Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Blog

Why compare hiring to high school basketball - maybe it’s because I’m immersed here in the last week of our season and my head is spinning over what’s working and what’s not. My Frosh-Soph Girls Team will win a game one day against a team that I never imagined them beating and two days later disintegrate against a team that should have been an easy win. Why does this happen and how does it relate to hiring great people? 

I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes we “match-up” well against other teams in terms of their style of play, such as intensity, pace, how they communicate with each other, size, and aggressiveness. Other times we don’t match-up well. Or, sometimes, a few of my starters don’t match-up well individually with the style of the other team.

Hiring top talent is a lot like basketball match-ups between teams. Brad and I have identified in our research of the top ten mistakes in hiring that one of the greatest hiring errors occurs when someone comes aboard from a very different company culture or environment and you expect that they can reproduce their accomplishments in your company culture.

Many times we become disappointed. We shake our head and wonder what went wrong in our hiring decision and interviewing process. Think back over the last few years - how many times have you experienced hiring failure because you did not probe deeply with specific interview questions about company culture and environment differences? Learn more about why hiring fails by downloading a copy of our Executive Summary on the top ten hiring mistakes.

Barry

Copyright 2008 Impact Hiring Solutions

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!