KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Conscious Interviewing-Bring Science And Precision To Your Hiring Process

Behavioral Interviewing Certification Training

 

The Premise

Turnover cost the US economy over a billion dollars last year. What is it costing your organization? The estimated costs of a poor hire runs 3-7 x's of a roles salary.

 

No matter what type of organization you run the competition for mission critical high quality people is heating up. With costs rising and margins shrinking, no organization can afford unwanted employee turnover and money pouring out the door due to poor hires. When we say costs of a mis-hire, we don’t only mean in the wrong hires’ salary, we are talking about the management and training hours wasted, the unsatisfied customers, the compromised processes and employee morale issues - it all adds up.

 

Let’s face it in the world right now, your internal people resources is one of your only differentiating competitive advantages. For your company to sustain growth and be profitable it is critical that you hire effective difference makers who have the capacity to achieve your company's goals and objectives.

 

In KeenHire's Conscious Interviewing program you learn a proven, effective methodology and a process to attract and select the right people, for the right roles all the time.

 

 Click Here to register
 
The Program

The KeenHire™ Conscious Interviewing course trains and empowers recruitment professionals and hiring managers to learn interviewing strategies that help your company succeed.  At KeenHire we bring science and precision to the recruitment and hiring process® and we teach you how to do it too.  We train you to implement a Conscious interviewing process that saves your company time, money and effort while causing early engagement from your high potential candidates.

 

Join us for this hands on training workshop that encompasses every aspect of correctly utilizing targeted selection, behavioral interviewing and Role analysis in your employee selection process. You walk away with a thorough understanding of when to look for what types of behaviors, competencies and motivators and which types of questions to ask to hone in on specific behaviors as well as what answers to listen for and when to probe and when not to probe. In our full Conscious Interviewing course you actually have the opportunity to create 2 behavioral interview benchmarks that you can use immediatley. With each course registration you get a FREE 90 day subscription to KeenView - KeenHire's on line behavioral, values and competency based interviewing software.
 

The Take Aways
1. Develop a fundamental understanding and appreciation for why most bad hiring decisions are made in the first ten minutes of the interview. Learn interviewing strategies that help your company succeed.

2. Learn the foundation behind behavioral, competency and value based interviewing and why it is so important to utilize this diligent conscious interviewing process when hiring for high impact roles.
3. Gain faculty in uncovering the key performance indicators for each role.

4. Delve into all facets of what drives peak performance -motivations, ways of being, ways of thinking, and modes of interacting.

5. Improve your prowess in creating astute behavioral interviewing models that target the right fit.
6. Receive your Certification in Conscious Interviewing which includes; role analysis, top talent benchmarking, behavioral selection, behavioral interviewing and behavioral interviewing interpretation.

 

The Expert

Dr. Stephanie Marberry, Interviewing Strategies Consultant received her Ph.D. in Industrial Organizational and Social Psychology from Northern Illinois University.  As an originating partner at KeenHire Talent Management, Stephanie has consulted with small to mid-sized companies in High Touch and High Tech markets to improve their hiring efficiency and effectiveness through the implementation of customized selection systems. Dr. Marberry has a passion for educating others on current HR best practices by utilizing the appropriate scientific tools and methods to identify, select, develop, and retain top talent. Her facilitative training style encourages discussion and application, allowing her participants to gain a clear understanding on how to implement the techniques into their own business processes.

  

Want to Bring a KeenHire Consultant In-house?

Call Today! 1-888-533-6447

 

Registration

Virtual Courses consist of 8 weekly 90 minute sessions and begin on Friday afternoons June 18, August 9, September 17 at 12:00 p.m. pst and costs $499.00 per person. Save 30% overall when you register 3 or more participants. Click Here to register.

 

Can't make time for training, visit the KeenHire on line store and purchase tools, workbooks, scripts, manuals, assessments, CD's, DVD's, books and more.

 

Conscious Hiring-Maximize Your Hiring Effectiveness!

An Effective & Operationally Efficient Talent Delivery Model for Astute Employers

 

The Premise

Fundamental to building an organization with the best resources is implementing a hiring process that attracts the right people, screens and assesses that those people have the right stuff to do the job in the right way and engages the right people to come on board ready to hit the ground running! KeenHire Conscious Hiring training enables you to learn interviewing strategies and helps your company succeed.

 

Companies with a very specific purpose and mission require a strategic Talent Acquisition plan and a carefully defined new employee selection process to get them where they are going. Business leaders of these organizations know that the success of their organization depends on the quality of the people inside. A Conscious Hiring process takes into account the purpose and result base for each employment position in the company, then it looks to your business philosophies, company mission, vision and core values. Only after the core business objectives are considered is an astute employee screening, selection process and interview strategy implemented.  KeenHire Talent Management’s Conscious-Hiring process trains and enables you to identify the right people for the right roles while causing early engagement of the right people throughout the hiring process.

A fundamental aspect of a Conscious-Hiring process is systematically integrating and on boarding each new hire into your organization.

One of your only competitive advantages is the how your mission critical, key contributor and next level leaders solve your company's business issues, execute your companies mission, run the operations and interact with your customers.  In a nutshell the success of your company hinges on its ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain its employee talent base wisely.

Make no mistake about it, your hiring decisions make or break your business. What you don’t know will cost you: training time, management time and workforce productivity losses, company morale and employee productivity, new sales and customers. The bottom line is if you want a healthy EBITA you must run an organization with the right profit minded, effective and 'can do' people. KeenHire Conscious Hiring training enables you to learn interviewing strategies and helps your company succeed.

A holistic Conscious Hiring process empowers you to hire right the first time, every time.

The Program
•Change the way you think about your employees' impact on your business

•Raise the level of influence and span of control your Recruitment and Employee Selection process  

  has on your company's overall organizational effectiveness

•Learn how to avoid common interviewing traps & mitigate hiring risk

•Hone in on the key elements of building a systematic results based Conscious-Hiring process

•Hire right the first time and increase your employee ROI

 

 The Takeaways

1. Walk away with a blueprint for creating a highly effective Conscious-Hiring process
2. Learn to conduct Role Analysis, the organizational development approach to scoping the role
3. Study a step-by-step process for Choosing Your Talent Wisely and hiring with your head
4. Understand how to use, select and administer psychometric assessment tools
5. Review Behavioral Interviewing techniques; the when, why and hows

The Expert

Dr. Stephanie Marberry, Interviewing Strategies Consultant, received her Ph.D. in Industrial Organizational and Social Psychology from Northern Illinois University.  As an originating partner at KeenHire Talent Management, Stephanie has consulted with small to mid-sized companies in High Touch and High Tech markets to improve their hiring efficiency and effectiveness through the implementation of customized selection systems. Dr. Marberry has a passion for educating others on current HR best practices by utilizing the appropriate scientific tools and methods to identify, select, develop, and retain top talent. Her facilitative training style encourages discussion and application, allowing her participants to gain a clear understanding on how to implement the techniques into their own business processes.

 

Want to Bring a KeenHire Interview Strategies Consultant In-house? Call Today! 1-888-533-6447

 

Registration

Virtual Courses consist of 4 weekly 2 hour sessions on Fridays at 12:00 p.m. pacific and begin on June 18, August 9, September 17 and costs $399.00 per person. Save 30% overall when you register 3 or more participants. Click here to register for Conscious Hiring.

 

Can't make time for training, visit the KeenHire on line store and purchase tools, workbooks, scripts, manuals, assessments, CD's, DVD's, books and more.

Call For Women Leaders Working In 'New Age' Biotechnology

SD Forum panel on June 29th - Yahoo Headquarters

Explore new business, career and investment opportunities with revolutionary Biotech solutions that transform health and wellness!

Preventative Health care – “There will come a time when the individual, with the help of technology, social media and self awareness becomes their own primary care provider” quote by a soon to be famous doctor from Minnesota via San Francisco

The SD Forum http://www.sdforum.org/ is putting on an evening event about the future of the biotechnology industry, specifically looking at proactive technology like Epigenetics, Genomics, Brain Stimulated medical device, etc.

We are looking for a moderator, a scientist, and 3 business operators. The session is June 29 and lasts from 7:00-8:30 and is primarily around the business side of the industry: careers, challenges, funding, education, competition, impact. Typically people start to show up at 6:00 for networking and leave by 9. Ideally, we would like females on the panel as this group is for women in technology.

Ultimately, we will utilize the help of the panel to formulate exactly how the evening will roll out. If you think this is a fit for you or you have a recommendation of someone who you think I need to call please forward :).

How cool is this topic!

Thank you so much for your time.

Margo

Hiring, Managing, Engaging and Thriving With Your Virtual Workforce

When you have to do more with less, hiring virtual employees could be the perfect solution, just remember to Choose those virtual team members wisely. When you make the choice to open your doors to the virtual workforce you open yourself and your company to a whole new world of responsibility such as performance management for virtual employees, virtual team building and retaining virtual employees.

Keep in mind certain aspects you take for granted in managing and engaging your in house employees must be addressed, shifted and tweaked when hiring, managing and engaging with the virtual workforce. It is extremely important that you get it right in the beginning as more and more of your workforce will choose the virtual option and more and more companies are offering it.

Virtual team members carry more than just the burden of remembering which time zone they're working in. Business and Hiring Managers need to recognize the different way that virtual team members experience signal and noise. In order for a team with virtual members to work well, some effort needs to be spent up front on team governance and organizing communication processes into a tune with a good beat you can dance to.

 

 I'm thinking about the distractions around virtual team members because I stumbled on a great, if somewhat geeky, article in Information Technology & People that speaks to what my company does.  The gist of it is that co-located teams and virtual teams have different ways of getting to trust and team commitment.  In short, co-located teams develop trust through irregular personal interactions, whereas virtual teams build trust out of regular processes and clearly defined working relationships. 

 

This makes a lot of sense.  If you work side by side with your teammates you get cues all the time from them about how to work together.  In fact, you're receiving peer pressure, process pressure, the persuasion of the team leader and company pressure all at once, all the time.  It’s like listening to a symphony – notes and melody swirling around, but with somebody guiding them in the same direction.  Not much of a surprise then that it's relatively easy to get to a high level of team commitment with all that conducting going on. 

 

But put yourself in the shoes of the virtual team member.  Boy, what fun!  You get all the interaction of your local environment, but what you're tasked with focusing on is something invisible, unfamiliar and that doesn't give much feedback.  It reminds me of a pledge drive: I'm trying to just drive the car and not to hit anything when the music stops and the man asks me to pick up the phone.  We all know how well that works: I turn down the distraction and stay on the road. 

 

What I read in this article is that, in general, it's hard to focus in a noisy environment, and that people are really bad at thinking on their feet when they're under pressure.  I've always thought that it's a good idea to have a protocol to follow in the event of a surprise, so that you don't have to actually think on your feet.  Fortunately, for co-located team s these surprises and the resulting pressure are (usually) infrequent events that occur and get resolved.

 

But in a virtual team, the members are always under pressure. What they need is more like sheet music to guide from beginning to end.  And what the authors are suggesting is that it's that note by note guidance that makes it possible for the team to get its work done at all.  The team’s sheet music helps keep everyone together so they can create a soundtrack, not just background noise.  A pledge drive is easily turned down and ignored, but a good regular four-four beat gets turned up and sung along to.

 

The team leader has to orchestrate those rhythmic processes and clear relationships at the outset when he or she has the best chance of being heard.  That's the time, early on when an awful lot of us would likely be thinking about the schedule, that we should be spending our energy on governance. That’s when we should be setting up the relationships, performance management standards and processes that inform how work actually gets done.  After all, a schedule tells me how long I can wait until my tasks go critical. But what a virtual team needs early on is members zeroing in on their responsibilities and understanding the process for communicating regularly to the team that they're on the beat.

 

It's all about making it easy to do the right thing. The world is full of distractions. The challenge for a virtual team is to systematically make teamwork simple enough and regular enough to cut through the noise. 

 

 

David Kershaw

Founder, eVisioner

http://www.evisioner.com

MetaTeam :: Revolutionizing The Way Teams Work!

 

If We Ran The State Of California Like It Were A Business...Then What?

Meg Whitman is running for Governor of California. Carly Fiorina is running for Senator.  I have read about and been watching both of these executives vie to turn their business expertise into government reform.  We have seen what happens when War Generals run government.  We have seen what happens when we have Movie Stars run it. We have seen, experienced and grimaced a spoiled child running the government, and now....we have the possibility of experiencing two high powered business woman take their expertise and push California to the next level.

As the founder of KeenHire, I built my company to help other companies lay the foundation for operational excellence and put systems in place to achieve the expected results.  We work with leaders of mission driven companies who are committed to making an impact and know the only way tot do that is to surround themselves with the right people.  It starts by designing a company's organizational infrastructure, implementing systems that bring for the best hires and then establishing protocols that ensure maximize workforce performance.  I understand government is somewhat different because it is not just your team you have to worry about it is Legislators and the like. I still think it starts in your office, with your team and it ends with you honoring your word in the matter of keeping your promises.

I expect that whether Meg Whitman gets in office or Carly Fiorina lands a Senate seat that both will bring best business practices to California. In my opinion, the ads are right; the country and  the state must start operating like a for profit business and not like a government agency with zero accountability for performance measurement to it's customers. 

Meg & Carly, are you reaching out and speaking to business owners? Are you addressing performance management issues that are holding the state of California hostage?  In your plan have you laid a foundation to build your team like you would build the Google or HP teams? Do you have an on boarding plan? Have you established performance metrics for yourself and your organization? Have you created a recruitment process so you can make your mark beyond the election?

We all know it is time for a change in California, however ads alone wont win the race. A specific plan of action and real time grass roots efforts addressing 'how the changes will occur' and 'by when' are mandatory. Are you making phone calls to business owners and executives, asking what they need and sharing how your administration will positively effect business?

In my research I found the below post/question, I think it sums it up for each and every business owner and Executive that I have spoken with. Carly....Meg....are you answering these questions?  I would like to see and hear about your town hall meetings. I would like to see and hear the answers to my and others questions. I am on your side and I want to help. I however don't get sucked in to fancy ads or competitive slam campaigns I want results, like you would want if you hired me to generate sales or votes.

Show us the results you will produce and we will show you votes!

===

I run a high tech business in Los Angeles where the cost of doing business for me and my employees is becoming prohibitive and I considering moving the operations to another state.

From my perspective, running a company is different from running the state. I fire under-performers. The legislators don't work for you. You can't fire them. You can't induce them to perform to your liking.

So my question to you is "How?" How do you put through your initiatives? How to get the lawmakers to break the log jam? It's great to have strong plans for improving California, but if you can't break the legislative log jam, you will be reduce to cutting ribbons rather than cutting budgets.

I do hope you can provide a frank and direct answer to the perennial problem we have in California.

----

Call For Executive Recruitment And Talent Management Presenters

HR Executive Forum – Silicon Valley –January 2011

Our intention is to create a transformational Executive Retreat at StillHeart Institute in Woodside California for companies committed to achieving extraordinary results in service delivery, operational excellence and profitability through the power and engagement of their workforce.

Call for Presenters:

I am looking for highly successful Executive Level Recruitment, Corporate Recruiting Leadership and Talent Management Consultants and Practitioners who are at the top of their league, have an extraordinary ability to capture and engage a room and have achieved transformational results in dynamic and challenging environments.

Areas of Expertise

Corporate Transformation Consultant

Systemic Change Agent

Leadership Development

Succession Planning

Organizational Development and Design Specialist

Corporate Recruitment Consultant

Engineering Management Recruitment Consultant

Executive Sales Recruiting Practitioner

Management and Executive Recruiting Consultant

Human Resources Management-Operational Excellence

HR Technology Consultant

Recruitment Technology

Performance Management Consulting

Employee Engagement Consultant

Application Process

Please submit your CV, a video of you speaking to a group as well as the 3 goals you want to accomplish by participating in the HR Executive Forum. mgraziano@keenhire.com.   Deadline for submissions 6.29.10

 

 

Are Mo, Larry And Curly Doing Your Hiring?

I'm serious.

Let's get real, have you ever hired someone you knew little about for a job you knew less about? It happens to all of us.

I started my own company, for the 1st time when I was 29 years old. I had a pre teenager, a young son at home and a new baby due any day. 

The company I was with was shutting down, literally, that night. The girls and I took our stuff and needed a place to go, FAST.  I had no operations experience, no management experience, no finance, no marketing and certainly no technology experience. I had no operational infrastructure, organizational design or business plan.  We had a couple desks, a phone and a hard floor. Failure was not an option, as I was the breadwinner.

Our first year we did $1,000,000.00 in sales, we had a temp division and a direct hire team. As I began to think about growing, I started to hire. I hired people who reminded me of me. Imagine that? In one year I hired 35 people. All failed, were fired, quit or stayed far....far too long.

I was a producer and I knew how to make the donuts, fry them up in a pan, serve seconds and then make more donuts. I did this over and over again for over a decade. It was who I was.  When the Pinnacle Society accepted my application I was flabbergasted. My billing status was a pretty big deal. I was good at this job.  So, the technician became a business owner, not out of a carefully designed plan, out of survival. 

The bottom line is in 10 years I spun through over 100 people. Some commission, some not. When I spoke to other business owners in the Staffing and Recruitment Industry, I was told this is what we get; our industry has an extremely high turnover, deal with it.  My paradigm for the staffing industry was developed on my first job.  I was brought up in a company that hired 10 people per month and if 1 was left at the end of the year, that was a victory. The difference between them and me, was that they had a person whose only job was to hire, train and churn people. I was the biller, owner, sales rep, recruiting manager, HR, and the so-called trainer.

Given my strong willed personality and insatiable appetite to get better, I knew I had to change, so I went to my Vistage chair (formerly known as TEC).  Mike Donahoe sat me down and we looked at what the high turnover, poor hiring practices and mediocre on-boarding was costing me. I knew it was costing me (Download The_cost_of_a_mishire) money, I never considered it was costing me time with my kids, happiness and fulfillment. That meeting changed my life. 

My coach had me take the income I earned in one year and divide it by the amount of hours in a work week.  Then he had me research how long each hire was with me, and the amount of my time was spent training, coaching, fixing, correcting, answering questions and un-ruffling feathers. Then he worked with me to figure out the cost to the organization in terms of lost sales, unhappy customers, unfilled orders. 

Then he had me take a calculator to it. The impact was astounding.

It was then, the fall of 2002; I chose to become a Manager. I chose to be a business leader that is effective at hiring and selecting employees, managing performance, on-boarding, compensation, employee engagement and retention.  Choosing was just the beginning; I then had to learn how. It did not happen right away, it took a ton of work. However, when I finally got it, I got it.

Before I knew it Alliance HR Network (my previous company) was training our customer's HR departments, Corporate Recruiters and their front line Chicago area Managers how to hire, on board and manage their new employees. The better I got, the better they got. 

When we surveyed our customers they told us they would like to see us offer more 'people consulting' services, such as performance management, hiring process training, human resource consulting, new hire selection, employee on boarding, employee retention and succession planning consulting for the people we placed and some of their key players. Our first projects were about installing effective hiring processes for growing companies.

In companies where the hiring process used to be a game of golf and a shot of Jack, they upgraded to using psychometric assessment tools in addition to an M interview and a behavioral interview to evaluate candidates. In Chicago area technology start ups, where normally a skill on a resume gets an interview, they upgraded their hiring process to glean the right behaviors, competencies and emotional intelligence required by the role. Skills are a given, they wanted more than skill from their technical consultants, they wanted to achieve corporate effectiveness through each and every hire.  Since those early days I have worked with many companies on different variations of our service offerings from Recruitment Process in Sourcing, RPI to Employee Retention consulting. More often than not we are bringing our recruitment, hiring, employee selection and on-boarding knowledge and processes to companies who have little or no internal Recruitment and Talent Management infrastructure.

I find it interesting, funny and amazing that most companies do not put more of a strategic emphasis on who they hire. The ones who do have sky rocketed in sales, in innovation, in service and in customer retention. The ones who don't, well maybe that is one of the reasons they fade away. Progressive, hiring savvy companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Enterprise Leasing, etc. do a very good job of following a hiring process, but most of the rest, from the perspective of over two thousand corporate recruiters and executive search consultants, don't even come close. They treat hiring like a crap-shoot or a collaborative popularity contest.

My question to a CEO of a growing organization is, "Why would you have a C player interviewing potential candidates?". I have heard jokes cracked that Mo, Larry and Curly led the interview in unison. People who have never been trained in interviewing, who don't fundamentally understand people or the role asking route questions, thinking about how much "other" work they have to do and resenting ever minute of it.  No wonder, my first sales coach, Tom used to say; the biggest problem with sales departments is the manager who does not know how to identify true sales people. "They thought they hired John Wayne only to find out it was Woody Allen."

I can't tell you how many times I interview a company who hired the wrong person and he or she failed in the role I find out they hired from the hip and not the head.  I see that type of behavior, specifically in sales recruiting the candidate shows up and looks super strong only to stop short of the finish line. The company, or the hiring manager bought the shiny penny, the creative communication, and the glamor of having 'the name' on the team.

If it is our job to run a profitable company, one who delivers excellent service; then it's also our job to run an operationally efficient company. Bad hires, people who miss the mark, people who are not aligned with the mission and vision, people who lack the work ethic and passion to get it done all lead to operational inefficiency and high cost.

We can not compete with high overhead and operational waste.

We can not compete with average sales people.

We can't compete with inefficient people, systems or tools. 

We can't compete without the right people, in the right roles, doing the right things, in the right way.

If your company carefully vets it's investments of time, money and resources and your people are your largest spend it's time for a change.

It's time to Choose Wisely.

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KeenHire Management Recruitment Consulting And More

KeenHire™ Talent Management partners with top executives, international business leaders and strategic HR management of customer facing enterprises committed to making their mark socially, environmentally & fiscally.

Our expert Human Resources Management consulting specialists develop the foundation for organizationally effective, stakeholder aligned, high performance operations. Once the systemic work is done we create Recruitment and Employee Retention programs that leverage your company’s ability to compete for Mission Critical, `Go To`, Key Contributors and next level Leadership resources.  

We provide strategic minded Organizational Development, Workforce Planning & Design, Talent Acquisition, Employee Retention and Human Resource Management consulting professionals to companies committed to building with the best.

We train Leading Practices in O.D., Strategic HR Management Consulting, Workforce Planning, Recruitment, Hiring, On-Boarding, Performance Management, Employee Retention and Employee Development. We maximize your organizational effectiveness.

We save you money and time by implementing world-class consulting in HR Management, Recruitment, Employee Retention and Talent Management process technology & systems within your organizations.

We support your Recruitment, Human Resources Management and Employee Retention efforts while you grow with our RPI, TMPI and A la Carte service offerings.    

KeenHire™ Talent Management

We deliver world-class HR management consulting, Technical Recruitment solutions, Employee Retention strategies and highly skilled people for Start Up, Socially Responsible and High growth companies where the vitality and success of the company depends on the people inside.   Our ideal customers are in need of strategies for implementing best practices in Engineering Recruitment, Technical Recruiting, Management Recruitment Consulting, Corporate Recruitment in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C.

KeenHire Talent Management - Business Opportunity - Chicago Market. Selling high end organizational effectiveness, recruitment and talent management programs and services to customer facing companies with mission critical growth plans. $250,000 earning potential - 1st year - I can prove it! KeenHire.com