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.

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.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

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?

Image credit: flickr

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

If generating revenue is high on your list of important stuff, then knowing your market should be right up there, too.

Actually, the knowing needs to come first.

There is no way a 20-something, white male from an even slightly privileged background knows, let alone understands, the needs/preferences/desires of a Gen Xer, Boomer or older, let alone those of a different gender, race or economic status.

IDEO not only understands that, it hires accordingly and enjoys big payoffs.

The problem is bias.

Google is one company that has recognized the reality of bias and is actively working to counter it, as is Silicon Valley Bank.

The bank has already undergone unconscious bias training globally, which involves exercises including splitting into groups and assessing the merits of four different résumés, only to return to find they belonged to the same candidate — just with different names and genders attached. (…) with female names, for example, the groups were more likely to question the candidates’ credentials.

But it may go much further.

It is considering whether to remove names from job candidates’ résumés in a bid to prevent unconscious bias from its recruiters.

Bias is a serious problem, but you’ll never win against it if you believe that ‘they’ are biased and you are not.

It also helps to understand that bias, whether genetic or cultural heritage, is hardwired in our brain.

As a founder, you have the ability to shape the values, culture and bias of your company.

And you need to do it intentially.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I try to be polite, but sometimes it’s difficult.

Sometimes I just need to shut up in order to avoid telling my host that I think he is the stupidest person I’ve been around lately.

“Clay” was talking to a group of new entrepreneurs; going on at length about how brilliant he is at hiring talent for his company.

He said that knew when he should interview someone just by hearing a few basic facts, like education and general experience; no need for detailed specifics.

When he finally stopped bragging and patting himself on the back just one guy had the temerity to disagree, saying that wasn’t enough information to make such company success-critical decisions.

Clay turned and asked me to do four thumbnail sketches of candidates I knew and he would prove it was enough.

Here are the four profiles I provided.

1. BSBA, some programming in college; started in customer service and worked his way up through the executive ranks.
2. Some college; 12 years of programming and management experience.
3. Harvard MBA w/ 25 years progressively more responsible positions in consulting, sales and management.
4. MIT BS; more than 40 years programming experience in a broad array of technologies. Strong entrepreneurial bent; excellent manager.

Clay laughed and said he wasn’t surprised I included mostly “oldies,” since I was one of them.

He went on to say that he would pass on 1,3 and 4, because they probably wouldn’t fit into the fast pace of a startup. The second was a possibility, although he didn’t sound particularly aggressive.

Poor Clay, his investors won’t be pleased; he just passed on

1. Marc Benioff (52)
2. Sheryl Sandberg (47), and
3. Ray Kurzweil (68)

He did think number 2 was a possibility, although not a strong one.

But Mark Zukerberg (32) probably wouldn’t fit in.

Flickr image credit: Jon Phillips

See all mY generation posts here.

I have a post today at Leadership Turn 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?

Image credit: flickr