Mike Warrick says a prospect’s “driving forces” need to be in synch with their job…and vice versa. When you do individual assessments for top candidates and you find a candidate who’s almost ideal, you can tweak the job requirements to be sure you capture their talent.
Mike: A lot of times our clients come to us because they’ve got a situation where they’ve had an employee that they felt fit the job very well with a great resume and they had great references, who didn’t succeed in the job.
I even had one case where an employer hired a person he knew for 20 years. And they thought they’d be a good fit. Everything looked good, but for some reason, they couldn’t get motivated, couldn’t get excited about the job.
And it’s frustrating. Because you’re so certain and you put a lot of time and energy into the hiring of the employee. You do that a lot of training – you spend money on him for that. There are many things that people do for onboarding that are quite expensive. And so, when you see that person you think, well, they’re going to be a perfect fit for the job.
Then, they end up leaving.
That leaves you to question, “What did I do wrong?”
Well, I’ll just spare you the worry about that: you didn’t really do anything wrong, because there wasn’t anything you could see to do differently. And the reason is frequently people are just not motivated by their job because the job doesn’t match what is required. Things they require for motivation, their driving forces, doesn’t match your driving forces.
And as a manager, there are lots of things you can see in a résumé. You can call references. You can even see behavioral traits. But one thing you can’t see is what’s driving that person – what motivates them. That’s hidden, and no one can see those driving forces.
Fortunately, enough, we do have an assessment that we can use that’ll help our leaders the people we work with to see what motivates a person. So, what it does for them is it allows them to see if this job doesn’t fit perfectly, there may be a few things I can do tweak here or there to meet that motivation, to meet that driving force to keep that person happy.
And then you know you won’t find yourself in a situation where you’re constantly having to hire new people and being surprised by it. It’s not 100% perfect, but it will drastically and dramatically improve your hit rate in terms of your employees and how long you keep them on the job.