If you ask them, what's your biggest problem,
your biggest drawback to working with you?
They say things like, I work too hard, right, they're trying to spin you a story.
So, it's very difficult to get past that at the point of selection.
Let's talk about recruitment.
I think all employers ought to spend more time
crafting an accurate description of what their job is like.
One of the biggest reasons people quit is they say,
I didn't know what I was getting into.
This is not what I wanted.
That's completely preventable and I think frankly, the reason it happens is
employers are kind of afraid to show people what their job is really like.
They want them to only see the good things when they're applying.
But then the problem is they've gotta live together afterwards and
they discover the reality and poof, they quit.
This is kind of like if you're going to live together with somebody or
get married and you're hiding a whole bunch of stuff and
you're hoping after you're married that they'll all be okay with it.
It typically doesn't work very well.
It doesn't work very well in hiring either.
So, what you want is a description of what your job is like that is accurate and
also one that will probably scare away people who don't fit,
because you don't want those people applying.
Every person who applies costs you money.
And every chance that somebody gets in who really doesn't fit, every time
that happens it increases the probability you're going to make a bad hire.
So you want a statement, some people call this the employee value proposition,
about what’s different working for
us than other companies maybe that are in the same industry.
Plus side and minus side.
What's different about working for us right?
And you want that to be accurate.
Now, one way to do this is with internship right?.
Now you might think that the typical reason for internships is
the candidate can scope you out and decide or you can scope the candidate out,
rather, and decide whether this is the kind of person you want.
But a lot of companies have figured out that the more important use of that
is the candidate can scope you out.
So that if you offer them a job and they say,
yes, they know what they're getting into.
It's going to have a retention device to make sure you're not going to lose people
as soon as you hire them.
So remember, not hiring somebody is a problem,
if you can't hire that's certainly a problem.
But hiring somebody who ends up quitting is arguably a worse problem,
because you've gone through all the costs of bringing them in.
And if they're unhappy and quit, they're making the people around them unhappy and
then you gotta repeat the process anyway, right?
So if we take that more seriously, we'd spend more time on recruitment.
Now on selection, what do we know?
There's a huge literature on this, but let me summarize it briefly.
The things that matter the most are things associated with past behavior,
tends to be the best predictor of future behavior.
If you could actually find out how they performed in a similar job before,
that would be great, right?
That would be maybe the best thing you could get.
It's hard to get that in many countries, hard to get good references from people.
If you could get that though, that would be wonderful.
That's partly why internal moves of people who already work for you are so good.
Much better than hiring from the outside typically because you know a lot about
that person already and the information's pretty accurate.
So, that's really good.