“When flying a plane with low visibility, you need to use instruments”
The Covid pandemic has brought complete free-fall to much of the employment marketplace in the U.S. and globally — more than 36 million jobs lost in less than 60 days between March and May, 2020, and and unemployment rate that jumped from below 4% at the beginning of March, to almost 15% by the beginning of May.
While this is a tragic loss of earnings power for individuals, families, and the economy, selective hiring is still happening. In particular at the executive levels. Why?
Many companies had stocked their senior leadership teams with expansion-skilled leaders to capitalize on the longest economic expansion in modern history stretching from the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009 through to early 2020. These leaders were talented at growth. Now, some companies are realizing they need a better balance of wartime leaders vs. peacetime. CEOs, CFOs, operations and sales leaders are all functions that are seeing significant turnover.
A trend toward “commuting” executives had grown popular, with the ease and relative inexpensiveness of air travel and technology. A growing number of executives “commuted” to work each week from other cities and other parts of the country. Given the strain on air travel, this long-distance commuting convention is also getting strained. And some companies — and executives — are looking to bring their senior leadership teams closer to home. Not all of these executives want to relocate however, and are therefore deciding to re-orient their career closer to their families.
Some executives who were at the latter stages of their career had been fine with “extending their retirement runway” while companies were growing. However, faced with wartime headwinds, and the inevitable tough times that come with a recession, they’ve determined that the stress & uncertainty wasn’t how they wanted to spend their last career chapter, so have notified their boards that they are accelerating their transitions out of the business.
So, the goal — whether in person interviewing or virtual — is all around how to do the best assessment you can given the limited amount of interaction any hiring process will allow.
Here are the top 10 actions to optimize the probability of making the best “virtual hire” for your new virtual workplace in the new normal:
1. You can’t manage what you can’t measure: Build a scorecard of deliverables for 1st year for the position, and use it as “north star” in all interviews
2. Don’t allow “instinct” or “blink” decision-making to rule out (or in) a candidate. There is now all too much research that proves that the best hiring is done slowly. Ergo the expression, “hire slow, fire fast.”
Especially when interviewing a candidate virtually, note the following frequent facts:
3. Human tendency is to hire resumes, and fire people
NOTE: using them right is to use them for further discovery and only then validation or invalidation. Tools in themselves will not deliver a clear-cut answer. These traits may exist within a candidate but their actual associated behaviors may not manifest in their interpersonal interactions.
4. RECORD all interviews Why?
NOTE: You need to get written permission, or get permission granted on the recorded video. Check the laws in your state for specifics.
5. Give a homework assignment/case study. For this exercise, you:
6. “Go Native” — find tools to interact over time. Find an online game, passion, hobby or other, and engage with the finalist(s) over several days or a week. Background on this: we used to advocate our clients “take a trip” with finalist candidate(s). Fly to another office together, even better drive to a meeting, or a plant/facility. Spending time next to each other in a car or airline seat speaks volumes to how a candidate thinks, behaves, socializes, and entertains.
7. REFERENCE DEEPLY
8. Nothing beats in person where possible
9. Use an onboarding health monitoring tool As if it isn’t hard enough to be the new kid in class on the first day of school, imagine having to do that in a “virtual workplace.” Everyone knows everyone already, and being the “new kid,” no one wants to invest the time, effort or energy to help get the new hire get smart.
For more on ours, see https://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/talent-toolbox/executive-integration-assessment
10. Combine health monitoring tool with a team integration & acceleration coach
Interested in learning more? Watch our most recent webinar on Virtual Hiring.