by Lou Adler, CEO and founder of The Adler Group
The process of hiring the right person has always been a balance of assessing technical skills and finding candidates who fit into a company’s culture, pace, and values. For decades, recruiters and hiring managers have struggled with how to achieve both – hiring people who not only excel at the job but also thrive within the company’s unique work environment.
A new generation of AI-powered tools like GPT is poised to change the game.
By leveraging these technologies alongside established hiring frameworks, companies can make more informed, objective hiring decisions, ensuring a better fit between candidates and both the company culture and the hiring manager’s leadership style.
Hiring Tip for Recruiters and Hiring Managers: Before making an offer ask the candidate if she/he is familiar with the performance objectives of the role and if so, why do they represent a true career move. DO NOT MAKE AN OFFER if the response is superficial.
The Critical Role of the Hiring Manager in Employee Success
Gallup’s research on employee engagement is a vital reference point when considering the importance of hiring the right fit. According to a Gallup study, 70% of the variance in employee engagement can be attributed to the relationship employees have with their direct managers. This is significant because engagement drives key business outcomes such as productivity, profitability, and turnover. When employees feel aligned with their manager’s style, and with the company’s values, they are far more likely to stay motivated and committed to delivering top performance.
Given this, it’s not enough to just focus on technical qualifications when hiring. The new hire must also mesh with the manager’s leadership approach, whether it be hands-on coaching or a more autonomous management style. This level of compatibility is just as important for long-term success as technical skills. However, identifying this fit has traditionally been difficult for recruiters and hiring managers to assess effectively, often leading to costly hiring mistakes.
Performance-based Hiring: A Framework for Hiring Success
This is where Performance-based Hiring (PbH) comes into play. PbH shifts the focus of hiring from focusing on skills, competencies and experiences to what candidates need to do to be successful in the new role. It centers on asking the question: “What does the person need to accomplish in this job to be considered successful?” By defining key performance objectives (KPOs) and desired outcomes for the role, recruiters and hiring managers can focus more on whether a candidate has accomplished something similar in the past. Just as important is assessing the situation underlying these success (and failures) as a means to measure the fit factors in the Hiring Formula for Success shown in the graphic.
This shift in perspective also allows for a more holistic assessment of fit. PbH digs deeper into soft skills like team collaboration, decision-making in high-pressure environments, and how well the candidate aligns with the hiring manager’s leadership style. For example, candidates who excel in a fast-paced, startup-like environment may not be as effective in a more structured, corporate setting. With PbH, these factors are considered early in the hiring process, reducing the risk of bringing someone on board who may technically be competent but is not fully engaged or aligned with the company’s culture or pace.
How GPT Can Enable Smarter Hiring Decisions
By integrating AI tools like GPT into this performance-based hiring framework, companies can now automate and optimize large parts of the hiring process. For example, GPT can assist in crafting performance-based job descriptions that are clear, actionable, and tailored to the specific needs of the role. These descriptions move beyond traditional job postings, focusing on what success looks like over the first 6-12 months. This approach alone can help attract more aligned candidates who are seeking roles that match their strengths and career goals.
Moreover, GPT can enhance candidate assessments by automating initial screening processes, ensuring that key performance objectives are met. By asking deeper, performance-focused questions, GPT can help uncover a candidate’s motivation, their soft skills, and how well they might align with the hiring manager’s leadership style. GPT-powered interviews can help identify not just what candidates have done, but how they’ve solved problems, led teams, and adapted to change—key indicators of how well they’ll fit into the culture and leadership style of the organization.
In addition to aiding in candidate assessments, GPT can also help with team and cultural fit. Using input from existing high-performing teams and data from company culture assessments, GPT can compare how well a candidate aligns with the desired traits of the organization. For example, it can gauge a candidate’s ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment or evaluate their openness to feedback and collaboration—traits that are often challenging to quantify during traditional interviews.
Better Hires, Better Teams, Better Results
By combining the strengths of GPT’s AI capabilities with the proven success of Performance-based Hiring, recruiters and hiring managers are now equipped to make better hiring decisions. The emphasis shifts from merely checking off technical qualifications to ensuring that candidates are the right fit for the company’s culture and the manager’s leadership style. This not only leads to better employee satisfaction and retention—as supported by the Gallup study—but also creates more effective and engaged teams, driving overall business success.
In today’s competitive talent market, finding technically skilled individuals is only half the battle. Hiring people who fit with the company’s culture, values, and leadership style is key to building high-performing teams that stay with the company for the long haul. By leveraging Performance-based Hiring and GPT-enabled tools, companies can achieve the perfect blend of skill, fit, and motivation—ensuring long-term success for both the employee and the organization.
Permission has been granted from The Adler Group and Lou Adler, author of Hire With Your Head and The Essential Guide to Hiring & Getting Hired, to reprint this article.
About the author
Lou Adler is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group – a training and search firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring℠. Adler is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007). His most recent book has just been published, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013). He is also the author of the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! Using Performance-based Hiring to Build Great Teams (2007). Adler holds an MBA from the University of California in Los Angeles and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in New York.
