Are you hiring too many 90-day wonders?

I find it interesting that most hiring managers will spend more time thinking about and evaluating which car, refrigerator or TV to buy, than interviewing and evaluating candidates.

We’re now conducting a survey to determine the impact interview time and rigor has on predicting candidate performance. As part of this we also want to determine how these factors impact a company’s ability to attract top performers. To get a sense of the importance of all this consider the following question:

For you, what is the purpose of the interview? (select all that apply)

• Hire someone to fill a job quickly
• Hire someone who is long-termer
• Hire a high achiever who’s looking for a career move
• Screen out the weakest
• See if someone makes a good first impression
• Hire someone whom you like the most
• Hire someone who makes a great first impression
• Determine if someone fits in the culture
• Determine if someone is technically competent
• Hire someone who’s self-motivated
• Hire someone who possesses the four “A”s – affable, attractive and assertive, with good academics
• Demonstrate to the candidate that your company has high selection standards where every person hired is highly valued and they’ll be working on high impact projects
• If you’re the hiring manager, demonstrate to the candidate that you’re building a team of top performers, that you’re an outstanding a leader, and someone a top performer would be honored to be part of your team.
• Prove to every candidate that you’re smarter than they are
• Prove to every candidate that you’re an important gatekeeper

Now consider the following outcomes, as a result of the above:

• After a person is hired, how long does it take to determine if the new hire is fully competent to do all of the work required?
• How long does it take after the person is on board to determine if the person is highly motivated to do the work required without urging or excess direction.
• How long does it take to figure out if the new person consistently meets all performance objectives.
• How long after the person is hired would you feel extremely confident enough to recommend the person for a bigger job or to take over a critical project?
• How long does it take the new hire to realize what the job is fully about and wasn’t misled?

If your answers to any of the above are longer than a day, how can you possibly judge the person on these same factors in less than a hour? So what is the real purpose of the interview? For most it seems the real purpose of the interview is to hire "90-day Wonders." These are people who are affable, outgoing, technically competent and make good first impressions, but 90 days later you begin to wonder.

When I started out as a headhunter in 1978, I offered a 90-day guarantee. In the next 10 years and 300 senior staff and mid-management placements later, I only had to replace one candidate. In 1990 everything changed. I shifted to a one-year guarantee. No longer was an assessment based on presentation, personality and technical competency enough. I discovered that hiring a 90-day Wonder could be safely done in about two short interviews, totaling about 90 minutes. These people could fill the basic role reasonably well and were likable enough, but it was problematic if they would rise much above the starting position. To hire someone for a year or longer, required a different process. In this case the purpose of the interview changed to the following:

1. Determine if the person is both competent and motivated to do the actual work required (this is why a performance-based job description is an essential first step).
2. Ensure the person fits within the company’s culture, especially with the management style of the hiring manager (measuring this is not based on first impressions).
3. Evaluate the person on his/her potential to take on bigger jobs within a year or two (this is the second question in the two-question Performance-based Interview).
4. Demonstrate to the candidate that the job is a true career move despite a modest increase in compensation (this takes more time, excellent recruiting skills and a rigorous assessment process)

10 years and 200 senior management placements later using this approach, only five people didn’t hit the one-year mark, and three of these were with the same hiring manager. None of their subpar performance had to do with technical competency or thinking skills either, all had to do with cultural fit. If you ignore first impressions (it’s a roll of the dice if you don’t), in about an hour you can figure out if someone is maybe a dud (the bottom 20%) or maybe an all-star (the top 10%). But the other 70% of technically qualified people range from those who are not good enough to promote and not bad enough to fire, to those who could become your next group of company leaders. It takes another few hours to separate the two groups. About as much time to figure our which TV, car or refrigerator to buy.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the Amazon best-selling author of Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007) and the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, is now available on Amazon. You might want to join Lou's new LinkedIn group to discuss this and related hiring issues.