Delivering the Systems and Expertise You Need to Make Great Hiring Decisions
Only the Employed Need Apply (Especially in Sales)
I’ve been sitting on this blog post for a while thinking that its efficacy would get better and better as the economy and job market failed to recover at the pace that the economists thought (hoped) it would. It looks like my hunch was right.
Nine months ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article called “Only the Employed Need Apply“. The premise of the article was that many employers were only interested in talking to people who were already employed – even if the candidate who had applied had lost their job even after performing at a high level.
Bobby Fitzgerald, a partner in five restaurants in three states, says these days he gets two dozen or more unsolicited résumés each day at one of his Phoenix restaurants, the White Chocolate Grill. But Mr. Fitzgerald says his top candidates, for jobs ranging from servers to management, usually are people who are employed elsewhere. He currently has 50 openings across his five restaurants and has told recruiters to bring in only people who are working.
When you consider that in March 2010 our unemployment rate is still on the precipice of 10% and the average time that someone is unemployed is still over 1/2 of a year, it would appear that Business Leaders like Bobby Fitzgerald aren’t alone.
At Hire Better, we’ve seen a significant up-tick in the number of clients who want us to assist them in hiring salespeople. For those salespeople who we see as applicants, the statistics are NOT in their favor if they’re applying for a role in which Hire Better is involved. Here’s what we’ve found:
In a typical hiring cycle, assuming that we have 100 people to consider for a role:
- 82-85 will be Direct Applicants
- 12-15 will be People who are “headhunted” or from our Network
- 1-3 will be Referrals from internal employees at the client company
When we get down to the Top Three Finalists, they’ll look like this:
- 1 Direct Applicant
- 1 “headhunted” Candidate
- 1 Referral
And when the finalist is hired: The chance of the Direct Applicant goes DOWN exponentially as the salary and responsibility goes UP.
For a Sales role, the prospects of a Direct Applicant are even WORSE. The same statistics will apply to the Candidate pool as before but I have to expand the pool to 5 people when you look for Finalists:
- 1 is a Direct Applicant
- 3 are “headhunted”
- 1 is a Referral
And when this is the case, the Referral has more than a 50% chance of getting hired and the Direct Applicant has less than a 10% chance. In the case of sales candidates – I believe these stats are just about right. And they’re justifiable! If you’re considering hiring an unemployed salesperson or sales manager, you should be asking yourself “Why would a good salesperson be unemployed?”
Dave Kurlan, who I haven’t mentioned in quite awhile, recently shared his findings on how long it takes to get an ROI on a salesperson. His bold mathematical formula looks like this:
If you have a 12 month sales cycle and an 8 month learning curve, it will take nearly 2 years to get your new salesperson producing consistently. In that 2 years, maybe you’ll pay out close to $150,000 in subsidies.
Using your average margin, how much revenue must be gemerated to offset that subsidy?
How much revenue must be generated to produce a satisfactory ROI?
How long must the salesperson stick around in order to produce that ROI?
To bring it all back together, if a prospective sales candidate (who, for the sake of this blog post is unemployed) has found him/herself in a new sales role every 2-3 years, what are the odds that anyone who is hiring them is going to experience a positive ROI?
When we look at candidates through this lens we find it’s a lot easier to not find ourselves getting “sold” during an interview by someone who has all kinds of great excuses for why “things just didn’t work out” at that last job they were in…
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, bad hires, Baseline Selling, challenges of hiring salespeople, Dave Kurlan, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, Kurlan, mediocre salespeople, Objective Management Group, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, recruiting salespeople, Salespeople, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, virtual bench
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
Recruiting vs Absorbing: Know the Difference?
I continue to hear from Recruiters, Journalists and even Business owners that now is a great time to pick up talent because of how high the unemployment rate is. I’ve written in the past about how I think that now is a great time to be RECRUITING as well but not because of the growing number of the unemployed. I’m not going to re-hash that here. Instead, this post is going to focus on what Jack Daly considers the difference between Recruiting and Absorbing.
I’d like to start by sharing that I live in Austin, TX (yes, it is as cool as you’ve heard). In this town we’re proud of live music, barbeque and, probably above all, Longhorn Football. Mack Brown is the Head Coach (aka the CEO) of the team.
Right now, spring practices are done and the coaching team is spending all of their time figuring out (1) what’s our depth chart for the fall (2) who are the top High School Sophomores at each position in Texas and the US and (3) how are we going to convince young men from around the country to pay us $300+ to come to our camp so that they can be seen by our coaches when every other school in the country wants them to do the same?
The reason I brought up point #3 is because it’s not unlike the current marketplace for Businesses looking to land top talent. How? Hundreds of young men will descend upon Austin in the coming weeks and happily throw down their $300 camp fee. While the coaching staff has a responsibility to treat every camper fairly by providing them with a safe place to stay, healthy food and some nominal feedback about how to improve, it’s the 8-10 players that they personally invited in for the camp that they are focusing their attention on. Every once in a while a young man who shows up and was unheralded impresses the coaches and gets a shot scholarship but it’s rare.
I hope you’re seeing the direct parallel between the people who are applying for jobs at your company as opposed to the people who you have to fight to get.
With that in mind, let’s go back to Mack Brown’s role in this recruiting process. Because he has the advantage of knowing who the top 10 Prep Quarterbacks or Linebackers are by subscribing to the industry publications that track this data, he can carefully place phone calls to these young men to get them excited about the program.
Focus because here’s the crux of the blog post: After Mack Brown gets off the phone with a young man who he’d like to see as his starting quarterback in 2011, do you think he sends that 16 year old a copy of a job description for what a Quarterback does?
Let’s bring it all back to your business: here are the 5 questions you have to ask YOURSELF when recruiting and then share with your “top recruits”:
1. Why come to work here?
2. What are we (as a company) doing to ensure that our team is successful?
3. How can you (our prized recruit) be sure that the reputation of our company is exceptional?
4. Where is our greatest opportunity for growth in the marketplace?
5. What are the most compelling reasons to join the team here?
If you’ve read the book Who you would know that these are also part of the 5 F’s (Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun and Fit). By asking yourself these questions as the CEO or Hiring Manager you’re attempting to proactively answer a lot of these concerns that a recruit would have.
If you’d like to pick up a great book for the weekend and learn how college football is answering each of these questions, check out Meat Market: Inside the smash mouth world of College Football Recruiting by Bruce Feldman.
Bonus food for thought: if Mack Brown needed a starting quarterback in 2011 and he didn’t start thinking about it until 2 weeks before the season started, would he start placing ads on CraigsList with the hopes someone would apply that he could hire?
Tags: 5 F's, A-Player, A-Players, Austin, bruce feldman, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, geoff smart, hiring manager, jack daly, longhorn football, mack brown, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, recruiting versus absorbing, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, who the book
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
Your Candidates Are Getting Smarter
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.
Tags: Frakkedcompany.com, hiring manager, Linked In, LinkedIn.com, OtherInbox, passive candidate, passive candidates, Recruiting, Salary.com, Vault.com
Gut Feel – does your “gut” have any role in recruiting?
Jeffrey Radt updated his Recruiting Blog last week with a post about Hiring Managers who go with their “Gut Feel”.
Not only do I agree wholeheartedly with virtually all of his post, I want to stand up on a mountaintop and share it with every Hiring Manager we’ve ever worked with. The primary reason we’ve so intimately adopted TopGrading is because it eliminates so many of the vague comments we got like, “He wouldn’t be a fit” or “He doesn’t match our culture”. In fact, we even once fired a client because their “culture” was really code for wanting only good looking people with light skin. By assigning an actual score to every single candidate and applicant, Hiring Managers can quantify their pipeline the same way a salesperson decides who the best prospects are.
When we are deciding whether or not to work with a client, one of the things that we always consider is whether or not the company has ever provided any formal training on how to interview and how to get anything out of an interview. If a company hasn’t spent any time on this kind of training, have they become homogenous without even realizing it? When Hiring Managers aren’t given a structure and game plan for recruiting and interviewing, “gut feel” hiring sets in and at American Workforce we consider that to be both counterproductive and unhealthy for organizations.
Tags: Diversity, formal interview training, Gut Feel, hiring manager, Homogenous, Interview, interview training, jeffrey radt
Categories
HIRE BETTER CEO
- Our new Director of Quality @HireBetter is causing me to re-think all of our processes. I feel so geeky - awesome. #LEAN 3 hrs ago
- If you're an entrepreneur, are you familiar with #EO &Accelerator? Spent the day in my Accelerator quarterly day-INSPIRED! (via @thomsinger) 8 hrs ago
- Flip Flops & a working pedicure http://bit.ly/cabacj (via @DineandDish) --- How things get done on the @HireBetterTeam 17 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 1 day ago
- More updates...
Blogroll
- Aquire's Blog
- Austin Entrepreneur Network
- Better Hiring Today
- Dave Kurlan’s Blog
- Some Assembly Required
- The Growth Guy
- Topgrading Blog
- WSJ Careers
Follow Hire Better
Search
