Severin Sorensen
Position/Title: Finding Difference Makers: covering the who, what, where, and how to attract, identify, and hire difference making top talent
Overview
The research shows that difference-makers in the workplace are exponentially more valuable to your company than the average employee. For instance, GE, Apple, Google, and others have determined that difference-makers add 10x to 300x more value than their peers. Consistently attracting and capturing top game-changing talent - aka, the "difference makers" -- for your business is a critical life skill for business owners and senior executives to master for sustainable company growth and business success. Difference makers are game-changing impact players and include key executive talent and much needed technical employee utility players that great businesses and teams are built upon. Unfortunately, knowing that you need and want employee "difference makers" does not make them magically appear, nor help you retain them.
Severin Sorensen, a successful serial entrepreneur, executive headunter, and former Vistage Chair (2010-2018), has long focused on "high growth" companies and the "difference makers" that lead them. This keynote and speaker presentation is informed by over 85 years of scholarly research on selecting talent. Severin has developed a consistent and reliable behavioral characteristics Talent Capture Management system that focuses on the business processes of identifying, recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding and retaining top game-changing talent. The keynote begins by exploring typical "hiring fumbles" and misjudgments that occur in the hiring process; a part 1 session called "Hiring Bad." These oversights frequently cripple organizations, waste resources, delay progress and cause mindshare distraction for firms. Severin argues that the root causes of many of these hiring fumbles are detectable flaws and frequently overlooked during the traditional hiring process. He also argues that candidate selection is not just about asking questions: It is knowing what to ask and what to observe.
Having identified the typical hiring problems, in Part 2 Severin next turns to the creation of a systemic process for greatly increasing the probability and success of hiring great hires every time. He explores the use of Ten (10) Talent Capture Management Tools that he uses regularly to consistently identify, attract, recruit, screen, hiring, and onboard for performance difference-maker success. Severin's Top 10 Tools of Talent Capture Management shared in the presentation include: Behavioral Job Analysis; Behavioral Job Description; Candidate Sourcing, Attraction, and Recruiting Plans; Employment Application Intake Process and the ATS; Applicant Funnel creation and first screening process; Phone Interviews of Top Candidates; Psychometric testing of top candidates in preparation for Panel Interviews; Candidate work samples and homework; cognitive tests; panel interviews; structured interviews and candidate ranking; job try-outs, integrity tests, and other pre-employment tests. Severin also reviews the stages of candidate warming, from candidate attracting, website career pages, outreach, and contact during the screening and selection process. Examples of questions for various stages of the review process are explored, along with setups strategies for phone screening interviews, panel interviews, and final interviews. Additional insights include tips for background checks and screenings, reference checks, and compensation negotiation. This session provides a watershed of concepts, theory, tips, and tools to enlarge the CEO, Presidents, and C-level officers and their companies.
Publications
"Hiring Heuristics: what science says about talent selection decision-making and your next key hire" (2020, in press).
"Hiring Bad: Catastrophic Hiring Fumbles and the points of failure that preceded them" (2017).
"Hiring Difference Makers: How to attract, select, screen, test, and hire difference making top talent: Resource Guide" (2015).
Education
M.Phil. in Economics, King's College, Cambridge University, England (1998)
B.Sci. in Economics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (1986)
B.Sci. in Political Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (1986)
Experience
Severin Sorensen is CEO of ePraxis LLC, a premier level executive headhunting, talent selection, and executive coaching company. As an executive headhunter, Severin is frequently called on to help companies identify, screen, test, and select top talent for businesses looking to place ‘difference makers’ in the CEO, President, and key executive positions. Severin leverages over 85 years of scholarly talent selection research to consistently find, screen, test, and select difference making top talent for his clients. Today, Severin is a highly sought Vistage Speaker on the topic of “Identifying, Recruiting, & Hiring Difference Making Top Talent” where he has given over 150+ presentations to Vistage groups on multiple continents. Prior to Vistage speaking, Severin was a Vistage Chair (2010-2018) of three Vistage Groups in Salt Lake City, UT, and during this period he was a repeat Mentor Chair and awarded the 2011 Vistage Rookie Chair of the Year Award. Prior to Vistage Chairing, Severin was a Vistage/TEC member in Washington DC (1999-2004) while he owned and operated a company he founded called Sparta Consulting Corporation (1994-2005), a management consulting, security systems integration, and remote video monitoring company; Severin sold this company in 2005 and it continues today as part of Interface Security Systems, the 7th largest security systems integrator in the US (2018). Throughout his career, Severin has made a business practice of working with fast-growing businesses and their leaders. From 1995-1999 Severin grew his own company over 700%, experiencing several years of 100% YoY growth. In Severin’s early professional years he was involved in public interest projects, government work, and political campaigns. Notably, from this period, Severin was a former Special Assistant to the President at the White House where he had the high honor to work for President George H.W. Bush (POTUS 41) (1992-93). Severin earned a graduate degree (M.Phil.) in economics from King’s College, Cambridge, University, England, and two undergraduate degrees in economics and political science from the University of Utah.
