How can my company hire the right employees and onboard them to succeed?

Five Questions, an occasional feature asking five questions of notable people in employment law and HR. Today’s guest is Regan MacBain Traub, CPC, SPHR, a founder and managing principal of The Human Resource Consortium. She’s got experience with change management and strategy - as well as staffing and retention. She was SHRM state director for Connecticut and served on the executive board of the HR Association of Central Connecticut.

We did want to thank Regan before we get started here. Her expertise is deep and valuable, and we’re grateful she found time for us.

We asked Regan, and she told us that for employers and job-seekers, the news isn’t bad.

There’s not much disagreement that companies today are talking and thinking about hiring. Many of them are even acting on that, and some organizations are writing checks for training again - though there’s still a heavy dose of circumspection, particularly about training budgets.

Emerging HR Priority

There really isn’t one emerging HR priority that stands out, there are several.

First up on that list is employee benefits. It’s not surprising.

Second is funding a performance-based culture. We’re not only talking about hiring here. We’re talking about rewarding what matters and what leaders say they value, and then living up to that. Being fair and being careful are good things, but the parade of 2-3% annual increases just can’t send the right messages to either the top performers or the watchers in the middle. If an organization wants to get performance from more of their employees, it needs to get that message across to the rest of them.

Then there’s governance. It’s more important than it was a couple of years ago, mostly because there’s more to manage. With change happening faster and getting more complex, who makes decisions inside organizational networks, and in what order, matters.

Right now’s one of those perfect times to take a hard look at your talent as an organization - to be honest about it, brutal if you need to. It’s a really good idea to assess managers, and just not at review time. Giving ongoing feedback, and expecting managers to do the same in return, keeps everyone on track.

And another organizational HR priority, staffing, deserves special mention. That’s getting hard to do. Recruiting and interviewing, your selection process, the other sources and pipelines you use to fill positions - those all went stale. One of the strategies that top performers had during the downturn was to hang onto what they had, whatever the days and weeks brought, until there was a reason to leave. Lots of workers could live with being hard-pressed right now if they knew they weren’t going to be the first to get the pink slip or the first to go when the clock starts rolling again. So talking about staffing, hanging onto employees you want to keep is one thing. Shoring up your staffing pipeline and practices is just as important. Bringing more people back, bringing them faster and making them a good choice, those aren’t only important because your organization needs more productivity right away.

Help Their Clients Hire Better

An expensive wrong hiring can be one of the most expensive mistakes you make. Here are a couple of statistics that drive the point home: eBullpen, LLC has found that 46% of new hires quit within a year. Michael Watkins, chairman of Genesis Advisers, found that 58% of top-priority hires ended up in failure in the first 18 months. This seems a little extra-depressing: Manchester, Inc. reports that 40% of newly promoted managers fail in their first 18 months, while the Corporate Leadership Council says half of newly hired executives will flame out by month 18. These are deeply disturbing numbers.

Turnover is very costly to an organization, on the operations side as well as the bottom line. Not only does turnover impair performance, it affects morale. You don’t have to be an accountant or economist to calculate the costs of turnover in your organization. All you have to do is follow the money. Look for opportunities to reduce these costs. Think of the changes that you make as eliminating waste.

What did Regan and her associates do about all this? They work with employers to transform their staffing practices, and add consultation to their staffing pipeline services.

She gave us four recommendations.

First, weigh your cultural fit and environmental fit more than your skills. Cultural fit for the organization is more important, along with the people a candidate would be working for and with, than experience and skills or educational pedigree. She’s been watching people get hired for two and a half decades now, and with rapid innovation and competition from all over the world, her understanding is, a lot of job skills can change quickly, but the core organizational culture you need in your people sticks around for longer. We’re not just talking about individual hiring decisions here, but how hiring fits with the culture and life-cycle stage of the whole organization. It’s important to identify your culture at this point in your company’s life.

The second recommendation is to analyze an open position more fully, but also differently. It’s tough to sit down and evaluate an open position. You might find out there’s little agreement among senior managers about what the job is, or who’s best for it. When there’s not a clear, agreed-upon idea about what you’re looking for - even of what the position requires at a basic level - your selection process is definitely underpowered.

Her third recommendation is to upgrade your interviewing and selection process. Use behavioral-event questions that explore the candidate’s behavior during critical past events. Other ways are experiential and situational exercises. Check up on candidates’ backgrounds and references widely - former supervisors at least if you can get them.

The fourth strategy Regan recommends is to explore the reasons if the same job keeps turning over at your organization. Exit interviews are essential, because you want to ask why this person, who in most cases seemed well-suited to this job, is leaving this position at this time.

On-boarding

What is ‘on-boarding’ and why is it so important? Well, on-boarding is just a fancy name for the process of a new hire getting acclimated in their job and to the organization during the critical 6-12 months after they’re hired. It’s important because it prepares your new hire to succeed by getting them to use the best practices in the organization and making them part of the team. New hires are such an expensive investment that you want to do everything you can to maximize the chances they’ll come up to speed and succeed on the job.

Now, best practices combine enriched orientation, rapid assimilation, a GE practice, and coaching.

Because an associate’s first day on the job is when it sets the tone for their whole relationship with your company, it’s a pivotal step. Try to get as much of the paperwork and red tape finished beforehand, since anything extra just slows a new associate’s first day. You don’t want to divert their attention from learning, or burden them right from the start. Set the big picture for your new hire: tell them the company’s history and why it’s so important. Tell stories of employees who really made a difference, and what role they played.

Then comes departmental orientation. Many of the basic steps are quick and simple. Introducing them to their workspace and any equipment they’ll use, the other people on the team, the schedules they’ll be working under, the official policies they need to abide by. That sounds like checking boxes but can make a huge difference.

After Day One, keep paying attention to them. Give them a mentor, an experienced hand to share feedback and ideas. Tell them who to talk to with questions about the company and their job. Make the introductions as personal as you can. Consider taking the new hire out for lunch their first week. All those steps boost the chances the new hire will work out.

A vital part of onboarding are the checkpoints set up by the hiring manager at least weekly the first month, then semi-weekly for the next couple of months. Timely feedback lets the new hire adjust their behavior, and gets them to feel the department wants them to succeed.

There’s plenty of ways to learn more about Regan and her organization: their website, for one. One of the sites MacBain Traub recommended is the Dr. John Sullivan online site for employers and staffing managers. Dr. Sullivan’s staked out a reputation as being intriguing, edgy and even controversial. The Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, has books, articles and bulletin boards on a bewildering number of HR and management topics.