Getting Results Magazine Getting Results Magazine Fall 2017 | Page 8

HIRE BETTER PEOPLE Hire Better People! J 8 Jim Jubelirer is a seasoned executive, coach, and public speaker. Jim’s mission is to help leaders improve their business performance and personal satisfaction. Jim speaks to a wide variety of audiences about leadership and business excellence and motivates people to achieve Breakthrough Results. He has designed and delivered custom training programs, and has delivered speeches, conference presentations, and/ or executive seminars to over 6,000 people from over 40 countries. ay Russo, co-author of Winning Decisions, a book for managers on the behavioral aspects of decision-making, taught one of my favorite classes at the Johnson School of Business at Cornell about behavioral science. Behavioral science is a relatively new academic discipline that combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience. Many experiments have shown that when experts are asked questions in the field of their expertise, and then novices are asked those same questions, the novices perform surprisingly well while the experts consistently overestimate the confidence they have in the accuracy of their answers. When it comes to recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new employees, less- than-stellar outcomes can cost your organization big money. • • • • • Weak applicants It turns out that experts aren’t as expert as they think they are! Why is this important? This overconfidence is a bias all humans have. It affects our decision making, and if we’re not careful, we end up with less-than-stellar outcomes. • Inadequate information about the candidates | FALL 2017 I work with middle market ($4M - $200M) companies who are growing and hiring. Those companies consistently spend too little time, money and attention on the hiring process. Common flaws in the hiring process include: • Fudged resumes Faked interview responses Lack of verifiability Insufficient time for proper vetting and interviewing Superficial interviews that lack the essential questions • Reference checks that are practically useless According to surveys from Gallup, 70 percent of the American workforce is disengaged, 20 percent of which is actively disengaged. Young people, who make up a disproportionate share of the service economy, are more disengaged than older workers. Companies may invest millions of dollars in sophisticated information systems, yet they don’t apply that same degree of sophistication in creating a work culture that breeds engagement. All too often, people accept a position because of an appealing job and company but leave because of their boss’s poor management skills. In my workshop “Why You Suck at Hiring—and What You Can Do About It!”, I describe the degree to which people’s unconscious biases lead them to make bad decisions. Those biases can