Delivering the Systems and Expertise You Need to Confidently Make Great Hiring Decisions
Categories
@HireBetter
- Are you ready to hire a COO? You very well may be - http://t.co/xJQxv6j7 #hr #management #hiring 1 day ago
- The Talent Paradox: why only a third of your employees actually want to work for you http://t.co/dovv1hq0 #hr #management (on @fastcompany) 1 day ago
- Hiring in 2012, from @openforum. With @HireBetterCEO - http://t.co/cfJh2dbR #hiring #hr #recruiting 1 day ago
- Think that you're too small to need a COO? Think again - http://t.co/xJQxv6j7 (by @HireBetterCEO) #hiring #management #hr 2 days ago
- More updates...
Blogs About Hiring
Blogs By Smart People
- Austin Entrepreneur Network
- Backpocket COO
- DRiVE by Dan Pink
- EOS Blog
- Growth Guy
- Results.com Execution
- The Rhetorical Journey
Follow HireBetter
Search
Tag Cloud
A-Player A-Players Austin Baseline Selling Brad Smart career history chris mursau Dave Kurlan EO Fame Family Fortune Fun generation Y geoff smart hire better hiring hiring manager Interview interview training job description Joe Navarro Kurlan Objective Management Group OtherInbox proactive recruiting recruit don't absorb Recruiting Reference Check Retention Scorecard smarttopgrading social networking talent acquisition Topgrading topgrading interview topgrading methodology TORC tweets Twitter unemployment unemployment rate verne harnish virtual bench who the bookIf You Love Them, Let Them Leave
Last week Major League Baseball was rocked by an incredible story that screamed “Blog About Me!”. Cliff Lee, an 8 year veteran pitcher who’s had the chance to play in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle and Texas, was the most sought after free agent of the off-season. The Rangers, who had his services for a mere 15 starts (plus the post-season) were so enamored with him that they attempted to “break the bank” to keep him in Texas. The Yankees, who have more money than any other team and like to throw that money around, offered him the second most lucrative contract for any pitcher in the history of the league (second only to their other starter, C.C. Sabathia). Lots of other teams had visions of sugarplums as well thinking that they had a chance.
In the end, Cliff Lee shocked everyone and returned to Philadelphia. A “dark horse” that didn’t even show up on the radars of any of the sports writers, Lee accepted LESS money ($50mm less to be exact, from the Yankees) to come back and play with the teammates that he really liked.
“You can definitely sense the fact that these guys step up and are up for a challenge and rise to the occasion and come up big when they need to,” Lee said before the 2009 World Series. “It’s not just one or two guys, it’s everybody. It’s a special team. To win the World Series (in 2008) and be back just proves that fact. There’s a lot of confidence here. Everyone expects to be successful.”
His former (and now current) teammate Raul Ibanez did a nice job of reinforcing what Lee was saying:
“We have a bunch of guys who are not concerned with getting attention,” Ibanez said. “They just want to win and they don’t care if they get the credit for it. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have that mind-set, and that’s not by accident.
No one doubts that Cliff Lee is a special, special talent. What else can you deduce when a single guy shows up and changes a team’s entire track record? Some examples:
- In 2008 Cliff arrives in Philadelphia and they win their first Championship since 1983. They returned to the World Series in 2009.
- In 2010, after a mid-season trade, he arrives in Arlington and helps the Rangers reach their first World Series in Team History.
WRAP UP:
What can you learn from Cliff Lee, Philadelphia, Baseball and the Yankees? Culture really does make a difference. Below, I’ve included a video (one of many) that were created by people who LOVE this guy and are so excited to have him back in Philly – quite a different story from a place like NYC where the money’s great but the egos are huge, the spotlight is brighter and the pressure is exponentially stronger.
One other thought: Jack Daly shared with me that people who make a Career Change typically regret their decision twice in the first 30 days of being in the new role. If you had someone great who left your organization recently for more money or for more spotlight, you might consider calling them and taking them to lunch just to catch up. You just might be surprised how many times the grass wasn’t greener for them on the other side of the fence and, with just a bit of urging, they’d happily come back.
BONUS QUESTION:
Author’s Note: The song that accompanies this video is explicit – and I’m not going to apologize.
Tags: A-Players, Fame, Fun, hiring, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Retention, talent acquisition
The 5 Best Ways to Judge People
I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to evaluating talent and Topgrading is about the best way that I’ve ever seen to do it. It’s objective, gives you a structure to follow and makes it easy to judge prospective employees without a lot of emotion.
To keep up with the latest and greatest tips for Topgrading better, I’ve subscribed to Brad’s newsletter. You can sign up here.
His most recent newsletter was fantastic – it was titled “The 5 Best Ways to Judge People”. The most significant parts of that newsletter can be seen below. Enjoy!
When people are just learning Topgrading, it’s easiest to use the A, B, and C categories, to show the dramatic differences. Topgrading professionals are able accurately put people in the right categories. In doing this they actually have three slightly different categories – A Player, A Potential, and Non-A. We define A player as someone in the top 10% of talent for the pay, in your location, in the industry, and reporting to you.
Following are 5 of the best ways I know of to judge people in a fair, objective, legally defensible way:
1. How A, B, and C players differ on key competencies. The following chart is a bit simplistic because not all A players are that great on all competencies and not all C players are that bad on all the competencies. Indeed, in real life C players usually are A players on some competencies.
2. Look for patterns of success. The “magic” of Topgrading comes from understanding, bottom line, how successful a person was in job 1, job 2, job 3, etc., with the greatest weight given to the most recent jobs.
Last year I interviewed a smooth talking executive who had clearly been a superstar in the industry, but the guy had not worked hard for years. He had peaked years ago, was on a decline and frankly the pattern showed he was “over the hill,” someone who had lost his energy, drive, resourcefulness, and passion.
3. Recruit a replacement. This really is the best way to see if your employee is truly among the top 10% of talent available.
After you have argued with your employee, complained about unsatisfactory performance, and heard 1,000 excuses, the simplest way to see if there are better people is to actively recruit them. This can be done secretly, but go through all the Topgrading hiring steps including talking with former bosses.
Over the years I’ve heard it hundreds of times: “It became very easy to replace my employee after going through the Topgrading hiring steps, because I became absolutely certain my excuse-making employee was a C player, and I had three A players very willing to join me at exactly the same salary as my C player.”
4. Never stop building your recruitment networks. As a Topgrader, you know the best way to recruit is by staying in touch with 40 A players you’ve worked with and also stay in touch with 20 “connectors,” people who know a lot of A players.
But in addition to using your networks to recruit, staying in touch helps you figure out if your team consists of A, B, or C players. As you chat from time to time with A players you’ve worked with in the past you hear about their accomplishments, what they pay people, the standards they set … and when you share your frustrations with a certain employee, your network will give you feedback that your expectations are too high or too low.
5. Assess employees using Topgrading methods. You might already know that my first consulting engagement with General Electric was to improve their success promoting people. They improved from 25% to well over 90% success, and the internal assessment methods are almost identical to Topgrading hiring methods. Two trained interviewers conduct the tandem Topgrading interview and instead of talking with outside references (for hiring) they talk with bosses, peers, and subordinates in the company.
Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Brad Smart, career history, chris mursau, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, hire better, hiring, Interview, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, virtual bench
How Would Socrates View Topgrading?
This past week, one of our Clients was presented with a difficult situation: through working with the Hire Better Team and allowing us to follow our Methodology and engaging in the theory of Topgrading, we acquired so much information about an Executive Level Candidate that it almost resulted in the Candidate NOT being offered a position.
How could this happen?
I’m going to reference a lot of what is now widely referred to as the “Allegory of the Cave”. What follows is from Wikipedia and, while it’s a little verbose for a single blog post, it’s worth a read. I’ve summarized my thoughts right below this entry.
Inside the Cave
Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads “including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials” The prisoners can only watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. Wouldn’t they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn’t the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?
Release from the Cave
Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
“Suppose further”, Socrates says, “that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn’t he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn’t the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be distressed and unable to see “even one of the things now said to be true”?
After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the “source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing”.
Return to the Cave
Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. “Wouldn’t he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn’t he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? “Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?”
The relationship I’m hoping to make here is that when a company initially begins to consider Topgrading, it often results in companies quitting before they even get started (note: @Topgrading protects their tweets but our request was approved). It’s hard, it takes a significant amount of time and it isn’t for the faint of heart. But when it is implemented effectively, what a company is able to find out about prospective candidates can sometimes be so overwhelming that it’s like the prisoner who steps out of the cave and walks into the Sun.
In the case of this Client, their existing interview process was really good. But it was designed to determine if candidates were cultural fits and didn’t really dig much deeper than the surface. When they were able to see the results of a full 4.5 hour Tandem Topgrading Interview that included personal challenges, a full career history and in-depth self-analysis and critique by the candidate around weaknesses and things that frustrated them, it was almost too much. Their old process would never have unearthed about 75% of what came out of the Topgrading process and, armed with this new information, they agonized over the final decision.
This all goes to show that Topgrading is really about the best methodology available today but it has to be adopted by an entire organization and not rolled out piece by piece alongside a rudimentary assessment and interviewing process because of how hard it is for people (Executives and Front Line Employees alike) to digest the stark differences that they must try to balance when making final decisions.
Tags: @hirebetter, @hirebetterceo, A-Player, A-Players, allegory of the cave, Brad Smart, executive level recruiting, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, hire better, hire better methodology, hire better systems, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, plato, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, socrates, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, wikipedia
Questions to ask when Assessing your Company Culture
The Austin Technology Council held a CEO Roundtable on May 18th about “How Healthy is your Organization’s Culture”? The featured speaker was Dr. Carol Kallendorf, the Founding Partner of The Delta Associates. I made a commitment to Tweet more often and so I maintained a Twitter Stream throughout the whole event. If you’re not following me on Twitter, why not?
The event wasn’t an exceptional one as the featured guest has been in business of telling companies what they do wrong for over 27 years. Further, no matter how pointedly people asked her questions she had a political answer that wasn’t based on experience and instead, sounded like rhetoric. At the end of the event we all got handed a piece of paper (how very Baby Boomer) of the 10 questions you can ask to assess your organizational culture. While the document wouldn’t surprise you even if you were from Mars and didn’t even know what culture was, there were a couple on there that at least bore repeating:
- What are the issues that tend to align your Executive Team? What about fractionalize it?
- To what extent do the people in your organization have shared goals, vision or fate?
- Could your employees explain to their family members what it is that they do within the company that contribute to its success?
- Do people at all levels in your organization know what business you are in, how you make money and who your customers are?
- What’s your culture for handling mistakes and failure? What would your employees say is the culture for handling failure or mistakes?
- Do people like to come to work?
- How big a priority is culture?
Again, nothing earth shaking or really insightful but they ARE thought provoking. Can you make any changes today inside of your company that could represent a baby step in the right direction?
Tags: alisha ring, Austin, austin technology council, brian wong, carol kallendorf, change management, culture, delta associates, drive culture, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, hire better, talent acquisition, tweets, Twitter
Build It Right – Right from the Start
Hanging out with Early Stage Entrepreneurs is about my favorite thing in the world to do. For the past 18 months I’ve been actively involved in EO‘s Accelerator Program which is dedicated to helping companies between $250k-$1mm grow faster and more efficiently through peer to peer learning, introductions to advisors and facilitated learning opportunities.
This morning I got the chance to share some of our best practices with the Portfolio Companies of Austin’s newest Incubator: Capital Factory. (If you’re interested, you can follow them on Twitter: @capitalfactory). I find it exhilarating to spend time with new companies and brilliant minds and I’m proud to have American Workforce be a supporter of this organization. This morning we focused on how each and every one of their companies has a chance to do things right – right from the start. None of them have started to hire employees yet but each of them has the plan to in the very near future. We talked about a number of strategies and the ways that they can make their companies attractive to top talent without having to spend a lot of money. But what I really challenged each of them to do was to analyze their Virtual Bench, build a repeatable screening process that gets to the point of what they need to find out about someone before hiring them, and thinking about the candidates’ perspectives when they are considering joining these new companies.
There were FOUR main questions that I asked them to really think about as we were wrapping up. If you’re a Business Owner, aspiring Entrepreneur or Manager, you should be thinking about these questions too:
- What is the first impression we provide to prospective A-Players when they come on-site to meet us?
- If we’re interviewing an A-Player and everyone knows it, are we willing to make our decision on the spot? If not, what else needed to happen during screening to make us comfortable and confident?
- Have we acknowledged the spouse or significant other and included them during the recruiting process? How could we?
- Are we ready to have new A-Players on our team? Can our management style challenge them so that they’ll stay and thrive in our company?
And the BONUS Question: Are we comfortable hiring people that have the potential to take our position?
Sure, Topgrading is tough to implement. But in the 2 years that I’ve been involved with it, I’ve found that it’s the questions above that impair companies and limit the effectiveness of the process more than conducting 4 hour interviews or executing on TORC. What are you doing in your company to Hire Better?
Tags: @capitalfactory, @joshuabaer, A-Player, A-Players, aspiring entrepreneur, Austin, capital factory, chris mursau, emerging entrepreneur, EO, EO Accelerator, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, hire better, hiring, Interview, job description, josh baer, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, Twitter, virtual bench, who the book
What does your Careers Page say about your Company?
Just about every company’s website has a careers page where you can glean an awful lot of information about the kinds of people that a company is hiring and how much commitment they’ve put into wanting to attract (and land) the best talent. I’d like to encourage you to spend a little time today on each of the websites that I’ll list below to understand the amount of time that they’ve dedicated, the message they’re trying to portray and the people that they are hoping will be interested in their company. Each of these companies has done an exceptional job and they continue to update their content and portray their culture through this page on their site to their advantage. Enjoy!
OtherInbox: focused on giving the very best developers all the information that they need to realize how badly they want to go work there.
PricewaterhouseCoopers: the understanding that a Campus candidate is VERY different from an experienced candidate.
Boeing: catering to professionals who might otherwise be intimidated by the complexity of sorting through all of the geographic locations.
And a listing of some of the companies that, at one time, were the VERY BEST at recruiting but who have clearly shown that they don’t care about it much any more:
Trilogy: there was a time when they were able to hire anyone they wanted from the very best universities in America
GM: they’re in the news every day and even if they declare bankruptcy they won’t disappear but their Careers Page doesn’t reflect that.
Tags: A-Players, attract the best talent, Boeing, careers page, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, GM, hire better, hiring, job description, OtherInbox, PWC, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, talent acquisition, Trilogy
Recruiting vs Absorbing: Know the Difference?
I continue to hear from Recruiters, Journalists and even Business owners that now is a great time to pick up talent because of how high the unemployment rate is. I’ve written in the past about how I think that now is a great time to be RECRUITING as well but not because of the growing number of the unemployed. I’m not going to re-hash that here. Instead, this post is going to focus on what Jack Daly considers the difference between Recruiting and Absorbing.
I’d like to start by sharing that I live in Austin, TX (yes, it is as cool as you’ve heard). In this town we’re proud of live music, barbeque and, probably above all, Longhorn Football. Mack Brown is the Head Coach (aka the CEO) of the team.
Right now, spring practices are done and the coaching team is spending all of their time figuring out (1) what’s our depth chart for the fall (2) who are the top High School Sophomores at each position in Texas and the US and (3) how are we going to convince young men from around the country to pay us $300+ to come to our camp so that they can be seen by our coaches when every other school in the country wants them to do the same?
The reason I brought up point #3 is because it’s not unlike the current marketplace for Businesses looking to land top talent. How? Hundreds of young men will descend upon Austin in the coming weeks and happily throw down their $300 camp fee. While the coaching staff has a responsibility to treat every camper fairly by providing them with a safe place to stay, healthy food and some nominal feedback about how to improve, it’s the 8-10 players that they personally invited in for the camp that they are focusing their attention on. Every once in a while a young man who shows up and was unheralded impresses the coaches and gets a shot scholarship but it’s rare.
I hope you’re seeing the direct parallel between the people who are applying for jobs at your company as opposed to the people who you have to fight to get.
With that in mind, let’s go back to Mack Brown’s role in this recruiting process. Because he has the advantage of knowing who the top 10 Prep Quarterbacks or Linebackers are by subscribing to the industry publications that track this data, he can carefully place phone calls to these young men to get them excited about the program.
Focus because here’s the crux of the blog post: After Mack Brown gets off the phone with a young man who he’d like to see as his starting quarterback in 2011, do you think he sends that 16 year old a copy of a job description for what a Quarterback does?
Let’s bring it all back to your business: here are the 5 questions you have to ask YOURSELF when recruiting and then share with your “top recruits”:
1. Why come to work here?
2. What are we (as a company) doing to ensure that our team is successful?
3. How can you (our prized recruit) be sure that the reputation of our company is exceptional?
4. Where is our greatest opportunity for growth in the marketplace?
5. What are the most compelling reasons to join the team here?
If you’ve read the book Who you would know that these are also part of the 5 F’s (Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun and Fit). By asking yourself these questions as the CEO or Hiring Manager you’re attempting to proactively answer a lot of these concerns that a recruit would have.
If you’d like to pick up a great book for the weekend and learn how college football is answering each of these questions, check out Meat Market: Inside the smash mouth world of College Football Recruiting by Bruce Feldman.
Bonus food for thought: if Mack Brown needed a starting quarterback in 2011 and he didn’t start thinking about it until 2 weeks before the season started, would he start placing ads on CraigsList with the hopes someone would apply that he could hire?
Tags: 5 F's, A-Player, A-Players, Austin, bruce feldman, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, geoff smart, hiring manager, jack daly, longhorn football, mack brown, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, recruiting versus absorbing, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, who the book
Why Employees Stay In or Take a Job
One of areas where I frequent on a daily basis is the LinkedIn Question & Answers section. Members post questions and other members chime in to provide their expertise. Today a question was posed surrounding what it would take to sway you away from your current job to accept a job with a different company. As the answers started pouring in, I was intrigued to discover that “more money” was never at the top of the list. It was always on the list, but it never topped the list as first and foremost the top priority. Employers, if you are reading this: your employees want a competitive salary, but it is going to take a lot more than an increase in pay to get them to leave their jobs. According to the answers provided to this question today, the top three areas of importance to employees when considering a move to a different position are:
1) People want to feel like they contribute to the company. They want to know that their ideas are heard, appreciated and implemented.
2) Employees today are seeking a greater work/life balance. Sure, the onsite gym is great, but that just means they will be at the workplace even longer, They want opportunities to flex their hours, involve their family, and feel like they can contribute to both and succeed.
3) Opportunities for growth and advancement. A company that invests in their employees by offering to pay for continuing education opportunities is high on the list of wants too. Investing a little in the future of your employees can provide huge payoffs for the company as a whole in the long run.
Next time you are sitting in your office feeling pretty secure about where things stand with your team, consider taking some time to think about not only what it took to get the employees you have, but more importantly, what it is going to take to get them to stay? Be sure that you know what is valuable to your employees and then make certain your company is taking reasonable measures to keep them on board.
Tags: 4F's, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, Recruiting, Retention