Analytics

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Measuring The Best Hiring Manager

The most critical test for any manager or supervisor is the quality of their hires. Studies show that a bad hire (or any employee turnover, for that matter) costs a company about 50% of that employees annual salary.

In fact, one of my partners now believes that employee turnover costs American businesses over $340 Billion dollars per year.

So hiring the right person is indeed a critical component of a managers success, how do you evaluate that success (or failure)?

Kris Dunn, writing in Fistful of Talent, outlines some essential values when determining how well a manager hires, including a reference to the recent Jack Welch article in Business Week.

Tracking the hiring success of your managers is essential. And if a manager has a poor record of hiring, then the opportunities for training and development are ripe:
  • Teaching the fundamentals of interviewing;
  • Having that manager observe other interviews;
  • Conducting performance appraisals of not just the newly hired employee, but also the hiring manager 90 days after the hire.
Speaking of Fistful of Talent, by the way: Jessica Lee, who is the Employment Manager for APCO Worldwide, has a blog that's must reading for small business owners and managers. And although she's obviously skilled at her job, a book (or two or three) is obviously in her future.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi eric - thanks for highlighting fistful of talent! i can't take credit where you gave it to me though... that entry on measuring a hiring manager's effectiveness was actually written by kris dunn who manages the blog. :)

cheers!
jessica lee

Eric W. Swenson said...

I stand corrected and have made the adjustments.

However, I meant what I wrote about you and your blog: I suspect I will be highlighting you more and more - and I know you have an incredible book inside of you - if not now, very soon.

EWS