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Top 4 Ways to Be A Great Interviewer

David Sandler once said, “You can’t teach a kid how to ride a bike at a seminar”.

With that in mind, I personally don’t believe that you can teach someone how to be a great interviewer through a blog post. My hope is, however, that by using a few of these simple tips in advance of your next interview, you can do a much better job than you previously have.

Here are my TOP 4 WAYS TO BE A GREAT INTERVIEWER

1. Setting Up the Interview Properly:

Through my volunteer efforts with EO I was responsible for managing our Event Calendar for 18 months. During that time I learned that every great event that you’ve likely ever been to had great planning at the beginning. Some companies base their entire reputation on it (i.e. Disney). When everything is planned properly it says a lot not only about your company but also significantly increases your chances for success:

Does the candidate have a copy of the Job Description and our Company Website?
Have they been called, confirmed and sent directions to our office?
Do they know how long they will be there and what the schedule is during their time?
If we don’t share the schedule or expectations, what does that say about us?
Who will greet them when they arrive?
What’s the 1^st Impression someone will have of our company?

2. When Your Team Plans the Fight, they Won’t Fight the Plan

Be sure that the Job Description, Competencies, and Accountabilities are distributed to all of those who are interviewing the candidate and everyone on the Interviewing Schedule has gotten the chance to review and ask questions. Here’s the Checklist:

Does everyone have the itinerary for the interviews?
Have you been selective in choosing WHO will interview people?
Where will they be interviewed in our office?
Has everyone received a copy of the Candidate Packet (Resume, Description of the Role, Prior Interview Notes)?
Does everyone involved know what role the candidate is interviewing for and how/why they are being asked to evaluate the candidate?

3. Have a GAME PLAN with your Interviewing Team:

Add or delete questions based upon what previous information (resume, Comprehensive Interview Notes, preliminary interview notes) has revealed about the candidate.
Assign areas of focus for your Interviewing Team so that questions aren’t redundant and everyone is maximizing their time away from their day to day responsibilities.
Encourage everyone to establish their estimated time to spend on each section of questioning.
Refresh your memory regarding the sequence and wording of questions to ensure a smoother interview.
Remind everyone to never, ever write on a resume.

4. Setting the Stage for an Effective Interview once you’re Face to Face:

After a couple of minutes building rapport, let the candidate know about the expected time frame and then sell the person on being open and honest. Topgrading® suggests that you state your purpose and plan in the following way:

Review your background, interests, and goals to see if there is a good match with the position and opportunities here
Determine some ways to assure your smooth assimilation into your new position, should you join us
Get some ideas regarding what you and we can do to maximize your long-range fulfillment and contributions
Tell you more about the career opportunities we have to offer and answer any questions you have
Understand your career history, which will be thoroughly verified in reference checks we’ll ask you to arrange with your previous managers

Tags: Brad Smart, chris mursau, hire better, hiring manager, Interview, job description, recruit don't absorb, Scorecard, talent acquisition, topgrading methodology

19 Aug 10 | Interviewing, Recruiting | Read on | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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

01 Apr 10 | Interviewing, Recruiting, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (7)

You Weren’t Born With Those Opinions

Doing a quick search in Google for “common interview questions and answers” will yield you 25,100,000 results.

I’m not sure what’s more surprising: the results or the questions that people typically ask in an interview?!

A few years ago, I had the unique opportunity to join an organization called EO. One of the first things they require you to do upon joining is go through a full day of “Forum Training” in which you get interested to a bunch of fellow Entrepreneurs and you also learn how to no longer offer opinions or advice. It really messes with your head – even today, after 5 years of practicing, I still find myself struggling to avoid hearing a challenge a fellow member is having and not offer feedback based on my opinions. As a society it’s present in our lives from the moment we can crawl and reach out for things like power outlets, hot stoves, etc. ”Don’t touch that!” we yell as parents. Yet, as our children get older and ask, “Why not, Daddy?” it’s sometimes hard to justify why we told them not to do something.

Instead of Advice or Opinions, EO encourages you to abide by something called “Gestalt Protocol“. A quick review of Wikipedia will tell you that Gestalt Therapy:

…focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.

Gestalt therapy is a method of awareness, by which perceiving, feeling, and acting are understood to be separate from interpreting, explaining and judging using old attitudes. This distinction between direct experience and indirect or secondary interpretation is developed in the process of therapy.

Put more simply, by sharing my experiences and how I reacted to a situation that previously happened to me is much more valuable to a colleague than what I would do if I were in their shoes at that moment. In other words: opinions are worthless.

Mary Schmich wrote an OpEd piece in the mid-90′s titled “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted On The Young”. In that was a very appropriate quote:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

To bring this idea back to the focus of this blog, how to help you HIRE BETTER, I’d offer the following random questions from that Google Search of 25,100,000 results:

What’s your biggest weakness?
What motivates you to do a good job?
How are you when you’re working under pressure?
Are you a team player?
How long would you expect to work for us if hired?

Can you guess the common theme in every one of those questions?

The answer: EVERY ONE OF THEM CAN BE ANSWERED WITH AN OPINION

One of the ways that we’ve made our process so consistent and effective is that we don’t allow people to share their opinions in interviews. Opinions in an interview are, simply, worthless. As a hiring manager you’ll find that you’ll have a LOT more success if you are asking questions that require someone to share with you how they behaved in a situation. We actually use a lot of the questions from the book Topgrading to assist in our evaluation of talent. Here are some examples:

What are a couple of the best and worst decisions you have made in the past year?
Describe a situation or two in which the pressures to compromise your integrity were the strongest you have ever felt.
What are examples of circumstances in which you were expected to do a certain thing and, on your own, went beyond the call of duty?
Describe a complex challenge you have had coordinating a project.
When was the last time you missed a significant deadline?

Upon review, what do all of these questions have in common?

They require the candidate to answer based on their experiences.

The Bottom Line: if you’re asking questions in an interview that allow for someone to offer their opinion, there’s a high likelihood that they’ve been to a lot of the 25,100,000 websites that Google returns when you go hunting for common interview questions and how to answer them so you sound like a superstar. But for job-seekers, there isn’t a single website they can go to that will give them the answer to a question that requires them to share their past experiences.

While there are a lot of people who will argue that past experience is NOT the greatest indicator of future success, you, as a hiring manager, often have the choice of either relying on those past experiences or listening to someone’s rehearsed answers and opinions instead.

Tags: A-Players, advice, Advice is a form of nostalgia, behavioral-based, Brad Smart, career history, chris mursau, EO, hire better, hiring manager, Interview, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology

06 Jan 10 | Interviewing, Recruiting, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (6)

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)

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

29 Sep 09 | Interviewing, Recruiting, Topgrading | Read on | Comment (1)

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

04 Aug 09 | Interviewing, Recruiting | Read on | Comments (0)

Process, Interviews and Urine

I had a few other topics that I was debating about writing on this week until I saw what Dave Kurlan had written in his blog and I realized that nothing I could write would be better than what he had come up with. Because of that, this week’s blog post is shamelessly & largely stolen from him. To read more about what Dave has to say about sales teams and recruiting, check out his blog. It’s good stuff.

****************

It was quite the claim. I remember telling my client that the next candidate we were to interview was the best sounding candidate I had ever spoken with on the phone. Robert, the sales manager, went to the lobby to get the candidate and returned, an ashen look on his face. Ray, the candidate, followed Robert into the conference room and suddenly, I had the same ashen look on my face. It seemed that the best candidate I had ever spoken with by phone was, well, a bum!

They say you make an impression in the first 5 seconds and if the first impression was horrible, it was a huge understatement. Here are just some of the things we noticed:

he had a paper bag with a bottle in it
his white shirt had yellowed
he was completely wrinkled – not a wrinkled face, but a suit that was wrinkled so bad it could only have occurred from sleeping in it – on a park bench – on multiple nights
he stunk – not like Yankees stink or Red Sox stink, but as if he had urinated on himself
his hair had not been combed – or washed – for days, maybe weeks
his clothes didn’t fit

The funny thing was that when we began to interview him, if you just closed your eyes, you would have heard the most pleasing, helpful, nurturing, lucid, quick, humorous, effective, competent salesperson you could imagine. And since this was an inside sales position…

Even that was a beyond a stretch. You couldn’t even support the logic for Ray working from home – away from the other salespeople who could find him offensive because, well, he probably didn’t have a home.

So outside of this being a great true story, there are some lessons from it.

It doesn’t matter how good the candidate’s resume, track record and phone interview are. There is a reason for a face to face interview and that must go well too.
The purpose for a recruiting process is to filter candidates out – not the other way around
It doesn’t matter how much confidence you have in your interviewing, recruiting, and selection skills. You will still be wrong about people
Your gut instinct has its place. Recruiting and selection isn’t the place to rely on it.
Your eyes can’t be fooled. Or can they? What if Ray was just plain ugly instead of repulsive and homeless? What if he was disabled? What if he had a disease?
Candidates might not be as good as advertised but rarely will they be better than advertised.
There is a reason for sequenced, multiple steps in the process. Never deviate or take short cuts.
Just because the earlier steps in the process did not effectively filter out Ray, you shouldn’t assume that the process is flawed because of one miss. Always practice what works most of the time, not what worked or didn’t work once.
Be warned about making compromises. Would you have hired Ray, a great salesperson, if everything was normal – except for the bottle in the bag (could it have been orange juice?), or except for the hair (just a bad hair day), or except for the shirt (the others were at the cleaners), or except for the size of the clothes (lost a ton of weight and still losing)?
Never hire anyone that smells like he peed on himself.

Tags: Dave Kurlan, hire better, Interview, Objective Management Group, Recruiting, recruiting salespeople, talent acquisition, topgrading methodology

10 Jul 09 | Interviewing, Recruiting | Read on | Comments (3)

Topgrading is too Dangerous to Try

Our phone has been ringing a lot recently with CEO’s of companies who are reaching out to me with questions about how to do a better job of implementing Topgrading – both to analyze their existing team to make it lean as well as to prepare for new talent acquisition as the economy is heating up and they’re ready to begin scaling again.

In nearly every situation, when I ask them why it is that they’re calling, they tell me, “Well, we tried Topgrading and it it was too hard or it took too long.”

It reminded me of an email I got the other day (I wish I could give credit but I entirely forget where I got it) that I thought I’d share in this blog:

Let’s conduct an experiment.

In the next paragraph, I’ll ask you to try to stop reading, close your eyes and count to 10. After which, you can open your eyes and continue reading.

Ready?

Close your eyes and count to 10. Give it a good try.

Did you stop reading, close your eyes and count to 10?

If you did, you didn’t try: you actually did stop reading.

If you didn’t stop reading, you didn’t try.

Confused?

Here’s the point, there is no “try.” You either do something or you don’t.

“Try” is a slippery word. At best, it communicates an intention; not a commitment.

I’ll try to make some call some people that should be on my “virtual bench” today.

I’ll try to get back to that compelling candidate this week.

I’ll try to get a firm plan from my management team around our talent needs for the next 12 months before the end of the month.

I’ll try to work with my HR Leader to help them understand the significance of Topgrading and why they need to learn about it.

You either schedule the time to complete the activity…or you won’t do it.

There is no in between.

Take a look at these two examples:

I’ll try to stop for the red traffic light.

I’ll try to love my children.

When the outcome is important, we leave “TRY” out of the equation.

The next time you’re about to say that you’ll “try to do” something, reconsider.

If the outcome of the activity is important, don’t try. Because if the activity (like Hiring the Right People) isn’t important, then why even try?