Hiring for accountability
When you hire people, you want them to be highly motivated and a good cultural fit for your business. Christine Khor talks us through the recruitment process that draws in purpose-driven and self-motivated people who take pride in their work and are committed to the overall vision of your organisation.
The ability to assess the levels of accountability in a prospective employee is becoming an increasingly important success factor in the corporate recruitment process as it can be a great predictor of how effectively a candidate will align with your business’s strategy, culture and goals.
Logically, making sure that a prospect is highly motivated and a good cultural fit for your business before they are hired will help ensure they accept accountability for their performance, and significantly raise the probability that they will be fully engaged, highly productive and stay for the long haul.
Getting value from values
The lack of accountability in employees is often a symptom of misalignment between the goals and motivations of a business and those of an employee. In order for people to feel accountable for their jobs, they need to feel committed to the vision and values of a business. Therefore it is crucial that the vision and values of the business are communicated to your current and prospective employees. When someone believes in your vision and has the same values, they release their discretionary effort and will therefore hold themselves accountable for their performance. They do their job because they want to, not because they have to. It is important to keep in mind that the success of value-aligned recruitment depends on how committed your organisation is to upholding its values and vision with consistency.
Assessing accountability
Assessing someone’s level of accountability starts with gauging their values and determining whether they are aligned with that of your company. A skilled behavioural interviewer will be able to assess a prospect’s values through their actions and the behaviours they exhibit. Often they will do this by asking questions about past, real-life situations with the assumption that past behaviour is likely to determine future behaviour. For example, if one of your company’s values is honesty, ask a candidate to describe a time when a negotiation didn’t work out in their favour. You’ll be able to tell if their example is authentic and whether they are honest about their shortcomings. Then ask them what they did about it. This will determine their problem-solving abilities as well as their resilience.
In addition to the behavioural interview and reference checking process, psychometric testing and credentials verification can be utilised to support your assessment of talent. This combination of quantitative and qualitative assessment will help to build an accurate picture of the ‘person’ behind the ‘candidate’, and establish their true potential for performance, accountability and sustained cultural alignment that will allow a company to weather the storms of the business world.
All aboard for Onboarding
To further maximise the commitment of prospective hires, ensure that individual performance objectives are clearly tied to the overall vision of the organisation. If an employee cannot see how their job contributes to the goals of the company, they will become disengaged.
A thorough Onboarding program will help a new starter understand and embrace the purpose of their job, the measures of performance, the broader goals of the organisation and the values that underpin the behaviours within the business.
Leaders who want their employees to be purpose-driven and self-motivated people who take pride in their work, need a recruitment process that draws in the kind of people who already have these attributes.
A strong vision, a robust and values-based screening process, and a consistent Onboarding program will give new employees the best opportunity to reach productivity sooner, perform to a high standard and hold themselves accountable.
Christine Khor is the Managing Director of Chorus Executive; a talent management company specialising in the recruitment, coaching and personal branding of executives. She is also Chair of The Hunger Project’s Victorian Development Board and a finalist for the 2015 Telstra Business Women’s Award. Prior to becoming Managing Director at Chorus Executive, she had a long career in Marketing and Brand management. She held a number of senior marketing roles for well-known brands including Kraft and Simplot. With over fifteen years of recruitment experience, Christine specialises in executive and C-suite recruitment, talent management, coaching and mentoring. Her book Hire Love: how to hire passionate people to make greater profit has recently been published. Visit www.chorus-executive.com.au to learn more about the work Christine does.
