How to Find the “Right Stuff”
Article by Dr. John E. Kello
How To Find "The Right Stuff": Placing the Right People on Your Bus
A well-known organizational theorist at Harvard is reported to have once said, “Give me the very best people to work with and watch what a great manager I become.” But, when we hire or promote someone to a new level of responsibility, how do we know we are getting “the right stuff”? There is abundant evidence that a good hiring or placement decision for a key role can make a vast difference (in some cases a multi-million-dollar difference) in the performance of the organization. We all want the right stuff on our team, so how do we find it?
Identify the Competencies
A primary tool that people in my business use for identifying the right stuff is the competency study, which is essentially a determination of the skills that are deemed critical to a particular role. Competency data can be gathered in a wide variety of ways. One extraordinary resource available to all is the O*NET (www.onetonline.org), an online and continually updated version of the old hardcopy volume, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Representing a tremendous amount of research, the O*NET lists jobs and job families, and for each entry gives detailed information about the knowledge, skills, and abilities that research has determined are important to the role. I think it is an excellent starting place for identifying key job skills for essentially any position, which can then be tailored to the specifics of the job in question.
Beyond using the resources of the amazing O*NET, when I am doing a competency study (and I have done many), I interview a sample of subject matter experts, which includes incumbents in the role, some of their managers and employees, and peers in their department and other departments with whom they interact. I use a structured-interview process to get their thoughts about the competencies that are critical to success in the job, and the typical work situations in which those competencies are used.
I find that when such studies are done for given roles, and their results are compared, some strong common-denominator competencies tend to be found across a surprisingly wide range of job titles and responsibilities. First and foremost, people skills – interpersonal effectiveness, relationship building, teamwork, communication with respect, conflict management – are a critical foundation of the right stuff, a common set of competencies that is the great differentiator of poor, good, or great performers in many, many roles. Additionally, some personal cognitive/self-management skills – problem-solving, planning and prioritizing, initiative – are also part of the puzzle, and, especially in leadership roles, a third skill set comprising vision, strategic thinking, flexibility, and adaptability becomes extremely important.
Let’s say you and your organization have done a competency study to identify the “right stuff” for key roles (like yours). How does that understanding of what it takes translate into hiring and promoting the right folks?
The Resume and the Unstructured Interview
Traditional approaches to hiring and promotion have focused on the easier-to-assess factors of work experience and technical competence, which are important and beneficial, but more often than not aren’t critical determinants of who will excel. A lot of folks have been hired and put “on the bus” based on their resume (“x years of experience in similar roles in the industry, the right educational credentials” etc.) and job interview (in which they are typically asked to talk about their work experience in similar roles, their educational background, etc.). The “hit rate” of the traditional resume-based approach is variable. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. In many key roles, the fully loaded costs of a bad hire can be quite high, so again, how indeed to find the right stuff?
The Behavioral Interview
There is a burgeoning business in employee selection tools aimed at answering just that question. One clear step in the right direction is the increasingly popular “behavioral” or “behavior-based” interviewing approach. Interviewers use a structured set of “Tell me about a time when you…” kinds of questions. The blank might be filled in with “…and your team performed extremely well” or “…had to handle a tough conflict with a co-worker,” etc., and these questions invite personal stories that may reveal more of the thought process, values, and priorities predictive of the individual’s on-the-job behaviors. The point is to go beyond (or around) the usual rehash of the resume, maybe supplemented by typical “what are your top three strengths as a manager and what are your top three weaknesses” kinds of questions.
The Situational Interview
There is a step beyond the behavioral interview that I strongly endorse. It is called the “situational interview,” and it allows the interviewer to explore the thought process and likely behaviors of the interviewee even if the interviewee has never personally been in the behavioral scenario described. Also, “good” answers are not so transparently obvious, reducing what psychologists call “social desirability bias”, i.e., the tendency to give a nice-sounding answer that the interviewee thinks the interviewer wants to hear, whether it happens to be exactly true or not.
The situational interview process goes like this. Let’s say you have a competency set for sales managers that prominently features the competencies of relationship management and prioritizing. You might create an interview question something like this: “You are a sales manager in this company. One of your reps calls you and says that a large customer has just contacted her with a product quality complaint. The customer is upset. You have also just gotten a call from your production counterpart, who wants your input ASAP on the agenda for a sales/production coordination meeting that has been scheduled for some time, and is to be held tomorrow. What would your approach be?”
Subject matter experts can quickly develop a scoring protocol for such questions, differentiating excellent from satisfactory from poor answers in terms of the key competencies being sampled. They can also suggest follow-up probing questions which the interviewers can use to get at even more of the interviewee’s thought process.
Here is one that I have used with supervisor candidates: “You look out in the shipping/loading area of your plant, which is not the area you supervise, and notice a couple of contractors who are doing some repair/rebuilding work in the area. Employees working their jobs in the area are wearing required PPE. The contractors, in plain view, are not. What would you do?”
The scoring protocol might focus on relevant competencies of relationship management, prioritizing, communicating, etc., and probing questions might include, “Would you say anything to the company employees? How about to the shipping/loading supervisor? The plant manager? The safety pro? What other actions would you take? Why?”, and so on.
There are grander approaches to ferreting out the right stuff, such as the venerable “assessment center”, in which such situational scenarios might be realistically role-played in a high-fidelity job simulation spread over several days, rather than presented as a hypothetical situational question for discussion. Indeed, for some purposes, the lengthier and costlier assessment center process is the fine-edged tool of choice. My team and I have developed and helped to run many of them, with good results.
Additionally, while it is still a bit experimental, some elements of the right stuff can be predicted moderately well by personality variables, and there are several personality profiling instruments available which have been validated for a variety of work roles. They are not in and of themselves perfect predictors, but they can help improve the hit rate of a selection process.
But, pound for pound, a well-designed situational interview based on a carefully done competency study is a highly effective (including cost effective) way for companies to increase their success rate in finding that all-important right stuff, the foundation of their culture of excellence. It is a tool worth looking at. How about an interview question like this one: “The top leaders in your organization have asked you to make specific recommendations to them as to how to create an effective and sustainable positive safety culture in the company. What would your advice be?”
Organizational excellence depends on finding, hiring, and then developing and retaining top talent. You don’t get there without the “best people”.
