Stop Hiring and Start Auditioning to Find the Best Candidate
Stop Hiring and Start Auditioning to Find the Best Candidate
Hi reader’s. I want to give you one other idea on hiring. Quit hiring. Start auditioning. Now bear with me for a minute and think about this. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a business where everybody wanted to work for you? They were just lined up outside and when you had a new job available, people were standing in line to audition for the opportunity. You got to watch them all do their things and then choose the best one. That’d be super wouldn’t it? To saying, “Hey Suraj. I had to hire people. I’ve put ads out there. I get some resumes. I look through the resumes. I choose to do some interviews with some people and I end up selecting what I think is the best one.
Well I’m telling you that’s not the right way to do it. Actually I’m not telling you, I learned this concept from Perry Marshall and you can read more about it on Perry’s website. I’m going to summarize what I think about it. Auditioning is a great tool for finding the right person and it’s related to the 80/20 rule. Let’s just say that we have, after going out there and trying to find the right person for the job, we’ve narrowed it down to ten possibilities, ten individuals that might suit this. I’m going to put them up here and I’m just going to go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. I’ve got these ten individuals.
Now if I hire one of them, one of them might turn out to be a real star and I got lucky. I could hire one of them and they might not be a star and I’m going to have to get rid of them and go through the whole process again. Let’s think about it. On average and if I apply the 80/20 rule to this, it would tell me two of these people are stars. Two of these people are losers. The other six in between are kind of average. Now 80/20 rule says 20% or a smaller number of inputs result in a greater outcome. Likely when I look at any group of ten people and I sorted it out, two of those ten or 20% of the people are going to be on the higher end, 20% are going to be on the lower end and then there’s just the middle.
If I go through those resumes and interviews and so forth, counting on my ability to pick the right person, to pick one of these two stars, I might think that I’m pretty good at it. But the reality is different people interview differently and sometimes stars may not be stars at the interview process. It’s a little bit like gambling. You don’t really know what the outcome’s going to be. You’re making your best estimate but, let’s face it. More likely than not you’re going to choose somebody from the middle or you might have gotten hammered with one of the lower ends. Rather than trying to use your own intuition, a series of interview questions and so forth, you’re going to take this group that you’ve narrowed down and you’re going to ask them each to do something for you.
Results matter. You want to see what they can really do. You could come up with a small project. As they come in for a round of interviews you can say, “I’ve got this little project for you to do.” It should just be something small. It doesn’t have to be huge but it’s going to give you a lot of insight as to how they approach a problem, approach an issue, deal with somebody. Maybe you’re putting them in a situation with another one of your employees. You’re going to create a test, if you will, and they’re each going to go through that test. I’ll tell you what, when you go through that process with this group of ten people, you’re going to find out in a hurry two of them don’t get it. They’re out.
Now you’ve just improved your odds a lot because you’re not going to get one of these two. Two of them amaze you with what they were able to come up with. You really love their insight and the others are kind of in the middle. By going through this auditioning process, not just interviewing them and sitting back and wondering, “Hmm, I wonder which one it is?” You have now identified the stars and even between those two stars, one of them is really, really, really good and the other one is good. Now you’re going to choose between those two.
You could take it another step further and run another test on those two individuals, give them another project or whatever. But the idea is by auditioning them you’re going to see who actually turns out to be the best. When they audition people for movies or other opportunities, what are they doing? They’re putting the person out there, they’re testing them out. They see how they’re going to do and they get the right person for the right role. You want to take advantage of the same thing. Why not invest a little bit of time up front to do this? Let’s face it. Hiring is expensive. You’re hiring, you’re training, you’re getting them up to speed and you go, “Ah, that one’s so-so.” Now I’ve got to go do it again and again and again.
I’d rather find out who this is up front, minimize my cost, train one person, get them in and be successful rather than playing the hiring game. Play the audition game. It’s a lot more beneficial and when you do that you’re going to be building a stronger and stronger team within your organization and it’s going to make your company more profitable, more successful and give you more time for the things that you want to do. Give it a shot. It’s worth looking at and you can also go to Perry Marshall’s site and read some more about the process. He’s the one that I learned it from and you can learn from this to. Take advantage of it and do it today.
