Poking through 14+ 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.

First, Steve Wozniak’s comments from 2016 are even less true today than they were then. Secondly, money has become the all-consuming focus for most people regardless of profession, driven for some by necessity, but in tech more often by ego, stuff and an aspirational lifestyle. That said, startups as a source of wealth may be falling out of style, as you’ll see tomorrow.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

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

I only partly agree with Steve Wozniak’s recent comment.

“I think the money that’s been made has attracted a different kind of people looking at technology today and saying ‘Oh my gosh, I could maybe have a startup and make a bunch of money,’” Wozniak said. “And the ones that come out of business school, money’s the priority. For the ones that come out of engineering school, being able to accomplish and design things that didn’t exist before is their priority.”

 Woz gives too much credit to the engineers.

It’s not just the biz school crowd that’s focused on the bucks.

The money bug has bit a good number of techies, too.

Years ago, no matter their role, people joined startups because they craved the bleeding edge, whether software, hardware or services.

This was true of both tech and non tech. In the words of Star Treck, they wanted “to go where no man has gone before” — or at the least go there differently.

Today the journey is more about getting rich and/or making connections for the future.

For decades I’ve told clients, “The person who joins your company for money/stock/perks will leave in a heartbeat for more money/stock/perks.”

That hasn’t changed, if anything it’s just gotten more so.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Think about this.

Since 1998, the US has seen employment rise by 22 million to reach historical highs. The main cause of this increase isn’t the dynamism of Silicon Valley or the entrepreneurial energy of Brooklyn hipsters. The vast majority (90%) of this increase is due to higher employment for workers aged 55 and above.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a barrel, the greying of the workforce won’t be news.

What does surprise many managers is that older workers are looking for the same things in terms of culture and management as Gen X and Millennials.

Which are pretty much the same things workers have always wanted and I doubt that will change with Gen Z or the generations that follow.

No matter the role you’re hiring for, if you are smart the candidate’s age isn’t going to affect your decision.

And if it doesn’t, then you have conquered one of the biggest hurdles to being a great manager.

Moreover, you will have fewer problems staffing, since you will have a far larger candidate pool to choose from.

Image credit: Amtec Photos

I’ve always been a Dilbert fan, probably because in the course of my career first as a recruiter and then at my company, RampUp Solutions, coaching managers on culture, hiring, retention, etc.,

I’ve spent a lot of time with pointy-haired bosses.

Pointy-headed, actually.

I’ve sat and listened to some of the weirdest, silliest, and just plain stupidest reasons for a hiring decision than you can imagine.

Over the years I’ve shared these stories with KG and several years ago he sent me a Dilbert that summed it up nicely — except that pointy-hair’s reasoning was more valid than some of what I’ve heard from real bosses.

Maybe it will resonate the next time your normal reasoning slips, since it can happen to even the most well-balanced boss.

One of the major reasons people ghost isn’t rocket science.

Nor is the major cause.

Candidates ghost because nothing connected — not the company, culture, job, people, and especially not the hiring manager.

Employees ghost because they aren’t engaged.

They feel that nobody — boss, company, colleagues — gives a damn so why should they.

And in many cases they are correct.

Companies don’t walk their cultural talk, low morale is obvious, as is a “me before thee” attitude, and

for a variety of reasons, bosses treat people as replaceable — even when they know it won’t be easy or could take months.

It’s nothing new.

Since the day people became hires, instead of slaves or indentured, bosses have used and abused them.

They still do, but on a more refined level.

Skipped promotions, demotions with little-to-no explanation, seriously brutal layoffs by email, with no warning (as Elon Musk just did), which is especially destructive to people when the company/job has been cast as some kind of “higher calling,” as is common in the tech world.

Candidates often fare no better.

Many managers consider hiring a necessary evil — resumes bore them, they hate wasting time interviewing — and they have more important things to do.

Strangely enough, HR often acts the same way, with preliminary interviews conducted by interviewers who look for word matches between resumes/candidates and job descriptions.

Obviously, it’s not all companies or all bosses — but likely the ones that get ghosted.

Image credit: Joe Le Merou

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

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

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

Hiring is one of the things where the “move fast and break it” mantra can cause real damage, including blowing product release schedules and, in extreme cases, blowing holes in your team or even destroying it.

A couple of yesterday’s links offered ways to avoid the Peter Principle when hiring, here are some others.

1. Analyze your openings and identify the attitudes needed to perform and be successful in your company, not the experience. Just because they have held a similar position previously doesn’t mean they did it well. And even if they did, the ability may not carry over with a different boss and/or culture.
2. Interview for attitude above experience and don’t rule out someone who hasn’t held a similar position — at some point every boss became one via promotion.
3. Managing is composed of various skills; in that respect it is no different than any other specialty, such as engineering, marketing or finance. Supply training/coaching to anyone promoted to management; nobody is born knowing how, nor is it taught particularly well in college.
4. Find ways to reward exceptional effort beyond promotion to a position that isn’t aligned with ability and interests. When people know there are financial/prestigious alternatives to management they are more likely to speak up when offered a promotion they don’t really want. The image above shows one approach that has been successful in technical and nontechnical fields, because the compensation between pairs is equal on each level.

As in most cases, to change results, change how you think.

Image credit: RampUp Solutions

Yesterday I mentioned the Peter Principle, by Laurence J. Peter, a prominent Canadian education scholar. It prompted a call from a young (23) friend asking how accurate it is now, considering it was written nearly 50 years ago .

It wasn’t that “Ben” disagreed with the premise, especially considering his boss, he just thought that there should be more current information.

And there is. So for Ben and others who wonder, here are links to more current information and research in chronological order.

First is Bob Sutton’s marvelous foreword written for the Principle’s 40^th anniversary edition in 2009.

My father loved The Peter Principle because it explained why life could be so maddening—and why everyone around you seems, or is doomed to become, incompetent.

Second, in August, 2014, from Rob Asghar, a good, somewhat depressing, overview of the book, along with a few words of hope.

We’re human, in the end. The Tony Robbins types try to sell us the life-hacks, the superfood diets, the meditation techniques and the mantras to transfigure us from mortal to immortal. That only sets us up to fail in a different and delusional way.

Next, in December, an article in HBR looked at the Principle from the other side — and it only took ten years to happen.

This seems surprising since of course every manager is a subordinate as well. And indeed in The Subordinate’s Predicaments, Case Western Reserve management professor Eric Neilsen and then-doctoral candidate Jan Gypen make that point explicitly.

In April this year, Rodd Wagner described research that proved the Principal was indeed real and ways to circumvent it. Although the research focuses on sales, it is applicable to any career field.

Three professors – Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Li of MIT and Kelly Shue of Yale – analyzed the performance of 53,035 sales employees at 214 American companies from 2005 to 2011. During that time, 1,531 of those sales reps were promoted to become sales managers.

I hope this info (and I’m sure there is plenty more for the searching) is useful to Ben and all those like him, who are either struggling with a very real Peter Principle boss or working hard to avoid becoming one.

Image credit: Barnes and Noble