In a recent post, we tried to set the table for what “employee engagement” really means and how to think about it. That felt like a good place to begin because the term is fast creeping towards business buzzword territory -- and once it’s there, it will be hard to reclaim as a legitimate strategic advantage for any business.
Here, we’ll discuss “hiring for employee engagement”. Admittedly, this is a tough concept from a measurement standpoint and how best to approach this.
This is how I sometimes tend to think about hiring: obviously, it’s very much an exercise in subjectivity. People are often meeting each other for the first time, rapid first impressions are being determined, and we’ve had the same series of check-ins and interview questions for so long now that most people know how to game the system -- or not.
There’s really no way to tell if someone will be a “good fit” for your organization until they actually work there. 46% of new hires fail within 18 months; only 19% are considered an unequivocal success. That ratio is higher than 2-to-1. Similarly, 23 percent of American workers look for a new job every single day -- and most start that process after they’ve only been at a job for 5.5 months.
There are ways to improve our hiring processes towards engagement, however.
Reduce the disconnect
When I say “disconnect” here, this is what I mean: there’s a way your company addresses and responds to customers, and there’s a way they address and respond to potential candidates. Usually, there’s a massive chasm between the two. Here’s former HR executive Liz Ryan on that topic:
I hope you don’t make your customers and prospects create their own records in Salesforce! You value your customers too much to make them unpaid clerical help, and you need to value job applicants that much or more.
So that’s the first step towards hiring for engagement: start treating candidates like what they are -- people that might soon contribute to your culture and your bottom line.
Along these lines, here are some other suggestions:
- Manage the hiring experience like you would the customer experience: Keep applicants informed during the process. Far too many applicants to too many companies end up seeing themselves as a nuisance to the hiring manager or HR rep. Since the first word of “Human Resources” is “human,” we should aim to make the process more human (i.e. relationship-driven) in nature, just like we try to do with customers.
- Shorten the hiring process: From 2009 to 2013, average time to hire in the U.S. doubled (from 12 days to 24 days). There are some indications it might be over 40 days by 2018. Long, dragged-out hiring processes are not good. While internally people may be arguing that a longer process is necessary to “get the best person,” it usually leads to analysis paralysis, and it’s so many hoops to jump through for the candidate.
- Don’t use ATS: I know most companies would never take this advice, because ATS makes their jobs easier and gives them the “data” they supposedly want on candidates, but … ATS is terrible. It screens out some of the potentially best people before the process even really gets started. This actually leads me to my next point.
Be better about job descriptions
It’s true that job descriptions are a little bit of a relic -- people often enter a company on one description, and then business models shift, and eight months later they’re doing something entirely different. I understand that. But if you want to hire people who will like the job and be engaged in it, you need to at least attempt to accurately reflect the job.
A few quick primers on job descriptions:
- Avoid the “laundry list” approach: We’ve all seen this. It’s 15 qualifications you must have. If you only have 13, the ATS screens you out. This is ridiculous, because it implies a person with 13 of 15 skills could never learn the other two.
- Dump the buzzwords: “Strategic, vision-oriented, goal-driven individual” might sound great when you write it. The words don’t actually mean anything when the job description is out there in the world.
- Think of them as an ad for your culture, and less an ad for your job: This is an invitation to begin a process with a company and learn about them, just as they learn about you. Job descriptions should be set up to highlight your company and what people there are like and strive for. It’s less about the actual job, in all honesty.
Feedback on the job at different levels
You need to involve different levels in your hiring process if you want engaged employees.
I know someone who hired into a company in Texas. His boss would be seated in Texas, but … most of the team he’d eventually work with was seated in Seattle. There had been internal politics whereby the Seattle manager didn’t get to “own” the hire, and you can imagine where this all was headed. The Texas hiring manager didn’t really understand the role, but she got to make the hire. My friend was assigned under her, and realized within 2-3 days that almost all his work would be done with the Seattle team. He had never met them, he was 1,200 miles away from them, and their boss semi-resented him because it wasn’t “his hire.” Productivity was essentially drained away 48 hours into this new job.
I don’t tell this story to make you feel sorry for my friend. Rather, the way we approach a lot of hiring is that a specific HR person and a specific hiring manager work together on “getting an A-Player.” But once that hire is made, the manager may barely interact with them (managers are admittedly busy people). They need to know the team. They need to interview with the people they’ll be doing projects with every day. The hiring manager matters, of course, but if he/she is the only person vetting a hire, how would you possibly know if the hire will fit in with the whole team?
This becomes even more muddled with external recruiters. They are often hired by companies to spearhead hiring processes, sometimes even at executive levels. But because they don’t often know the company culture that well, or the team that the new hire will sit on, it gets murky rather fast.
Understand what your culture is
The whole notion of “engagement,” while a fluffy term to many, basically is a synonym for “fit.” You’re asking: Will this person fit in here?
I’ll be one of the first to admit that executives often pick a bunch of nouns and adjectives and slap those together on a list, tack it to the wall, and call it “core values.” That’s hardly inspiring.
But even if your company does that, you still have to be aware of what your real internal culture is. Is it a very heads-down, get-your-stuff-done-and-leave place? Is it a financially-driven place where everyone yells about making the quarter? Is it a place with yoga balls as chairs? Is there a slide? Are the bosses into coaching, or into acquiring perks for themselves?
Now: it is true that most companies try to portray themselves in the best light possible. The flip side of that, of course, is that sites like Glassdoor have created a cottage industry for really being able to see what a place is like before you commit to working there.
The dark side of “hiring for fit” exists too, unfortunately. You can argue, as The New York Times did, that it’s a new form of discrimination. If “fit” is seen as “more engineers like me,” then that can keep diversity and inclusion programs down. (More on diversity in a second.)
Most people don’t look critically at their own culture, which is human nature. But if your culture is really a “make the quarter” place and you hire someone who wants real purpose and mission, there will not be any engagement there.
This ties a little bit into …
People Analytics
People Analytics is an emerging form of HR data science, whereby past performance and evaluation in roles helps leaders better understand what type of person is needed in a job.
Let’s say someone holds a job (“product manager”) for six years and then leaves their company. The company now has to hire a new product manager.
People Analytics would go through six years of reviews, look at goals/competencies, and see what skills the hire really needed and what they seemed to do well/poorly at. This would create a data bank that says “Hey, for this position we really need these skills, and these are less of a priority.” That can inform the job description for the new hire -- and the hiring process itself.
This could be a very useful tool for HR and for hiring for engagement, but … one problem is that it violates a lot of core workplace psychology. People with a lot of experience in an industry have often been told repeatedly to “trust their gut,” so giving up hiring decisions to a data-backed concept and not “I like the cut of his jib!” scares some people. We can’t ignore that fact.
Diversity
This is a big concept and here I’ll only touch it briefly. It’s nearly impossible to have a fully-engaged workforce if everyone is exactly the same. Most research over the past 50 years has shown that spending time with people different from you makes you a better leader (and person, to boot). Art Markman of UT-Austin noted this about a year ago in Fast Company:
There is a real danger with working in a group made up of people who largely agree with each other. Research demonstrates that when you communicate with other people, you come to think more similarly to them, because in order to understand what they are saying, you have to think like they do. Even if you ultimately disagree with the conclusions they draw, you exit the conversation thinking more similarly to them than you did before.
When we speak of “diversity,” we often mean “Hire more women or minorities.” That is part of it, yes. In the broadest terms, though, it means hire from a variety of backgrounds and ideas -- which will ideally make your company more engaged, more productive, and more profitable.
In Sum
The above ideas are just a few approaches to hiring for an engaged workforce -- or, at the very least, ways to consider your hiring process to make for more engaged team members. The final step in this arc will be “managing for engagement”.