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
What To Do When Generations Clash
I’ve just returned from the EO President’s Meeting in Dallas, TX and one of the biggest topics that they were discussing was the significance of delivering value to members. The major reason why value is so important: retention of members. Like most organizations and companies, acquiring a new member (or customer) is very expensive and time-consuming. It seems obvious that, once you’ve acquired them, retaining members should be a heavy area of focus for any leadership team. As the discussion continued it began to shift to the age of our members and the risks/rewards of eliminating the ceiling that is currently placed on new members.
I found myself sitting in this large conference room with 100+ other business leaders reflecting on the amount of preparation and time that had gone into evaluating this topic. The most amazing thought I had was that the collective revenues of these 100+ businesses represents the GDP of a fairly significant nation and this was the most important thing on their minds.
When EO was started just over 20 years ago, it was created for Entrepreneurs who were under the age of 40. When I joined EO 5 years ago it was called the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization (YEO). At the time, the average age of a member was about 37. Today, the age limit of 40 has been eliminated and the average age of a member is now 41. To put it in a more simple perspective: every year that I’ve been part of this organization, the average age has gone up by 1 year. This is quite indicative of our entire population as well as a major challenge for businesses around the US.
Something we’ve been looking at a lot here at Hire Better is directly related to this particular topic. The area of focus for us: as businesses continue to grow and mature, they’re worried about the retention of their employees as well as the age of their teams. Jason Dorsey, widely known by the business word as the GenY Guy, has some incredible data points that he’s been publicizing to business leaders around the world. Here are a few:
- For the first time ever we have FOUR generations working together in the same workplace (GenY, GenX, Baby Boomers and “the Mature” Generation)
- The average life expectancy of a Baby Boomer is about 78 while the “retirement age” is still 65
- GenY’ers are the first generation in history that will likely need to WORK for 65 years (that’s retirement at 87-90 years old)
On top of these points, here are a couple of other really scary ones (if you’re a business leader)
- While Baby Boomers are finally comfortable with email and are actively learning about Facebook, GenY’ers aren’t using those mediums much any more because they’re cumbersome and/or they’re no longer “cool” now that their parents are part of the community
- GenY’ers believe that long term tenure in a role is 13 months. Baby Boomers want to give them employee reviews once a year.
- GenY’ers aren’t really motivated by money as a “carrot” the way most previous generations have been. Why? Because their parents (those same Boomers) have given them a credit card to pay for things like gas, groceries, vacations, etc.
Driving retention, loyalty and performance from the GenY population is becoming a real challenge for businesses around the US. This is a generation that is affordable and hard-working as well as passionate about their work but they can’t be relied on to work diligently from 8 AM to 6 PM every day. They aren’t interested in sitting in meetings to talk about the next meeting. And they’re no longer even “tech savvy” (Jason calls them “tech dependent” because they don’t have any idea how their smart phone works – they just know they can’t live without it).
What in the world are you supposed to do as a business when you wake up and realize that the future of your organization depends on leveraging this new population of workers that you can’t relate to? Here are a couple of quick suggestions:
- Accept that while Work/Life Balance is something that Baby Boomers dream about and GenX’ers talk about, GenY lives it. You won’t be able to keep them around if you expect them to sacrifice their friendships and social time. Create a workplace that inspires them and encourages hard work in short spurts and then downtime to go “be a kid”.
- Let them work in teams as often as possible. This is a generation that was raised playing soccer, baseball and other team sports starting at age 3. They were on tournament teams starting at age 8. When then went to these tournaments, even if they finished in 8th place they all got trophies. If you’re asking them to work solo and independently without praise, they’re not going to stay engaged.
- Start with the outcome and then work backwards to to talk about the steps. This is counter-intuitive to the way most people are used to teaching and also to how our educational system has educated every generation for the last 5 generations. By starting with the big picture and driving universal awareness of the challenges, GenY will embrace the challenge and buy-in to the goals instead of zoning out at step 4 of a 200 step process.
- Give employee reviews all the time – 10 minute check-ins every week or two are significantly more powerful than an annual review. Let this new generation know what they are doing right, give them praise, offer corrective actions and make minor adjustments all the time instead of hoping they’ll be around for their 1st annual review.
Jason Dorsey just released a new book and you owe it to yourself to buy it and read it. You can also read a lot more about him on his website.
Tags: Entrepreneurs, EO, gen Y, generation Y, geny, hire better, jason dorsey, Retention, Scorecard, talent acquisition
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
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
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
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
Process, Interviews and Urine
I had a few other topics that I was debating about writing on this week until I saw what Dave Kurlan had written in his blog and I realized that nothing I could write would be better than what he had come up with. Because of that, this week’s blog post is shamelessly & largely stolen from him. To read more about what Dave has to say about sales teams and recruiting, check out his blog. It’s good stuff.
****************
It was quite the claim. I remember telling my client that the next candidate we were to interview was the best sounding candidate I had ever spoken with on the phone. Robert, the sales manager, went to the lobby to get the candidate and returned, an ashen look on his face. Ray, the candidate, followed Robert into the conference room and suddenly, I had the same ashen look on my face. It seemed that the best candidate I had ever spoken with by phone was, well, a bum!
They say you make an impression in the first 5 seconds and if the first impression was horrible, it was a huge understatement. Here are just some of the things we noticed:
- he had a paper bag with a bottle in it
- his white shirt had yellowed
- he was completely wrinkled – not a wrinkled face, but a suit that was wrinkled so bad it could only have occurred from sleeping in it – on a park bench – on multiple nights
- he stunk – not like Yankees stink or Red Sox stink, but as if he had urinated on himself
- his hair had not been combed – or washed – for days, maybe weeks
- his clothes didn’t fit
The funny thing was that when we began to interview him, if you just closed your eyes, you would have heard the most pleasing, helpful, nurturing, lucid, quick, humorous, effective, competent salesperson you could imagine. And since this was an inside sales position…
Even that was a beyond a stretch. You couldn’t even support the logic for Ray working from home – away from the other salespeople who could find him offensive because, well, he probably didn’t have a home.
So outside of this being a great true story, there are some lessons from it.
- It doesn’t matter how good the candidate’s resume, track record and phone interview are. There is a reason for a face to face interview and that must go well too.
- The purpose for a recruiting process is to filter candidates out – not the other way around
- It doesn’t matter how much confidence you have in your interviewing, recruiting, and selection skills. You will still be wrong about people
- Your gut instinct has its place. Recruiting and selection isn’t the place to rely on it.
- Your eyes can’t be fooled. Or can they? What if Ray was just plain ugly instead of repulsive and homeless? What if he was disabled? What if he had a disease?
- Candidates might not be as good as advertised but rarely will they be better than advertised.
- There is a reason for sequenced, multiple steps in the process. Never deviate or take short cuts.
- Just because the earlier steps in the process did not effectively filter out Ray, you shouldn’t assume that the process is flawed because of one miss. Always practice what works most of the time, not what worked or didn’t work once.
- Be warned about making compromises. Would you have hired Ray, a great salesperson, if everything was normal – except for the bottle in the bag (could it have been orange juice?), or except for the hair (just a bad hair day), or except for the shirt (the others were at the cleaners), or except for the size of the clothes (lost a ton of weight and still losing)?
- Never hire anyone that smells like he peed on himself.
Tags: Dave Kurlan, hire better, Interview, Objective Management Group, Recruiting, recruiting salespeople, talent acquisition, topgrading methodology
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
Why People Ask for References
If you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity you ‘ll know that I’m a big fan of Dave Kurlan. His blog and much of his company’s focus is on how to do a better job assessing sales talent before you hire them. What he also focuses a lot of his time on is making people better salespeople.
On June 3, Dave wrote a blog post entitled, “Salespeople and Requests for References“. He wrote the blog because a prospect he was hoping to sell his wares to asked him for references before they would agree to complete the transaction. It caused him to step back and analyze why someone would ask for references.
I read the post and gathered something entirely different from what he was hoping to get across. That was: this absolutely explains why a potential employer would ask for references as well! Geoffrey Smart, in the book WHO, suggests that 25% of what you’ll learn about someone will happen during the reference process. Even knowing that, when I surveyed a room of Entrepreneurs last week that I was talking with, nearly all of them admitted to hiring someone without ever asking for references and a full 100% of them said that they had, at least once, asked for references and then never called them.
Here are some of Dave’s points from that Blog Post. Do any of these apply to you as a hiring manager (in the context of the interviewing and selection process)?
Why would people ask for References?
- they are skeptical of your claims or promises;
- they weren’t referred to you by someone they know and trust;
- they haven’t previously bought from your company;
- they don’t understand what you sell;
- it’s their nature to ask (they always do that);
- they must invest more money than they had planned or feel comfortable with;
- they want to learn what it’s like to do business with you;
- they want to learn if there is anything to beware of;
- they prefer to be sold by your references, not you;
- they are simply using the reference request to put you off.
Tags: ask for references, Baseline Selling, Dave Kurlan, geoff smart, hire better, Interview, Objective Management Group, recruit don't absorb, Reference Check, talent acquisition, Topgrading, TORC, who the book
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