A novel approach to hiring good candidates

As active recruiters specializing in the tire industry, my team and I have relied on the traditional ways to find and vet candidates for years.

Most of our client partners are desirable companies for employees and hire qualified candidates in the tire industry through us and other pipelines.

But how heavily are they being vetted? There is still a void and high turnover within many corporations' one- to five-year experienced hires.

In the last year alone, I have heard stories of candidates quitting on their first day of work, candidates misleading employers about their experience and skill set in their one- to two-hour interviews and still receiving offers, and candidates being polished in interviews and then lacking the soft skills required to execute on day one.

How do you separate "interview rock stars" from high-performers?

How can this be prevented? The answer is companies actually have to vet candidates. Most companies deeply vet for their executive positions (C-suite, senior VPs, etc.), but they don't apply that same level of scrutiny to arguably their most important employees: Professionals with one to six years experience, the operational engine room of the business.

Entry and mid-level hires are expensive and require a lot of resources to train and support. A bad new hire in the tire industry could cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars until they are "managed out of the business."

How does your process work? Resumes, interviews and references sound familiar? In all of my years doing this, I have never seen a resume that tells me a candidate's weaknesses, and I have never heard of a bad reference. Moreover, almost any candidate can be coached to shine for an hour interview.

I barely would classify these efforts as vetting; they are practically formalities.

To make matters worse, our industry is facing other issues. We are all aware of the tire talent shortage.

Let's face the facts — tires aren't very sexy, and Millennials today want to work at a startup or create iPhone applications.

We have an aging employee base that struggles to attract or relate to Millennials. As the talent pool shrinks, every company is fighting over the same talent.

Many firms we work with seem hesitant to hire from outside the industry; meanwhile we see CEOs jumping from industry to industry (Pepsi to Apple, private equity to GM, etc.).

So why are we so scared to take chances on a hire that is three years out of college?

There is one more issue in the hiring space — lack of patience. Companies don't take their time to hire the right candidates. This creates a vicious turnover cycle that results in depreciating human capital returns.

Put simply, it is like putting Band-Aids on the holes in the dam instead of patching them. Six months later, when that Band-Aid falls off, you run to a recruiter asking for a new Band-Aid. We need to fix the dam.

Proper vetting

What is proper vetting? There are some steps companies can implement into their interview and vetting process today:

1. Focus more on candidates' soft skills (learning agility, communication, collaboration), rather than the hard skills. Dive into their critical thinking skills. Ask them how or why they arrived to their solution, not just if they got the answer right.

2. Fill your bench with diversity both from inside the industry and outside. High performers are high performers. If they have the right soft skills (i.e., learning agility), they will learn quickly and thrive with any task you give them.

3. Don't ask about hard skills; test for them. Don't ask a candidate if they can do a VLOOKUP in Excel or if they are good with pivot tables; test them on it.

4. Spend time to figure out if candidates are the right cultural fit for your organization. This is impossible to understand by reading a resume and conducting one or two hours of interviews. You have to put the time in.

The traditional hiring process is still limited. There is only so much we can learn about a person from a short interview and some lessons.