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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
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
Common Characteristics of A-Players Defined
I’m a huge fan of Chris Mursau. He’s been working inside of the Smart & Associates organization for over a decade and knows Topgrading as well as anyone (even including Brad Smart!).
There aren’t many blogs that I read on a regular basis but when Chris writes on the Topgrading Blog it’s worth a read. On April 10th, he tried to do something that has always intimidated me. He sat down and looked at the thousands of Topgrading Interviews he’s personally conducted as well as those that the company has been involved in and come up with a list of absolute “must haves” for someone to be classified as what the book Topgrading considers an “A Player”.
Here’s the list. To read the whole blog post you can click here.
- Smart (raw intellect and business savvy)
- Driven to succeed
- Trustworthy
- Passionate
- Consistent high performer
- Able to adjust to many different personalities
- They Surround themselves with High Performers (Topgraders!)
- Very hard workers
- Resourceful, overcome obstacles
- Effective leaders, inspiring commitment to a clear vision
- Tough-minded, they hold people accountable
- Down-to-earth and well-grounded, self-aware, humble
What I like the most about Chris is he’s always willing to go even further and make a point even stronger by saying that one thing that drives the point home. The statement he used on this blog post that did that (because let’s face it, this list shouldn’t shock you) was:
“Use this list of characteristics as a ‘rule of thumb’ when creating scorecards and analyzing the data during each step of your assessment process. If a candidate is weak in even one of these areas, consider it a major “red flag” and question whether that person is really an A player candidate.”
What do you think? Would you add anything else to this list? Anything on here that you don’t believe should be?
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Brad Smart, career history, chris mursau, competencies, competency library, hiring, Interview, Recruiting, Scorecard, Smart & Associates, smarttopgrading, talent acquisition, Topgrading, Topgrading, topgrading methodology
Establishing Accountability on a Volunteer or Non-Profit Board: Topgrading can help
For the past 2 years I’ve been fortunate to be involved with something called the Accelerator Program. Established by the Entrepreneurs Organization, the Accelerator Program was built around educational content focused on four key issues faced by first-stage entrepreneurs: strategic planning, sales & marketing, people and finance. Unlike Business Schools or Government Programs, the Accelerator Participants learn from actual Entrepreneurs who are running their organizations day to day and have businesses that are over $1mm in Revenue (less than 4% of companies in the US ever attain this level).
In July, my role as the CHAMPION for Central Texas (essential the Chairman of the Program here in Austin) expires. My Champion-Elect, Jeffrey Stukuls, will take over. I’ve been working hard on a transition plan and wanted to be sure that I had:
- Chosen the right person for the position
- Assessed them on the skill sets and competencies needed to be successful
- Clearly set expectations so that they knew both (a) what success meant and (b) what was expected of them
As I was going through all of this I had one of those light bulb moments of clarity. I thought, “Why not create a Top Accountabilities document like we do for our clients here at Hire Better?” In case your not familiar, the Top Accountabilities idea was established by Dr. Brad Smart in his book Topgrading.
It’s funny that this kind of idea never struck me as being a solution before but when you really think about it, when have you ever gotten something as simple as a Job Description for a Volunteer role that you had?
Because this blog post wouldn’t have that much meaning unless I showed it to you, I asked Jeffrey if he would mind if I published the document. Hope you enjoy it! Click HERE and it will open in a new window.
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Accelerator Program, american workforce, amwf, Austin, Board, Brad Smart, business school, central texas, Champion, Champion-Elect, chris mursau, competency, competency library, comptencies, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs Organization, EO, first-stage entrepreneurs, Interview, Jeffrey Stukuls, job description, non-profit, revenue, Scorecard, Top Accountabilities, top accountabilities document, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, volunteer, what success means, YEO
Now IS the time to be Recruiting but not for the reasons you would think
There’s a link circulating out in cyberspace about a Podcast in which Steve Mullen is interviewing Brad Smart, the author of Topgrading. The focus of the interview is all around Hiring in a Weak Economy.
I had a great conversation with a friend of mine just the other day around this exact topic. We were specifically discussing the fact that the Press obviously doesn’t understand what is going on and they’re printing the same things about recruiting as they are about investing in the stock market and buying real estate: that there are huge advantages to being a contrarian.
As someone who runs a consulting company that focuses on recruiting for a living as well as having some stock holdings and a small real estate portfolio: I couldn’t agree more.
But being a contrarian is tough. And in this market, recruiting in a traditional manner is absolutely NOT the prudent thing to do. Prior to the unemployment rate being where it is, we had a member of our team who did nothing but research the very best places for us to be posting every position that we work on. The results were always solid because we could get 300-500+ applicants no matter what the role was. While direct applicants usually make up between 60-80% of the total pool of people we consider for a role, they rarely comprise more than 1 of the 3 finalists we end up with. Today, even if you’ve got no posting strategy at all, you can get well over 500 applicants for nearly everything. It may come as a surprise to many, that even with an exponential increase in direct applicants, this pool of pool of candidates still only represent about 1/3 of the total finalists for any position. Why? Even with over 10% unemployment in states like California, nearly 90% of the people in the state are still employed.
However, I’ll still contend that now is the best time in recent history to recruit. My reasoning isn’t scientific. Rather, it’s based on our own internal survey of how things are going. Our justification: there are very few people who are currently employed turning down phone calls. In fact, they’re returning calls at a higher rate than we’ve ever seen before! Lots of things could be causing it but we feel that there are a couple that are most prevalent:
- Their companies aren’t communicating about their direction.
- Management has reacted to market conditions and eliminated performance based pay.
- Salespeople have had quotas increased but compensation decreased.
Starting tomorrow we’ll launch a new search for a Vice President of Sales with a target compensation of around $250,000. Care to guess how many websites we’ll post it on? ZERO. We know that the right person for this job has a great career right now. We’re going to need to RECRUIT them away.
It is tougher than posting for the job and watching the resumes come flowing in from hundreds of people? Absolutely.
Is it fair to our clients to have us spend hours sorting through (potentially) thousands of resumes instead of targeting the 75-100 companies who we think have the person we’re most interested in? I think Dr. Smart would agree with me – in an economy like this, the best return on investment is to recruit, not post and hope.
Tags: A-Player, Brad Smart, caps on commission, contrarian, decreased compensation, earning caps, endgame PR, hiring in a weak economy, increased quota, job applications, performance-based pay, posting jobs, recruit don't absorb, startup bizcast, steve mullen, Topgrading, Topgrading, unemployment, vice president of sales
An Open Letter to The Staffing Advisor
I’ve watched a dialogue occur over the last couple of weeks between Brad Smart, the Author of Topgrading, and Bob Corlett who owns a recruiting firm in Washington DC and refers to himself as The Staffing Advisor for his Blog.
I’m genuinely concerned that by responding to the initial post of Mr. Corlett’s called, “What Exactly is a Top Performer?” Dr. Smart provided some credibility to what was written and provided an opportunity for this blog post to get some notoriety that it didn’t deserve. After reading Mr. Corlett’s rebuttal I simply can’t stay quiet.
Disclaimer: Topgrading is not a novel. Topgrading is not an easy read. Topgrading is not a page-turner. Honestly, Topgrading is about as dry as a piece of burnt toast without butter. With that being said, it’s still one of the best business books ever written.
Before I begin, I’m going to take a small tangent. The book Freakonomics sold more than 3 million copies when it was released 4 years ago. Buried within those pages was a chapter about the imperfection of the commission model for Realtors. It closely assessed the value of a Realtor’s contribution to the home selling process and found, in short, “the commission you pay your Realtor is in essence a big fat tip”.
I’ll complete my thoughts on why I’ve included this random snippet from Steven Levitt in my conclusion but I wanted to make sure I got that in on the front end to get you thinking.
On to the Open Letter…
I’d like to point out that I’m going to be jumping back and forth between both of Mr. Corlett’s posts on Topgrading (the second being his rebuttal) and his website. I’ll lead in with a direct quote as a precursor to that section to make it easy to follow.
Part 1
“I freely admit that I gave up and only made it halfway through [Topgrading] (worst beach read ever).”
“I found nothing that would help my clients make better hires, short of implementing a massive, formal, top heavy initiative to learn how to conduct a Topgrading interview. And that is simply not practical when you are hiring only one or two of each kind of person.”
I’ve grouped these quotes together to try to point out a very significant element of my counter to Mr. Corlett. If you’re [Bob Corlett] positioning yourself as an expert in the world of “Results Based Hiring” and you’re choosing to bash your “competition” in a very public forum, might it make sense to actually read the entire book before making blanket judgments and heavy-handed criticisms of a process and methodology that is proven to be wildly successful when implemented properly? You’ve lambasted every CEO who shares with you that they want to hire A-Players through Topgrading after admitting that you personally have an inability to finish the foremost book on the topic. Is this at all indicative of how you screen candidates whom you are considering presenting to your clients – that is, seeing a resume that is more than a page long, making a judgment after reading their address and then choosing to wholeheartedly endorse or count an applicant out?
Here’s the thing: if you can’t find a single item in this book to help your clients make better hires I truly doubt that you even read half of it. My guess is, you got to page 63, read the section about Search Firms and Brad’s suggestions on due diligence, and stopped.
Here are some examples of things that we have implemented and have helped our clients implement as well that we learned from inside the pages of Topgrading:
1. Take the time to build Scorecards. When we know what we’re looking for and then we can show the new hire what we screened them on and what we expect of them, the likelihood of their success (in our experience) improves exponentially. Interestingly enough, Mr. Corlett, you even mention this exact idea later in your blog when you said, “Here is a strategy that will dramatically improve both your results and the quality of your life: set performance goals [and] manage your people against the results.”* My guess is that you weren’t able to get far enough into the book to read that part.
2. TORC (threat of reference checks). We always check references but not the ones that our candidates are interested in giving us. We require and only talk to previous managers and we don’t let candidates advance in the process until that is finished. Geoff Smart, Brad’s son, suggests that about 25% of the information you learn about a candidate is obtained during reference checks. I think he’s right on.
3. Create a Virtual Bench. Jack Daly, an esteemed Public Speaker and former CEO is famous for saying, “It’s called RECRUITING, not ABSORBING”. We’ve got a list of people that we’re always recruiting and talking to in the event we need to hire them due to growth or turnover at American Workforce. Our clients do too!
Part 2
“In a job description you need to nail down exactly what you are looking for.”
“There is no universal set of attributes. It depends on the job.” “Most companies need a diverse mix of skills and work styles, but all with a common shared set of values.”
“Small organizations need to think hard, move fast, and make the best decisions possible with imperfect information.”
Really, I love Jack Daly. I bring him up again because I got to hear him recently and so much of it rang true. One of his favorite stories is about VISION and PLANNING. The story goes something like this:
Jack walked out of his house the other day and saw his neighbor filling his car with luggage. He was really cramming it in; filled up the trunk and then the back seat too.
Jack called out to him, “Hey, where you headed?”
“East!” his neighbor replied.
“How long you think it’s going to take you?” Jack countered.
“Quite a while, not sure really.” his neighbor shouted back.
“How much money you gonna need to get there?”
“Beats me, just hope I don’t run out!” said the neighbor.
I shared this story because I think that the next-door neighbor is a lot more like most small businesses than you could possibly imagine. Simply asking a hiring manager to write a job description when they have no experience doing it and hoping that they can “nail down exactly what they are looking for” is a lot tougher than it appears on the surface. Believing that your clients need to think hard and move fast while making decisions based on imperfect information as it relates to their hiring decisions is very, very dangerous. Not only does it adversely affect your ability to screen for the right kinds of people, it leaves your clients open to hiring based on “gut feel” and emotion instead of reality and strategy.
No, Topgrading is NOT easy. Neither is being an A-Player.
Part 3
“We’ll continue…developing faster, less expensive, less cumbersome ways to help our clients consistently hire people who will drive business results”.
There was a time when we thought about touting our speed to hire or cost per hire at American Workforce. Before we learned about Topgrading we were proud of our speed. Today, the focus isn’t on speed or cost at all. Rather, we focus on helping organizations change their methodology and expectations around hiring. We know that Topgrading has been effective when (1) our clients can hire the first or second person they interview – no matter what the role because the hiring managers know what they are looking for and (2) the employees perform as expected.
When Business Owners or Hiring Managers share with me that Topgrading is or was too hard it is almost always indicative of them being ill-prepared by not knowing what they actually want to hire or too reactionary in their hiring process (e.g. only thinking about new hires when someone leaves). As previously mentioned, these companies are simply absorbing new people, not recruiting them.
Part 4
“As someone who runs a search firm, I am also cognizant of the candidate perspective, which is generally not favorable toward Topgrading.”
Dave Kurlan, Founder and CEO of the Objective Management Group, has come up with the five major challenges that salespeople face and must overcome before they can be successful in sales.
The most significant of these challenges is something that he calls a “Need for Approval”. He describes it as, “Salespeople who have a high need for approval will avoid saying or doing the things which, in their mind, would change how the prospect feels about them. This includes asking tough questions, legitimate confrontation and the potential inability to handle rejection.”
At American Workforce we’ve actually had to screen out the Need for Approval from the people on our team who conduct interviews. Why? Our interviewers need to be able to interview with the clear understanding that it’s not their responsibility to make the candidates like them. Candidates don’t hire us – companies do. If the candidates can’t handle a company doing its due diligence and lose their temper or get easily frustrated, what does that say about how they will react under pressure in front of a client six months from now as an employee? Conducting Topgrading interviews takes focus and guts. Focus to stick with the plan and the guts to be able to ask the tough questions and not back off when someone gives a weak answer to a question because they either have something to hide or they’re too lazy to go into greater detail.
Conclusion
As promised, I want to finish my thought on why I included a whole paragraph about the commission structure of Realtors in the beginning of this Letter. When he really dug into it, Levitt found that Realtors aren’t really acting in the best interest of their clients. You can pretty easily figure out why when you consider the following:
-When they are selling a house their only incentive is speed, not getting the best price. They’re going to receive 3% of the sale price. To encourage a homeowner to reduce the cost of their home from $200,000 to $180,000 results in a net loss of only $600 to the realtor but they pick up a check for $5,400. The homeowner loses 10% of their value. If they [the Realtor] turn down a lowball offer and really stand up for the seller of the house, they risk not getting paid at all.
-When they are helping to buy a house, every dollar that they negotiate in savings for a buyer results in them making LESS money.
Here’s why I think this is so applicable to why nearly every recruiting company in America is denunciatory of Topgrading:
-If a company is paying a recruiter a percentage of the first year’s salary (akin to a Realtor receiving a percentage of the sale price), the ONLY incentive that recruiter has is to get someone hired quickly so they can avoid expending more than the minimum amount of effort. They are NOT incentivized to:
- ask tough questions
- conduct reference checks with past managers
- point out red flags on a resume or a career history form
-If a company is paying a recruiter to help negotiate compensation with a prospective candidate, every dollar they help the company save is costing them part of their commission.
Your recruiters should be partners with your company. Because they are truly incentivized against doing so, why should we expect any traditional recruiting firm, and especially ones like Staffing Advisors, to ever embrace the tenets of Topgrading?
Finally, Topgrading isn’t the ONLY way of recruiting and it can’t be implemented as an initiative from HR. It must be adopted wholeheartedly and with the full endorsement of every Executive inside a company. When this happens and it is implemented properly and executed on with precision, its results are staggering – no matter the size of the company.
About The Author:
Jonathan Davis is the author of the HIRE BETTER blog and also the CEO and Founder of Hire Better.
Jonathan has spent the last decade helping build companies from scratch. It started with an e-commerce company in New York City in the late 90’s and he quickly learned that he loved helping other companies build strong systems that would support rapid growth. After five years as a Principal of a Staff Leasing and HR-Outsourcing firm he started working on the one area where he saw the biggest lack of viable solutions for growing companies: Talent Acquisition. A self-professed “Operational Dork”, Jonathan is responsible for the strategic leadership of American Workforce as it continues to revolutionize the world of recruiting through a focus on metrics and innovation. He graduated from the University at Albany in upstate New York. An active member of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), he sits on the Global Committee for Emerging Programs and is the Austin Champion for EO’s Accelerator Program. He’ll graduate from the MIT “Birthing of Giants” program in 2010. When he’s not at the office you’ll find him officiating a college baseball game or regaling the merits of capitalism with a stranger at a local coffee house. He can be reached by calling (512)-355-1499 or clicking here.
About Hire Better
At Hire Better, our mission is simple: provide high growth companies with high impact solutions for Hiring Confidently and Predictably. Because after all, should recruiting your future employees really be something that is done faster and cheaper?
We achieve success by focusing on our 3 Core Values:
- BALANCE: Because our employees have balance in their lives they produce a better work product and results than any other company in the world of Talent Acquisition.
- TRUST: Trust is paramount to everything else.
- VALUE: Always add value. Always.
Our understanding of recruiting processes, networking and government compliance combined with insight into the online landscape and technical innovation drive real, quantifiable results.
*Geoff Smart & Randy Street released a little more user-friendly book entitled WHO in 2008. The quick and dirty version of their scorecard framework can be found on page 44.
Tags: @bobcorlett, A-Player, A-Players, ABdynamics, american workforce, amwf, birthing of giants, bob corlett, bob costello, Brad Smart, build scorecards, career history form, chris mursau, conduct reference checks with past managers, Dave Kurlan, doug wick, EO Accelerator, geoff smart, high need for approval, hire A-Players through Topgrading, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, it's called recruiting not absorbing, jack daly, job description, jonathan davis, make better hires, MIT, Objective Management Group, randy street, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, results based hiring, Scorecard, search firms, smarttopgrading, smarttopgrading blog, staffing advisor, talent acquisition, threat of reference checks, Topgrading, topgrading interview, topgrading is easy, topgrading is hard, topgrading is not easy, topgrading methodology, topgrading TORC, TORC, virtual bench, what exactly is a top performer, who, who the book
5 Things You Can Do To Improve Hiring (Part 1)
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.
Tags: 90 day reviews, bonus, Brad Smart, chris mursau, employee review, good to great, jim collins, job description, Scorecard, top performer, Topgrading
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- Flip Flops & a working pedicure http://bit.ly/cabacj (via @DineandDish) --- How things get done on the @HireBetterTeam 8 hrs ago
- You may not agree & some won't like it at all, but if you're unemployed & in sales, I've got some bad news http://www.HireBetterBlog.com 22 hrs ago
- Sign of a great client: I send an email, "This guy's great-we need to hire him" & the CEO's response is "Right on - do it". #TrustIsEarned 1 day ago
- Teaser for tomorrow morning: new blog post about why hiring an unemployed salesperson is probably a mistake. http://www.HireBetterBlog.com 1 day ago
- More updates...
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