Noise Goes Up But Quality Remains The Same

It’s not often I’m floored by the comprehensiveness of a Blog Post simply because too many people write them with speed in mind or just for Search Engine Optimization.

Today I was floored.

Gina Kleinworth is one of the Team Members at HireBetter.  A significant amount of her role here is being responsible for combing the web every day to find articles that reinforce our goal of helping companies confidently make great hiring decisions.  (Are you following us on Twitter?  You should – we invest a lot of time in making you a better leader.  We’re Tweeting 2-3x per day under the moniker of @HireBetter.)

Gina found an article today written by Auren Hoffman on his blog Summation.  It’s title: “Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn“.  Its subtitle is what I chose for this blog post’s title: “Noise goes up but the quality remains the same”.  You can also read it on the Huffington Post.

His comments rang true with me again and again as I read the blog 3 full times.  Here are some of the points that he makes throughout this well-written post (read it, seriously):

“Great people are more likely to be employed with a company since a great person is often over 3 times as productive as a good person. Joel Spolsky argues in Smart & Gets Things Done that an A-player is anywhere from 5-10 times as productive.”

“In troubled economic times, anyone can get laid off, but a disproportionate number of layoffs tend to fall on C-players.  This is because they are the lowest performing people in a company and there generally are more C-players at a company than any other caliber.  Note that this isn’t always true, as evidenced with Yahoo!, a company that has recently experienced many layoffs but doesn’t have many C-players.  In Yahoo!’s case, majority of the lay-offs fell on B-players and even some A-players.  Yahoo! is an exception and is an exceptional company — most large companies, however, are chock-full of C-players.”

“There are A-players that are MORE likely to leave.  Tough times often paint companies into a corner and force them into maintenance mode rather than continuing to innovate.  Great players love to innovate and usually NEED to innovate.  It’s usually very hard to keep these type of A-players caged-up and thus this presents a big opportunity for recruiting.”

“Great people are often first to leave sinking ships.  They don’t feel they need to stick around for a severance because they are confident they can always get another job.”

“Unfortunately, it is really hard to tell the difference between an A-player, B-player, or C-player just from a resume.  Which means you need to engage with candidates and therefore you’ll have far more candidates to deal with given this economic climate.  My guess – for a standard job announcement, you’ll have three times the number of C-players applying, twice the number of B-players, and the same number of A-players.”

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, auren hoffman, B-Player, C-Player, hire better, hiring, hiring is hard, Interview, joel spolsky, Recruiting, Scorecard, talent acquisition, topgrading methodology, tweets, Twitter, unemployment, unemployment rate