Early in my career when I was responsible for in-house recruitment in a smaller company, I remember partnering with a Sales leader to hire an Account Executive.
He had an aggressive target to hit, we were well into Q1, so the hire was urgent.
After a fast and focused process, we hired a candidate with a strong track record closing deals, coming from a big competitor in the industry, and who immediately left a strong positive impression with his charisma. Let’s call him Adam.
We were confident Adam would hit the ground running and meet his sales targets.
Turns out, he didn’t.
Defining the performance outcome
You see, during the recruitment process we were laser focused on someone with strong experience in closing deals.
“A successful hire is someone who meets and exceeds their sales targets”. The definition of success for the role was very clear… or so it seemed. The recruitment assessments were tuned towards the candidates’ past experience in closing, the size of their deals, their portfolio of clients & network, their industry expertise. It all seemed right.
However, once on the job Adam fell short of expectations. There were several factors:
- He was used to getting highly-qualified leads from SDRs in his previous job. In this company he had to do a lot of the qualification himself, with a different dynamic with a much smaller SDR team.
- His previous company was large and well known in the industry, clients would usually want to work with them. This new company was smaller, not as well positioned, we had to really sell ourselves to win each deal. Adam was used to playing from above, not from below.
- We didn’t have very strong sales processes, our CRM and tools were limited. It was a scrappy environment and culture. Much different from Adam’s previous job.
Keen to meet his targets, Adam ended up closing whichever deals could come his way, even if they weren’t fully qualified and sometimes with a bit of over-promising, resulting in accounts of high maintenance effort and low profitability.
The sales targets were (partially) met, but not the profitability targets, nor the quality targets, among others.
And the main responsibility for that wasn’t on Adam -he truly tried his best-, but on us as the hiring team for not setting up the hiring process properly since the beginning.
We only focused (inaccurately) on the what (closing deals), but not enough on…
- The why (the connection to the broader strategy and purpose),
- The where (the specific context & culture of this role within the team and organization),
- and the how (the manner in which deals need to be handled and closed in this org).
Our initial definition of the performance outcome was incomplete.
Starting with the right foot using the Critical Incident Technique
A proper definition of the performance outcome for a role seeks one core thing:
A clear understanding of what behaviours a top performer has in the role and context.
This is the base for a “successful hire” (meaning someone who meets and exceeds performance targets after the first 18 months), and the very first step of Evidence Based Recruitment.
The behaviors boil things down to specific, observable actions needed for success in both the role and the particular context of your team and organization.
The easiest way to achieve this understanding is using the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), a series of progressive questions to support a job analysis. This is what we use in Academic Work with our clients during the first meeting to set up a recruitment process.
- Purpose: What is the purpose of this position? What value is it meant to generate for the business?
- Tasks: What are the most critical tasks to achieve this purpose?
- Behaviors: What key behaviors have you seen in a great performing employee when executing these tasks?
- Skills: To be able to perform these behaviors, which traits and skills are needed? (differentiate required vs preferred).
- Proficiency: Which level of proficiency is needed for those skills?
In this article we’ll focus on the first three questions, and the other two will be addressed in the next article focusing on “Choosing Critical Requirements”.
So back with Adam:
- Purpose (‘why’): we simply saw the point of the role as “sell more, hit revenue targets”, but that’s more of a task. The purpose should have been aligned to the broader sales strategy of that moment, in short: “build a smaller client base with high commitment, low maintenance, and high profitability”. This ‘why’ clearly sets the tone for the ‘what’ in the tasks (the type of deals to close, etc.).
- Tasks (‘what’): we just focused on the tasks related to closing, without properly scoping the parts related to qualification, nor the ‘ad hoc’ tasks that come in a less-structured environment. We ended up with blind spots in our “what” that misinformed our ‘how’.
- Behaviors (‘how’): lastly, and most importantly, we didn’t map the behaviors needed for executing the task. We assumed that if the candidate had done it successfully in the past, they’d know how to do it now. But the context and culture (the ‘where’) always demands behavioral adaptation: for example, selling in a smaller company usually requires more grit, resourcefulness, proactivity. These then translate into personality traits such as being resilient, explorative, hopeful, deliberative, etc.
We used these questions to better set up the process the next time we hired an Account Executive, and the difference was stark. Faster time to productivity, better deals with higher profit margins, less frustration for everyone.
These principles then became the cornerstone of all our hiring processes.
They even carried further into the onboarding and performance management processes for the hire hires: since the beginning we were able to onboard them with (1) a clear purpose for their role and how it connects to the broader strategy, (2) sharp clarity on their tasks in their broader context, with clear performance targets, and (3) the expected behaviors that would enable them to succeed in achieving their targets.
How to get started today
You don’t need to rehaul processes or infrastructure to make this happen. The next time you are about to start a new recruitment, simply start with those 3 questions: the purpose of the role, the tasks & targets, and the behaviors needed to succeed. That’ll set the tone for everything else.
But if you want expert support, we at Academic Work are here for that. We’ll set everything for you in this initial stage of recruitment, and the rest of the whole process, to make sure your next hire is a perfect fit. Just reach out to us.
This article is the 2nd in our introductory series of Evidence Based Recruitment (EBR), so you can continue navigating our blog to read the first article that outlines EBR as a whole, and our next articles that provide a deep dive into the following four steps of EBR.
- Define performance outcome.
- Choose critical requirements.
- Apply reliable selection methods.
- Use unbiased decision-making.
- Validate performance.
In the next article, focused on choosing critical requirements, we’ll go over the remaining two CIT questions focused on Skills and Proficiency, which then become the focal elements to assess during candidates evaluation.
What did you think? Found this interesting? Share it with a colleague who’s also a hiring manager or perhaps in HR and have a conversation about your experiences!