Would your organization hire YOU now?

Hiring practices that build great organizations can often get cannibalized.

By: Vincent Scaramuzzo, President & Executive Recruiter, Ed-Exec, Inc.

 

It is a great question to ask if you have been with your organization for three or more years and it has been growing rapidly (it usually takes a few years of accelerated growth for these things to occur).

Question:

……If I was interviewing for my job today, with my organization, would I get the job?  It is a curious question – you had to pause and think didn’t you?  Here is even a better way of looking at it.  If you had to interview for your job now, would you tolerate the interview process or say “pass” for a less complicated organization and hiring process?

It can be fascinating to watch from afar.  Organizations that have hired some of the best and brightest people available, and as a result have grown to heights never imagined, have abandoned the exact process that brought those innovators to them.

It seems to be a pitfall of getting big, and quite frankly “bloated” that few can avoid.  Let’s face it – Google didn’t get 2 Million applicants per year when they were a startup.  They likely had to hire differently.  The same is true for any great startup or revitalization.   The decisions in the early days are based more on gut, instinct, word of mouth, etc.

Those early day hires that make organizations great somehow slip away as things scale.  To be big you need Human Resources, then internal education recruiters, and databases.  Next thing you know there are assessment tests – some of these are two day excursions that would challenge the length of any normal work day and include interviews with psychologists.  Others resort to using a 30 minute written assessment tests as a decision piece for whether someone moves forward to interviews or not.  Imagine that, deciding who is best to fill a role from a test and nothing else?  No phone interview – just the test pass/fail.  Oh… and let’s not forget my favorite, the “homework assignment”.  These typically border on the fringe of free consulting jobs.

Other organizations now use Video Interviews.  No, I am not talking about a SKYPE or FaceTime video chat where you can have a dialogue with a hiring manager.  I am talking about sending a candidate that no one from the organization has spoken with to a timed video interview.  This usually requires them to answer a series of questions while recording themselves.  Then someone, somewhere, allegedly views these videos and decides if you are “special” enough to speak with someone on the phone or meet in person.

Would you get through that process today?  Would you even bother?  I can tell you from direct experience many do not.

Look – there are a lot of great technologies out there to help make you better at making great hires.  Some of the ones I mentioned above have tremendous value when used the right way, for the right position, in the right sequence.

The “War on Talent” is more real than ever as the economy continues to heat up.  Unemployment is under 5%! It hasn’t been that low since the tech boom.  75M Baby Boomers are finally starting to retire.  40M Gen X are not enough to replace them in the workplace even with the automation and some sectors becoming extinct.

Take a close look at your hiring process.  If you don’t think you would be able to get your job today, or wouldn’t be sure if you could withstand the hiring process – than there is an opportunity to improve. Because if you lose what made your organization great – it won’t be.

Vincent Scaramuzzo is the President of Ed-Exec, Inc. A leading education executive search firms.  He is also a contributing author to various education publications. As a specialist in the education field for over a decade, Scaramuzzo works nationally with Education Institutions, PK-12, and Educational Service Providers Nationwide.  He can be contacted at vincent@ed-exec.com 860-781-7641.