Much has been written about Gen Y, AKA, Millennials, in the workforce—the difficulty hiring them, the problems managing them and the much greater problems of retaining them.

What makes them so different?

“When they get to the workplace, they have a sense of entitlement, a need for validation, difficulty in really discerning what to do because their whole lives were managed,” –Christine Hassler, Gen Y career expert and consultant.

Not only managing them, but also fighting their fights—even at the office.

There are eighty million Gen Y, but not all of them fit this description; millions of them are ‘aMillennials‘.

The funny thing (as I’ve said before) is that when you look at a list of what turns Gen Y off you’ll find the same traits that turn off 90+% of the workforce.

• Inflexibility.
• Judgmental attitudes.
• Close-mindedness.
• Unwillingness to listen to and respect Gen Y’s opinions, ideas and views.
• Intimidation.

Yuk! Nobody wants to work for someone like that; the difference is that Gen Y may less patient and quicker to leave—at least until they have a mortgage and kids to consider.

Ryan Healy, co-founder and COO of Brazen Careerist, attributes companies’ success to culture.

“The companies that are doing it well and right know that it’s really about the culture you create.”

Tony Hsieh is well known for creating a culture that both attracts and retains and it’s not just for Millennials.

Flickr image credit: debaird

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Yesterday I had the displeasure of enduring multiple power outages for about 90 minutes. When the power finally stabilized and I turned on my computer nothing happened.

Nothing I tried worked, so today I dragged out a seven year old laptop and spent the time between phone calls getting enough running to be able to work—more or less. (don’t you just love technology?)

However, one of the calls was from a founder whose last three hires didn’t work out. They all had great skills, but none worked well with the team. All three fell in the category of “first outsider,” AKA, cold hire, in other words not friends or referrals.

He asked if there was a way to ensure a good fit with the current team.

I’ve been asked this a lot lately, so I think it is once again time to share the following post with you.

Don’t Hire Turkeys!
Use Your Culture as an Attraction, Screening and Retention Tool to Turkey-Proof Your Company.

Companies don’t create people—people create companies.

All companies have a culture composed of its core values and beliefs, essentially corporate MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and that culture is why people join the company and why they leave if it changes.

Generally, people don’t like bureaucracy, politics, backstabbing, etc., but when business stress goes up, or business heats up, cultural focus is often overwhelmed by other priorities.

In startups, it’s easier to hire people who are culturally compatible, because the founders first hire all their friends, and then their friend’s friends.

After that, when new positions have to be filled the only people available are strangers.

So how do you hire strangers and not lose your culture?

Since your culture is a product of your people, hire only people with matching or synergistic attitudes. The trick is to have a turkey sieve that will automatically screen out most of the misfits and turn on the candidates with the right values and attitudes.

Here is how you do it.

• Your sieve is an accurate description of your real culture.
• It must be hard copy (write it out), fully publicized (everyone needs to know, understand, believe and talk about it), and, most important of all, it must be real.
• Email it to every candidate before their interview and be sure that everyone talks about the culture during the interview and sells the company’s commitment to it.
• Everybody interviewing needs to listen carefully to what the candidate is saying and not saying; don’t expect a candidate to openly admit to behaviors that don’t fit the company MAP, since she may be unaware of them, may assume that your culture is more talk than walk or consider it something that won’t apply to her.
• Red flags must be followed up, not ignored because of skills or charm.
• Consider the various environments in which she’s worked; find out if she agreed with how things were done, and, more importantly, how she would have done them if she had been in control.
• Whether or not the candidate is a manager, you want to learn about her management MAP, approaches to managing, leadership and work function methods.
• Probing people to understand what their responses, conscious as well as intuitive, are to a variety of situations reveals how they will act, react, and contribute to your company’s culture and its success.

Finally, it is up to the hiring manager to shield the candidate from external decision pressures, e.g., friends already employed by the company, headhunters, etc.

Above all, it is necessary to give all candidates a face-saving way to withdraw their candidacy and say no to the opportunity. If they don’t have a graceful way of exiting the interview process they may pursue, receive, and accept an offer, even though they know deep down it is not a good decision.

A bad match will do major damage to the company, people’s morale, and even the candidate, so a “no” is actually a good thing.

Remember, the goal is to keep your company culture consistent and flexible as you grow. From the time you start this process, you need to consciously identify what you have, decide what you want it to be, publicize it, and use it as a sieve to be sure that everyone who joins, fits.

Use your cultural sieve uniformly at all levels all the time. If someone sneaks through, which is bound to happen occasionally, admit the error quickly and give her the opportunity to change, but if she persists then she has to go.

For more help, download the CheatSheets in the right hand frame or give me a call at 360.335.8054.

Option Sanity™ is a great screening tool because it mirrors your culture

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation process.  So easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Fickr image credit: Kevin Spencer

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

For years I’ve told managers ‘you are who you hire‘ and offered them tools so they become more proficient at hiring; this is true whether the company is a startup or it’s been around for decades.

Startup hiring happens in phases, which have a predictable pattern—

1. hire your friends,
2. hire friends of friends,
3. hire ‘outsiders’.

The first two phases usually go smoothly, since friends typically share similar values and, therefore, are at the least synergistic as to the company culture.

Phase three presents a totally different and disconnected challenge.

Accurately identifying a stranger’s values and evaluating how well they mesh with yours is not only difficult, but also time-consuming.

And therein lies the problem—not the difficulty, but the time.

When this subject comes up entrepreneurs often tell me that I don’t understand how busy they are.

They say it’s hard enough just finding the actual skills they need without adding an extra set of cultural hoops for candidates to jump through.

If that doesn’t shut me up they use the ultimate argument, “You haven’t actually done it, so you wouldn’t know.”

However, there must be a reason that Tony Hsieh pays people not to work at Zappos after they go through training and that hiring is number one on his list of how to build a company.

Hire very carefully — you’re creating an enduring culture.
“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person,” Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos told a colleague in the company’s early days. Why? “Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.” New employees either dislike the culture and leave or feel comfortable and stay. So the culture becomes “self-reinforcing” and “very stable.”

I wrote about using culture as a screening tool way back in 1999 and have reposted it often, most recently in February.

Your culture, no matter how young, is the best filter you have for finding the kind of people you need to follow in the footsteps of Bezos and Hsieh.

Assuming, of course, that you think they are worth following.

Option Sanity™ mirrors and reinforces culture

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation process.  So easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Image credit: Image credit: kevinspencer

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Are you familiar with KISS? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and is the best guidance for developing your culture.

KISS culture is a product of the boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™.

KISS culture attracts the best people and is a powerful force for retaining them.

A few years ago I wrote about KISS culture and this seems like a god time to revisit it.

KISS Corporate Culture Instead Of Branding

A blog post from India caught my eye earlier this week. Its premise was that retention starts with hiring (absolutely true) and went on to explain how to create and use “employment branding” for recruiting.

Essentially, pretty much everything that falls under the banner of employment branding also falls within the company’s culture—call it corporate MAP—along with the necessary processes.

But corporate culture isn’t static, it’s a living organism that shifts and changes as you grow and hire.

So it’s about hiring to match your corporate culture and using your corporate culture to screen candidates, limiting your hiring to people who are at the very least synergistic with your it—something I first wrote about in 1999.

Understand, I’m not disagreeing with what Sourabh said, just with the way he said it.

Using jargon to cast it as ‘branding’ makes it far more complex than it needs to be—especially if you want the knowledge to permeate your organization from top to bottom.

If that’s your goal, then take the time to understand your culture, KISS* it and communicate it to your people through a Cultural Mission Statement; once they understand it they’ll talk about it using language and terms with which they’re comfortable.

The result will be a culture that sounds and is real—not one invented by the marketing department.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

The referral source is awesome.

The resume is amazing.

The candidate asks great questions.

He is excited—interested in you, your vision and your product.

The team is thrilled.

The offer is made and accepted.

Everybody cheers.

As the euphoria of landing a “star” wears off you find yourself reviewing the interview like a favorite video looking to regain that feeling of triumph.

Instead, you find yourself with a slightly queasy feeling—because you can’t remember any of the candidate’s specific answers to critical questions.

So you ask your team and it turns out that either they thought someone else had asked those questions or were so caught up in his enthusiasm and answering his questions that they ran out of time.

And you suddenly realize that you have no idea going forward if he will be a star or a dud.

Option Sanity™ helps screen candidates.
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

Warning!
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Image credit: kevinspencer

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It has always amazed me how many entrepreneurs honestly believe that the people they hire will morph into a creative, productive team with no management effort.

They class themselves as “leaders,” but see “management” as a need and function of large/old companies—not startups.

They say they hire self-starters and these people don’t need to be managed; as long as they understand the vision they are self-propelled.

They talk about connecting their people through social networks, Twitter, texting and other modern tools.

And if (when) that doesn’t work they term them fools and dump them.

But the old adage “give a fool a tool and you still have a fool” still applies.

First, for them to actually be fools means you hired fools.

If you don’t believe that you are guilty of hiring fools then what you have are talented lost souls looking for a path to productivity and personal satisfaction.

People want to do their work well and they want to feel good about what they do; they care about their company’s success.

It’s not simple or easy or even much fun, but your real job as a founder is guiding your people out of fooldom and into becoming a powerful team.

Not every startup succeeds, but no startup succeeds sans management—whether you call it that or not.

Flickr image credit: PUBLISYST Comunicaciones

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Yesterday I said I would share ways to find employees who would be invested in your company and not just in themselves.

The best place to start is to take a look at the stupidest hiring practice I know and why it is so stupid, i.e., only hiring people who are currently working or not off more than six months.

I’ve seen this attitude before during other recessions, but to see it this rampant now, when the economy is still shaky and the job market hasn’t turned around is beyond belief.

As I told the managers who contacted me and I’m telling all of you, I have no empathy for managers who say they can’t find good people.

Pundit managers (those who share their views through articles and blogs) are constantly saying that attitude is more important than skills; add willingness and ability to learn and the value skyrockets and if the candidate is a good cultural fit the value jumps by an order of magnitude.

Manage them well and you will get additional benefits that money can’t buy—gratitude, appreciation and loyalty—all because you gave them a chance.

The wisest engineering vp I ever met once told me that he would rather have a programmer who knew multiple languages than an expert in the one he needed at the moment. He said that technology would keep changing faster and faster and he needed people who could learn on the fly and change with it. He said that a proven ability to change was more valuable than expert status.

When hiring stay focused on the fact that your next top performer won’t necessarily

• have the best grades;
• attend a prestigious school;
• work for your competitor,
• in your industry or
• even be working at all;
• be younger than X;
• have a full head of hair, with no gray; or
• fit easily into your comfort zone.

The bottom line is your success is the result of your ability to recognize jewels where others see only lumps of coal.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

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The following email came in over the weekend (edited and shortened for clarity).

Hi Miki, About seven months ago my company (name deleted) started providing most of the perks you see written about, including teaching how to be an entrepreneur. We thought that our efforts paid off when we were about to hire some amazing people. Fast forward to the beginning of July when two of my top developers quit because the entrepreneur class was canceled due to the launch schedule of a new product. To top that off, Friday my architect gave notice, explaining that he had found an angel investor and it was a guy he had met at one of our classes! What the hell is going on?

I’ve received seven similar emails and four phone calls over the last few months; they’ve come from executives and managers in development, sales and marketing at all levels in new startups, growth companies and larger, public corporations.

They all say they have gone to extraordinary lengths to attract people, but many of those hired left in 15 months or less.

They all complain that talent is scarce and that many of the people they do manage to attract have no loyalty or interest in anything except their own career.

The managers say they hear variations of the same stories over and over at events they attend, over lunch or when grabbing a beer after work.

My response to each is tailored to their personal situation and much gentler than what I’m going to write now.

You know the old saying that you get what you pay for? That is just as true when it comes to hiring as it is when shopping.

People who join for money or stock or perks will leave for more money or stock or perks.

They have no loyalty because they are not invested emotionally—there is no reason to be. Many candidates get the feeling they are doing the company a favor by joining, based on the lengths to which companies are going to recruit and hire them, and if they leave, they leave. No big deal.

The next part of our discussions focused on where to find and how to hire people who would be invested in the company. Obviously, no silver bullets, but the basics of solutions that each could tailor to their own needs.

Please join me tomorrow when I share that information with you.

Flickr image credit: stevendepolo

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I never did understand the frenzy around startups and small biz as an engine for job creation, but I kept still—no one makes a fool of themselves intentionally.

Then last July I read an article by Andy Grove about what it takes to create jobs and my thoughts didn’t seem quite so ignorant. In September I read that after the first rush of hiring small and large companies are fairly even regarding job creation.

I also couldn’t understand the economic value of companies such as Groupon, Twitter, Zynga or even Facebook. I really couldn’t see how new ways to sell stuff was going to rebuild the middle class; it just didn’t seem that anything new and real was actually being created, but I didn’t broadcast those heretical views, either.

Now I’m seeing my heretical ideas voiced by people with cred.

So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? [Steve] Perlman [founder or WebTV] grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “…But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”

Beyond all this is the fact that selling stuff requires a strong middle class to buy it and even startups with real products aren’t contributing to the manufacturing jobs that underpin that same middle class.

“The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.” –Andy Grove

China and India are consumer powerhouses not because of their newly minted uber-rich, but because of their growing middle class.

Most of this has been said in one way or another, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in. I certainly don’t have the answers, but I am sure that the conversation needs to become a lot louder before anyone notices, let alone takes action.

Image credit: Flickr

Article first published as No Help Wanted on Technorati.

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“I thought the whole process was more geared toward problem-solving than to me talking about who I was as an applicant and I liked that.” Andrew Snyder, 25

Hiring is in the top three, if not number one, of actions that ensure success, because it is having the right people that builds the strong teams that juice creativity and make it possible for the company to pivot as needed.

Hiring well means interviewing well and while there are many approaches to hiring there is nothing that can take the place of a really good interviewing process and well-trained interviewers.

Teams are old hat in some industries, but in others they are considered radically innovative and startup Virginia Tech Carilion Medical School is in that category.

The year-old startup, more than three years in the planning, received 2,700 applications for 42 openings in each class.

The applicants were first screened by traditional methods (grades, SAT scores, etc.) and 239 were invited to interview—and that is where things changed.

Driven by research, Carilion decided that (1) excellent communication and (2) strong social skills were must haves for any candidate they accepted.

The first is a growing catalog of studies that pin the blame for an appalling share of preventable deaths (98,000 deaths each year) on poor communication among doctors, patients and nurses that often results because some doctors, while technically competent, are socially inept.

The second and related trend is that medicine is evolving from an individual to a team sport.

Rather than rely on an interview with one recruiter, Carilion utilized a different approach called Multiple Mini Interviews (M.M.I.)

The system grew out of research that found that interviewers rarely change their scores after the first five minutes, that using multiple interviewers removes random bias and that situational interviews rather than personal ones are more likely to reveal character flaws, said Dr. Harold Reiter, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who developed the system.

Here’s how it works,

…the school invited candidates to the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical.

MMI is used by eight other medical schools including Stanford and UCLA.

It’s a great approach, especially for screening out those who believe their vocation or actions confer god-like status—and the ego to go with it. Those types don’t play well with others and are rarely, if ever, strong team players.

I’ve been a fan of team hiring for years and done correctly the speed interviews bump it to the next level; a far smarter approach than Google’s algorithm or the normal one-on-one, with an introduction to a few team members.

Image credit: Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine

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