Hiring for Executives - an online training course and webinar series

Wisnio

Every day, millions of hiring decisions are made by managers who are not prepared for this. The decisions are often made without data and with no research-based methods involved. Can you think of any other equally important management decision made this way? 

The existing managerial folklore makes things worse - people tend to believe harmful slogans like “strong managers make (hiring) decisions quickly” and “recognise the right person immediately”. Many have heard the saying “hire fast, fire fast” and maybe even read the famous blog post it comes from. 

The post argues that there is no way to make sure if a person will be a good fit with the role and organisation. Therefore, it does not make sense to waste time on time-consuming assessments and hiring procedures. The only truth in this startup mantra is the second half of it - if you hire fast, then better fire fast as well. But, of course, you should never actually hire fast in the first place. 

The same year that the famous blog post was published, a great book was printed: Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. In it, the Nobel Prize winner in behavioural economics describes two types of thinking:

• System I  - intuitive, automatic, near-instantaneous thinking

• System II - slower, conscious, and logical thinking

Based on data-rich research, the author shows that hiring decisions are among the latter - that is, among the decisions that should always be made slowly. 

Unfortunately, this is far from being common knowledge. Therefore, it is not surprising that about half of the hiring decisions do not end well. After a year, only 50% of the managers who have made a hiring decision, say with confidence that they would make the same decision again. 

However, these decisions are usually not corrected. The reasoning is simple - the person who should correct the hiring mistake is the same who made the original decision and is therefore not motivated to admit it. 

Most managers say that the majority of their managerial wisdom is learned through experience. In hiring, this is a very expensive way to learn. It leads to an enormous waste of human capital, resulting in many people being appointed to roles they are not suitable for and into teams where their potential is not fully used.

All the above hiring challenges led us at Wisnio and Estonian Business School to develop an online course named “Hiring for Executives”. A course about hiring for business leaders. Most hiring courses are designed for HR leaders and tend to be theoretical and boring. This one is not.

The course was created by using Coursera’s Private Authoring Tool and it will be shortly available at www.MyEBS.ee starting from 15.06.2022.  The course covers all the crucial steps of the hiring process: 

• Position mapping 

• Sourcing

• Interviewing

• Reference checking

• Making a hiring decision

• Candidate onboarding 

The course is based on a fictional hiring scenario where an executive is looking to expand his team. It includes over 30 minutes of video material of the executive going through the process and explaining his thinking. Viewers see the sometimes funny mistakes and the improvement process of the executive.

Additionally, the course includes practical exercises, reading materials, podcasts, and mini-lectures led by the course instructor, Tonis Arro, for each module. 

The course is designed for all leaders who need to make hiring decisions. It takes from a few to up to 10 hours of each manager’s learning time, depending on how thorough they want to go. 

As replacing a bad hire can take months and is estimated to cost at least the yearly salary of the person being replaced, it’s time well worth spending. The course has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of euros by improving the decision making quality and reducing the probability of hiring mistakes.