#HRTechChat: What Companies Get Wrong About Selection with Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton

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With consistent churn in leadership roles at all organization levels, we have to step back and ask the question:

  • What are we missing in our selection process?
  • How do we continually make poor selection decisions?
  • And why aren’t we doing better?

Let us start with how we can get caught in the “likeability trap.” Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, in The Five Talents that Really Matter, found that likeability factors have a significant impact on how a candidate is perceived. The problem is that likeability will not correlate with whether the candidate can perform in a specific role. Throughout my career I have seen organizations select highly likeable candidates that go on to fail in the job, often within the first 6-12 months. In the selection discussions, likeability is often defended as the criteria and can often win out over the discussion on potential performance.

In this podcast, join the conversation to learn more about:

  1. How we can mislead candidates. Do you think it is possible to mislead candidates in face-to-face interviews? I have seen this multiple times—candidates feel they had great interviews, and then are shocked when they do not get the role. Misleading candidates can not only create negative experiences for them, it can also damage a company’s brand.
  2. How 360 Assessments are subjective at best and biased at worst.
  3. How misaligned incentives with search firms can advocate for candidates that may not be the best choice.

In this session, Barry and Sarah offer a path forward for how to audit and evaluate your selection process.

“Their strategy is to introduce tools and processes that guide the hiring, selection, succession, and promotion decisions toward a defined structure that has measurable outcomes.”

With each leadership selection decision, company performance is on the line—we can improve selection and have an enormous positive impact.

 

Learn more about the book:

Five Talents Pre-Sales | Conchie Associates

 

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.

Transcript:

Pamela Stroko 00:00
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two of our podcast series on the five talents that really matter, and back with us again. Today we have the two authors of the five talents that really matter, Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton. Welcome, and we’re so glad that you’re back to take us through yet another section of the book. So today we’re going to be talking about how we select leaders. And when I went through that section of the book, what I realized is what most organizations are doing today may not help them select the best leaders, as a matter of fact, in the marketplace, over the last you know, several months, you hear a lot of stories and see a lot of evidence of someone got selected to a top leader job, and after a certain amount of time, six months, seven months, 12 months, they failed, and they’re being ushered out in some sort of capacity. They’re going to take an advisory role, and then they’re opening up the search again for another leader. And Sarah, I want to start with you on this, because I know you’re an expert on selection and assessment, and so I want to start with you on how does that happen. I mean, I can’t imagine that these organizations don’t do some due diligence and feel like they’re making good choices. I’m sure they feel that. But how is it that they select the wrong people and then they’re looking for a way to usher them out and package them out in a pretty short amount of time?

Sarah Dalton 01:41
I think part of the problem is all of that due diligence that we do isn’t helping us make better predictions about who’s going to be the best performer. You know, when we wrote this book, one of the earlier chapters outlines what we would call seven key errors that every company makes when selecting leaders. And I hope people read that chapter with the sense of humor and start to get real about the fact that we aren’t that good at picking people. One of the first issues is around misaligned incentives with search firms. So in when you initiate the search what you’re relying on that search firm to do is to give you their preferred candidates. And the assumption is that they’re going to give you the very best candidates that they could find. But we’ve got to get real about the fact that they’re when I talk about misaligned incentives, what I really mean is that, you know, they they want to close that search out quickly. They get paid on how quickly they close that search out. And so when they present candidates to you, you’ve just got to recognize that it might not actually be the best candidate. It’s just their preference. Some of the other issues that we look at in that chapter are just around the simple fact that face to face interviews often reward likability. So when we get leaders in a room with us, and they are highly tenured, they’ve been in all of the right companies, they show up with a bit of confidence, right? It’s so easy to build chemistry in those kinds of situations. And as soon as you start falling in love with candidates, then you start assigning capabilities and talents to them that might not actually be true. And you also take every other candidate less seriously than you should, because you’ve already developed a preference in your mind for the person that you like. And again, in the book, we’re trying to help people realize that just because you like a person doesn’t mean that they’re the right fit for the role.

Pamela Stroko 03:43
Don’t you want to? I do want to ask a kind of a little, kind of slide question to that, um, Pete, we do want to work with people we like, though, and so I can see how someone would get caught in that, how they would be like, I really like this person, and maybe they don’t have all the qualities I’d like, or maybe they don’t have all the experience I would like, but I can teach, you know, by the way, there’s a little bit of a I can coach them. I can teach them. I can take likability and turn it into competence.

Sarah Dalton 04:20
I mean, if they are objective enough that there are obvious red flags in a candidate that they’re then rationalizing and saying, Well, I can just coach these. I can cover these. We’ve got to realize that if, if that rationalization process is playing out so early, that should make you pause. Yeah, it should make you question whether or not that’s really the right person. Just because you like them doesn’t mean that as a leader, you should spend all of your time coaching and developing the obvious deficits that you see up front I and some of those things, it’s kind of interesting some of those deficits and the things that would. Make you that should make you think a candidate isn’t the best fit for the role. A lot of those times, a lot of times, those don’t get surfaced in the interview process because we’re not often really well prepared for the interviews that we do conduct. They tend to be unstructured, free flowing. It’s the questions that come to mind in the moment that help us develop a relationship with the person. It’s really rare, when we look at a company’s selection process, that they’ve got good, structured questions that are actually relevant enough to the role, to help that hiring manager or to help that leader make the right decision.

Pamela Stroko 05:40
That’s true, especially, you know, one of the things I’ve seen, particularly on likability is I, when I worked for Oracle, I had a client where I went to this company and and this one individual was incredibly likable, and so much so that you’re like, Boy, that’s a That’s a lot of likability all wrapped into one. And what I realized was that he, this person, had gone from company to company for, you know, a decade or more, and and would stay about a year, and he was in the time I met him, is in a situation where likability was starting to kind of come apart, and the company was asking for results, and that’s how we got called in. And so, you know, at some point I can see where likability does come apart a little bit, if someone really can’t deliver in in the role.

Sarah Dalton 06:42
And I think what companies try and do to answer that performance question is they look at things like 360s where they try and conduct reference checks, where we talk to people that have worked with you in the past. And you’ve got to recognize how subjective people’s opinions are. So when I’m raiding a leader on a 360 I’m looking at them through a very narrow window around the experience that I had working with them at a specific time in a specific company, with unique circumstances. And people tend to be overly positive in 360s anyway, they just because right and just because a lot of people have contributed to them, doesn’t make them an objective predict. It doesn’t make it an objective prediction about past performance and how that person is likely to show up in the role. Now

Pamela Stroko 07:34
I have to tell you a little vignette on 360s and this happened earlier in my career. I was working for a company where we decided to use 360s on the various teams in manufacturing. And one of the gentlemen said in a team meeting, he goes, here’s the thing, if you can’t find nine people to say that you’re really great, the problem. The issue isn’t what they’ll say on the 360s the issue is you can’t find nine people that like you, and that’s more of a problem than anything they’re going to say in a 360 and I kind of laugh, because everyone was going through the list of who do I like, who likes me, and and who, who’s going to speak favorably about me, and so I totally get the the the objectivity issue with 360s at times,

Sarah Dalton 08:30
I’ve been invited to take 360s for people that I know, and sometimes the questions that they ask are terrible. If you just read through the questions themselves, you immediately should get the picture that these aren’t telling me about how effectively this person performed. And it’s to say, you know, it’s a similar issue when you start looking at reference checks if I’m cherry picking the people that I want you to call on my behalf as part of an interview process, and those people can only come up with a glowing, really flowery recommendation around why I’m the best candidate that you can find. We always tell companies immediately disregard. Put that to the side. It’s not helping you.

Barry Conchie 09:15
Think the other issue is that with reference checks, yeah, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assigning referees special powers that we don’t possess ourselves. And you know, the point I’m making there is that if a person nominates somebody as a reference, or even if you do what’s called a backdoor reference, where you know somebody in the company, and you do a rather surreptitious inquiry to find out what they are. It’s an opinion. It’s nothing special. It’s nothing that you know. They don’t carry any special powers or any special insights. And the evidence that I would ask people to consider is this, why do internal accounts? That it’s fail at all.

Pamela Stroko 10:03
That’s a great question.

Barry Conchie 10:04
Why do they fail and and we know these people the best. We’ve probably been working with them for several years, the head of steam gets built up through an interview process. We think they show up well, we like them, we promote them, and then the question is, why do they then fail? Because they do so even the people we know the best, where we have the most insight, where we’ve got the deepest knowledge, we make mistakes. And what we’re trying to do in the five talents that really matter is help people understand why those mistakes get made, and then ultimately, how to correct them and how to reduce the error rate in the appointments that you make. Now, one of the things that Sarah mentioned, I just want to touch on it, you know, the face to face interview, yes, too many, too many executives focus on the question anyway, I’d say, Well, isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Well, here’s how it goes. Executives have their pet that either the pet questions that they like to ask or they try to come up with a particularly difficult question. And I’ve sat with these executives when they’ve been doing this task, and I’ve hit them with the question, what do you expect to hear? And they’re clueless. It’s like crickets. So they think of a question, and then they’re going to interpret the answer in the moment, depending on whether it agrees with their presuppositions, and it’s a silly game that they’re playing. We know some companies have got extremely esoteric questions that they ask that they think teaches them inordinately important things about the candidates they’re interviewing. Google’s famous for this with their you know, their infamous how many ping pong balls fit inside a school bus or something like this? And I don’t know what they think they’re learning about a candidate, but it has absolutely nothing to do with their ultimate performance. So the face to face interviews are a problem. But then the last thing I want to mention on these, because we’ve been talking about likability, and I’ve got a slightly different take on this. I think leaders should appoint people they actively don’t like. They should give them serious consideration. I don’t think likability is a very helpful mechanism when people talk to me of chemistry, the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Because what it really means is, you know, we’re in the same social group. We go to the same places, we do the same things. We’ve got similar attitudes. We like each other. Well, how about appointing a candidate who’s brilliant but you dislike them too few leaders are prepared to take that step. And I’ll tell you something Paola, one of the most important stages in my career was working with a brilliant person that I thoroughly detested. I would never go to coffee with them. You know, there was they were on my birthday card list. Mind you, I didn’t have a big birthday card list, as he was, but these wild people I would even talk about at home. My goodness, they were brilliant. They made me better, but I didn’t like them.

Pamela Stroko 13:37
But that’s it. That’s a great point. How many leaders are willing to select someone that makes them better, that challenges them. I mean, isn’t it true that they say they want that, but then often don’t pick it.

Sarah Dalton 13:52
I was giving feedback to one of our leadership candidates yesterday, and one of the characteristics we measure is just the ability to read people at the level of their psychology, to kind of figure out what makes a person tick without having to ask a lot of questions. And when we find really strong evidence of that, you get people who are actually really sophisticated in interviews, they build stronger teams because they’ve got a ray of a way of reading people and thinking through how they position. And this guy didn’t have any of that. And I tried to make the point to him that he was going to be most vulnerable in interview situations where he’s got to make judgments about who the right person is on his team, because what he’s actually going to do is place a preference for people who show up and exhibit and talk about the same characteristics that he had, which is incredible work ethic, high level of discipline and detail orientation, but more of an action orientation in terms of wanting to get things done really quickly. And we were talking about what good partners looked like for him. And it was the slow, deliberate thinkers who ask annoying questions, who want to slow the process down, and those are the people to you’re on Barry’s point, that are going to annoy you, but could make you so much better if you appreciated that kind of quality. So we had a great conversation about this exact issue.

Pamela Stroko 15:21
Yeah. I mean, you hear so often. And throughout my career, I’ve heard over and over again, we actually hire people like ourselves. We want people like ourselves and and I have to say, I’ve seen a lot. Probably the majority of hires senior leaders have made. They choose people they like. They choose people like themselves. And it may or may not work. It’s not it’s not a sure fire solution. When you hire people like yourself, that it doesn’t work out all the time.

Barry Conchie 15:58
It’s a big problem Pamela for a couple of reasons. One of them is, everybody denies that they do that.

Pamela Stroko 16:03
Yes, that’s true. That is true. When

Barry Conchie 16:06
you ask the question, do you pick people like yourselves? Everybody knows the correct answer to that question, and it’s no, because if they were to admit it, the next question is, well, why don’t you pick people different to yourself? So everybody knows the game that they’re playing. But here’s the problem, when we get called into companies and we start carrying out our validated leadership assessment to really figure out, you know, what makes each person tick, what’s each person’s path to brilliance? And I guess the coronavirus to that is, how effectively does it all work together? You know, we often, we often assess teams and what we get the results like it’s as though we scanned a village in western Nebraska. Everybody is almost cut from the same genetic cloth. They think the same way. They act the same way. Now they look physically different, and sometimes they are, you know, different in terms of gender, different in terms of race, but they’re not different in terms of their psychological characteristics. Part of the reason for that is that when we look at people who’ve got similar characteristics to ourselves, we tend to rate them higher. Because of that. It’s, in a way, it’s an inverse form of self praise, because I’m good. Look at me. I’m in a leadership position, and I’m evaluating you. Oh, you’ve got similar characteristics to me. That must mean you’re going to be good too. And before you know it, you know, everybody really is cut from the same cloth. So even though leaders deny that they’re building teams like themselves, they’re not. You know that they are bringing in people who are radically diverse, new thinking, lots of different ways. It’s not the truth, and that’s one of the biggest impediments to team performance, less so individual performance, but certainly team performance.

Pamela Stroko 18:03
Um, let’s, let’s move a little bit on to one of the other things you mentioned in the book about selection and its connection to the brand, and what happens to the brand during the selection process, particularly when it doesn’t go well.

Barry Conchie 18:23
Well, I’m going to let Sarah answer this, but I’m going to put a little bit more before she does that. Let me just describe the typical experience of average executive trying to get a job in whatever company, and this can be a mid sized company, it could be a large company. They they have to put their resume together, and then there is a resume filter. Some people are rejected based on what they write on paper. It’s actually quite ludicrous when you think of it, but that’s what they do. But then what happens is a few people get called to interview, but it’s not one interview. It’s not as though you go for an interview, you might be meeting 10 to 12 people in one hour segments read out over a couple of days or even a couple of weeks, right? And all these people, all these candidates, are getting exposed to all these people. Here’s what we learn from candidates. Nobody’s prepared. The duplication of questions is enormous, right? So, so it’s as though the interviewers haven’t really got together to figure out who’s going to ask this question, who’s going to ask that question. The dominant impression that comes out of it is that the candidates don’t think the company know what they’re doing. Having said that, I’ll let Sarah fill in the rich and vibrant details of how this destroys your brand.

Sarah Dalton 19:57
I mean, if you’re if you’ve got. A leadership role open and you’re looking at multiple candidates in the process, these things do take time to Barry’s point. Sometimes these decisions play out over weeks or months. And I think there’s this pressure that people in the company feel to keep those candidates warm, to be incredibly positive about the process that we’re leading them through to try and be really affirming about why we think they’re such a great candidate, because we’ve got to keep them warm as this process plays out, right? But what happens is you get to the end of that, the decision is made, and for those unsuccessful candidates, we find that way too often these people get ghosted by the company. Yeah, sometimes they’re not even given call backs to say that they haven’t gotten the job. Sometimes they are calling, emailing whoever the recruiter is or the HR partner who’s managing that search, and they can’t even get a response. So you think about how damaging it is to a company’s brand when as a leader, I’ve invested months in this process, I’ve been as responsive and positive as I think I can be, only to get to the very end and then hear nothing, right? Or you get to the very end and you do know that you were unsuccessful, but you’re given no feedback in that process. So for us, when we take people through our leadership assessment, I tell every candidate, we will give you feedback when this process concludes, regardless of the outcome, whether you join the company or not, I want to hear from you. I want to know the decision. I want you back on our calendar so we can share what we learned, and people are always in shock when I say that, because so often the experience is completely the opposite, where they don’t get feedback. They put their time into doing these assessments and whatever hoops the company has designed, they jump through and they don’t learn anything about what that company is learning about them. So we always try and own our part of the process and make sure that we we respect people’s time and that we share what we learned about them. And I find that to be a very rare experience for a lot of leadership candidates.

Pamela Stroko 22:15
I think

Barry Conchie 22:16
a couple things to add to that, if I may, Pamela, the first is that it’s not just that companies ghost these candidates and they they just ignore them, or they don’t give them any feedback at all. It’s that during the process, when they were being kept warm, they were being told extremely positive things about. And then when it gets to the end, they turn around and said, Well, all I heard were positive things. You know? Why? How can I not be chosen? And it creates just a lot of noise and confusion. And I think the reason why companies ghost these candidates, is that the candidates are going to ask them some pretty tough questions. Well, well, you told me this, or you told me that, or whatever it is, and there’s not a really easy answer to that, that question, I think the second, the second point about these, about the candidate experience, that I want to make is that there are some companies that do a fantastic job, and I’ll tell you what happens with those companies. They don’t oversell to the candidate the nature of the job, and they don’t gush over the candidate as a means of keeping them warm in the process, what they do is they simply say, hey, here we are. Matter of fact, we’ve gone through this first stage here. Next stage takes place here. We’re going to ask you to do this. But these these companies, don’t mislead their candidates. They don’t say things to them that aren’t true. They don’t give them hints as to whether they’re a strong candidate. I mean, we’ve had situations where candidates have told us that they’ve come out of interviews and said I was told I was brilliant. Only a month or two later, they didn’t get a job, so they went from peacock to feather dusters.

Pamela Stroko 24:24
In I’m writing that down, peacock to feather duster. I love it.

Barry Conchie 24:30
So these are the problems that companies really have to sort out. And what Sarah and I commit to do is to probably do a better job of managing the brand of the client than the client does themselves. Because to from our perspective, it’s a white blood treatment. Everybody is a absolute top notch executive. We treat them with the utmost of respect that we commit to give them feedback, and the feedback is designed to help them, because if they don’t get this job. Them, maybe they’ll get another job somewhere else, and our advice could help set them up for success. So little work to be done there, and too few companies have spent time thinking about the damage they do to their brand by not getting that part right,

Pamela Stroko 25:17
absolutely and ghosting, you know, particularly since the pandemic, and as the job market shifts, and you know, there are more openings in some areas, less than others, ghosting has gone up. You can you see people writing about it all the time. I was part of 15 interview processes. Nobody ever got back to me. And ghosting is prevalent today. Used to be companies were complaining that candidates ghosted them, and now the shoe was on the other foot, and they don’t remember what it was like to be ghosted, apparently, because they are ghosting people. Now we’ll tell you one little story of who doesn’t ghost people. And a company that I thought did this well is virgin in the UK, they had a philosophy that said, every person that interviews with us could be a potential customer, if they’re not already they could be a customer of some part of our portfolio. And so our goal is to find the right people to fill our open roles, but it’s also to create customers, to create good relationships with these people, so they want to do business with us, whether we hire them or not, because who knows, at some point we may call them back, we may want them to come in and interview for another role. And I thought their approach was just so practical and so respectful, because even if you didn’t get the job, if I really worked on having a connection with you so you felt good about the brand, it’s good for the brand and it’s good for the person. It’s very respectful to the individual. So I want to actually move on to a couple of things here, so we know what people are doing that might not be working and might be sub optimal in terms of their hiring process. What should they be doing instead?

Barry Conchie 27:21
Well, I don’t think, I don’t think face to face interviews are going to go away. Yeah, that’s true. There is an absolute need for some form of human contact, although we seem to have mastered it by a video through the pandemic in a number of cases. But let’s just put that to one side for a second. There is a need for face to face interaction. Frank Schmidt and Stephen Hunter produced a really interesting research paper, and it was back in, I think it’s 2006 and they looked at the efficacy of face to face interviews in terms of selecting candidates who were more likely to perform better once they’ve been picked. So they they did a meta analytical study of a lot of research into face to face interviews, and what they found was really quite interesting. They said, if you want to get the biggest bang for your book from face to face interviews, quit the round robin nonsense. Quitting, it’s, it’s not doing anything for you. There is, you know, when people say what’s best practice in selection? There is no such thing as best practice with regard, regard to round robin interviews. There’s just malpractice. And you know, what they recommended was, was this ideally set an interview panel of three people, ideally, and the optimal number was found by doing a regression in in the size of different panels and the ease with which they were able to make a decision that seemed to have some predictive value regarding a candidate’s future success. So they said the number is three. You could go to four better, not stick to three and don’t be at one. Get that group of three people together and agree your selection criteria agree what it is that you’re looking for, and this work has to be done well in advance of the interview, not five minutes before, which is what typically happens. So this panel puts together the interview criteria, essentially the selection criteria, and these are the elements that we’re looking for, and then they said design questions aimed at testing each of those areas, and you might ask more than one question for a particular area. So let’s say it’s really important that we have somebody with a strong commercial mindset. Okay, that’s critical for this position. Well, okay, so what questions might we ask? A track towards a commercial mindset. So you develop those questions. And in our book, by the way, we’ve done a lot of hard work for you, because in the back of the book, we’ve got tons of brilliant questions with expected answers, by the way, to help you make your selection. So so be sure to get the book and read there. And then they said, when you go into the interview with a candidate, only one person asks the question, no nobody else asks questions. The others just take notes. So there’s a candidate in front of you, there are three people, one person’s asking questions, and the other two don’t speak at all, except to introduce themselves. Everybody just takes notes based on those questions. Now why? Well, if you don’t do that, and you have each person asking questions rather than listening to what the candidate says, the person’s thinking of the wording for their question, because they’re up next, so all they’re thinking in their mind is they’ve got to get the word in red. It was a brilliant research recommendation, but I have to tell you, Pamela, it’s as though nobody’s ready, though nobody’s even considered this. But what they found was, if you behave that way, and you get to the end of the interview for the candidate, you do all your scoring on your criteria immediately at the end of the interview, but you don’t discuss it. And if you do that for each candidate, and you add up all the scores, if you actually go with the candidate that you scored the highest, they’re the ones that are more likely to be the better performer in the future role. Now, it’s not as good as a research assessment like the one we’ve built. My goodness, it gives you a lift, and you would think organizations would implement it, but it’s as though they’ve never heard about it. We talk about it in the book.

Pamela Stroko 32:01
One of the things that I’ve been really impressed with over the course of your career, Barry and Sarah, is that you talk about assessments that are predictive of performance and potential. And to me, that’s like, that’s like giving me kind of a view to how this person might work out in the company. This is, this is how well could you do in this situation? Because so few things, so few assessments out there, or processes out there are actually predictive of performance and potential. And if you told me, If I pick Candidate A there’s a nine out of 10 chance they’re going to be a top performer. I’d go, Where do I find more of these? Because we don’t have those kinds of guarantees in almost every situation. So I want to just, we were a little we’re kind of running on time, so just for a couple minutes, if you could talk about the predictive nature of your assessment methodology and how it does predict performance and potential.

Barry Conchie 33:12
Briefly, Pamela, it starts with studying outstanding performers in the role and with our leadership assessment, we will dig into that in a future podcast. But the idea is, we study brilliant leaders, we learn from them, we find out that they achieve success in different ways. So we develop a talent model that captures all those different ways in which leaders are successful, and the assessment is built from the talent model. So once we know what the talents are that we’re looking for, we then develop questions that are designed to separate really strong performers from those who are average or weak. And you know, there are lots of different questions that we ask, but when we aggregate the responses to those questions, it amounts to a statistical prediction of success. And you know, to your point about who wouldn’t want to know about this. This assessment doesn’t take selection decisions for companies. Is it that way? In fact, if a company came to us and said, We want your assessments to give us the best you know to for us to appoint the best candidates based on your assessment. We probably refuse to work with them. We want. We don’t want the assessment taking the decision. We want the assessment informing the decision. Yes, that means you balance it against all the other characteristics that you know. But the assessment carries predictive validity because of the nature of the research that went into building it. But it’s, you know, it’s one of those pieces of information that I don’t know. Any CEO would not want to know before they head with a with a candidate, because these are people you don’t know very well if they’re external. And this. Is giving you an insight into how they’re likely to operate and ultimately, how they’re likely to perform. You can balance that against all the other candidates and the information you have on them, you’d be a fool to say, no. I mean, why would we want that information?

Pamela Stroko 35:15
Exactly So that leads to our last question, and Sarah, I’ll direct this to you. And Barry also please comment. What advice would you give an organization that’s wanting to improve their selection process?

Sarah Dalton 35:36
Well, listening to the last couple of questions that you’ve had, Pamela and the value of companies finding more leaders who are just going to knock it out of the park. And everyone wants that, but what we’ve got to recognize is that those truly exceptional leaders

Pamela Stroko 35:51
are really quite rare. Yeah, right. There

Sarah Dalton 35:55
aren’t so many of them. And I think if I were to give one piece of advice, beyond what Barry was talking about with with structured interviews, is that I hope Kim, I hope companies can hold themselves back a bit longer to surface more candidates in the process, because we’ve been involved in so many searches where there’s only a single candidate for the role, Yeah, and then, by definition, they’re the best candidate, because they’re all we’ve got,

Pamela Stroko 36:24
right? I love it. We have one candidate, and they’re the best, and

Sarah Dalton 36:28
they’re the best because we have no other options, and those are always the most dangerous situations, because we come out with a candidate who really isn’t the right match for the role. Now, might be brilliant. In other areas with the company, there might be a role for them in the future, but for this particular one, it’s obviously not the right fit, and because we’ve invested so much time in a single candidate, we’re all the way to the end of the process now we start rationalizing how we might make it work. So maybe one of the pieces of advice I would give is hold yourself back long enough to surface multiple credible candidates. Put those all the way through the process. Right now, I think companies are narrowing their options way too early. Yes, right.

Barry Conchie 37:14
The other thing is, be very clear when you’re working with search firms to separate the sourcing of candidates from the assessment of candidates. So too many search firms right now will their own assessment practices completely oblivious to the obvious conflict of interest that exists. So we discuss this in detail in the book. Search firms do a fantastic job. You know, we partner with some great search firms. They are experts at finding candidates, so let’s test them on that have the assessment of candidates carried out by a completely independent group, and that way you’ll end up with the best candidate.

Pamela Stroko 37:59
That’s true, that’s true. So thank you so much for talking with us today on selection, on how we can get it right and how companies can be more successful at picking the right leaders for their businesses. And if you’re interested in reading more about this, please go to Amazon and pre order the book, the five talents that really matter. It comes out on August 27 and thank you Barry, thank you Sarah. And we’ll be talking with Barry and Sarah again in a six part series on the five talents that really matter. Thank you for joining us.

Barry Conchie 38:39
Thank you, Pamela.

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