How to Hire Highly
Engaged Employees
... if a person isn’t
internally motivated to do the work you want done, the person will wind up
being in the 68% of your disengaged workforce.
Chapter
I - Last Wednesday AM
Last week was a strange one. I started off
bored stiff. Unwilling to get to work, and when there, just went through the
motions. However, I had a slight spark on Wednesday leading a workshop for LinkedIn on how to help SMBs (small, mid-sized
businesses) compete for talent with the BBBs (big and bigger businesses). One
of the participants asked how his company could hire highly engaged employees.
My response in a minute since this is just the first chapter in this story.
Chapter
II - Last Wednesday PM
Things started to get interesting that
evening while waiting for a flight in Orange County to San Jose (both CA).
Somehow someone somewhere must have known I was thinking about employee
engagement. As I flipped open Flipboard there was a cover story from Gallup
with the rather sensational, at least to me, headline:Majority of U.S.
Employees Not Engaged Despite Gains in 2014. My
first thought, “I’m not alone. It’s probably the weather or Deflategate.”
The
article itself was rather depressing. Less than 32% of the U.S. workforce was
engaged, 51% were not engaged and 18% were actively disengaged.
Chapter
III - A Week Prior to Last Week
The
week before these two events happened, a co-worker from 15 years ago
out-of-the-blue suggested we meet for coffee. We scheduled a meet-up for this
past Friday. I didn’t remember the co-worker too well although the name was
familiar. I actually thought the person was a college fraternity brother. Boy was
I wrong. He now provides leadership training to companies around the world on
how to increase employee engagement! He found his work inspirational. He even
inspired me to write this article.
Chapter
IV - Last Friday
During our conversation he asked me for
advice on how to hire highly engaged employees. It was the same advice I gave
during the Wednesday webcast. In fact, it’s the same advice I’ve been giving since I became a
successful headhunter in the 1980s. It went something like this:
Adler’s Avuncular Wisdom on How to Hire
Highly Engaged Employees
To hire highly engaged people, only hire
people who are already highly motivated to do what you want done.
Here’s
how you do this:
·
First,
recognize that motivation to do the actual work required is not the same as
being motivated to get the job or being motivated some of the time to do some
of the work.
·
If
you don’t clarify job expectations before you hire the
person, it’s problematic if the person will be motivated to perform the actual
work you want done. If you know someone who’s ever taken a job and discovered
it wasn’t what he or she thought it was going to be, you have personal
experience with this common hiring problem.
·
Rather
than use skills- and experience-laden job descriptions to define the work and
advertise your jobs, prepare performance-based
job descriptions that clarify the job expectations upfront. (Note: not doing this is
the root cause of hiring the wrong people.)
·
In
your recruitment advertising highlight
the work that needs to be done and the impact it will have. This will
attract people – even passive candidates – who are motivated to do the work you
want done. (Note: this is actually commonsense disguised as rocket science for
marketing.)
·
Ask
the Most Significant Accomplishment question 3-4 times
and find out where the person proactively took the initiative to get things
done. Have all of the other interviewers do the same thing. During the
debriefing session look for a pattern of where the person went the extra mile,
wouldn’t quit, took the initiative and did more than required. This is the work
that the person's will do without needing to be energized or reengaged. Then
compare this to the actual work that needs to be done.
·
Use
our talent scorecard to evaluate and
compare candidates. This form embodies our hiring formula for success,
essentially: ability times motivation squared equals results. Point: if the
person isn’t internally motivated to do the work you want done, the person will
wind up being in the 68% of your disengaged workforce.
Chapter
V - Summary
Hiring
highly motivated employees is simple. Just define the work you want done before
you hire the person. Then find people who are highly motivated to do this work.
Lou
Adler
CEO, best-selling author, created
Performance-based Hiring. Recent book: The Essential Guide for Hiring &
Getting Hired
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-hire-highly-engaged-employees-lou-adler
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