Courage Quotient: How many organizations have the courage to hire and retain the best people?

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When it comes to hiring - most of the organizations set up noble mission of hiring the best of the best – at least to hire best people by their respective standards and no organization in the world disagrees with the fact that hiring inferior quality leads to destruction of the organization. In same way every organization tries to put together all possible measures to retain them, the Irony is it is the best they lose every year, and add “not so great people” to replace the best. I think organizations end up in this paradox because of the below reasons. It will be good if HR teams monitor and put a check otherwise all the efforts will go in vain.

“The sin called – “he is overqualified, let’s not hire him”

All of those who are part recruitment would relate to this statement really well because they  would get to hear this sentence frequently, Organizations reject candidates because someone has couple of years of more experience than what the job description says, their argument would be “He/she will be expecting a bigger role” and we cannot keep them happy. Sometimes feedback will be like “he has done better things already I don’t think the work we have will excite him” It could be true in some cases, but the crucial point that the interview panel/Organization miss here is that particular candidate will not remain in the same role over period of 2-3 years, he/she will grow and need to grow to help organization better. So keep the future needs in mind and hire people. Hence it is worth enough to hire such people that will help organization in the long run even it means paying 2-3 lakhs more than the usual salary.

Action from HR Teams

Keep a track of number of rejects under the heading of “Over qualified” every month, talk to the interview panel and later find out for what they might suit better.Have courage to create positions/Roles for such candidates who are really good, don’t lose them  

Sometimes best things do not come so easily

Great people are most sought after too, hence it becomes difficult to attract best people in to the organization, most recruitment teams settle for compromise here because we have the pressure of filling the role and they ant be blamed for the same. It is the organization who should support Recruitment teams to escape from the routine of SLAs and peruse excellent candidates, give a pat on the back to recruitment team for each great hire made. Leadership teams should identify at least few open roles/positions as “does not fall under the SLA’s – get the best” and gradually the culture hiring the best will become usual, recruitment teams will not succumb to the pressure of SLAs. If organization don’t show courage to do this. They would have to live in a scenario where people are not scaling up and not delivering expected results.

Interviewer’s insecurity closes doors for rock stars

All recruiters agree with me with the point that there are bad interviewers not because they conduct interviews in a bad way but because they get scared by bright candidates and reject them. It is wise to deal this issue from the other side.

Think once, have you ever recognized a good interviewer? If so how frequently? This does not happen in organizations. This is a costly ignorance; applaud people who are getting “best material” in to your organization. This might sound idealistic but think again once who would not like to get noticed for doing good. A thank note to a good interviewer means a lot, that sends a right message to rest of the interviewers.  You could ask me how exactly I think this is possible. Well end performance appraisal season J is the key time here; prepare the list of “great performers” who joined a year back - now go back to your files and check who interviewed these guys, that’s all, if you see a consistent trend with a particular interviewer selecting best performers award him. In the same way if you find a trend between an interviewer and poor performers caution them. It consumes some time for sure but it is worth it and volume of the recruitment and number of employees does not cause a problem at all.

Retention is high, great! But who are you retaining?

It is great to have high retention rate /low attrition rate but it is important see who are we retaining? Retaining 50 B players will not be equal to retaining 2 A players. An organization losing A players will become a huge bunch of mediocres where there is no innovation. So while doing attrition analysis, do try to know on how many rock stars have you lost this year as per previous year’s performance rating. Dont worry even your attrition rate is 30%, but worry a lot if  5-10% of them are “great players”. Retaining “Rock stars” does not mean spending more money always and giving to them regularly. In most cases it could be done by just moving them in to the team they want, changing their work, changing their manager.

Do you have the courage to listen to the outgoing employee?

We all say oye yes! We do exit interviews religiously for all leavers and document the summary of them. But what we do after that is the big question, exit interview is just a formality and the moment an employee resigns in most of the cases that employee becomes insignificant; the feedback he gives becomes even more insignificant. It is true that leaver throws out their frustration during exit interviews; it is also true that they give useful feedback because there is no need for them to impress anyone anymore. HR team should have courage to face the criticism from leavers and pay attention to them, think honestly to bring their feedback in to the strategy.