in the pasts, and personality traits. In this case, the recruitment process consists of screening, behavioural based interviewing, document verification, skill testing, personality profiling, and reference checking. All the selection criteria should be addressed at least once during the process. However, depending on their importance, they should have multiple and independent sets of verification.

For example, if we get three independent observations, let's say accept personal responsibility, which we will assess in our interviews, as well as through personality profiling and during the reference checks. If all of these observations lead to the same conclusion, we have minimised the risk for that selection criteria. If a candidate has two positive observations and one negative, then this doesn't mean that the candidate is unsuitable. However, the risk is higher for that selection criteria. The philosophy is to minimise the risk for all the selection criteria through independent, individual, unrelated observations.

At 11, we have created software that built this matrix, and it has made the recruitment process much more transparent and thorough. If you have worked with agencies before, you might have experienced that you gave an agency a spec for a person you're looking for. And shortly afterwards, some CV lands at your doorstep. Why they are suitable, it's not always obvious what process they've gone through can be questionable. The assessment matrix that we have created can assist you in hiring more superstars than underperformers. Feel free to contact us if you wish to hear more and I do thank you for your time.