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The most powerful question to make hiring easier

The traditional hiring process goes something like this: a vacancy opens up in a manager's division, and the manager panics. They have no idea how they are going to fill the vacancy, so they call HR and beg for help. HR asks for a job description which the manager copies from an old one they find and submits it to the HR team to post.

Predictably, three months go by without much traction until, getting desperate, the manager pushed the HR team to source more people. Finally, HR presents a few candidates to the manager, and since nobody in the firm knows anything about these people, they subject the candidate to multiple forms of voodoo hiring methods with the hope of making a good decision. Months later, the manager fills the position with one of these unknowns. Is there a better way?

Take a moment and think about how passive such an approach is. It relies on finding people in "talent pools" at particular points of need. Yet we all know that talent pools grow stagnant. Like tidal pools far from the ocean's edge, talent pools rarely contain the most vital and energetic candidates. In fact, these traditional talent sources are so overworked that most of the people left in them are not the ones you want to hire.

Many managers source candidates by placing advertisements in one form or another. This is often a good way to create a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates. Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. This approach may seem scary and time-consuming, but it is the single most effective way to find potential A players.

Take Patrick Ryan, who grew Aon Corporation from a start-up in 1964 to a $13 billion company. "I guess the one thing that I have done differently than most people is that I am constantly on the hunt for talented people to bring to my company.

"I set a goal of personally recruiting thirty people a year to Aon. And I ask my managers to do the same. We are constantly asking people we know to introduce us to the talented people they know."

Ryan's approach is among the easiest. Whenever he meets somebody new, he asks this simple, powerful question: "Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?"

Talented people know talented people, and they're almost always glad to pass along another's names. Ryan captures those names on a list, and he makes a point of calling a few new people from his list every week.

You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan's simple question - "Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?"- can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.

Source: Who - The A method for Hiring

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