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- Getting job descriptions right, part two - http://t.co/OjIP9vUr #hr #recruiting #management 2012-10-10
- If you love someone, let them go, gracefully. It matters - http://t.co/BIJ92ZGV #hr #management #leadership 2012-10-10
- RT @HireBetterCEO: Three reasons a hire doesn't work out - http://t.co/c040hWrQ #management 2012-10-10
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As I was browsing through the Sunday paper last week there was one article in particular that really caught my eye. It was written by Paul Sullivan of the New York Times and it shared the findings of a new academic study Money Beliefs and Financial Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory published in the current issue of The Journal of Financial Therapy.
Disclaimer: this is a heavy blog post but if you finish it I think you’ll understand why I found it compelling enough to share with you as a Hiring Manager.
The worship of money or the avoidance of it are equally as destructive
He found that some people were under stress about having too little money while others were anxious about losing what they had or felt guilty for having so much. Some people immediately disliked anyone with money, while others would spend their money immediately without regard to the future.
The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance.
- Money Avoidance: people who may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger.
- Money Worship: the opposite of those with avoidance, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others. “They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.”
- Money Equals Status: occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.)
- Money Vigilance: The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Klontz said.
As Mr. Sullivan insightfully pointed out, “Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents.”
Most of the people in the study identified themselves as “middle class” during their developmental years. Another common thread was how people remembered a financially traumatic moment in their life. Klontz described a case in which a family was beset by debt and about to lose its house. In one case, the grandmother bails out the family. In the other, the family figures out a way to keep the house on its own. The outcome is the same, but the takeaway can be different.
“If grandma swoops in and saves the day, you could walk away from that thinking that you don’t need to worry about money,” he said. “Or where there was a lot of talk about losing the house, that could impact you so you live your life afraid of losing everything.”
What I found most interesting for you as a Hiring Manager was this: One of the goals of the study was to use the results to create a test that therapists and financial advisers could use to quickly understand their clients’ beliefs about money. Klontz estimated that administering the test could save therapists hours of conversation and help them understand how a patient came to a particular belief about money.
Conclusion: if someone you’ve got on your team grew up in an environment where their parents demonstrated destructive behaviors but got bailed out, don’t be surprised when that employee misses deadlines and expects someone else to jump in and save them.
Tags: Credit History, hiring manager, Interview, job performance, Karl Scheible, unemployment
Attitude is [almost] Everything
Conor Neill, a close friend of mine and a prominent Entrepreneur in Spain, wrote this short story below for the Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s blog. It’s a great reminder of just how important attitude is in hiring.
Two men, Bill and Frank, begin working at a hotel the same day. They are intelligent, educated and ambitious. The manager of the hotel greets them and hands them both doorman uniforms. They are to begin opening and closing the doors, helping with bags, flagging taxis, etc.
Bill thinks “Doorman? I am worth more than this! I could manage this hotel better than the current guy.” But he doesn’t have an alternative offer and he needs the money, so he does the job anyway. He maintains a pained grimace on his face and deals with customers and other staff in a negative way because he is “better than this.”
Frank, in contrast, thinks “Okay, doorman. It’s not what I had in mind, but hey, I get to spend some time outside, get to meet the customers, and I’ll learn about how this hotel works.” He sets to work with a smile on his face and finds that he quite enjoys the small challenges he faces as a doorman at such a prestigious hotel.
After six weeks, a position at the front desk opens up, and the hotel manager immediately thinks of Frank. Frank is promoted and immediately brings his positive attitude to the front desk of the hotel. Several years later, Frank is the hotel manager. He leaves late one evening and there, opening the door with a hard-wired grimace, is Bill.
Is it luck, or is it fate? Bill will spend forever in a job that he hates and Frank will love every job that he is given. This story is such an inspiration, because it encourages me to always stay positive about my responsibilities and to find the reward in every remedial task. When hiring staff I spend more time exploring attitude and self-motivation than I do exploring capabilities. I also spend time looking to direct my employees toward challenges that are motivating for them.
When it comes to running a business, I’ve learned it’s not just about the results, but the work you put in. That’s where successful people thrive.
Tags: A-Players, career history, hire better, hire for attitude train for skill, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, proactive recruiting, Retention, talent acquisition, unemployment
Icarus Was On To Something
The story told of Icarus was his attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall to his death.
What in the world does this have to do with making better hiring decisions?
Simple: in order for Icarus’s wings to melt there had to be a sun. And in hiring, the sun means a lot more than you can possibly imagine.
I grew up in the Northeast (AuSable Chasm to be specific). Summers were exceptional! We had long days where the weather hovered around 80 degrees and the sun wouldn’t set until about 9pm. My sisters and I would play for hours in the river behind our house. I’d compete in baseball games that would start at 6 and end at 8:30 but there was never any need for the fields to be lit because the sun hadn’t set yet. The way I’m describing it you’re probably thinking to yourself, “that sounds like paradise.” For those couple of months a year, it was.
But with every ray of light there’s usually a dark tunnel.
For us, that was winter. It was dark when we woke up, dark when we got on the school bus and then dark again when we got out of school around 5pm. We’d literally never see the sun except through some windows as we walked from classroom to classroom. Add to that it was often so cold and overcast that you couldn’t go outside anyway. This kind of environment became oppressive to a lot of people (my Dad, for one). It wasn’t until just 25 years ago that people started recognizing what was happening. Wikipedia has this to say:
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression, winter blues, summer depression or summer blues, is a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer, spring or autumn, repeatedly, year after year.
Once regarded skeptically by the experts, seasonal affective disorder is now well established. Epidemiological studies estimate that its prevalence in the adult population of the US ranges from 1.4 percent (Florida) to 9.7 percent (New Hampshire).
The US National Library of Medicine notes that “some people experience a serious mood change when the seasons change. They may sleep too much, have little energy, and may also feel depressed. Though symptoms can be severe, they usually clear up.” The condition in the summer is often referred to as reverse seasonal affective disorder, and can also include heightened anxiety.
How can this knowledge help you as a Leader and Hiring Manager? Simple: Behavioral-based interviewing, when conducted properly, means you should avoid questions that allow someone to answer with their opinions. Whether or not someone has lived and thrived in “the North” or “the South” before should absolutely be part of your interviewing process. Just because someone says they’ve “Always dreamed of living in Seattle because they’ve heard great things” doesn’t mean they’ll be able to survive the lack of sun. The same goes for Austin – the summers are brutal and we don’t go outside much at all from late June until early September.
SAD is real. Accept that and use the knowledge to your advantage when making a critical hiring decision that will involve moving someone from one latitude to another.
Tags: hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Recruiting, Retention, SAD, talent acquisition
In Defense of Discrimination [Part 2]
On February 9th, 2011 I began this series on Discrimination with some thoughts on the reduced productivity of smokers.
I also started the conversation with this:
What I’m hearing from Business Leaders all over the United States is, “I want to hire US workers but their costs are too high for me if I end up hiring people who aren’t productive enough.”
During the course of this series on Discrimination I’m going to say some things you won’t agree with, may take offense with and that will border on legality. However, until employers ARE allowed to “discriminate” based on these things, the value of the US Worker will continue to decline (on average) and the fiduciary pressure to hire off-shore talent will be greater.
If I haven’t scared you away yet, here’s the next installment:
Part 2: Obesity
About a month ago the Comptroller of the State of Texas tallied the business costs of obesity. This is what they said, “Obesity is expensive for Texas employers, costing them $9.5 billion a year in worker health costs, absences, disability and reduced productivity.”
That number is nearly 3 times what the same office calculated it to be in 2007.
The report, Gaining Costs, Losing Time, estimates that Texas employers paid $4 billion in direct health insurance costs in 2009. Indirect costs included $1.6 billion for obesity-related work absences, $3.5 billion for reduced productivity of obese workers, and $328.1 million for disabilities linked to obesity.
$3.5 BILLION for reduced productivity in Texas alone.
In 2006, Leade Health published a report entitled The Business Case for Weight/Obesity Management Using Health Coaching Interventions.
They called Obesity “The Number One Factor in Productivity Loss”. The paper goes on to cite the following statistics:
- Medical costs for obese employees are 77 percent higher than for healthy weight employees; obesity-related disabilities cost employers up to $8,720 per claimant.
- Obese workers have the highest prevalence of work limitations, with 6.9 percent experiencing such limitations compared to three percent among normal weight workers.
- Obesity is estimated to account for 43% of all health care spending by U.S. businesses on coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis of the knee, and endometrial cancer combined.
Lastly, in August 2010 the Brookings Institute released a report that went even further than most people have ever been willing to go. It’s called Economic Impact of Obesity in US and it includes results like:
- There is a positive and statistically significant correlation between obesity and measures of absenteeism. Specifically, at a North American division of Shell Oil Company, 3.73 additional days of work were lost per year for each obese employee relative to their normal-weight co-workers.
- A similar report referenced in this same white paper was able to prove that employees considered at risk for obesity were 1.23 times more likely to be in the ‘high-absenteeism’ group than those who were not. That author (Durden) showed that obese workers were 194% more likely to use paid time off than their counterparts.
- In conclusion, the report found that the productivity losses to Shell Oil Company alone due to absenteeism effects of obesity were worth $11.2 million per year. This amount includes only the direct productivity costs of absenteeism (that the employee is paid while not at work); it does not account for any secondary effects on training, morale, or other network effects.
In closing and in defense of discrimination (especially based on the above facts): it is my opinion that obese workers should absolutely be considered inferior to their non-obese counterpart if the skill sets are on an equal level.
Tags: discrimination, hire better, hiring, obesity, talent acquisition
Those who “Plan the Fight” won’t “Fight the Plan”
A couple of months back I interviewed Patrick Thean about the success he’s experienced in building scorecards for new hires. He provided some great suggestions of the metrics he’s used along with the real-life example of presenting a scorecard to a prospective hire to help her “opt out” of the interviewing process because she determined she wasn’t capable of the job.
I absolutely loved the example Patrick shared because it reinforced what I’ve repeated over and over again about the two reasons why a new hire doesn’t work out:
- You failed (as the Hiring Manager) to clearly articulate what you needed someone to do
- You failed (as the Hiring Manager) to tell the new hire what you needed them to do
Having a scorecard is a HUGE first step in making sure that you’ve put in the time to define what will determine success for someone who’s just joined your team.
Last month (January ’11) I had the opportunity to meet Pepe Charles from MAP. He’s an expert in helping organizations develop what they call “VITAL FACTORS”. You won’t be surprised to learn that these vital factors are another name for…wait for it…scorecards.
I asked if they’d be willing to share their proprietary vital factors with you as readers of this blog. They graciously said yes and so you can find a very robust list of things that you can measure across departments and skill sets here.
The day that I heard Pepe speak about these vital factors he brought something up that really stunned me (and I was also a bit embarrassed for not having thought of it myself earlier). There’s a very high likelihood that you’ve heard of the acronym SMART for goals. It commonly accepted that the acronym stands for:
- S: Specific
- M: Measurable
- A: Attainable
- R: Realistic
- T: Timely
What Pepe suggested was that the A (typically referred to as attainable) should actually stand for AGREED TO. What a revelation!
In summary, I now have 3 reasons why someone you’ve just hired won’t work out:
- You failed (as the Hiring Manager) to clearly articulate what you needed someone to do
- You failed to tell the new hire what you needed them to do
- You failed to come to an agreement with the new hire on what they needed to do
Thanks, Pepe.
Tags: A-Players, hire better, hiring, Interview, job description, Retention, Scorecard, talent acquisition
Recruiting Season is Heating Up
In case you haven’t noticed, the hiring freeze that seemed to overtake the our nation over the last 14 months is thawing, just in time for Spring.
Here are a few of the articles that I’ve noticed in the past few days that suggest it’s time for you to pay attention and get your act together because it’s going to be time for you to start RECRUITING instead of ABSORBING…soon.
- Upstaged by Younger Rivals, Google aims to Get Hip again [LINK]
- Demand for Programmers has returned and Start-Ups are out of luck [LINK]
- Microsoft is spending 10x that of Apple to Recruit and still struggles [LINK]
- There are more than 1,000 Job Postings with the word “Java” in them on Monster [LINK]
- The same keyword results in >8,000 on CareerBuilder [LINK]
The next BLS survey isn’t due until February 4, 2011 but the statistics will continue to hold true, while there is a nationwide unemployment rate of between 9-10%, the unemployment rate for college graduates is around 5% and about 2% for married college graduates.
It’s time to get your game faces on or you’re going to be forced into hiring people in the very bottom of the barrel.
And if you haven’t checked it out GlassDoor yet, you should. Your current and former employees are talking.
You’ve been warned.
Tags: A-Players, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate
Could Free Agency Help Your Employee Evaluations?
The Hot Stove was fired up early this year with the new policy of Major League Baseball being anyone who was eligible automatically become a free agent upon the last pitch in the World Series. As a Cardinals Fan, this was a welcome change because it meant that I had an excuse to start paying attention again.
One of my favorite websites for watching what is going on is run by the St. Louis chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research or SABR. Fungoes includes lots of interesting (if you’re a stats geek) debates about the values of players and how they compare to other people at the same position, on other teams, on the same teams and even against retirees and minor leaguers.
The winter’s offseason has had me really wondering why we don’t have this kind of research ourselves when we’re evaluating existing talent and considering who to hire. I started to go down the path of trying to figure out if there was an effective scoring system of statistics that I could create – as that’s the #1 thing that baseball has 100 years of and business doesn’t.
Maybe these particular stats will get your synapses firing to think more objectively about how you might evaluate your team during the upcoming Employee Evaluation season that typically happens right around the 1st of the new year.
- VORP (my personal favorite): Value Over Replacement Player. The number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player at the same position would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances.
- RARP: Runs Above Replacement, Position-adjusted. A statistic that compares a hitter’s Equivalent Run total to that of a replacement-level player who makes the same number of outs and plays the same position.
- Breakout Rate: The percent chance that a hitter’s EqR/27 or a pitcher’s EqERA will improve by at least 20% relative to the weighted average of his EqR/27 in his three previous seasons of performance. High breakout rates are indicative of upside risk.
- Stuff: A rough indicator of the pitcher’s overall dominance, based on normalized strikeout rates, walk rates, home run rates, runs allowed, and innings per game.
Obviously, it’s not going to be possible for you to come up with the raw data to plug into the formula for STUFF (For the record, Stuff = EqK9 * 6 – 1.333 * (EqERA + PERA) – 3 * EqBB9 – 5 * EqHR9 -3 * MAX{6-IP/G),0}). However, with some creativity, you can come up with some equivalents.
The questions for you:
- Do you have some young talent that drives you nuts but has HUGE upside potential?
- Do you have someone whose performance was great 3 years ago but they’ve been sinking since and you’ve still got them hanging around?
- Have you ever thought about something like VORP and considered how worthless or valuable someone on your team is compared to what else is out there in the marketplace?
Tags: baseball, evaluations, objectivity, SABR
The Big/Small Gap: Hiring Challenges of Entrepreneurs
As an Entrepreneur it took me a number of years of observing and operating within the “People Sector” before I began to recognize the unique skills necessary for people to be successful and content within different-sized companies. While it’s likely won’t come as a surprise, I found that people from BIG companies rarely succeed in SMALL ones and vice versa.
To better understand the why this might be the case and how it directly impacts Entrepreneurs and small companies I sought out Conor Neill – a business thought leader with a decade of Accenture Experience along with a resume that includes four start-ups of his own.
[JDavis] Before talking about the unique challenges of hiring in a Small Business, what did you experience during your time at Accenture?
Everything was already set up for us to succeed. We had an HR Team that had access to a vast bench of talent that could help staff up a 6-person project quickly. We had so many candidates to consider for our new hire needs that I was able to build what I called the “Critical Behavior Interview”. Put simply, I had a list of 21 behaviors and they had to mention each of these types of behaviors without my prompting in an open format for me to recommend them for hire.
Because of this infrastructure I got a little spoiled. I realized that even if I made a snap judgment within 5 minutes of meeting someone and it turned out to be wrong, they were being hired into a huge pool of people and there were lots of opportunities for them to hide.
[JDavis] How did it change once you began starting your own companies?
I’ve learned through my own experience and through talking with other Entrepreneurs that the initial 10-20 hires in a company are actually quite easy. It’s because you’re hiring friends or networks of friends and as the Owner/Founder you can still tell everyone what to do. That means that even a failed hire isn’t all that damaging because each of the people are just there to execute on your vision.
[JDavis] Where does it start to get hard?
At $1mm in revenue a company has a product or service and it usually works. If the company is capable of scaling it will result in a lot of jobs but in the run from $1mm to $10mm a lot of change happens – more than at any other time in the lifecycle of a company.
One of the biggest changes is bringing in Senior Management. When an Entrepreneur starts to hire for these roles and they’re hiring from a resume and talking with someone who knows all about Six Sigma or Plant Logistics it can be really hard for them. There’s a lot of intimidation that occurs due to the resume and experience of the Executives and it’s difficult for an Entrepreneur to really determine, “is this the right person for the job?”.
[JDavis] What was the hardest part of this for you?
Without a doubt it was hiring people older than me. They had impressive CV’s. Significantly more experience than I did. I found it hard to see beyond their experience. I also found it hard to ask someone who was my Dad’s age about how they performed, how they handled failures or what their weaknesses were.
[JDavis] What’s your #1 Takeaway for Entrepreneurs?
A Hiring Process is largely common sense. The problem most people (myself included) ran into was that many of the processes that I created were ones I expected my staff to comply with yet I went around them. Hiring was no exception.
Having a Hiring Process in place will help tremendously. I liken it to brushing your teeth. Brushing your teeth works because you do it every day and the same way each time. You do it every day and the same way because you’ve seen other people do it and you know it’s working. If you wait to start brushing your teeth until they’re rotting, it’s too late.
Conor Neill is a professor at IESE Business School. An entrepreneur who has founded four companies, he is past Area Director of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and spent a number of years in the Change Management division of Accenture. He has earned both a psychology degree and an MBA and in his spare time blogs about entrepreneurship, success and learning from the little failures in life at www.conorneill.com.
Tags: behavior-based interview, conor neill, entrepreneur, hiring process
5 Blog Posts of Significance [Motivation]
At the suggestion of Kristen Doyle, our Director of Strategic Marketing, I’m going to begin occasionally sharing some Top 5 Lists of great blog posts that I have read around certain areas of Recruiting and Retention that I believe will have a huge impact on you as a Leader.
With so much in the news today about worker productivity and its impact on the US and global economy, Motivation seemed like a very logical place to start. Add to it, the last 3 CEO’s that I’ve spoken with all listed “Self-Motivated” as one of the most important traits that someone possess to be successful at their company.
What do you think about these? Have I missed any? Please comment or send me an @Reply on Twitter so that your fellow readers can benefit as well.
- Animated Video about Motivation 3.0 – a few months ago, Henry Sauer of Rackspace sent me a copy of Pink’s new book DRiVE and when I read that cash bonuses have the same impact on the brain as cocaine, I started to really pay attention. If you’re not into reading books, this 10 minute video is a great summary.
- If You Want Performance, Give Intent – Simon Sinek has been talking about Purpose-driven organizations and the impact it has on motivation and productivity. This post shares a military story about trust and accountability that will really cause you to think.
- Dave Kurlan’s 5 Ways to Motivate Salespeople – from encouragement to demands, this one’s short but powerful.
- The Significance of Purpose – A short blog post that references a much longer study completed at Wharton that confirms just how powerful a purpose motive actually is.
- Zappos CEO’s Letter to His Team – his open, honest answers to all of the questions that the employees were asking of each other are a great example of how you should communicate to encourage productivity as opposed to the alternatives.
Tags: daniel pink, Kurlan, motivation, Objective Management Group, simon sinek
Be Like Mike: Tips for Visualizing Success
While it’s not necessarily scientific, the HireBetter Team has determined that there are two reasons why a new hire doesn’t work out: (1) You weren’t clear on what you needed someone to do OR (2) You failed to tell the new hire what they needed to do.
To explore this further I sought out Patrick Thean, a professional Coach and the author of Execute Without Drama – a book that we have greatly benefited from as an organization.
In Patrick’s experience, for a manager to get better at visualization within hiring as well as company leadership, they will find the most success in doing the following four things:
- Listen to what others have to say. Too often we are pushing people to listen to how we want them to do it. Instead, ask others “What does success look like? How would you view this journey? How will the person feel or look if they’re doing well?”
- Explain the exact outcomes you want to see. Then assess the work environment that you’ve got and be honest with how much time you can spend as a manager coaching and advising them.
- Walk through a single successful day with your new employee. What are the things that they might do that would drive you nuts that would cause you to want to jump out your window by lunch?
- What does success look like? What are the few things that you see as the few activities that new person will be engaged in that would make them successful? What makes YOU successful during your day that they’ll need to do?
For those of you who are old enough to have watched Michael Jordan in the 80′s & 90′s, you’ll likely remember the stories of him visualizing every shot before he would take them. This exercise isn’t nearly as hard as you think it is!
According to Patrick it’s unlikely you will be “spot on” during visualization. You’re probably going to make mistakes. But if you can explain what a successful day looks like for a prospective employee and they don’t like what they are hearing, they’re probably going to self-select out!
Patrick Thean is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who has started and exited multiple startups. He received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for North Carolina in 1996 and achieved a ranking of 151 on the Inc 500 in 1997.
An international speaker and the author of Execute Without Drama, Patrick has spoken to thousands of business owners on the topics of sustaining business growth, venture capital, and strategic exit strategies. He provides practical insights on building a culture of execution.
Tags: hire better, hiring, Interview, patrick thean, Topgrading, visualization