I've worked almost all of my adult life managing/Leading teams
in restaurants and retail stores. The
average retail turnover hovers between 60% and 100%, often higher in restaurants. Does your turnover fall into that average
range?
Then I would suggest if your turnover is average, your
hiring is average at best. If you’re
good with that… average hiring, average workers, average performance, well…
good luck with that!
If you are not satisfied with your turnover, what can you do
about it? For one thing you must make an
honest assessment of your hiring. I
haven’t figured out why, and I have yet to meet one person who will admit
that they are not good at hiring. It’s hard
to find anyone who will even say that they could use some help at hiring, even
when it is obvious that they are not very good at hiring. Why is that?
Almost everyone will admit that they are not great golfers,
tennis players, or dancers; that we would love a personal trainer, would think
about taking a cooking class, or looking back, wish there had been parenting
classes. No one would think of going
skydiving, scuba diving, or even driving a car without some minimal lessons. Yet pretty much no one is willing to admit that
they aren’t great at hiring, and might be able to use some help.
Since we agree that our turnover is average, then our hiring
cannot be better than average, right?!
And are all of our teams’ high functioning teams, full of superstars? No?
Then how do we justify our thoughts about our hiring skills? On what do we base the belief that we are
good at hiring people?
It takes an honest person to admit that while they are doing
the best they can, they are not achieving the results they want. And isn’t that what the facts are telling us
about our hiring? Someone taught you
what they knew about hiring, and off you went… doing what you could to hire the
best people you could find.
But where is the feedback?
In order for us to get better at something we need feedback. How’s about an example… I hope it makes sense.
If I gave you a bow and some arrows, stood you 20 yards away
from a target, and gave you 2 weeks to practice, even without any coaching you
would get better because you get feedback with every shot. You could try different techniques, and since
you could see how each change affected your accuracy, you would get better
pretty quickly. You might never win any
competitions, and you could certainly get better.
Now what if I put a sheet between you and the target? We’d hire a kid to collect your arrows and
return them to you, so you never see where your shots hit… you’d never get any
feedback… If you don’t get to see where your arrows hit, you never know if any
changes you made had a positive or negative affect on your shooting. Do you think after 2 weeks, or even 2 years
you would get any better? No… how could
you?
When it comes to our hiring, I believe we put a sheet
between our hiring efforts and the results of those efforts. Some of you are asking what in the world I
mean by that, aren’t you? Well… I mean
that since hiring is not like math… there is no perfect right and wrong… there
is no one agreed upon right way to hire, we hire the way we were taught to
hire. We do what we were told would
work, and we expect that it works. And
it’s easy for us to go on thinking that we’re doing a great job hiring, because
the results of our efforts are so far removed from the effort. That distance between our hiring and the
success or failure of the person is the sheet that keeps us from connecting our
efforts with the end result.
We find and interview candidates; we choose one and hire
her. We feel that she is qualified, has
the skills we need, and should be a good fit here. Then what happens? Someone else takes our new hire off to her
job. How is she treated there? We can guess, and hope… and we cannot really
know for sure whether she is welcomed and encouraged, or if she is looked at as
an intruder and ignored. We just don’t know
what perception she has of her new workplace.
How does her boss treat her? Is
he or she a real Leader who will build a strong, trusting relationship with
her, or is our new hire facing an insecure bully who is afraid of strong
women? We can’t know for sure.
So, we see how easy it is to separate our hiring from the
outcome. It’s not our hiring skills;
it’s her… I'll bet she lied about her qualifications.
It’s not our hiring skills; it’s that Leader… he’s a bully and can’t
keep anyone. It’s not our hiring skills…
you see where this is going. Even if we
don’t consciously think these thoughts, it’s how the human mind works. The success or failure of the new hire is too
far removed from our hiring to make it easy for us to objectively judge our
efforts. So we don’t… we just think
we’re doing great, and it’s never out hiring that was at fault.
And… back to the original thought… if our turnover is
average, we have to admit that our hiring is average at best. That is all of the feedback we need. If we continue doing everything the same way,
we will continue to get the same results.
If we want different results we have to change the way we
hire. Would you agree? Disagree? Either way, if you find this discussion interesting, you might want to read Why You Should Hire For What You Can't Train.
Perhaps another time we can talk about all of the reasons
team Leaders should do their own hiring, Hmmm…?
Oh… and if you like my blog, please ‘like’ my Facebook
page. The button is just up there at the
top right. I dare you to click it!
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