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.
How do you hire? What do you focus on? What carries the most weight with you? How do you decide what is most relevant to your situation? Do you look hardest at what they’ve done or concentrate on what they could do in the future. And the key question, is your approach successful?
We see the idiocy of assuming that past performance is always a good predictor of the future all the time, but it seems especially true at senior levels.
First, there is the penchant for identifying ‘high potential’ starting in kindergarten and providing lots of extra training and coaching, while ignoring those who may be late bloomers or less obvious (read quieter).
Then there’s the Peter Principle, which is not only alive and well, but functioning even more efficiently today than it was when Laurence J. Peter first described it back in 1970.
We relish looking at the past to predict the future, thus choosing to ignore all extenuating circumstances and surrounding factors that played a role in the person’s performance.
We forget, or ignore, that
one manager’s star is another manager’s bomb;
the skills needed to take advantage of an economic expansion are very different from those needed in a downturn; and
turmoil or an ongoing crisis in a person’s personal life often impacts their performance at work.
Last, but not least, we need to get over our love affair with the idea of the hero-leader who, with a wave of the hand, can part the seas and eliminate obstacles.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.
I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.
In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.
He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.
My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.
There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.
Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.
Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”
What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”
There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.
Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).
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?
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.
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.
On March 25th 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
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.
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?
One manager’s star is another manager’s failure. In other words, past achievement is an indicator, not a guarantee, of future performance.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Diversity hiring is focused on women and minorities (we’ll be talking more about this during the week), but there are other categories that are the focus of negative bias.
Obviously, one is age, school bias is still front and center, and, of course, GPAs. As an ex headhunter, i.e., recruiter, I can tell you that GPAs are a total joke when it comes to great candidates. It’s not that good grades are bad, it’s that GPAs don’t tell much of the story — or at least not the parts that really count. Sam’s story below is a good example of what you miss when you focus mainly on GPAs.
I have a post today at Leadership Turn (a blog I wrote for b5 Media) that focuses on college student’s grade expectations for “trying really hard.” It’s worth clicking over to read because these are the same people you will be hiring over the next few years. Scary thought.
I said at the end that hiring managers might find it of more value to look at grades a bit differently.
Historically, managers and corporations have considered overall GPAs to be a significant factor when recruiting.
But based on current attitudes towards grade inflation, combined with federal, state and local governments’ focus on funding numbers as opposed to learning, perhaps there is a more useful use of grades.
Let me give you a real world example, I’ll call him Sam.
Sam has a 2.7 GPA, but if you look closer you see a different story.
Sam said that when he started college he not only didn’t bother studying he didn’t really know how. He said his grades in high school were mostly Bs and a few As, but that he never really put out much effort. His first semester was totally in the toilet and he almost flunked out when his GPA hit 1.8.
That was a wake-up call.
Sam buckled down. He started by learning how to study and how to learn and really applied himself.
Third semester his GPA was 2.5; junior year GPA was 3.1; senior year isn’t over. Additionally, the GPA for his major is a solid 3.5.
Sam isn’t getting a lot of interviews; he believes it’s because of that 2.7 GPA and he’s probably right.
But for a manager with an entry level position, Sam is solid gold.
Think about it,
he knows that he doesn’t know it all;
he enjoys learning and understands the value of hard work;
he knows that showing up every day isn’t enough; and
he realizes that he needs to perform at a high level to have value.
Sure sounds like a valuable employee to me—and one with a lot of potential loyalty to those who can see past the trappings to the real value.
Are you smart enough and confident enough of our interviewing skills to find the Sam hiding in that stack of resumes?
Job hunting can be stressful, but also extremely rewarding should the right role present itself. You deal with learning about the culture, taking time off for interviewing, crafting the perfect resume, and finally going through the processes to come out on the other side with an offer. That offer can be well worth the stress of it all.
What if you had to do all of that with your current employer’s full knowledge that you were interviewing? Would you still go through the process? Does the risk outweigh the reward?
I actually had that scenario presented to me recently. I have a close working relationship with a hiring director at a company I would be open to working for. I love the culture, how they go to market and it would be a career boost for me.
In addition, since I have a close relationship with folks there, the role opening was presented to me versus me applying on a website and hoping they see me.
One problem though.
They asked that I tell my current employer first, before interviewing, so there is no conflict of interest (my current company does business with the target company).
I have been sitting on telling my boss now for five days. Each morning I walk in with a plan to tell him and each day I delay. I have prayed, meditated, asked for a sign in a dream that I am making a good decision in telling a current employer that I am interviewing before I even know if I have the role.
It has been a major stress for me as I know the move would be great, but I feel it’s too much of a risk to show my cards before I even know the outcome.
Today I even contemplated loosening my own moral code, pulling a Hope Hicks and telling a white lie. I was considering saying I had told my boss when in reality I wouldn’t.
Doing this, of course, may be small, but it starts the foundation on the wrong foot. It chips away at who I am.
I want the role, see a future and see a path forward. But through all my gnashing of teeth, I have not felt right putting my family at risk by saying anything to my boss.
The feeling helped me delay, because today I received a call from that director. He asked that I wait to tell my boss. He realized it didn’t need to be done and it wasn’t right of him to put me in that position.
Have you ever felt you had to compromise to get ahead?
I find it amusing that of everything I’ve read from a variety of academics, consultants, and other pundits regarding hiring and retaining millennials it is Sharna Goldseker who best described it
Goldseker agreed and said it’s time to do away with the stereotype of millennials as entitled slackers. “What we really saw, the top three reasons for giving among these generations, they’re supporting a mission or cause that fits with my personal values, fulfilling my duty as a person of privilege to give back to society, and seeing that my contribution makes a real difference and the organization has real impact,” she said. “As these people are entering the working world and having more resources, they are caring about values more than valuables, and they’re making choices in alignment with those values.”
“…care about values more than valuables.”
That pretty much says it all.
Of course, values are very much public knowledge, as opposed to a poster on the office wall, which makes them hard to fake.
Think Marc Benioff as opposed to Travis Kalanick and you can’t go wrong.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
I saw a new Snickers’ commercial and thought how relevant it was to the startup world — founders, employees and candidates.
In case you haven’t seen it, here it is.
Dimpatient.
Great word. No question what it means and so apropos to the situation.
Most bosses have interviewed a fair number of dimpatient candidates in the course of their careers.
Of course, candidates have been interviewed by a goodly number of dimpatient founders, managers and team members.
And that’s not counting how many founders have presented to dimpatient investors and been forced to interact with dimpatient advisors.
Or, worse yet, because they have no one to blame but the selves, hired dimpatient contractors.
Dimpatience is already rampant throughout the tech world and spreading rapidly to other fields.
Too bad Snickers®adv can’t actually curtail the epidemic.
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And if you’re looking for inspiration, information, guidance or solutions click over and browse the August Leadership Development Carnival. You can’t go wrong.
Some companies look spend millions in recruiter fees and poaching candidates from their competitors; others are more creative.
Those in the second category are open to staffing solutions far outside the box — even the standard race/creed/color/gender/national origin diversity box.
It’s called neurodiversity — those with some kind of cognitive disabilities, such as people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
What do you do when you have highly repetitious work that also requires a high degree of intelligence — like software testing?
That is actually a viable description of people with ASD.
Of course, that means hiring people who, for most people, aren’t the most comfortable to be around.
Roughly 60 percent of people with ASD have average or above average intelligence, yet 85 percent are unemployed.
For smart companies, such as SAP, that group is a goldmine of talent and five years ago it set a goal to have 1% of their workforce comprised of individuals with ASD.
Hiring people with ASD isn’t about charity or financial exploitation; it’s about gaining a competitive advantage and partnering with Specialisterne goes a long way to providing the right program.
So far (as of 2013) about 100 people have been hired [by SAP] for jobs including software developer or tester, business analyst, and graphic designer, and pay is commensurate to what others in those jobs earn.
SAP use an analogy that individuals are like puzzle pieces with irregular shapes.
“One of the things that we’ve done historically in human resource management is, we’ve asked people to trim away the parts of themselves that are irregularly shaped, and then we ask them to plug themselves into standard roles,” says Robert Austin, Professor of Information Systems, Ivey Business School. “SAP is asking itself whether that might be the wrong way to do things in an innovation economy. Instead, maybe managers have to do the hard work of putting the puzzle pieces together and inviting people to bring their entire selves to work.”
That approach can benefit other forms of diversity like race, gender, and sexual orientation.
“Innovation is about finding ideas that are outside the normal parameters, and you don’t do that by slicing away everything that’s outside the normal parameters. Maybe it’s the parts of people we ask them to leave at home that are the most likely to produce the big innovations.”
Read the article and then decide what’s best for your organization.
Good bosses won’t have a problem with the approach; the rest will whine and resist.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
I saw a new Snickers’ commercial and thought how relevant it was to the startup world — founders, employees and candidates.
