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Ducks in a Row: Hiring with Adam Grant

Tuesday, December 11th, 2018

 

Do you hire based on grades and/or the college attended?

If so, give yourself an F — for being a hiring dinosaur and ignoring the data.

Way back in the 1980s, when I was a tech recruiter, one of the best/smartest engineering vps I ever worked with told me he didn’t care about GPAs or college attended. He said that the value of a technical degree lost approximately 20-25% of its value each year, because the tech world changed so fast.

He also said that grades were more the result of a good memory and the ability to regurgitate information on demand than actual knowledge.

Fast forward to Adam Grant’s most recent column. Grant is one of the smartest people I read and I read a lot. Not because he has a PhD, but because he has more common sense than almost any other three (four? five?) combined.

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. (…)

Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence.

Take a good look at that list. It encompasses all the skills that bosses, no matter their level, claim they want, but frequently pass on.

Why? Because candidates with those qualities don’t as easily “fit” into rigidly framed jobs.

Whereas one thing that can be said for straight A students is that they are expert at coloring inside the lines, so are usually easier to manage.

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.

“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Moreover, hiring with the assumption  that you can reshape their embedded code when it is convenient for you is totally unfair and sets you both up for frustration, at the least, or outright failure.

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

So the when you go to fill your next opening give serious thought to what you are really looking for.

Image credit: Adam Grant

Seen Any Good Candidates Lately?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/4nitsirk/3777270261

What do you look for in your candidates?

How important is college?

Do you focus on GPAs?

Google homogenized it’s workforce by using an algorithm that measured people in terms of their similarity to current googlers (but I think that has changed).

Some managers are so naïve/dumb/lazy that they hire based on Klout scores.

EMANIO created a hiring manifesto to define its approach.

Some people think certain questions are the secret to good hiring, and while they are useful they aren’t silver bullets.

However, good questions asked correctly can tell you how the candidate thinks, which is far more valuable than where they went to school, previously worked, position held or even current skills. This is especially true if your goal is to increase creativity and innovation.

For those bosses who think that hiring is a waste of time, not to mention a pain in the patootie, I remind you that the only thing more important than acquiring talent is keeping what you have.

And if doing a good job isn’t enough, keep in mind that as a boss (any kind/any level) your reviews/raises are a function of your team’s performance not just your own.

For more how-to-hire knowledge read my Insanely series.

Flickr image credit: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Irrelevant Hiring Criteria.

Wednesday, December 18th, 2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragesoss/2159596182/

Over the years hundreds of bosses have explained to me why top colleges and high GPAs were critical to hiring the best people.

They explained why hiring only from top schools assured top candidates.

They enlightened me as to the importance of high GPAs in their hiring decisions.

What they never did was convince me.

They blustered when I told them neither had much value when evaluating candidates.

And they got downright irate when I added that whatever value they did have dropped 20% a year, since much (most?) of what they learned was rendered irrelevant in the next five years.

Actually, the value probably drops faster now, since the world has sped up a lot since I said that.

If you find yourself disputing this and still putting your faith in ‘brand-name’ schools and high GPAs I suggest you pay close attention to Harvard’s grade inflation.

“It’s really indefensible,” Harvey C. Mansfield, a faculty member for more than five decades, said in a telephone interview. (…) “I thought the most prevalent grade was an A-minus, which is bad enough,” when I asked the question [about the most frequently given grade], it was worse.”

But even Mansfield goes along with it.

Mansfield described how, in recent years, he himself has taken to giving students two grades: one that shows up on their transcript and one he believes they actually deserve.

“I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade,” he said, adding that administrators must take the lead in curbing the trend.

While I agree grade inflation isn’t limited to Harvard, I’m willing to bet it’s more prevalent at brand-name schools.

Hopefully, the next time you find yourself dazzled by a combination of school and GPA, you’ll remember Professor Mansfield and take both with a pound or two of salt.

Flickr image credit: Sage Ross

Leadership’s Future: Inflation

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

My niece and her husband are both teachers; several other friends also teach.

They teach at various grade levels from kindergarten through advanced high school courses.

One complaint they all voice is the pressure from parents and students to give better grades.

Not to be better teachers, offer more relevant material or strengthen students’ skills, but to give better grades.

It’s called “grade inflation” and it is rampant across the country at all levels of education.

Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “An A should mean outstanding work; it should not be the default grade,” Mr. Perrin said. “If everyone gets an A for adequate completion of tasks, it cripples our ability to recognize exemplary scholarship.”

Business was the culprit a decade ago when title inflation was rampant during the dot com boom; now it is grade inflation.

Everybody knows inflation is bad—but are you aware that it devalues people in the same way it devalues money?

Think about that before you pressure a teacher or hand out a title instead of a raise.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Leadership’s Future started several years ago with guest posts from a college professor when I was writing Leadership Turn; after he left I continued from my own viewpoint.

After Leadership Turn was shut down I moved the feature to MAPping Company Success. In a broad way, Leadership’s Future focused on the Millennials and the following generation in terms of the kinds of people our society had and is producing.

There may be occasional posts on the topic in the future, but not a regular feature.

Join me tomorrow for an overview of the changes coming to MAPping Company Success in 2011.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyenicolas/4056810694/

Leadership's Future: Making Grades Work

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

A few of weeks ago I wrote about how kids believe they are entitled to good grades for trying as opposed to achieving.

That post was sparked by Andrew’s comment and he also sent me an article about grade inflation in colleges showing that the trend is progressing unabated.

An article today in the NYTimes describes a new approach to grades,

“In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization…standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.”

“I was never the A student, and it would constantly frustrate me,” Dr. Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent said. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me how to get that A, to get to that next level.”

I think that the approach is good since it focuses back on learning and not just on testing and it’s being adopted in various districts across the country.

The down side is that most districts don’t have the money or parental ability, not just involvement, of an upscale Westchester, NY suburb.

Currently grading in most schools, K-12 through college, is on a curve where the best gets an A. But as Dr. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at Georgetown College in Kentucky, says “The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything. They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

I agree. When people do average work they shouldn’t get an A because everyone else is below average or flunked.

If it can be made to work I think the idea of the kids working with parents and teachers to set goals to work towards and the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving them is excellent; it’s motivating and prepares them for the real world of performance reviews—at least when they’re done correctly.

This could be a step forward, but it involves change.

“The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi — who supports standards-based report cards — said that many educators and parents were far from ready to scrap letter grades, especially for older students, in part because they worry about the ripple effects on things like the honor roll and class rank.”

“I think the present grading system — A, B, C, D, F — is ingrained in us,” Mr. Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

And we certainly can’t expect adults to change or learn anything new just to improve kids’ education—can we?

This reminds me of something that happened decades ago. Women would taste baby food and if it didn’t taste good to them they wouldn’t buy it, so Gerber added salt in order to appeal to the adults. When the public finally woke up and screamed Gerber quickly changed the formulas.

Right now the public is whining, any suggestions on how to get them screaming?

Your comments—priceless

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