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The Top 4 Predictors of Success When Hiring

I read a few blogs on a very regular basis and this week I want to share with you a really great post from one of them. Conor Neill, on his blog The Rhetorical Journey, recently featured a video by Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, where shared how the PROOF of a portfolio is significantly more valuable than the PROMISE of a resume.

The things that you’ll read below are truly some of the most powerful tips that I’ve ever read or heard and if you’re in any kind of leadership capacity within a business, you absolutely need to read this at least once (and I’d encourage you to read it more than once) and then take the time to watch Randy’s video. This is incredibly insightful – I hope you agree!

Depth (in any area) – Randy believes that the best predictor of ability to master any one area is if somebody has already mastered another area. It is more likely that someone who has achieved mastery in golf will achieve mastery as a Pixar artist or programmer than any set of pre-existing talent as an artist or programmer. Mastery requires discipline more than talent. Discipline requires humility. In the highly important NASA search for the astronauts to travel to the moon they were looking for mastery after some form of setback. They placed a huge value on people who had failed and recovered. In doing new things (buzz word “Innovation”) the key skill is “failure recovery”.
Breadth - He says they look for interested people more than interesting people. People who are broadly curious rather than just “different”. The key question is does this person “amplify me”? Can this person take my ideas and return them with passion?
Communication - Communication requires a process of translation. When a techie speaks to an artist she must speak in language that the artist understands. Randy says that nobody can be considered articulate, because the only success of communication is that the listener can say “I understand you”.
Collaboration - This is far beyond simple cooperation. Cooperation is for assembly lines [e.g. Ford Model T production workers]. Knowledge work requries the ability for team members to amplify each other – creating truly connected human beings.

The video for this is about 10 minutes long and it’s worth the time. You can view it below.

Tags: conor neill, hire better, hiring, Interview, predictability, recruit don't absorb, talent acquisition, Topgrading

14 Sep 10 | Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (2)

ECO101 – Is Your Company In Demand?

In the Davis Household, the start of the NFL Season is always a momentous time for our family. As we’ve been watching HBO’s Hard Knocks (I’m a huge Jets Fan) and reading about the players’ reactions to having the coaches’ critiques of them being aired for everyone to see as well as how hard the coaches push the players to perform, it got me thinking about how this kind of situation applies to businesses that don’t employ professional athletes.

Specifically, a few months ago, in advance of the NFL Draft, there was a situation where a Wide Receiver from Oklahoma State was being interviewed by the Miami Dolphins and a General Manager stepped over the line. While interviews with management are very common before these Teams make their decision to spend millions of dollars, the reason this particular interview received so much press was because the GM asked Mr. Bryant, “Is your mother a prostitute?”

I’m not interested in debating whether or not this was a fair question.

Rather, I’d like to offer the following thoughts for you to ponder as a Business Leader:

One of the common complaints I hear from Business Leaders is that the process of Topgrading is too arduous to implement or, even more common, they question why an A-Player would allow someone to put them through filling out a Career History Form or go through a 4 Hour Interview. They challenge me by saying, “Other companies that want that person won’t ask them to go through all of these steps – won’t we lose the best talent if we ask them to do so much more than our competition?”

My belief is that this a simpler situation than many would make it out to be: it’s Economics 101 where you learn about Supply and Demand. However, it’s not supply and demand from the perspective that these aforementioned Leaders would think [that A-Players are in short supply and thus have high demand]. Rather, it’s whether or not your COMPANY is in demand and the SUPPLY of positions available are limited.

Everyone is aware of those companies that have such a great culture and reputation that they have thousands of people who want to get considered for each role – Companies like Google, Oracle and DELL back in the 90′s, Bazaarvoice here in Austin a couple of years ago.

With the NFL, so many young Athletes want to have a shot at “working” for a professional team that they are more than willing to subject themselves to the Combines where they are poked and prodded and then stripped down to their underwear and asked to sprint and lift weights. They take mental acuity tests (remember Vince Young 3 years ago?). Even in the college ranks, there are young men across the country who pay hundreds of dollars to attend “camps” at major universities where the instruction that they receive is secondary to their dream of getting “noticed”.

The ultimate question I would pose to you is: What are you doing to make your Culture and your Organization one where people people WANT to get in and they’re more than happy to go through an extensive Assessment Process (like Topgrading) with a smile on their face because they know that there’s a brilliant career opportunity waiting for them on the other end if they make it through?

Tags: A-Players, career history, hire better, hiring, Interview, recruit don't absorb, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology

07 Sep 10 | Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting, Topgrading | Read on | Comment (1)

Build a Better Scorecard

Patrick Thean is the author of Execution Without Drama and in June 2010 I got the opportunity to hear him share some of his thoughts on creating specific scorecards for Manager Level talent and, because I get so many questions from hiring managers and business leaders about this exact topic, I felt like a blog post to share his suggestions was worthwhile. Here they are:

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR MANAGERIAL SCORECARDS:

RELATIONSHIPS & PEOPLE

Employees:

Voluntary Attrition
Keep Smart (learning, furthering themselves)
Employee Net Promoter Score

Customers:

Net Promoter Score

Shareholders:

Dry Powder
Burn Rate
# of Months of Cash (Runway)

PROCESS

Make/Buy:

Quality & Bugs
Supplier Mistakes
Project Health Index (actual vs. plan)

Sell:

Sales against plan/quota
Pinkie Report (Patrick’s idea for his sales team – if this deal doesn’t close I get your pinkie)

Records (Finance):

A/R Quality
Cashflow
# of days to Close & Report

Tags: A-Player, EO, patrick thean, Retention, Scorecard, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, verne harnish

11 Aug 10 | Compensation, Employment, Retention, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (3)

Do Your Employees Know What Equals Success

The following letter was written by a fellow Entrepreneur who needed his top Technical Talent to really understand what he was getting into by asking to take on the role of CTO as the company continued to grow. I’ve taken out any personally identifiable information but I DIDN’T remove any of the CEO’s requests because I wanted each of you that read this blog on a regular basis to be able to see how well thought out this is and how he did such a good job of explaining his vision for the role, what it would take for the current employee to move into that role and what they would be responsible for. But he didn’t stop at that, he gave him options! Proactively realizing that it would be likely that the employee wouldn’t want the role of CTO after seeing what went into it, he described the four other roles that the employee should consider pursuing instead so that the employee didn’t read this and get the wrong message that maybe he wasn’t “wanted” any more.

There’s a lot that everyone, including myself, can learn from how well this CEO communicates.

A CTO’s role and responsibilities

A Chief Technical Officer is an executive-level position in a company who is focused on technological issues within an organization. It typically involves overseeing Research and Development activities, and formulating long-term visions and strategies at the officer level.

CTO’s focus on planning, budgeting, and business management. They see technology as a tool to solve business problems. In my option, the challenge we’re currently facing is that we view technology like a toy – one that we enjoy playing with but not focusing on its real purpose – to finance our team and solve business problems (with a focus on the finance). We solve problems with technology, we respect it, we enjoy working with it, can sell it, but there is a higher order ROI (Return on Investment) and applicability function that a CTO must perform. And that’s where I see us coming up short.

What it takes to be a great CTO

Admittedly, we’re both inexperienced with defining this particular role. To compound the issue, you haven’t been part of a bigger company to observe what a CTO does. You don’t know what you don’t know yet. If you’re restless and in a rut, this may surface in future challenges as well in terms of how you perceive your value. I learned long ago that technology is perishable and you have maybe 6-8 years of being a super geek before you need to reinvent yourself or face becoming obsolete. And with the extreme changes in technology, that window is getting smaller and smaller. To take the next step in your career development, I suggest changing your perspective. Perhaps try thinking the following ways:

Think bigger. Be responsible for the transformation of capital – be it monetary, intellectual, or political – into technology to further our objectives. You must combine your strong technical background with business development skills in order to create and monitor business value from IT assets.

Think differently. I get the impression that you’re struggling with knowing what our business is supposed to be. Simply put, it’s a machine that solves problems for money. Period. We need to accept and remember business fuels technology. Technology does not fuel the business.

Think strategically. Start looking at things differently. Technology is nothing more than a tool that is used to solve business problems. As a corporate officer, your primary concern should be long-term strategy and “big picture” issues while still having deep technical knowledge of the relevant fields we occupy.

How do you get there?

Becoming a great CTO and technology leader is going to require you to at least double the amount of effort you’re currently putting in – and that’s no exaggeration. There’s a lot you’ll need to learn. This requires a great deal of restraint and will force you outside of your comfort zone. I realize this will not happen overnight. But, I believe in you, and if you want to take the next step in your career development, here are the things you’ll need to do.

Read every day. You must set aside time every day to read blogs, newsletters, books and magazines. This is non-negotiable. Put the time on your calendar, shut off your phone, IM, email, etc and read.

Better communicate your vision. Be more proactive in what you want the team to accomplish, what our product should do, and what you hope it can achieve. You’re the driving force with building our product suite, and it needs to show! This needs to be done on a daily basis. You must reinforce your views every day.

Know the competition. You should be able to rattle off a list of our competitors without hesitation. You should be able to tell me exactly what they’re doing, who they’re targeting, what kinds of features and benefits they have, and how we’re different and better than them.

Know the players in the space we occupy. You should be obsessed with our marketplace. You should be able to list off every major company out there we could possibly do business with. You need to know how their technology works and how we can work with it.

Know the latest technology trends. You must be up to date on the latest platform decisions whether it’s .NET or PHP. You need to have a view on whether Ruby on Rails is worth the hassle. What I’m getting at is technology is changing very fast. You don’t want to be left with an obsolete skill set in case .NET falls out of favor and/or something better comes along. The only way to prevent this is to know what’s happening now and what’s coming down the road later.

Forge relationships with the players in the space we occupy. You need to get out there. You need to become comfortable in the role of wearing the company’s public face when it comes to all things technology. This will require you to start proactively talking to people and introducing yourself to them. Start attending trade shows and conferences, contribute to discussions on online forums, find people on LinkedIn and introduce yourself. Consider even taking a public speaking class through your local Toastmasters club.

Meet other CTO’s. Start rubbing elbows with people like you at other companies.

Properly manage and mentor the team. This means you must make time every day to meet with your team to discuss issues and roadblocks, discuss technology trends, and get to know them better. In addition to, I suggest meeting every other day to or two times a week to do code review as well.

Travel to our office at least once a month. I’m not convinced what we are doing can be done remotely. Being successful will take a herculean effort. As such I’d like you to plan on spending most of your time here each time working face-to-face with the guys.

Find a mentor. I highly suggest a mentor. That’s the only way you can be sure that the CTO role is right for you. You’ve got to talk to someone who actually does it. I certainly haven’t been a CTO but I have worked alongside them. It’s a demanding job and not right for everybody.

Take ownership and be more accountable. You know what’s required to get the job done, not me. You have to enforce deadlines and dates. This is what successful companies demand. We can’t be any different otherwise we’ll always miss our deadlines and dates.

Do you still want to be CTO?

As you see, it takes a ridiculously large amount of work and discipline to be a CTO. I’ve never faced this issue before and it isn’t easy. But being in it now and seeing how much is required of a CTO, I don’t want to presume that this is something you want to be. I’d like you to reflect on my suggestions above and work with me to define what role you want to play in the company.

Other roles for you to consider

I want to help you find out what you love doing while being careful at the same time not to pushing you into something that you’re not, or not ready for. If you decide the CTO hat is not for you, I want you to consider the following alternatives:

1. The Lead Architect – Every great technology startup needs one of these – this is not unique to our company. If we don’t have somebody inside our organization that is setting the technology direction then I’m convinced we’ll never head for greatness. Either our core is innately technical or it’s not. It’s what makes Google, Google and Facebook, well, Facebook.

I believe that every great technology startup has the technology visionary inside the company. This needs to be you! You not only need to own all the technology but you need to dictate what it is we’re building and why – every day.

Trying to work without this person is like wanting to build a world class sky scraper but not having a great lead architect and civil engineer. They provide the vision for our infrastructure. The problem that many inexperienced startup CEO’s like me make is confusing these people for the people who lead the technology team. Most often they are not. The deepest thinkers on technology architecture are seldom good team leaders. They often aren’t great at planning development work. The best technologists often aren’t amazing people managers. Sometimes they are introverts.

2. VP Engineering – First and foremost, a VP of Engineering is a people manager. They have the respect of their team because they’re technical by training. But they’re that rare breed that also understands the human element. They know how to motivate their people. They know how to get people to hit deadlines. They know when it’s OK to push hard for the team to hit a deadline even if it means yet another all-nighter or weekend. And they know when to tell me (the CEO) to shove it because the team has reached maximum stress / effort. A great VP of Engineering manages me (the CEO) as well as the team below him.

In my view it is important to distinguish the difference between the CTO and the VP Engineering. The VP of Engineering is the person who still has great technical chops but prefers not to be a developer.

The VP Engineering aspires to manage teams. They feel comfortable with C# but are also whizzes in Excel. They are sticklers about managing unit tests, system tests and regression tests. In fact, they’re passionate about automating testing overall. They know how to estimate work units, how to manage the agile development process and how to get the most out of their teams. VP’s of Engineering are essential to making sure the trains run on time. The VP of Engineering is also our company’s primary interface to our future head of product management and often the VP of Engineering is somebody I would bring with me to meet clients and to win big deals.

3. Program Manager – This title almost sounds like a consultant’s job. It is not somebody that we need just yet. However, it is one of the more critical roles as we scale our company. As we head into the phase where we get real customers paying real money for a period of time we’ll have a whole new set of issues. Examples include:

Every time you release new features you need to update our technical documentation

Updating our marketing documents including our website

Somebody needs to be sure that customer service is alerted to the new features and are trained in how to handle these functions with customers

New features need to be rolled into PR strategies and competitor analyses

New features need to be documented so the rest of us know the latest and greatest about how to differentiate from the competition.

Many startups have never faced these challenges because they haven’t hit scale. Trust me, as we grow these issues become the key to winning large customers and keeping them happy.

4. Lead Developer – This person is the most senior of all developers on staff. They are typically the go-to person on projects they are assigned. Their entire function in the company is to product top-tier code while acting as a mentor to other developers that are more junior.

The lead developer typically reports to a CTO or VP of Engineering and is a key part of their team.

Closing thoughts

In summary I hope this didn’t scare you away. On the contrary I’m here to help you. You’re an incredibly gifted and talented individual that does so many things right. At the same time, however, you have a lot to learn and achieve. We both do. I hope this letter identifies what steps we need to grow this company and helps you to reach your full potential.

Tags: A-Player, EO, hire better, proactive recruiting, Retention, Scorecard, Topgrading

03 Aug 10 | Employment, Retention, Topgrading | Read on | Comment (1)

I Can Smell You From A Mile Away

I had the good fortune of hearing Cameron Herold today while I am in Boston for EO’s Entrepreneurial Masters’ Program. His topic was “Leadership at 100 MPH” and a lot of the focus was on hiring with predictability and not making mistakes that really could really hurt your company.

For 2010 we’re proud to sponsor Cameron because we agree with what he teaches to Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders around the world. While I’ve heard him speak a number of times I always get a few new things each time I hear him. Here’s some quick thoughts from today that hopefully you can benefit from:

Culture’s hard to build and easy to destroy. One of the fastest ways to destroy it is to not fire people who clearly can’t do the job they’re in. Not only that, you’re doing that “problem” employee a disservice by asking them to live on pins and needles while you’re “too chicken” to let them go.
When you’re hiring someone new onto a team, don’t ever let your team’s “average performance” drop. More pointedly: if you’ve got 6 people on your marketing team and you’re about to hire a 7th, make sure that the person you’re hiring is at least more qualified and better than 3 or more of the existing team members to keep raising the bar.
Ensure that you’re very clear on what your needs are when hiring and then make sure you can “smell the right person from a mile away”. Cameron used the example of going duck hunting with his grandfather as a child. Early in the morning, as the sun was coming up, small V’s of ducks would appear on the horizon and even as they were just specs a mile away Cameron’s grandfather would be able to tell whether or not they were the right ducks for them. “Nope, put your gun down” he’d say. When pressed to explain why he would clearly describe wingspan, formation of the flock and altitude. The business application isn’t a hard jump to make: it’s easy to get excited when you’re in the thrill of the hunt but you have to be very clear about what you’re hunting.
Staying with the aforementioned parable, when Cameron was out duck hunting they’d always bring decoys to go by their blind. To an amateur, a decoy is a decoy. However, to the experienced sportsman, the use of decoys will make or break your time on the water. Choose the right decoys with the proper placement and you’ll have plenty of opportunities but choose the wrong one and you won’t attract a single target to shoot at. Business application: if you walk outside your office and look at the front door and you’re not impressed with the look, what’s an A-Player going to think? If your reception area is unattractive and your office sounds like a funeral home, how’s that 28 year-old superstar going to feel when they show up to learn more about your company culture? The morale of the story: if you’re not using the right bait, you’re going to end up eating really nasty fish or not eating at all.
Are all of your Hiring Managers fully aware of the background that you’re looking for in team members 2 years from now? If you’re hiring for the people that your company needs TODAY, and with the scorecards of the performance targets they need to hit this month, you’re likely not attracting the A-Players who will move your company forward. Instead, they’ll be the people who will keep your company stable. Are your Hiring Managers guardians of your culture? Are they clearly aware of your company goals?
Tread carefully during negotiations with top performers and try to avoid including profit sharing as part of their compensation plans. When you’re growing like crazy, profit-sharing can be a great bonus for people for their work but if your key players rely on profit-sharing bonuses to pay their bills and maintain their lifestyle they’ll bail as soon as the company hits any rough spots – and that’s when you’re going to need them the most. Build compensation packages that key team members feel is fair for the work that they’re doing and then have any profit-sharing programs be the cherry on top.

And lastly, Cameron shared the matrix of Jack Welch at GE used when evaluating his teams. Nicknamed “Neutron Jack” for his often rash and emotionally-devoid decisions, he was also widely regarded as one of their very best evaluators and developers of talent. In fact, Jack was the first CEO to implement executive-level Topgrading. This simple 4square was his way of slotting and categorizing talent that he already had on his team. I found it both really easy to understand/remember while also profound.

Here’s the image:

The Definitions:

F = FIRE THEM. NOW.
C = COACH THEM – THERE’S STILL A CHANCE.
H = HANDCUFF THEM. MAKE SURE THEY”RE LOCKED UP FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS.

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Brad Smart, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, jack welch, job description, recruit don't absorb, Retention, Scorecard, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology

25 Jun 10 | Compensation, Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting, Retention, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (2)

What You Know About Motivation…Is Probably Wrong

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll know that the impact of incentive-based compensation on recruiting and retention is something that I’m both passionate and opinionated about. I’ve often referenced Dave Kurlan as being one of the top thinkers of our time with regards to sales-based compensation. But only a small portion of the typical company’s workforce is their sales team.

People in Sr. Leadership and Human Resources are likely familiar with the studies that have come out about how, on a list of the Top 10 reasons why people take or stay in a role, money typically ranks 9th or 10th. Thanks to Henry Sauer (the Dean of Rackspace University), a friend who I’ve recently had the privilege of getting to know better, I received the book DRiVE. He sent it to me because it had a profound impact on him and the way that Rackspace is working to retain their culture of “Fanatical Support” as they continue to grow.

I began reading this book as I was on a plane last week headed up to visit with a client in the Boston area and recognized quickly that this was going to be a page-turner but its information was not going to be easy to digest (and even harder to implement). On the same flight I read a new report that Dave Kurlan just released about the tenure of salespeople and how tough it is to retain them.

I wanted to share some snippets of both the book’s most compelling findings in its first 100 pages as well as interesting things from Dave’s white paper.

From Dave & The Objective Management Group:

My most recent study and analysis has shed light on some of the characteristics that determine longevity, or to use a more familiar concept, turnover prevention. Turnover, whether voluntary or involuntary, occurs when one party, either the employer or employee, is unhappy with the other. More often than not, the turnover is voluntary, and the employee resigns when income, culture, degree of difficulty or management practices are not to the salesperson’s liking. Involuntary turnover occurs less often because most sales managers are too patient, accept mediocrity, and avoid confrontation, especially a potentially uncomfortable termination.

We live in an era where employees no longer remain with a company for most of their lives. It is not unusual for a younger employee to work for several companies before they turn 30. Today, turnover is inevitable and when you consider the unique dynamic of the odds of a salesperson succeeding, the risk of expensive turnover increases dramatically.

He goes on to talk about the 5 Factors that he’s identified that are the leading indicators in predicting longevity and success for a salesperson:

Figure It Out Factor (FIOF): In the case of retention, those who achieve overnight success tend to look for the next challenge more quickly than those who are slow and steady. Showing these talented salespeople a career path with growth opportunities, more responsibility, and promotions can offset the risk of losing “A” players too quickly.

Sales Quotient (SQ) [Author's note: the proprietary score assigned to a candidate based on the OMG pre-hire assessment test]

Supervision: Sales Managers must be able to effectively coach, mentor, motivate, challenge and develop these salespeople to increase their levels of success and earnings.

Experience: Salespeople with experience – at least 5 years – are much more likely to be retained for 5 years than salespeople with less experience.

Compensation: Salespeople who are compensated mostly by commission are twice more likely to be retained than salespeople who are compensated mostly by salary.

When you consider that salespeople are often classified as “wired to sell”, incentivized to chase deals/revenue and are often have the opportunity to earn uncapped income when they are successful dangled before them, it’s easy to think that it is because they are motivated by money. However, after reading DRiVE, I don’t believe that it is necessarily the money that is motivating them.

Here are some examples of why (taken directly from Daniel Pink’s book DRiVE):

*Author’s note: Mr. Pink references “Motivation 2.0” throughout the book. Motivation 2.0 is defined as follows: 50,000 years ago we were trying to survive as a species. Our motivations were obtaining food, running away from saber-toothed tigers and copulating – an early operating system called Motivation 1.0. As humans formed complex societies that required cooperation to get things done, M.1.0 was inadequate because it was based purely on biological drive. We developed a second drive: to see reward and avoid punishment more broadly. Motivation 2.0 was based on the theory that the way to improve performance, increase productivity and encourage excellence was to reward the good behavior and punish bad.

The trouble is that Motivation 2.0 assumes we’re the same robotic wealth-maximizers I was taught we were a couple of decades ago. Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we’ll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don’t believe that any more. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don’t. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0. What’s more, if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn’t we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we’re predictably irrational – and we clearly are – why couldn’t we also be predictably transcendant?

Bruno Frey, an economist at the University of Zurich, has argued that we need to move beyond the idea of Homo Oeconomicus (Economic man – the fictional wealth-maximizing robot). He suggests that the new model is Homo Oeconomicus Maturus (Mature Economic Man). He says that this figure, “is more ‘mature’ in the sense that he is endowed with a more refined motivational structure.” He goes on to write, “Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are merely motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.”

Consider, the revelations that he revealed above were within the first 30 pages of the book. Fortunately, he’s got another 185 pages beyond this that continue to drive home his point. I’ll be blogging more in the future about many of his theories and also attempting to integrate them into the HireBetter Team’s culture and performance-centric environment. For now, if you’re not ready to go out and buy the book, I’ll share with you one other area of thought that, for me, was when I began to realize he was really on to something and that nearly all employees, even salespeople, are being motivated to perform and produce for reasons that aren’t monetarily driven. Rather, monetary reward becomes the proverbial “cherry on top” that is the result of the intrinsic motivational factors that pushed the employee to perform.

“An object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest, unless acted on by an outside force.”

Newton’s first law of motion is elegant and simple – which is one of the reasons why it is powerful. Everyone can understand it. Motivation 2.0 is similar because at its heart are two elegant and simple ideas:

Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.

Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there – in the land of hadrons, quarks and Schrodinger’s cat – things get freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. Motivation 2.0 is similar in this regard, too. When rewards and punishments encounter our third drive, something akin to quantum mechanics seems to take over and strange things begin to happen.

Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call “baseline rewards”. If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.

But once we’re past that threshold, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims. Mechanisms designed to increase motivation can dampen it. Tactics aimed at boosting creativity can reduce it. Programs to promote good deeds can make them disappear. Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose and give rise to cheating, addiction and dangerously myopic thinking.

Tags: daniel pink, Dave Kurlan, drive culture, generation Y, motivating employees, motivation, Objective Management Group, recruit don't absorb, Retention, Scorecard, talent acquisition

17 May 10 | Compensation, Employment, Retention | Read on | Comments (8)

Only the Employed Need Apply (Especially in Sales)

I’ve been sitting on this blog post for a while thinking that its efficacy would get better and better as the economy and job market failed to recover at the pace that the economists thought (hoped) it would. It looks like my hunch was right.

Nine months ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article called “Only the Employed Need Apply“. The premise of the article was that many employers were only interested in talking to people who were already employed – even if the candidate who had applied had lost their job even after performing at a high level.

Bobby Fitzgerald, a partner in five restaurants in three states, says these days he gets two dozen or more unsolicited résumés each day at one of his Phoenix restaurants, the White Chocolate Grill. But Mr. Fitzgerald says his top candidates, for jobs ranging from servers to management, usually are people who are employed elsewhere. He currently has 50 openings across his five restaurants and has told recruiters to bring in only people who are working.

When you consider that in March 2010 our unemployment rate is still on the precipice of 10% and the average time that someone is unemployed is still over 1/2 of a year, it would appear that Business Leaders like Bobby Fitzgerald aren’t alone.

At Hire Better, we’ve seen a significant up-tick in the number of clients who want us to assist them in hiring salespeople. For those salespeople who we see as applicants, the statistics are NOT in their favor if they’re applying for a role in which Hire Better is involved. Here’s what we’ve found:

In a typical hiring cycle, assuming that we have 100 people to consider for a role:

82-85 will be Direct Applicants
12-15 will be People who are “headhunted” or from our Network
1-3 will be Referrals from internal employees at the client company

When we get down to the Top Three Finalists, they’ll look like this:

1 Direct Applicant
1 “headhunted” Candidate
1 Referral

And when the finalist is hired: The chance of the Direct Applicant goes DOWN exponentially as the salary and responsibility goes UP.

For a Sales role, the prospects of a Direct Applicant are even WORSE. The same statistics will apply to the Candidate pool as before but I have to expand the pool to 5 people when you look for Finalists:

1 is a Direct Applicant
3 are “headhunted”
1 is a Referral

And when this is the case, the Referral has more than a 50% chance of getting hired and the Direct Applicant has less than a 10% chance. In the case of sales candidates – I believe these stats are just about right. And they’re justifiable! If you’re considering hiring an unemployed salesperson or sales manager, you should be asking yourself “Why would a good salesperson be unemployed?”

Dave Kurlan, who I haven’t mentioned in quite awhile, recently shared his findings on how long it takes to get an ROI on a salesperson. His bold mathematical formula looks like this:

If you have a 12 month sales cycle and an 8 month learning curve, it will take nearly 2 years to get your new salesperson producing consistently. In that 2 years, maybe you’ll pay out close to $150,000 in subsidies.

Using your average margin, how much revenue must be gemerated to offset that subsidy?

How much revenue must be generated to produce a satisfactory ROI?

How long must the salesperson stick around in order to produce that ROI?

To bring it all back together, if a prospective sales candidate (who, for the sake of this blog post is unemployed) has found him/herself in a new sales role every 2-3 years, what are the odds that anyone who is hiring them is going to experience a positive ROI?

When we look at candidates through this lens we find it’s a lot easier to not find ourselves getting “sold” during an interview by someone who has all kinds of great excuses for why “things just didn’t work out” at that last job they were in…

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, bad hires, Baseline Selling, challenges of hiring salespeople, Dave Kurlan, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, Kurlan, mediocre salespeople, Objective Management Group, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, recruiting salespeople, Salespeople, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, virtual bench

10 Mar 10 | Compensation, Employment, Interviewing, Networking, Retention | Read on | Comment (1)

When a C-Player is Better Than an A-Player

Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Brad Smart, the author of Topgrading. I remember reading his post in September of 2009 and thinking how powerful it was. When going through my list of topics for what made the most sense to blog about this week I realized that this was as timely and quite a bit more profound than anything I had come up with. He and Chris Mursau, the Vice President of Smart & Associates, write a great blog that you should definitely read on a regular basis.

I’ve taken the liberty of shortening the article down to apply more to a Hiring Manager than a job seeker so that you’re aware of the kinds of challenges that an A-Player might be having in clearly articulating how and why they’re exceptional.

A players are remarkably … um … inexperienced at job hunting, and they are remarkably inept at it.

C players, however, are nudged out of jobs and companies and they become masters at getting the next job. C players also become masters at imitating A players. They’ve read many books that teach them how to make their resumes look better and how to answer interview questions.

In this economic downturn thousands of companies have folded and hundreds of thousands of not just under-performers but high performers, A players, are out looking for jobs. The unemployed are from every industry and there are quite a few super sharp people out looking for work – sometimes for the first time in their career.

Here’s the problem: C players become masters at imitating A players; their resumes are full of hype and conceal negatives, and their interviewing behavior is well-rehearsed. So on the surface C players look like A players. And the poor A player who is looking for a job doesn’t know how to convey – “Hey, my resume is truthful and so is everything I say in interviews.”

Throughout their careers, A players needing a job have simply gone to their network and asked for connections to hiring managers. That historically has been a very productive method. “Birds of a feather …” and when A players contact their networks and say a super sharp A player they know is available … hey, job offers pop up.

Rewrite your resume, tooting your horn. Keep it to 2 pages and list ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND SUCCESSES. I’ve looked at hundreds of resumes since the economic slide and I see A players being TOO HUMBLE. Don’t include much about responsibilities and don’t state your career objective (save that for the cover letter). Don’t puff yourself up – stick to the facts. But make it clear when YOU accomplished something and not just the team, of which you were a member.
Rewrite your cover letter. Cover letters are usually boring and canned. Speak from the heart, say what you’re looking for, but here is the key…
Make it clear that your bosses in the past decade would give you rave reviews. If you have received overall performance ratings that are tops, say so. Humble A players rarely do this – too bad because C players don’t do it for a different reason (it ain’t true that bosses gave them top ratings!).
Offer to arrange personal reference calls with your former bosses (and subordinates and peers, too). Only A players CAN make such an offer and actually follow through, but again they are too humble. In the past their network got them a job and they knew that others were singing their praises, so they were simply their usual understated self. In this economy if you won Olympic gold metals, you’d better display them if you want to get on the team. It frankly impresses the heck out of recruiters and hiring managers to read and hear that your former bosses would praise you and that YOU do the work of arranging the phone calls.
Don’t accept low pay. In the past few months I’ve seen some companies take advantage of people they are recruiting and hiring, knowing that even A players are desperate. Trouble is, when the economy improves, A players who KNEW they were worth more than what they were paid, leave. Companies you would want to work for won’t try to cheat you in the short term.

Brad writes that he’s interviewed more than 6,500 people over the years as his basis point for the credibility of his thoughts. I’d make the argument that I’ve seen more than 100,000 resumes in my career and maybe 0.1% of them were well written. Takeaway value = far too many hiring managers who made snap decisions about candidates based on just a resume even though resumes have a high likelihood of not telling anywhere close to the whole story about someone.

Tags: A-Players, Brad Smart, C-Players, chris mursau, hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, job postings, resume, smarttopgrading, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, unemployment, unemployment rate

10 Dec 09 | Employment, Interviewing, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (2)

Team Motivation When You Need It Most

It’s that time again: I dug up an old gem from Dave Kurlan as I was working on building the incentives for our Executive Team at Hire Better.

Earlier this year, Dave shared his opinions on the 5 Steps To Motivation. We Tweeted just this past week about ensuring that you’re worrying less about Motivation as a Leader and more about De-Motivating your employees.

Below are some of Dave’s thoughts. Of note: he suggests that various people react to these in different ways. I found that doing a Communication Builder with my Sr. Team and Executive Assistant was really valuable (thanks to the suggestion of my Mentor Lois Melbourne). Knowing how each of them wants to receive information and how they want to be Praised/Critiqued was really valuable but I still have found that the #1 item on his list is the most valuable. I’ll only (personally) use #2-5 as the situation gets more dire.

“I believe that motivation is very misunderstood. You can’t motivate by being a cheerleader, nor can you motivate by reciting somebody else’s inspirational quotes. Motivation comes from within and you must find out what your people’s internal motivators are. Why are they doing this thing called selling?

The other thing that’s important to know is that everyone reacts differently to motivation and motivation takes many forms. For instance, perhaps you have some people who respond to one of these methods when trying to get them to perform:”

Challenge them (I have a challenge for you…do you think you’re up to it?)
Feign that you’ve lost faith in them (Tell them that you don’t think they can do it)
Encourage them (I just know you can do this!)
Demand that they perform (You are required to do this)
Ultimatums (If you don’t do this you’ll be out of a job)

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Baseline Selling, challenge, Dave Kurlan, demand, encourage, Fortune, hire better, job description, lois melbourne, lose faith, motivate, motivation, Scorecard, Twitter, ultimatum

23 Nov 09 | Compensation, Employment, Retention | Read on | Comments (0)

Winners Never Cheat and Cheaters Never Win

I’m a HUGE St. Louis Cardinals (and baseball) fan. It struck me with a huge amount of disappointment when the Redbirds announced that they had voided a contract that they signed with a 16 year old from the Caribbean who they had been working to sign for quite some time.

Why would they void a contract after beating out a dozen other teams and offering $3.1mm (a record for the Cardinals in signing an Amateur)?

Because, as it turned out, his Agent lied about the fact that the young man had a degenerative eye disease that was robbing him of his vision. They hid it in the hopes that he could get signed fast enough to just start playing and put the money in the bank.

Yes, I understand that most business owners and hiring managers aren’t dealing with salary numbers anywhere near the millions BUT, if someone’s been unemployed for a period of time, has a mortgage that’s overdue and has bill collectors calling every day, how honest do you think they’re being during their interviews?

Some things that you should be closely evaluating to be sure that you’re getting as close to the truth out of prospective employees during the evaluation process:

Do your Job Descriptions give away too much about the job? In other words, if it was a personal ad, does it explain too much about your likes and dislikes so that someone could “fake it” on a first date?
Are your interviews structured and planned in advance? If you’re making up your interview questions on the fly based on the answers you’re getting, are you getting to the meat of what you need to learn about a prospective employee or are you having great discussions about all of their strengths and letting them withhold their weaknesses?
Are you conducting INTENSE Reference Checks? I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback from a blog post from a couple of weeks ago about how to dig in during the Reference Process. Without really pushing to talk with previous hiring managers, are you getting the truth from candidates or just their half of the story?
Are you running Credit History Reports on candidates to evaluate if they’re in such dire straights that they are more likely to tell you whatever you want to hear?

People in tough situations will often be pushed to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. Many times, we’ve seen that this includes bold-faced lies during their interviews and on their resumes. A prime example: just this past week we had an applicant suggest that she had 10 years of Business to Business Marketing Experience. She had such a good story that an inexperienced interviewer probably would have ‘bought’ it. Because the Hire Better Team Member who was interviewing her knew how to dig in further it was discovered that her 10 years were really only 9. And that B2B experience: working as the Office Manager for a Flower Shop that had a local relationship with 1-800-FLOWERS and a $500/month budget for Google AdWords.

Bottom line: expect the best from people but, especially in this kind of economy, don’t just accept what you’re hearing as the truth.

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, career history, cheating, dishonest, hire better, lies, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Reference Check, talent acquisition, Topgrading, unemployment, virtual bench

19 Oct 09 | Compensation, Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting | Read on | Comments (0)

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