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

Poking through 12+ 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.

I read an interesting article from Wharton on the current trend of ghosting by both candidates and employees (more on that later in the week). Today’s Oldies are kind of the yin and yang of finding and keeping people who aren’t likely to ghost.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Talent in good times and bad (2008)

The people market is tightening (again), and the pundits are arguing (again) over whether there actually is a shortage of qualified people to fill openings across industries, especially high tech.

Is there really a shortage? Does it matter?

If there is a perceived shortage (i.e., jobs aren’t being filled), then companies will continue to fret over finding qualified people and managers will continue to worry that a lack of talent will damage their own careers.

During the most recent downturn there was an abundance of talent available as has happened in the past; for example

• The early nineties, when a typical ad for a software engineer in Silicon Valley drew 100-plus viable responses.
• Post-October 1987, when a financial services ad would easily draw five hundred qualified responses.
• The early seventies, when an ad for a microwave designer ran in the Sunday San Jose Mercury and over three hundred qualified engineers started lining up at 6 AM Monday morning to wait for the company’s doors to open.

It is neither the surplus of talent in a down market, nor the dearth of it in a tight market, that creates a staffing problem. Rather it is the attitude of many managers that if the person is not already working there must be something wrong.

In the Eighties the thought was “There must be something wrong; companies only lay off their deadwood.” In the late Nineties, it was, “There must be something wrong or this candidate would already have a job.”

Frequently the source of such attitudes is managers’ lack of confidence in the ability to make good hiring decisions. By hiring currently employed people, managers unconsciously can validate a positive hiring decision (must be good or she wouldn’t be there) or excuse a hiring mistake (assumed he was good because he was at XYZ).

Why the prevalence of this rarely-discussed-almost-never-admitted lack of hiring confidence? Why is staffing, with all its associated pieces, one of the most disliked of all management tasks?

Simply stated, most people don’t like doing things when they don’t feel competent and it is difficult to feel competent doing an intricate task for which you’ve had little-to-no training.

Staffing involves many tasks

• developing detailed reqs,
• screening resumes,
• doing substantial, time-saving phone interviews,
• creating and mentoring an interviewing team,
• interviewing,
• crafting an offer,
• closing and landing the candidate,
• avoiding post-acceptance pitfalls, and
• a myriad of other details.

Above all is the need to hire correctly; in other words, to hire the right person at the right time for the right reasons. To do it well requires sophisticated, proactive, real world-based training geared specifically to line managers.

Instead, much of the available training is geared to having an HR department or using an outside recruiter; is too mechanical; or is comprised of general psychology information.

When there is an abundance of highly qualified candidates it’s a result of the economy, not of a surplus of people.

Population demographics, baby bust to retiring Boomers, guarantee hard hiring times for a decade at least. To assure their ability to meet the staffing challenges of the twenty-first century companies and managers need to work together to

• create an efficient, proactive hiring process;
• build internal sourcing skills that work in any labor market;
• raise hiring skills to the level of core competency; and
• disseminate them throughout the organization.

The winners of the future will be the companies that can fill their needs from the available labor pool, whatever the size, and the managers whose hiring skills allow them to confidently recognize talent, no matter the source.

Boom Or Bust, People Availability Is Not The Real Problem (2006)

Talent availability goes up and down, up and down all through the town—and the country and the world.

Thanks to a strong global economy and an aging population talent has been in short supply for awhile, so if the economy slows and more talent becomes available staffing should be easier—right?

Not really. It was still difficult during the last recession when all the information channels were saying that there was an abundance of well trained, highly qualified workers available.

A looser talent pool doesn’t mean that it’s easier to hire.

And it sure doesn’t mean that turnover is less costly, because the 80/20 rule still holds true.

The overt costs (20%) during good times include recruiters, relocations, and over-sized salaries/sign-on bonuses and they all but go away during lean times.

But the covert costs (80%), including interviewers’ time, slipped schedules, lost opportunities, lost productivity, and lowered morale, are still present.

Hiring itself isn’t easy, either. In 1999, an ad might generate 80 responses, 90% of which weren’t a fit; in 2002 the same ad generated 500 responses, but 90% still didn’t fit.

Other fundamentals don’t change, either.

• A corollary of Murphy’s Law states, “No matter the condition of the labor market, the specific skills being sought by any given company at any give time will be
  a. the least available skills
  or
  b. the same skills that are being sought by every other company,
• No matter how long or hard you work, your organization will not meet its objectives without the right talent.
• A manager’s raises, bonuses, stock options, and even job, depend on the ability to hire the right person, at the right time, for the right reasons.
• Without the ability to hire and retain people in a timely, cost-effective manner, managers are gambling with their own success. After all: You are who you hire.
• People retention is critical, and retention is the result of good hiring practices.

The days of labor famine come and go, but even in days of labor feast, staffing is too costly to ignore good retention practices.

Image credit: Willi Heidelbach

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.

You can not imagine the thrill when I see the stuff I passionately believe in mirrors the beliefs of people I hold in high regard, such as Fred Wilson, who knows and has experienced far more than I ever will. It’s a definite high.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few days ago Fred Wilson wrote about the importance of culture and fit.

Some entrepreneurs and CEOs buy into “hire the best talent available” mantra. That can work if everything goes swimmingly well. But as I said, it often does not, and then that approach is fraught with problems. The other approach is hire for culture and fit. That is the approach I advocate.

That’s the same approach I’ve advocated for decades.

What many forget is that “the best talent available” refers to whoever will perform best in your culture as part of your team and focus on your company’s success.

Too many founders, CEOs, other execs and even lower level managers seem to hire for bragging rights instead.

I wrote about hiring and culture here last Sept and included a link to an article I wrote for MSDN way back in 1999 that explained how to use your culture as a screening tool when hiring.

I’ve always told clients that the fastest way to success is to always hire the right person at the right time and for the right reasons.

Good hiring is like cooking Chinese—80% of the time used is spent prepping and the balance doing.

There really are no shortcuts; especially not hiring other people’s stars.

Not to sound self-serving, but I’ve been surprised at how closely the ideas I’ve always believed in parallel Wilson’s thoughts.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

is not always sufficient.

In 2008, the psychiatrist Stephen Greenspan published The Annals of Gullibility, a summary of his decades of research into how to avoid being gullible. Two days later, he discovered his financial advisor Bernie Madoff was a fraud,…

Why would an expert in gullibility be so gullible?

The answer, according to David Dunning, a University of Michigan social psychologist, is simple —

We are always most gullible to ourselves. (…) “To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground,”

I read about Dunning’s research on incompetency way back in 2000, when he was at Cornell, and wrote about it in 2007, so learning how closely gullibility was related to incompetency made a great deal of sense to me.

A body of research has also established what scientists call “egocentric discounting”: If participants are asked to give an estimate of a particular fact, such as unemployment rate or city population, and then shown someone else’s estimate and asked if they’d like to revise their own, they consistently give greater weight to their own view than others’, even when they’re not remotely knowledgeable in these areas.

There lies the greatest danger, as well as the greatest challenge, for every manager when hiring outside of their own expertise — which is most of the time.

The easy part of the solution is to have team members with specific expertise included in the interview process.

The truly difficult part is to put aside your “egocentric discounting” and give credence to those more knowledgeable than yourself.

Image credit: ArrrRT eDUarD

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

I thought a lot about what I wanted to say today, but realized I’d already said it more than once.

And I didn’t feel like spending my energy on a rant that would most likely just be preaching to the choir and, if not, wouldn’t change anyone’s mind.

So this will be short, direct and honest and I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

 First up, a comment from Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital and one of the most successful investors in Silicon Valley history, on why there are no women VCs at Sequoia.

“We look very hard. What we’re not prepared to do is to lower our standards. But if there are fabulously bright, driven women who are really interested in technology, very hungry to succeed, and can meet our performance standards, we’d hire them all day and night.”

Lots of backlash on social media, so all I’ll add is what a crock.

Hard to believe that anybody with half a brain or awareness would say something so stupid — not to mention that it’s a blatant lie.

The “not prepared to lower our standards” has been the reason to exclude women, people of color, Jews and whomever else is out-of-favor at the time.

Makes you wonder why a guy who makes his money looking at the future can’t at least come up with a modern reason for the bias.

Flickr image credit: TechCrunch

Hiring is as much art as science.

It’s a fact that the data-driven really hate.

Such as Google, which hires hundreds of people every week..

It used to hire only candidates with 3.7+ GPA, double 800 SAT scores and world-class interviewing skills — But those criteria weren’t accurate at predicting success in the Google world.

In 2007 it developed an algorithm to screen candidates — it didn’t work.

More recently, Google’s brain-teaser questions garnered a lot of attention, but they don’t work, either.

“Everyone likes to ask case questions and brain-teasers. It turns out our data shows that doesn’t actually predict performance. There’s no correlation with your ability to do that,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Operation.

Anallytics can do an amazing job if the company is large enough to develop valid data points.

“Once you get through all the noise and beliefs that people have, and identify that right profile, you can have some solid impact in your organization,” Ryan Dullaghan, Jet Blue’s manager of people assessment and analytics, noted. He described the measurable benefits for the company that have resulted from “really focusing on fit for the job, “including higher employee engagement and retention, and a 12% decrease in total absences.”

Those are significant numbers.

But what do you do if you don’t have access to viable analytics, whether because of size, money or senior management apathy?

Start by developing a written set of questions (see the article for ideas) that you ask your own people.

Crunch the responses to get a general company profile.

Then make it a habit to ask them of all candidates (no matter the position, along with the position-specific questions.

The one caveat to always remember is that while some people are expert at acing questions/tests, others are the opposite, so don’t treat that as make or break criteria.

More on hiring tomorrow.

Flickr image credit: jphilipg

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

Wayne Jackson, CEO of software security firm Sonatype, has a favorite question he asks when interviewing.

“Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?”

My favorite question is also a three-parter, but looks at company instead of self.

“How did you/your team do X, did you agree with the approach, what would you have done differently if it was your decision.”

Both questions address the most important issue of an interview, how the candidate’s mind works, i.e., how she thinks.

Getting insight into how she thinks trumps any other information you can discover during the hiring process.

Understanding how a person thinks gives you insight as to how she will interface with the team, approach her work and handle challenges as they arise.

How she thinks is also key to how well she’ll fit your culture.

And cultural fit is the key to productivity, engagement, happiness and everything else.

Hat tip to KG Charles-Harris for sending me the Inc article.

Flickr image credit: bpsusf