Saving the World from Mis-hires

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post that started a list of the Top 5 Things You Can Do To Improve Hiring. I am trying to offer simple but high-impact exercises that companies and Hiring Managers can engage in to improve their hiring predictability.

#1 was “Work Backwards to Create a Job Description”. Start from the 1 year review instead of trying to create a Job Description from Scratch.

#2 was “Write a Scorecard”. By knowing what the 5-7 things are that you’re looking for you’ll be less likely to hire someone because you really like their personality.

Here are the other three things that you can do today, without much effort, to have a significant impact on your hiring predictability.

3. Implement a screening process that allows you to rapidly “screen to exclusion”. A Topgrading interview is 4 hours long. Not many people can actually conduct more than 2 or 3 of those without getting burned out. To quickly screen your large candidate pool, try implementing 2 or 3 quick steps before conducting any “real” interviews. Remember through the process that you’re trying to find reasons to take people out of contention, not include them. Some examples:

a. Rapid Resume Review: have they had more than 3 jobs in the last 8 years? Have they changed industries more than once? Have they taken a demotion for no obvious reason?

b. 10 Minute Phone Screen: ask two or three quick questions and score the answers.

i. This role requires that you have experience establishing metrics around profitability of our various retail products. Are you qualified to handle this?

ii. Would you please share with me a specific example of how you’ve done this in the past?

iii. And what did you learn through doing this?

If they really impress you with their answers to these three questions you’ll gain the clarity of knowing that they’re worth spending more time learning about the rest of their background and how they might fit into your organization.

4. Ensure that your job postings are in places where people can find them. Significantly increasing the volume of candidates who apply for your role can make a huge impact on your ability to hire effectively. When you post, ensure that the website is tied in with some of the more popular job posting aggregators like Indeed.com or SimplyHired.com. Try to also find niche websites where the traffic will be much lower but the quality of the eyeballs is higher. Make an effort to seek out local associations or user groups (example: Java User Groups or JUGS exist in every major metro area).

5. Interview for behaviors instead of relying on a resume. Even if you’ve only created a rough scorecard and you’re trying some of these tactics for the first time, interviewing for specific behaviors will yield significantly better results than simply going from role to role on a resume and letting a prospective employee tell you about just the things they want to bring up. Ask why they were hired in a role? Were they successful? Why or Why Not? What specifically were they engaged in that would make them uniquely qualified for your position? Beware the applicants who have never made mistakes (or won’t admit them).

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Dr. Brad Smart, in his book Topgrading, gives a scary statistic that should make any Manager or Executive cringe:

“[Only] 25% of people hired and promoted by most companies turn out to be high performers.”

An even more alarming statistic: Topgrading has only sold about 150,000 copies. Why isn’t it the most popular business book ever written?

The most common answer we hear: implementing all of the Topgrading principles isn’t easy. With that in mind, here are 5 simple things, many of which are based on Topgrading and Good to Great, that you can implement in your business today to have a direct and positive impact on your hiring track record.

1. Work Backwards to Create a Job Description. Most people start with the Job Description when they start to think about hiring a new employee. The next time you need to hire someone, start at the end: be honest with yourself about what your year-end review would look like with this new team member. Quantify as much as you can. By understanding what could be accomplished by an A-Player in the first year, the creation of a job description is a lot easier. An added bonus, because you know where the person needs to be at the end of 1 year, your 30, 60 and 90 day reviews just got a lot easier.

2. Write a Scorecard. What are the top 5-7 things that you need from this new hire? Could you handle hiring someone who has only 4 of the 7 skill sets? What if they have 6 of the skills but not the most important? Scorecards give you a strong focus and allow you to rank and quantify the people you’ve interviewed objectively and unemotionally.

I’ll cover #’s 3, 4 and 5 later this week.

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I had the opportunity to sit next to one of my favorite people today on a flight from Houston to Chicago. Ben Richter, the Founder and CEO of Bradford Airport Logistics , and I spent a lot of time talking about bodies of water and specifically: Ponds. Odd you might think, but really applicable to what’s happening around so many companies in America right now. Here’s his thought: there are three types of ponds:

-Vibrant & Fresh
-Static
-Septic

When companies are growing and expanding, their ponds are vibrant and fresh. New people are joining the team. New customers are coming online. The team is dynamic and performing together. Wins are celebrated and profit seems easy to come by.

When economic recessions hit, many companies shift to a static mode, and rightfully so. There are serious dangers in doing this, however. People who don’t carry their weight don’t have the “deodorant” of winning to mask their lack of results. Static Ponds, where no new opinions or experiences are being interjected have a tendency to both disincentivize teams and create tension. It also, when not monitored closely, can become a source of corporate welfare for people who shouldn’t have been in the company in the first place but who know are just hiding and trying to garner as little attention as possible.

This kind of environment usually leads to the third kind of pond: a Septic one. Attitudes are miserable. People walk around the office waiting for pink slips to be handed out. Not only are there no new ideas being injected into the company but the under-performers are dragging everyone down. Fingers get pointed. Blame gets laid on others. It just plain stinks.

Obviously there are lots of ways to identify when a pond is turning from Vibrant to Static and in a future post I’ll devote significant time to explaining how processes like Topgrading can work really well when applied to an existing organization.

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Great post this week from a woman named Penelope Trunk. She’s the self-named Brazen Careerist and a column writer for the Boston Globe. She writes a lot about Generation Y and I think that she’s touched on a very interesting topic today that employers need to pay attention to. She’s got a great BLOG for further reading as well.

High points from her recent post:

*Gen Y wants to constantly be learning. If they’re not learning, they’ll leave. “This is the generation that is steeped in SAT tutors, Spanish tutors, and private soccer coaching. So they expect to be learning every step of the way for their whole life.” If you’re not challenging them and helping them learn as an employer or manager, they’ll leave!

*Gen Y wants to work as a team. They grew up playing soccer, they attended the prom in large groups. This isn’t a generation of kids that played out on the playground by themselves.

*Hiring women costs more than men. For the first time in history, women in their 20’s are out-earning men and rightfully so. Get used to it.

*Gen Y is getting more done than you can possible imagine. Don’t be intimidated when they run circles around you while listening to their iPod, sending a text message and tweeting all at the same time.

Christina Harbridge, the founder of Allegory Training in San Francisco, is all over this topic as well. As a coach on public speaking she’s shared with me some remarkable things in the last few times I’ve seen her speak or had conversations with her. Some harrowing examples that scared me as a 30-something who considers himself pretty “hip”:

1. Young people today, when asked how often they check their email, said ‘Pretty often! At least once a week.’
2. It used to be considered rude to send text messages with your phone during a meeting. Today, the next generation need the distractions to stay focused.

This generation is moving into management positions quickly. Are you prepared to add them to your team and challenge them enough to have them elevate your company?

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The Rice Alliance held a panel discussion last night on the subject of: “Why the Best Time to Launch Your Business is During an Economic Downturn”. While not on the panel, a big portion of the discussion was around the presentation that Sequoia Capital gave to their 100 portfolio companies 2 weeks ago. Among the high points:

-Don’t trust models and spreadsheets, all assumptions prior to today are wrong.
-Pound your competitors’ shortcomings. They are hurting and they’ll be quiet.
-Adapt Quickly.
-It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black.

Checking out websites like ERE will make you think the sky is falling. The simple truth is that a lot of so-called recruiters made a lot of money in the past few years by overcharging and under-delivering. Now they’re scared to death because, in this kind of economic climate, companies are demanding accountability around the hires that they’re making. They expect a higher ROI from the people that they add or replace. And they should!

Here’s what’s most interesting: searching for A-Players, in an economy like this, is actually easier! No, they’re not getting laid off and no, they’re not putting their resume up on CareerBuilder, but they are listening. Interested in knowing why? Here’s an example of a conversation that is happening in companies all over America:

Jim: Where are all the HR people?
Joe: They’re in their offices with the doors closed.
Jim: The economy is real bad. They must be planning a downsizing.
Joe: Uh-oh, you’re right. I’ve heard that a lot of companies in this area are cutting jobs. As soon as things pick up I’m going start looking. Better to do it to them before they do it to me!
Jim: You got that right. Hey Bill, did you hear that there’s going to be a RIF soon?

What we’re hearing from our clients today is that (a) they’re more scared of the cost of a mis-hire today than they were even 3 months ago (b) retention of their existing A-Players is their top focus and (c) when they recruit to add head count, they must get the right people in the right seats to justify the additional payroll expense.

What is your company doing to retain your best talent and refine your needs?

Bonus Question: if someone just applied for a job at your company after being laid off in the last 30 days (the first round of cuts for most companies), what are they chances they were an A-Player?

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I found myself watching the Texas Longhorns today on television (Hook ‘em!) and was reminded of a conversation I had just the other day with a friend who was quoting the Kelleher mantra of “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill”.  

Here’s my issue with the Kelleher school of thinking: if Mack Brown (the Longhorns Head Coach) went around the great state of Texas looking for the best athletes every spring he’d get a lot of notoriety from the writers that follow college football but they’d all probably be scratching their heads as the signings of Running Backs, Wide Receivers and Cornerbacks stacked up.  The point: when Coach Brown sits with his staff they have to talk about the specific skill sets that they need, both today and for the next few years.  These skill sets often don’t include just being really fast or being able throw a football 80 yards.  They’ll also need offensive linemen who have great footwork, linebackers with a combination of size, speed and a nose for the ball.  

The point of my blog post: if you’re only hiring flight attendants, trying to get people with great attitude, regardless of their background, is a pretty good idea.  If you’re building a team that requires different skill sets working in tandem to execute on your strategic initiatives and drive profit you need to know the skills that you’ll need first before you can determine if an ambitious, willing and chipper recent college graduate could be your Vice President of Operations because of their attitude. 

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At American Workforce, we’re big fans of Verne Harnish. His book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, is one that we strive to adhere to as much as possible. He devotes a significant amount of the book to something called a BRAND PROMISE. His overview:

“A measurable brand promise is crucial. It defines your company…it gives your organization something huge and galvanizing to strive toward. It does not overstate it one whit to say your brand promise is a single-minded measure around which all decisions are made.”

We’ve been working on our BRAND PROMISE for a couple of months now. Because this one piece of our business is so important in separating ourselves from the rest of a crowded and generally un-trustworthy industry, we knew it had to be good. After all, when you’re competing against companies that promise to hire quickly and cheaply, we felt it was mission critical to not only point out how wrong that line of thinking is, but also focus on the importance of hiring for the long haul. We call that Hire to Last.

And so, after months of deliberation and analysis, I’m excited to share with you the BRAND PROMISE that we’ve decided concisely and effectively declares what we do and how we’re putting our reputation and wallet on the line to ensure that we’re doing it right:

YOU’LL HIRE THE RIGHT PERSON.
EVERY TIME.
WE’LL STAKE OUR PROFITS ON IT.

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In a meeting with a client yesterday, our Chief Search Strategist had an interesting question come up: “You came up with 300 or so people who fit our general requirements in our local area.  If I went on LinkedIn, would I find people that you hadn’t found?”.  

It sparked a conversation in our office afterwards that would have never happened 10 years ago.  The conversation’s focus: if we’re doing research on prospective candidates, and there are lots of easy ways for clients and hiring managers to do the same, how much more research can a candidate do once they’ve been contacted?  

The simple answer: they can research.  A lot! 

It starts with just knowing what jobs are even out there.  With aggregators like  Indeed and SimplyHired , active job seekers can quickly find out every job that could potentially be a fit for their skill set and fire off dozens (or even hundreds) of resumes in a very short amount of time.

But it’s more than just knowing about the jobs that are available. The “passive” candidate, the really elusive folks who don’t apply for jobs and who you have to go find, can quickly learn quite a bit about your company through social websites, information about your competition, what your past employees thought about how they were treated or if you have every had any financial difficulties by checking out sites like Frakked Company .

We’ve also seen a huge uptick in the number of sites that will provide really valid pay information. While every survey we’ve ever seen will show that Salary/Compensation is way down near the bottom of the list of reasons why someone would stay in a job, it’s a significant piece of why someone would choose to accept a new job. Everyone’s heard of Salary.com and PayScale but now there are even sites where company-specific salaries are published. Don’t believe us? Check out Vault.com’s Salary Overview .

The biggest take-away from our whole conversation: we’ve got to make sure that our clients have cleaned up their online image as best they can and then keep an eye on it. People want to work at places where they can have fun and be recognized and if you’re not making sure that your company has a reputation for allowing those things to happen it’s probably having a pretty big impact on your ability to land A-Players.

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The first few times it happened I considered it coincidence. Since then it’s become an epidemic. It would seem that there’s one guy in Austin who everyone wants to model their VP of Marketing after. If you’re not from Austin there’s still probably a decent chance you’ve heard of him as he’s recognized as having quite the ability to get people to pay attention to what he’s saying - whether it’s on his own behalf or to the benefit of someone else.

Sam Decker recently took a stab at something that’s in our backyard and now I’m thinking that maybe we should be modeling any searches where we’re looking for a VP of Talent Acquisition on his resume as well because he’s done a good job of identifying the 5 key aspects of a ROCK STAR .

To summarize:
1. Initiative
2. Integrity
3. Execution
4. Strategic Agility
5. Communication

He offers intuitive reasons for each of these skill sets and justifies the importance of each in greater detail in his blog (see link above).

If we could teach this guy to write a scorecard he might be dangerous! But who knows, it’s Sam Decker and if he’s even 1/10 as good at Recruiting and Talent Assessment as people suggest he is at Marketing he probably knows how to do that too.

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I got forwarded a tremendous Whitepaper that was written by Doug Wick, a Certified Gazelles International Coach . This short document outlines, for the first time that I’ve seen, the differences in opinion between (a) hiring great people or (b) putting in place great systems. If you’ve read this blog with any consistency you’ll know that we’re huge fans of Topgrading at American Workforce so I was a little skeptical when I first saw the title.

Here’s the initial “teaser” for the article:

Successful business models must operate successfully with low-skill employees. Replicable models use systems that do not require high-skill specialists. If your franchise model requires a highly skilled and motivated clone of you, its potential success is structurally limited from the start. How many you have you met?

Systems-dependent models, unlike personality- or expert-dependent models, produce consistent results when replicated. Such systems allow ordinary people to produce reliable, predictable, yet extraordinary results. The Gazelles Inc, in their seminar Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, test Michael Gerber’s fundamental idea with a concept called Topgrading. What is Topgrading? It is a view that holds that high-skill-based models can be more profitable and still be duplicated consistently.

I’ve found myself sitting and reading this Whitepaper numerous times already since yesterday and I think that virtually every one of his arguments is well stated and thought provoking. Check it out, it’s worth a glance.

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