Did you ever make a bad hire…Of course…but you hired them because you needed them…but that assumes you find the right person too. Do you ever hire someone simply because you DO need them knowing (or maybe failing to admit to yourself) they are not the right person. This brings me to Ryan Tannehill.

Who? Exactly. I consider myself a bit of a college football fan but his name never sank into my mind over the past few years. I just had to look to find that he went to Texas A&M. In short, he had a nice college career and a very good pro day where he showed his stuff to NFL scouts. The top two quarterbacks in the draft are probably going number one and two and are already spoken for. This makes Tannehill the number three QB available. Couple this with his good pro day and he is all of  a sudden the talk of the draft and he will go higher, perhaps much higher, than originally predicted or perhaps even higher than he should go based on demonstrated talent. In other words, his body of work, clearly shown in his game films is good but not great and created expectations he would go at number 18 or so. Now he could be top 10. Good for him, maybe bad for the one drafting him.

How many times have you needed to hire someone and you talked yourself into them in the interview. Heck, you probably talked yourself into it when you looked at the resume. The interview is where you are suppposed to be evaluating the person, not talking yourself into hiring them. An interview is inherently inaccurate. We all know that. They are measured to be 31% accurate/effective in predicting the success of a new hire. It seems this is exactly what some teams are doing in this draft. Tannehill had a good pro day (see that as the interview) and teams are talking about drafting him high. Mind you, before the interview he was good not great.

The point here is that hiring is a process that should have serveral phases and parts to it. The interview is only part of it. The NFL also uses an assessment called the Wonderlic (I have had this one done to me) to determine overall cognitive reasoning (I got hired so I guess I did OK). What do you use and how well do you use it?

We help people in the hiring process with assessments of various kinds. Most firms use no assessment but those that do enjoy a better success rate in the hiring process. We can even benchmark a position and then help you hire to the benchmark. The NFL does that too. They know the general size, strength, speed, and intelligence requirements for any given position. This doesn’t mean having the right numbers insures success but it does help.

I hope Tannehill has a great NFL career. He does seem like a good guy but I can’t say for sure. What I can say for sure is hiring should be based on the needs of the organization coupled with the ability of the organization to find a qualified candidate. To do anything else is to invite failure in hiring.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2012 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Hiring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.