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You Weren’t Born With Those Opinions
Doing a quick search in Google for “common interview questions and answers” will yield you 25,100,000 results.
I’m not sure what’s more surprising: the results or the questions that people typically ask in an interview?!
A few years ago, I had the unique opportunity to join an organization called EO. One of the first things they require you to do upon joining is go through a full day of “Forum Training” in which you get interested to a bunch of fellow Entrepreneurs and you also learn how to no longer offer opinions or advice. It really messes with your head – even today, after 5 years of practicing, I still find myself struggling to avoid hearing a challenge a fellow member is having and not offer feedback based on my opinions. As a society it’s present in our lives from the moment we can crawl and reach out for things like power outlets, hot stoves, etc. ”Don’t touch that!” we yell as parents. Yet, as our children get older and ask, “Why not, Daddy?” it’s sometimes hard to justify why we told them not to do something.
Instead of Advice or Opinions, EO encourages you to abide by something called “Gestalt Protocol“. A quick review of Wikipedia will tell you that Gestalt Therapy:
…focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.
Gestalt therapy is a method of awareness, by which perceiving, feeling, and acting are understood to be separate from interpreting, explaining and judging using old attitudes. This distinction between direct experience and indirect or secondary interpretation is developed in the process of therapy.
Put more simply, by sharing my experiences and how I reacted to a situation that previously happened to me is much more valuable to a colleague than what I would do if I were in their shoes at that moment. In other words: opinions are worthless.
Mary Schmich wrote an OpEd piece in the mid-90’s titled “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted On The Young”. In that was a very appropriate quote:
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.
To bring this idea back to the focus of this blog, how to help you HIRE BETTER, I’d offer the following random questions from that Google Search of 25,100,000 results:
- What’s your biggest weakness?
- What motivates you to do a good job?
- How are you when you’re working under pressure?
- Are you a team player?
- How long would you expect to work for us if hired?
Can you guess the common theme in every one of those questions?
The answer: EVERY ONE OF THEM CAN BE ANSWERED WITH AN OPINION
One of the ways that we’ve made our process so consistent and effective is that we don’t allow people to share their opinions in interviews. Opinions in an interview are, simply, worthless. As a hiring manager you’ll find that you’ll have a LOT more success if you are asking questions that require someone to share with you how they behaved in a situation. We actually use a lot of the questions from the book Topgrading to assist in our evaluation of talent. Here are some examples:
- What are a couple of the best and worst decisions you have made in the past year?
- Describe a situation or two in which the pressures to compromise your integrity were the strongest you have ever felt.
- What are examples of circumstances in which you were expected to do a certain thing and, on your own, went beyond the call of duty?
- Describe a complex challenge you have had coordinating a project.
- When was the last time you missed a significant deadline?
Upon review, what do all of these questions have in common?
They require the candidate to answer based on their experiences.
The Bottom Line: if you’re asking questions in an interview that allow for someone to offer their opinion, there’s a high likelihood that they’ve been to a lot of the 25,100,000 websites that Google returns when you go hunting for common interview questions and how to answer them so you sound like a superstar. But for job-seekers, there isn’t a single website they can go to that will give them the answer to a question that requires them to share their past experiences.
While there are a lot of people who will argue that past experience is NOT the greatest indicator of future success, you, as a hiring manager, often have the choice of either relying on those past experiences or listening to someone’s rehearsed answers and opinions instead.
Tags: A-Players, advice, Advice is a form of nostalgia, behavioral-based, Brad Smart, career history, chris mursau, EO, hire better, hiring manager, Interview, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology
When a C-Player is Better Than an A-Player
Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Brad Smart, the author of Topgrading. I remember reading his post in September of 2009 and thinking how powerful it was. When going through my list of topics for what made the most sense to blog about this week I realized that this was as timely and quite a bit more profound than anything I had come up with. He and Chris Mursau, the Vice President of Smart & Associates, write a great blog that you should definitely read on a regular basis.
I’ve taken the liberty of shortening the article down to apply more to a Hiring Manager than a job seeker so that you’re aware of the kinds of challenges that an A-Player might be having in clearly articulating how and why they’re exceptional.
A players are remarkably … um … inexperienced at job hunting, and they are remarkably inept at it.
C players, however, are nudged out of jobs and companies and they become masters at getting the next job. C players also become masters at imitating A players. They’ve read many books that teach them how to make their resumes look better and how to answer interview questions.
In this economic downturn thousands of companies have folded and hundreds of thousands of not just under-performers but high performers, A players, are out looking for jobs. The unemployed are from every industry and there are quite a few super sharp people out looking for work – sometimes for the first time in their career.
Here’s the problem: C players become masters at imitating A players; their resumes are full of hype and conceal negatives, and their interviewing behavior is well-rehearsed. So on the surface C players look like A players. And the poor A player who is looking for a job doesn’t know how to convey – “Hey, my resume is truthful and so is everything I say in interviews.”
Throughout their careers, A players needing a job have simply gone to their network and asked for connections to hiring managers. That historically has been a very productive method. “Birds of a feather …” and when A players contact their networks and say a super sharp A player they know is available … hey, job offers pop up.
- Rewrite your resume, tooting your horn. Keep it to 2 pages and list ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND SUCCESSES. I’ve looked at hundreds of resumes since the economic slide and I see A players being TOO HUMBLE. Don’t include much about responsibilities and don’t state your career objective (save that for the cover letter). Don’t puff yourself up – stick to the facts. But make it clear when YOU accomplished something and not just the team, of which you were a member.
- Rewrite your cover letter. Cover letters are usually boring and canned. Speak from the heart, say what you’re looking for, but here is the key…
- Make it clear that your bosses in the past decade would give you rave reviews. If you have received overall performance ratings that are tops, say so. Humble A players rarely do this – too bad because C players don’t do it for a different reason (it ain’t true that bosses gave them top ratings!).
- Offer to arrange personal reference calls with your former bosses (and subordinates and peers, too). Only A players CAN make such an offer and actually follow through, but again they are too humble. In the past their network got them a job and they knew that others were singing their praises, so they were simply their usual understated self. In this economy if you won Olympic gold metals, you’d better display them if you want to get on the team. It frankly impresses the heck out of recruiters and hiring managers to read and hear that your former bosses would praise you and that YOU do the work of arranging the phone calls.
- Don’t accept low pay. In the past few months I’ve seen some companies take advantage of people they are recruiting and hiring, knowing that even A players are desperate. Trouble is, when the economy improves, A players who KNEW they were worth more than what they were paid, leave. Companies you would want to work for won’t try to cheat you in the short term.
Brad writes that he’s interviewed more than 6,500 people over the years as his basis point for the credibility of his thoughts. I’d make the argument that I’ve seen more than 100,000 resumes in my career and maybe 0.1% of them were well written. Takeaway value = far too many hiring managers who made snap decisions about candidates based on just a resume even though resumes have a high likelihood of not telling anywhere close to the whole story about someone.
Tags: A-Players, Brad Smart, C-Players, chris mursau, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, job postings, resume, smarttopgrading, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, unemployment, unemployment rate
More Thoughts on Incentive Pay
Continuing with the theme of evaluating the behaviors of Major League Baseball Teams and trying to tie their contracts, incentives, etc into those of a business, I thought it would be beneficial to look at an interesting article that was just published called, “How One Cy Young Vote Could Be Worth $21 Million“.
Written by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Mr. Goold pulled back the curtain on the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) by suggesting that they were politically motivated (or de-motivated) when casting their votes for this (and previous) Cy Young award winners.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of Steven Levitt (Author of Freakonomics). In his blog that he writes for the New York Times entitled “The Hidden Side of Everything” he said:
Most people, given the opportunity, would like to have a say in what other people earn. If someone is nice to me, throw a little extra Christmas bonus their way. If they are rude and surly, how about a 3 percent pay cut?
So I find it interesting that the Baseball Writers of America (BBWAA) recently approved a rule which says that any player who has an incentive clause based on an award voted by the BBWAA (e.g., the Cy Young award) will not be eligible to win that award. The proximate cause of this decision is Curt Schilling’s contract, which pays him $1 million if he gets even a single third place vote for the Cy Young. When he joked about paying off a writer to throw him a vote, that was the last straw.
I understand that the politics of voting for the Cy Young award may not make all that much sense to you if you’re wondering why I’m bringing this up so I’ll get to my point. Topgrading has long suggested a Scorecard by which you can measure the performance of an employee using statistics, accountabilities and accomplishments. This is something that baseball has been doing for over a decade. Granted, it’s a lot easier to measure OPS (On Base Average Plus Slugging Percentage), ERA (Earned Run Average), WHIP (Walks & Hits per Inning Pitched) or VORP (Value over a Replacement Player) than whether an HR Manager was able to improve the coaching skills of middle management, but the idea is the same.
For a baseball player, when millions of dollars are at stake, would you rather have someone demand $10 million per year in guaranteed pay with no performance incentives (hint: the sales guy who wants a base of $150k) or would you be more inclined to sign the player who said, “Pay me less than the market but if I perform, you’re going to need to back a bank truck up to my house”? As a business owner, I’m MUCH more inclined to risk the chance of paying a lot more in the long run to get stellar performance because, if the employee performs at a level a lot higher than what I anticipated, our company will be better for it.
Here are some additional thoughts from Derrick Goold on Adam Wainwright, the Runner-Up for the 2009 Cy Young Award in the National League:
Wainwright’s deal is packed with a two-year option for 2012 and 2013. Both years are triggered at the same time and the base value set for them is $21 million. Wainwright’s two-year option vests like [Matt] Cain’s [a pitcher with the San Francisco Giants]. If Wainwright finishes the 2011 season healthy — i.e., not on the disabled list with an arm injury — then the option vests if he has pitched a total of 400 innings in the previous two years or finished in the top five of Cy Young voting in the previous two seasons.
Consider that for a moment in light of what happened Thursday [the voting for the NL Cy Young].
If Wainwright finishes in the top five of the award in either the 2010 or 2011 season and he finishes the 2011 season healthy, a $21-million option vests for him and the Cardinals. We saw yesterday two voters make two votes that put two pitchers in the top five. That was it. One vote and a healthy arm could equal $21 million.
While I can see the point of Mr. Goold, I’d also argue that paying someone like Adam Wainwright, if he can pitch 400+ innings in the two years leading up to a contract extension and he’s getting votes for the Cy Young, is a VALUE at $21mm. He’ll be about 30 years old (the middle of a Pitcher’s Prime), he’ll have shown stability, he’ll be leading the pitching staff and he’ll have thrown well enough to have earned some recognition.
CEO’s who find themselves worried about Performance-based and Incentive Pay are only worried because they’re incentivizing the wrong things. If you can get your incentives truly aligned with moving your organization in the right direction – they make all the sense in the world.
Tags: A-Players, baseball, chris mursau, cy young, hire better, Incentive-based pay, incentives, incentivizing salespeople, recruit don't absorb, st. louis cardinals, talent acquisition
Team Motivation When You Need It Most
It’s that time again: I dug up an old gem from Dave Kurlan as I was working on building the incentives for our Executive Team at Hire Better.
Earlier this year, Dave shared his opinions on the 5 Steps To Motivation. We Tweeted just this past week about ensuring that you’re worrying less about Motivation as a Leader and more about De-Motivating your employees.
Below are some of Dave’s thoughts. Of note: he suggests that various people react to these in different ways. I found that doing a Communication Builder with my Sr. Team and Executive Assistant was really valuable (thanks to the suggestion of my Mentor Lois Melbourne). Knowing how each of them wants to receive information and how they want to be Praised/Critiqued was really valuable but I still have found that the #1 item on his list is the most valuable. I’ll only (personally) use #2-5 as the situation gets more dire.
“I believe that motivation is very misunderstood. You can’t motivate by being a cheerleader, nor can you motivate by reciting somebody else’s inspirational quotes. Motivation comes from within and you must find out what your people’s internal motivators are. Why are they doing this thing called selling?
The other thing that’s important to know is that everyone reacts differently to motivation and motivation takes many forms. For instance, perhaps you have some people who respond to one of these methods when trying to get them to perform:”
- Challenge them (I have a challenge for you…do you think you’re up to it?)
- Feign that you’ve lost faith in them (Tell them that you don’t think they can do it)
- Encourage them (I just know you can do this!)
- Demand that they perform (You are required to do this)
- Ultimatums (If you don’t do this you’ll be out of a job)
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Baseline Selling, challenge, Dave Kurlan, demand, encourage, Fortune, hire better, job description, lois melbourne, lose faith, motivate, motivation, Scorecard, Twitter, ultimatum
Winners Never Cheat and Cheaters Never Win
I’m a HUGE St. Louis Cardinals (and baseball) fan. It struck me with a huge amount of disappointment when the Redbirds announced that they had voided a contract that they signed with a 16 year old from the Caribbean who they had been working to sign for quite some time.
Why would they void a contract after beating out a dozen other teams and offering $3.1mm (a record for the Cardinals in signing an Amateur)?
Because, as it turned out, his Agent lied about the fact that the young man had a degenerative eye disease that was robbing him of his vision. They hid it in the hopes that he could get signed fast enough to just start playing and put the money in the bank.
Yes, I understand that most business owners and hiring managers aren’t dealing with salary numbers anywhere near the millions BUT, if someone’s been unemployed for a period of time, has a mortgage that’s overdue and has bill collectors calling every day, how honest do you think they’re being during their interviews?
Some things that you should be closely evaluating to be sure that you’re getting as close to the truth out of prospective employees during the evaluation process:
- Do your Job Descriptions give away too much about the job? In other words, if it was a personal ad, does it explain too much about your likes and dislikes so that someone could “fake it” on a first date?
- Are your interviews structured and planned in advance? If you’re making up your interview questions on the fly based on the answers you’re getting, are you getting to the meat of what you need to learn about a prospective employee or are you having great discussions about all of their strengths and letting them withhold their weaknesses?
- Are you conducting INTENSE Reference Checks? I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback from a blog post from a couple of weeks ago about how to dig in during the Reference Process. Without really pushing to talk with previous hiring managers, are you getting the truth from candidates or just their half of the story?
- Are you running Credit History Reports on candidates to evaluate if they’re in such dire straights that they are more likely to tell you whatever you want to hear?
People in tough situations will often be pushed to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. Many times, we’ve seen that this includes bold-faced lies during their interviews and on their resumes. A prime example: just this past week we had an applicant suggest that she had 10 years of Business to Business Marketing Experience. She had such a good story that an inexperienced interviewer probably would have ‘bought’ it. Because the Hire Better Team Member who was interviewing her knew how to dig in further it was discovered that her 10 years were really only 9. And that B2B experience: working as the Office Manager for a Flower Shop that had a local relationship with 1-800-FLOWERS and a $500/month budget for Google AdWords.
Bottom line: expect the best from people but, especially in this kind of economy, don’t just accept what you’re hearing as the truth.
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, career history, cheating, dishonest, hire better, lies, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Reference Check, talent acquisition, Topgrading, unemployment, virtual bench
How Would Socrates View Topgrading?
This past week, one of our Clients was presented with a difficult situation: through working with the Hire Better Team and allowing us to follow our Methodology and engaging in the theory of Topgrading, we acquired so much information about an Executive Level Candidate that it almost resulted in the Candidate NOT being offered a position.
How could this happen?
I’m going to reference a lot of what is now widely referred to as the “Allegory of the Cave”. What follows is from Wikipedia and, while it’s a little verbose for a single blog post, it’s worth a read. I’ve summarized my thoughts right below this entry.
Inside the Cave
Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads “including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials” The prisoners can only watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. Wouldn’t they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn’t the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?
Release from the Cave
Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
“Suppose further”, Socrates says, “that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn’t he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn’t the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be distressed and unable to see “even one of the things now said to be true”?
After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the “source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing”.
Return to the Cave
Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. “Wouldn’t he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn’t he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? “Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?”
The relationship I’m hoping to make here is that when a company initially begins to consider Topgrading, it often results in companies quitting before they even get started (note: @Topgrading protects their tweets but our request was approved). It’s hard, it takes a significant amount of time and it isn’t for the faint of heart. But when it is implemented effectively, what a company is able to find out about prospective candidates can sometimes be so overwhelming that it’s like the prisoner who steps out of the cave and walks into the Sun.
In the case of this Client, their existing interview process was really good. But it was designed to determine if candidates were cultural fits and didn’t really dig much deeper than the surface. When they were able to see the results of a full 4.5 hour Tandem Topgrading Interview that included personal challenges, a full career history and in-depth self-analysis and critique by the candidate around weaknesses and things that frustrated them, it was almost too much. Their old process would never have unearthed about 75% of what came out of the Topgrading process and, armed with this new information, they agonized over the final decision.
This all goes to show that Topgrading is really about the best methodology available today but it has to be adopted by an entire organization and not rolled out piece by piece alongside a rudimentary assessment and interviewing process because of how hard it is for people (Executives and Front Line Employees alike) to digest the stark differences that they must try to balance when making final decisions.
Tags: @hirebetter, @hirebetterceo, A-Player, A-Players, allegory of the cave, Brad Smart, executive level recruiting, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, hire better, hire better methodology, hire better systems, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, plato, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, socrates, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, wikipedia
Maximize Your Reference Checks
I got a reference phone call yesterday by a temporary staffing firm who was inquiring about someone who worked for a previous company I was involved in. I’m not sure why I got this call, nor was I expecting it. The poor woman on the phone sounded exhausted and defeated even before she asked me the first question. I found myself wondering, “What box on a piece of paper is she trying to simply check off to say she’s completed this task?”
Two weeks ago I tweeted (are you following me? I’m @HireBetterCEO) about how significant we’ve found Reference Checks to be in our evaluation process for prospective employees both for the Hire Better Team and for roles within our Clients’ companies. The statement I made was that we typically can glean about 20% of what we learn about someone through the reference process. I got a lot of questions about this statistic. I wish I could take credit but it was actually Geoff Smart who was the first person who helped me figure out that references are a lot more than just asking about dates of employment and whether or not someone is rehire-able.
Here are some examples of what we’re seeking during a reference call (and don’t be shy – we ask for permission but don’t apologize for wanting these calls to take up to 30 minutes):
- Why did you hire him?
- What were the top 2 or 3 biggest Outcomes that the Previous Manager hired John Doe to achieve?
- Did he achieve them?
- How much direction did he need at the beginning and during their tenure to be successful? (a GREAT question for both micro-managers & hands-off managers)
- What things did you witness that frustrated John?
- How did he mature during his time with you?
- What advice would you have for me, as his new manager, for on-boarding him effectively and getting him productive quickly?
- Likewise, what advice would you have for the people that will report to him to maximize their relationship with him?
If you’ve ever asked a previous manager, “What were John Doe’s weaknesses?” and gotten the answer of, “You know, I can’t think of any…” it’s because you’re not asking correctly. Everyone has weaknesses and if you’re not validating them in the reference process you’re going to significantly slow down your on-boarding process. A better technique: document the self-admitted weaknesses of a candidate during their interview and then re-position the question that you pose to the previous manager to sound more like this, “Mr. Manager, John shared with me that he felt like his biggest shortfall while working with you was that he struggled to prioritize his time and that it resulted in him missing some pretty key deadlines. Would you agree?”. By showing that previous manager that you’ve established enough rapport to have acquired this kind of information from the candidate, you’ll find that the previous manager is much more willing to talk not only about that stated shortfall but also about other areas of weakness and, if you’re really good, follow-up by asking, “How did you see John address this weakness while he worked for you?”
And one last tip: during your interview with a prospective employee, ask them who their previous managers were. Write down those names & titles and then, when you’re ready to move to the next step of evaluation with that candidate ask them to make an introduction that former manager on your behalf. We found it’s even better if the candidate CC’s you on the email to that previous manager. Brad Smart (Geoff’s Dad and Author of Topgrading) calls this process “Truth Serum“. I couldn’t agree more!
Finally, a parting shot meant as a challenge: because you’re now empowered to get so much more information out of the reference process, are you comfortable telling a prospective candidate who says, “My previous employer has a policy of not providing references” that YOUR company has a policy of not hiring people who can’t introduce you to their previous manager as a reference? In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve NEVER seen a situation where an A-Player hasn’t maintained a great relationship with their managers of the prior 10 years.
Tags: @hirebetterceo, A-Player, A-Players, Brad Smart, conduct reference checks with past managers, gepff smart, hire better, hiring, Interview, Reference Check, smarttopgrading, threat of reference checks, Topgrading, TORC, tweets, Twitter, who the book
Noise Goes Up But Quality Remains The Same
It’s not often I’m floored by the comprehensiveness of a Blog Post simply because too many people write them with speed in mind or just for Search Engine Optimization.
Today I was floored.
Gina Kleinworth is one of the Team Members at American Workforce. A significant amount of her role here is being responsible for combing the web every day to find articles that reinforce our goal of helping companies HIRE BETTER. (Are you following us on Twitter? You should – we invest a lot of time in making you a better leader. We’re Tweeting 2-3x per day under the moniker of @HireBetter.)
Gina found an article today written by Auren Hoffman on his blog Summation. It’s title: “Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn“. Its subtitle is what I chose for this blog post’s title: “Noise goes up but the quality remains the same”. You can also read it on the Huffington Post.
His comments rang true with me again and again as I read the blog 3 full times. Here are some of the points that he makes throughout this well-written post (read it, seriously):
“Great people are more likely to be employed with a company since a great person is often over 3 times as productive as a good person. Joel Spolsky argues in Smart & Gets Things Done that an A-player is anywhere from 5-10 times as productive.”
“In troubled economic times, anyone can get laid off, but a disproportionate number of layoffs tend to fall on C-players. This is because they are the lowest performing people in a company and there generally are more C-players at a company than any other caliber. Note that this isn’t always true, as evidenced with Yahoo!, a company that has recently experienced many layoffs but doesn’t have many C-players. In Yahoo!’s case, majority of the lay-offs fell on B-players and even some A-players. Yahoo! is an exception and is an exceptional company — most large companies, however, are chock-full of C-players.”
“There are A-players that are MORE likely to leave. Tough times often paint companies into a corner and force them into maintenance mode rather than continuing to innovate. Great players love to innovate and usually NEED to innovate. It’s usually very hard to keep these type of A-players caged-up and thus this presents a big opportunity for recruiting.”
“Great people are often first to leave sinking ships. They don’t feel they need to stick around for a severance because they are confident they can always get another job.”
“Unfortunately, it is really hard to tell the difference between an A-player, B-player, or C-player just from a resume. Which means you need to engage with candidates and therefore you’ll have far more candidates to deal with given this economic climate. My guess – for a standard job announcement, you’ll have three times the number of C-players applying, twice the number of B-players, and the same number of A-players.”
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, american workforce, auren hoffman, B-Player, C-Player, hire better, hiring, hiring is hard, Interview, joel spolsky, Recruiting, Scorecard, talent acquisition, topgrading methodology, tweets, Twitter, unemployment, unemployment rate
Topgrading is too Dangerous to Try
Our phone has been ringing a lot recently with CEO’s of companies who are reaching out to me with questions about how to do a better job of implementing Topgrading – both to analyze their existing team to make it lean as well as to prepare for new talent acquisition as the economy is heating up and they’re ready to begin scaling again.
In nearly every situation, when I ask them why it is that they’re calling, they tell me, “Well, we tried Topgrading and it it was too hard or it took too long.”
It reminded me of an email I got the other day (I wish I could give credit but I entirely forget where I got it) that I thought I’d share in this blog:
Let’s conduct an experiment.
In the next paragraph, I’ll ask you to try to stop reading, close your eyes and count to 10. After which, you can open your eyes and continue reading.
Ready?
Close your eyes and count to 10. Give it a good try.
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-
-
-
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Did you stop reading, close your eyes and count to 10?
If you did, you didn’t try: you actually did stop reading.
If you didn’t stop reading, you didn’t try.
Confused?
Here’s the point, there is no “try.” You either do something or you don’t.
“Try” is a slippery word. At best, it communicates an intention; not a commitment.
I’ll try to make some call some people that should be on my “virtual bench” today.
I’ll try to get back to that compelling candidate this week.
I’ll try to get a firm plan from my management team around our talent needs for the next 12 months before the end of the month.
I’ll try to work with my HR Leader to help them understand the significance of Topgrading and why they need to learn about it.
You either schedule the time to complete the activity…or you won’t do it.
There is no in between.
Take a look at these two examples:
I’ll try to stop for the red traffic light.
I’ll try to love my children.
When the outcome is important, we leave “TRY” out of the equation.
The next time you’re about to say that you’ll “try to do” something, reconsider.
If the outcome of the activity is important, don’t try. Because if the activity (like Hiring the Right People) isn’t important, then why even try?
Tags: A-Players, american workforce, chris mursau, hire better, if outcome is important, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, strategic HR, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, try, virtual bench
Thoughts on the new book by Jim Collins: How the Mighty Fall
Jim Collins has been taking quite a beating in the news recently for a lot of what he wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. As it turns out, much of what he praised companies like Fannie Mae and Circuit City for has been emulated by thousands of companies around the globe. The problem: well, if you’ve had a pulse and watched the news for more than 10 minutes in the past year you’ll know that both of those companies aren’t in the best shape any more.
In response, Jim Collins has written a follow-up book called “How the Mighty Fall“. Fortunately for you, you can skip buying it at the book store and, instead, read this summary to capture what he’s trying to get across. Unfortunately, the book reminded me a lot of the scene a couple of years ago where Mark McGwire (one of my favorite baseball players of all time) sat in front of Congress and kept repeating over and over again, “I don’t want to talk about the past”. If you missed it, I found the video on YouTube.
Mark McGwire in front of Congress
The book was hastily put together, is a shorter read than Parade Magazine on Sunday (it’s only 123 pages), and feels more like Jim trying to save his reputation than actually get any point across.
That being said, here are the TWO nuggets that I was able to capture (and hopefully they’ll save you the pain of reading his short story):
PEOPLE NEED RESPONSIBILITIES (Page 57) “One notable distinction between wrong people and right people (in key seats) is that the former see themselves as having ‘jobs,’ while the latter see themselves as having ‘responsibilities.”
Verne Harnish suggests, “Every person in a key seat should be able to respond to the question “What do you do?” not with a job title, but with a statement of personal responsibility. “I’m the one person ultimately responsible for x and y.” Think columns two and three on our Accountability Worksheet. In fact, Collins, when he’s hosting executive teams at his research lab often challenges executives to introduce themselves not with titles, but by articulating their responsibilities.”
MANAGE WITH DISCIPLINE (Page 119) ”If you’ve fallen into decline, get back to solid management disciplines — now!” ”In fact, our research shows that if you’ve been practicing the principles of greatness all the way along, you should get down on your knees and pray for severe turbulence, for that’s when you can pull even further ahead of those who lack your relentless intensity.”
Tags: A-Players, built to last, circuit city, congress, fannie mae, flywheel, good to great, hedgehog, hire better, how the mighty fall, jim collins, management discipline, mark mcgwire, testimony, verne harnish
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- For all of you who are descending upon Austin this week for SXSW - here's the list of the free parties: http://bit.ly/dfOB30 1 day ago
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