There was a time when the words used in job ads actually made sense.

These days the words used seem to have little relation to either the skills needed or the opportunities offered.

For example, courage

Courage is mentioned in a variety of job postings for minimum wage retail and service work. Companies like JCPenney (where an ideal employee will “show the confidence and courage to do what’s right“), Ann Taylor (in which one “has the courage to know who she is“), and Lululemon (wherein a worker “leads with courage, knowing the possibility of greatness is bigger than the fear of failure“) ask for it specifically in job ads.

Does that mean the employee can expect a positive outcome if they have the courage to report their boss, another executive or a customer for harassment?

Then there are the companies looking for passionate workers.

Lisa Cohen, an associate professor of organizational behavior at McGill University’s Desautels School of Management shared that passion is a common attribute that companies she’s spoken with want, but they struggle to explain why.

“They haven’t defined the term,” she said. “They don’t know why it matters and probably what they’re looking for—and they’ll put this in not particularly nice terms—is somebody who’s going to work like crazy for long hours, right?”

Hiring for intangibles is smart, but it should be for traits that actually matter, as opposed to smoke and glitter.

Image credit: Robert Nunnally

Two facts

1. Google hires a lot of people
2. Google is very good at algorithms

So why not use the latter to solve the former?

It doesn’t work.

Google is known for hiring really smart people, so why not use brain teaser questions to identify them.

It doesn’t work.

Analytics can make a difference if your company is large enough.

AI may help, but its bias, the result of biased data sets, means a high cost in missed candidates.

It also means more time to hire and more money spent, because you will be chasing the same people as everyone else.

Like it or not, your staffing is dependent on the hiring skills of your managers.

There is no staffing gene; people aren’t born knowing how to hire anymore than they are born knowing how to manage.

It’s your responsibility to make sure they learn both.

Image credit: Otota DANA

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

The mindset many founders look for. Sadly, they aren’t the only ones.

Can AI analyze MAP as well it does other qualifications?

Image credit: HikingArtist, Unknown, very old Dilbert

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Last week looked at various recruiting and hiring scenarios and will looking at more this week.

Ignorance and bias have always played a role in all human endeavors. However, when they are known, recognized and yet still done, they deserve the label of stupid.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

On March 25^th I read an article on the newest perk, teaching employees how to start their own company, being used to lure talent; I choked and saved the URL for today’s post.

A few days later I read Bill Taylor’s reaction to the same article at HBR. To say that Taylor, who is a co-founder of Fast Company, is a big booster of entrepreneurial efforts is like saying Google is a modest success, but his reaction was the same as mine.

Rather than rehashing what he said (click and read it) I want to point out why jumping through hoops to hire from a certain tiny percentage of available talent is insanely stupid and tomorrow I’ll offer alternatives.

Insane because, as Einstein so aptly put it, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Stupid because there is a wide range of talent available that would work its butt off for the right reasons.

Why it’s insanely stupid

1. The candidate who joins a company primarily for money, stock or whatever is hot du jour will quickly leave for more money, stock or hotter du jour. In other words, when joining a company is “all about me” there is nothing invested in the company, its values/culture, products or even its success, so when (not if) the going gets rough there’s no vested reason to stay.
2. Many companies and managers hire as much for bragging rights as for need. In other words, do you really need to hire god or will an angel or even a mortal do the job just as well?
3. One manager’s star is another manager’s failure. In other words, past achievement is an indicator, not a guarantee, of future performance.
4. Candidates have definite cultural ideas and needs. In other words, people perform based on how synergistic their cultural and managerial needs are with the same elements in their employer.

(Note: although the focus here is on software development, I’ve seen the same insanely stupid hiring in most fields and industries at one time or another.)

Companion posts,

• Insanely Smart Hiring
• Insanely Smart Retention and Stars

Image credit: Riccardo Bandiera

Of all the things I wondered about during the more than 20 years I spent as a tech recruiter was why companies used their most ignorant/untrained/naïve people in “first impression of the company” positions.

This was especially true when it came to hiring where ‘recruiter’ was the entry-level position in HR. It was where you served your time in order to get to the “real” jobs, such as benefits mgr, etc.

As you might guess, talking to a recruiter who couldn’t pronounce what you did, selected you by matching the words on the resume to the words on the job description, and had no glimmer of understanding about the position, wasn’t exactly encouraging to candidates. And the greenest of these recruiters were often the ones sent to handle college recruiting.

One would assume that this would have changed in the nearly 20 years since I left active recruiting. One would also assume that it had changed radically over the recent eight-plus year focus on gender diversity efforts.

One would be wrong.

College recruiters are worse; techincally knowledgable, but incredibally ignorant-to-downright-stupid when trying to engage candidates.

In 2012 and 2013, researchers attended 84 introductory sessions held by 66 companies at an elite West Coast university. (They never explicitly name Stanford, but …) Roughly a quarter of attendees at these one-hour sessions were women, on average. The researchers documented an unwelcoming environment for these women, including sexist jokes and imagery, geeky references, a competitive environment, and an absence of women engineers—all of which intimidated or alienated female recruits.

If you were a woman how interested would you be in those companies?

As a guy, would you want your daughter/sister/wife to work in that environment?

And, obviously, all this applies to the hiring of any under-represented demographic.

The researchers, Alison Wynn, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Stanford sociology professor Shelley Correll, have shared their research with both recruiters and others inside the tech companies, with the (to me) expected reaction.

“They’re astonished. They often just don’t know what’s going on in their recruiting sessions.”

Astonishment and ignorance to what’s happening seem to be the standard reaction when anything within a standard process surfaces — recruiting is a process.

One solution is for companies to recognize that first impressions are the most lasting impressions people will have of them, whether they are candidates or customers, and choose/train their people accordingly.

However, if they don’t mirror that positive first impression in their culture, they probably shouldn’t bother in the first place.

Image credit: Tech Jobs Tour

Yesterday we looked at some terrible management advice; today we’ll check out the unstated, totally ignored elephant in the room when it comes to hiring.

When AI tells you the success of your new hire, before you hire them is a typical misleading media headline.

While the experts talk about the enormous amount of candidate data available online that goes way beyond education, skills, experience and even background checks, and AI’s ability to correlate and to some extent, interpret it, they agree that it still requires human involvement.

But comprehending someone’s motivations and soft skills – attentiveness, nimbleness or assertiveness — requires a level of interpretation that some recruiters don’t believe machines have just yet. (…)

That type of intuition is already being built into machines. In the hiring process, the data to analyze is flooding in and it will require powerful and intelligent machines to digest it all; companies are realizing they need to be more precise about their hiring needs in order to get answers from machines; and already we’re seeing some machines conduct simple tasks, such as administrative matching.

Once again the elephant is ignored.

All focus is on candidates, while the elephants are completely ignored.

What are the elephants?

The manager and the culture they create in their individual domain all the way down to a team leader.

That’s why the person who soars as a star working for X can easily burn out and crash after going to work for Y and vice versa.

The elephants aren’t new; they’ve always been around and even occasionally written about, but rarely credited with candidate success or failure.

Will/can AI change that?

Unlikely, because, as seen in hundreds of examples, self-analysis is rarely accurate and how someone wants to be managed is not necessarily predictive of how they will manage others.

So, as long as the elephants continue to roam and thrive, it remains unlikely that AI will actually be able to predict hiring success.

Image credit: David Blackwell

Two old adages, “don’t waste time reinventing the wheel” and “profit from the mistakes of others, you don’t have time to make them all yourself” gave rise to a new series for 2017. Role Models is my effort to help you adhere to both, always remembering to tweak their ideas to fit your MAP.  

Yuchun Lee was a member of the famous MIT blackjack team (the basis for the movie 21) and a serial entrepreneur since childhood. Unica, his first “real” startup, which went public in 2005 and sold for around $500 million to IBM in 2010 . He is currently co-founder/CEO of sales training startup Allego.

Lee learned early on that telling, let alone ordering, people to do whatever didn’t work and radically changed his approach.

But then you very soon realize that human beings have free will and you’ve got to persuade them.

He runs his company based on three core philosophies.

The first is the ability of the company to know what is true, what is not true, and what’s real and what’s not real. (…) The foundation is all about truth.

The second is how you behave as a team to solve problems. (…) Everybody’s trying to figure out how to look smart in front of the C.E.O. (…)  it’s actually O.K. if you sit there. If you’ve got nothing to say, don’t say it.

The third is about mistakes. We tell people you’ve got to love your mistake. If you go through a whole day without making a mistake, you just wasted a whole day because you probably haven’t pushed yourself. (…) You need to see mistakes as opportunities to improve.

Image credit: Allego

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over nearly a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time. Read other Golden Oldies here

I’m no happier about the AIG and other bonuses paid to screwed up Wall Street banks, but I’m not sure why any of us are surprised.

“In the largest 25 corporate bankruptcies between 1999 and 2002, while hundreds of billions of dollars of investor wealth and over 100,000 jobs disappeared, the Financial Times found the “barons of bankruptcy” made off with $3.3 billion.”

Giant compensation packages, guaranteed bonuses and platinum parachutes are excused by Boards and executives as necessary to attract the “best and brightest,” but here’s what’s really going on.

The ‘name’ demands outsize compensation/stock options/guaranteed bonus/etc. in order to validate their ‘brand’.

Those responsible for hiring not only meet the demands, but even exceed them in an effort to attain or sustain the company’s reputation as a better home for ‘stars’—the more stars you have the greater the bragging rights— mine’s bigger than yours in high school locker room talk.

Now let’s consider the folly of this attitude.

Those hiring often seek a name brand in the mistaken belief that the brand comes with a warranty that guarantees good results.

But no matter who you hire you’re actually paying for their past performance, which is always influenced by

• circumstances—boss and company positioning in its market and industry
• environment—culture and colleagues;

and let us not forget that minor factor

• the economy.

The hiring mindset is that everything the brand accomplished was done in a total vacuum and dependent only on the brand’s own actions, therefore changing every single surrounding factor will have no impact on performance.

Put like that it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it.

This is one of the prime reasons that so many CEOs bring their ‘own team’ over when they move, as do managers all the way down the food chain—they know they didn’t do it alone.

CEOs aren’t like movie and rock stars whose very names draw consumers into spending money—nobody ever bought a product from GE because Jack Welch was CEO, nor do they carry Jobs’ iPods—so why pay them that way?

Moreover, assuming that performance occurring during an expansion is a valid yardstick for performance in general, let alone a downturn, is sheer idiocy.

You have only to remember the difficulties faced by people whose management skills were honed between 1991 and 2000, the longest expansion in our history. When the recession hit in March of 2001 they had no experience whatsoever of how to drive revenue or manage in a down economy.

That recession and the previous one in 1990 lasted only 8 months each. The longest recession we’ve had was 2 years, January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982, and that one had a 12 month break in it. This means there are a very small number of managers with any actual experience managing in anything even close to what’s happening now.

The current recession officially started in December 2007, so it’s already 15 months old and the end isn’t in sight.

What experience makes these folks the ‘best and brightest’ for today’s world?

Just what the hell are companies still guaranteeing oversized compensation and exorbitant exit packages when now is definitely the time to pay for future performance—no guarantees.

Sad, isn’t it. Seven years and nothing’s changed, in fact, it’s gotten much worse.  

The wealth of the richest 62 people grew by more than half a trillion dollars in that last half-decade, while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of people globally decreased by more than $1 trillion during the same period.

Image credit: flickr

In one way or another, I’ve been involved in staffing for more than 30 years; first as a recruiter, then as a coach and mentor.

I’ve worked with companies from earliest startups to Fortune 500; with bosses ranging from CEOs and other executives to first-line supervisors and team leaders.

The best and smartest companies/bosses never have an opening and almost never lay people off — the ‘almost’ being directly connected to the the bosses’ level of control within the company.

How they accomplish this is often a mystery to outsiders, but it’s simply the result of specific MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

I’ve listen to many bosses tell me why this approach wasn’t feasible, often using their industry as the reason.

Most of the ‘reasons’ fall apart when you consider Intuitive Research & Technology, which has never laid off an employee.

That’s impressive for any company, but it’s especially notable for a 16-year-old aerospace engineering and analytics firm that’s a contractor for the federal government.

Intuitive also never has job openings.

Harold Brewer, Intuitive’s co-founder, chairman, and president, says the company has avoided reductions by taking a unique approach to hiring. “We don’t really have job openings,” he says. Instead, the company operates like a talent agency—always scouting for skilled employees. (…)  Brewer calls it a “speculation hire.”

His mantra is simple, “If it’s good for employees, it’s good for business,” so the company supports training, advanced education (unlimited tuition reimbursement) and pays substantial bonuses.

It’s what I’ve always said, hire great talent, instead of filling openings, cherish them, so they stay and watch your organization prosper.

Flickr image credit: Serena

Last Friday I shared my response to a founder who was having difficulties closing desirable candidates and touched on the need for a good hiring process; here is the information needed to create one for you company.

Key points to remember,

• process is good;
• bureaucracy is bad;
• authentic, transparent communications are the basis of good process

While a good hiring process is necessary, it is often one of the first to ossify into bureaucracy.

A good hiring process is

• transparent and painless for the candidate, and
• simple, easy to use and painless for the hiring manager.

But why a process? Why take the chance on creating something that so often turns into a bureaucratic nightmare? Why not just grab ‘em when you find ‘em?

Because you need a repeatable procedure that allows for the orderly acquisition of people, so the company can plan for and support its growth and, more importantly, land the candidates you want.

A good hiring process removes chaos and allows speed in staffing.

The best hiring process is flexible and, although based on a set of fixed principles, constantly re-invents itself based on changes in the real world.

Speed is the key.

Without question speed is the most effective, least expensive of all hiring practices.

This means there must be speed at all points of the process—any delays should originate only from the candidate.

Speed is key because people tend to judge what it will be like to work for a company/manager by how they are hired.

If the process is fast, smooth, and enjoyable, they will assume that decisions are made speedily, the company has little bureaucracy, and that working there will be fun—and they are usually right.

And vice versa.

Here are the basics of a good hiring process:

• The company’s operating plan and budget are the basis of the staffing plan.
• Know exactly what the job entails, what authority it has, and how it interacts with the team and outside departments, customers, vendors, etc.
• Based on number two, write a complete req and hire the first person who meets its minimum requirements (see Req or Wreck in the right frame).
• Be flexible and creative when sourcing.
• Involve your people.
• Interviews should be as culturally-relevant as they are work-relevant.
• Always sell the meat (projects, growth opportunities, chance to contribute and make a difference) as opposed to focusing on dessert (perks, money)

Do’s:

1. Do create a positive experience for both the hire-ees and hire-ers.
2. Do use multiple interviewers—they are harder to con
3. Do have a well-understood set of components including: media spending, recruiter use, relocation, sourcing, resume evaluation, scheduling, interviewing, negotiating, cutting and extending offers, closing candidates, deflecting counter offers, and pre-start actions in your hiring process as well as a flexible way to deal with each.
4. Do make sure that sourcing and headhunter policies reflect both company needs and the current labor market.

Don’ts:

1. Don’t “figure out” what you need by interviewing multiple candidates.
2. Don’t keep interviewing candidates in the hopes of finding one who embodies your entire wish list.
3. Don’t assume using a headhunter will automatically reduce your time and work.
4. Don’t have a start and stop hiring process—whether from whimsy or human bottlenecks.
5. Don’t buy people; those who join only for the money/perks/stock will leave for more money/perks/stock.

When all is said and done, the true purpose of a hiring process is to help the company compete for talent, which, in turn, allows the company to compete for customers.

Image credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept