How some offsite manufacturers are using data to find and keep the best people
- Conventional hiring practices rarely attract the best employees. Long-term success requires a more systematic approach.
- You’re more likely to attract people who actually like their jobs if your descriptions include the personality traits and the skills needed.
- The author recommends a behavioral approach to interviewing and managing.
One problem with a tight labor market is that it can lead to sloppy hiring practices. Busy offsite manufacturers need workers and whether they’re looking for a sawyer, designer, or driver, many will hire basically anyone and hope it works out for the good. But the truth is that it often doesn’t. A bad hire can be disastrous, costing you money in terms of turnover, the investment in recruiting and training new hires and lost productivity. New hires also have higher rates of accidents.
You can avoid these costly mistakes by using people’s data to help guide your hiring strategy. That same data will also improve your onboarding and management techniques. These benefits will help your business grow and thrive.
Define What You Need Beyond the Basics
Most organizations’ job descriptions include the education requirements, the pay rate and the tasks the job involves. What they don’t often do is define how they expect workers to complete those tasks.
Of course knowledge, skills and experience are crucial but, by themselves, they’re not enough to ensure that a new hire will succeed. Each person brings a set of unique behavioral drives, cognitive abilities and competencies to the workplace. To hire smarter, you need to understand the whole person, not just the resume items.
It’s useful here to think of jobs as being like shoes. Poorly fitting shoes can cause the feet to blister and a poor job fit may cause some people to psychologically blister. You can’t expect a naturally talkative person who needs social interaction to work quietly and alone in an analytical role such as structural design for long periods. Nor can you expect someone who is very independent to always follow rules they naturally question. Understand that each person has strengths and make sure those strengths align with what’s needed to get the job done.
The first steps in this understanding are to analyze all aspects of the job and to clearly define how you expect someone to tackle their work.
Job Descriptions that Attract the Right Candidates
By defining the ideal behavioral drives and cognitive abilities for each role, businesses can add language to the job descriptions that attract candidates who will better match that ideal. Here are two examples.
Let’s say you want to hire a General Manager. The job description will include the obvious—reviewing financial statements, sales projects, inventory management, employee scheduling and vendor management. But you also want to list the personality attributes that will make someone successful. For instance: “The successful candidate is an assertive, practical problem-solver with a competitive drive to get things done, quickly and correctly. This job requires ensuring established standards of quality and accuracy are met. Drive, determination and self-discipline are required to achieve expected results.”
Or maybe you’re looking for a truss builder. In that case, the personality attributes might be as follows: “We need reliable team players who are organized and willing to carefully adhere to clearly defined tasks that result in the same outcomes every day. The successful candidates must have very strong attention to detail while working at a steady, consistent pace.”
Different people will have different responses to these different job postings. Some might not even apply knowing they aren’t a fit. This allows employers to better attract candidates who are more likely to be successful.
Interview to Understand Fits and Gaps
The job listing is just the first step. You’ve now attracted candidates who are reasonably close behaviorally and cognitively to what you need, but you still make sure to interview beyond the skills.
This is called behavioral interviewing. Depending on the role, you need to explore competencies such as achievement orientation, openness to learning, integrity and others. You should also use the interview to look for alignment with your organization’s values and culture.
Keep in mind that no one is a perfect fit. In preparation for the interview, compare each candidate with the ideal job model you’ve created.
Julie Free, Human Resources Manager with Atlantic Building Components in South Carolina, says her company identifies the behavioral attributes required for each job and includes those attributes in job listings. As a result, the company and the candidate are better prepared for the interview.
“We have key performance indicators for different roles [and competencies such as] being able to prioritize and being able to move from task to task,” says Free. They discuss the expectation of the role and help the candidate understand the work environment. “We also discuss other requirements, such as a commute if there is one.” She says all this helps the company make better hiring decisions.
It’s important to note the candidates’ responses and review them with the interviewing team. Does the candidate offer positive responses and show self-awareness? For example, will they follow a process they don’t necessarily agree with if that’s what the job requires? The interview team should also review gaps in skills and gauge needed investment to get that person up-to-speed.
Manage Each Individual
Successful candidates for the two jobs described above should also be managed and communicated with differently. Don’t let your managers drive people away—one-size-fits-all management styles do not work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the US quits rate remains at consistently high levels, which means that people are quitting jobs regardless of whether they have other work lined up.
Managers and leaders at all levels need to learn how to give direction, feedback and praise to different people in ways that energize them. Most managers lead people the way they want to be led, rather than using people’s data to know how to best motivate each individual on their team.
There are many trainings available to help managers with this and the managers I know who have taken them have good things to say. For instance, Josh Wright, Vice President of Manufacturing at The Truss Company, took the management training that I teach. He had this to say: “By developing and training our leaders, we get more productivity from them.”
Plan for the Future
Understanding that every person in the company has unique strengths and talents helps employers plan better for the future. They can look at their people and see how to invest in skills and other training, how to create learning opportunities with lateral moves in the organization and how to create leadership development initiatives.
“We’re building a bench of up-and-coming leaders and recognizing that they have the potential to grow,” says Marion Nielson, Executive Assistant at The Truss Company. “All of us are learning how to navigate people as professionals and how to understand their individual behaviors as part of that development plan.”
Ashley McCanna, Human Resource Generalist at The Truss Company, says that the type of data mentioned above has helped them see how best to move someone up in the organization, how to help someone make a lateral move such as from designer to estimator and how to manage employees transferring to a different plant. “Data gives us a better perspective on our people throughout the whole operation.”
When companies implement these talent strategies, they’re in a good position to expand their workforce, while also understanding how to help each individual improve their on-the-job performance.
