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- Getting job descriptions right, part two - http://t.co/OjIP9vUr #hr #recruiting #management 2012-10-10
- If you love someone, let them go, gracefully. It matters - http://t.co/BIJ92ZGV #hr #management #leadership 2012-10-10
- RT @HireBetterCEO: Three reasons a hire doesn't work out - http://t.co/c040hWrQ #management 2012-10-10
- 5 questions to ask to see if your recruiting process really works - http://t.co/8qOuGPSc #hr #management #recruiting 2012-10-09
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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 bookTeam 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
Maximize Your Reference Checks
I got a reference phone call yesterday by a temporary staffing firm who was inquiring about someone who worked for a previous company I was involved in. I’m not sure why I got this call, nor was I expecting it. The poor woman on the phone sounded exhausted and defeated even before she asked me the first question. I found myself wondering, “What box on a piece of paper is she trying to simply check off to say she’s completed this task?”
Two weeks ago I tweeted (are you following me? I’m @HireBetterCEO) about how significant we’ve found Reference Checks to be in our evaluation process for prospective employees both for the Hire Better Team and for roles within our Clients’ companies. The statement I made was that we typically can glean about 20% of what we learn about someone through the reference process. I got a lot of questions about this statistic. I wish I could take credit but it was actually Geoff Smart who was the first person who helped me figure out that references are a lot more than just asking about dates of employment and whether or not someone is rehire-able.
Here are some examples of what we’re seeking during a reference call (and don’t be shy – we ask for permission but don’t apologize for wanting these calls to take up to 30 minutes):
- Why did you hire him?
- What were the top 2 or 3 biggest Outcomes that the Previous Manager hired John Doe to achieve?
- Did he achieve them?
- How much direction did he need at the beginning and during their tenure to be successful? (a GREAT question for both micro-managers & hands-off managers)
- What things did you witness that frustrated John?
- How did he mature during his time with you?
- What advice would you have for me, as his new manager, for on-boarding him effectively and getting him productive quickly?
- Likewise, what advice would you have for the people that will report to him to maximize their relationship with him?
If you’ve ever asked a previous manager, “What were John Doe’s weaknesses?” and gotten the answer of, “You know, I can’t think of any…” it’s because you’re not asking correctly. Everyone has weaknesses and if you’re not validating them in the reference process you’re going to significantly slow down your on-boarding process. A better technique: document the self-admitted weaknesses of a candidate during their interview and then re-position the question that you pose to the previous manager to sound more like this, “Mr. Manager, John shared with me that he felt like his biggest shortfall while working with you was that he struggled to prioritize his time and that it resulted in him missing some pretty key deadlines. Would you agree?”. By showing that previous manager that you’ve established enough rapport to have acquired this kind of information from the candidate, you’ll find that the previous manager is much more willing to talk not only about that stated shortfall but also about other areas of weakness and, if you’re really good, follow-up by asking, “How did you see John address this weakness while he worked for you?”
And one last tip: during your interview with a prospective employee, ask them who their previous managers were. Write down those names & titles and then, when you’re ready to move to the next step of evaluation with that candidate ask them to make an introduction that former manager on your behalf. We found it’s even better if the candidate CC’s you on the email to that previous manager. Brad Smart (Geoff’s Dad and Author of Topgrading) calls this process “Truth Serum“. I couldn’t agree more!
Finally, a parting shot meant as a challenge: because you’re now empowered to get so much more information out of the reference process, are you comfortable telling a prospective candidate who says, “My previous employer has a policy of not providing references” that YOUR company has a policy of not hiring people who can’t introduce you to their previous manager as a reference? In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve NEVER seen a situation where an A-Player hasn’t maintained a great relationship with their managers of the prior 10 years.
Tags: @hirebetterceo, A-Player, A-Players, Brad Smart, conduct reference checks with past managers, gepff smart, hire better, hiring, Interview, Reference Check, smarttopgrading, threat of reference checks, Topgrading, TORC, tweets, Twitter, who the book
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
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
In Defense of our Culture at Hire Better
Earlier this week I found myself on the phone with one of our service providers at Hire Better. The company: Monster.com. We’ve used their service with average satisfaction for about 5 years. Every year we step back and evaluate it but ultimately, we’ve chosen to invest the $10,000-$15,000 that they want to charge for access to a huge database of largely uninteresting people – many of whom need work Visas to make career moves.
Our account comes up for renewal at the end of May. We haven’t heard from anyone in their company since last September when our account was nearly cancelled FOR FRAUDULENT ACTIVITY.
A little bit of history – Last year an interesting thing happened: their Compliance Department caught wind of a report that the “seats” that we paid for were being used by IP addresses that weren’t in Austin, TX. This set off all kinds of alarms at Monster.com and I received a disturbing voicemail from a woman who more than suggested that we were guilty of fraud because of our usage and that the legal team was looking into canceling our account without a refund – essentially a loss of $10,000 for us.
Why were they accusing us of Fraud? Because our Corporate Address is in Austin, TX. ”If your address is in Austin, why would you have anyone with an IP address in Iowa, Kansas or Arkansas?” they asked. How very 1993 of them. I challenged that same Legal Team and their Compliance Team by asking,
“Have any of our seats EVER been logged into by more than one person simultaneously and in different geographic regions?”
“No, never once.” they responded.
“And is our usage on any of these accounts outside of our terms of use or so heavy that it would make you think that we were trying to be fraudulent or mis-represent ourselves in any way?”
“No, not at all.” was their answer.
It took me a week and about 20 hours of our senior team’s time to explain to their Legal Department that we’re a Virtual Company that’s built around team members who work from their homes because of the Balance that it provides to each and every one of us. We finally settled on an agreement with their team that we could give each and every one of our employees their own usernames and passwords and split up the usage of each “seat” into what was the equivalent of 50% of a traditional license. This satisfied their Legal team and it allowed us to avoid a $10,000 loss. My Account Representative at the time was a gentlemen named Chris Shaw. He stuck up for us, was the internal champion for our cause and put his reputation on the line with that same Compliance Department to vouch for us and insist that there wasn’t any fraudulent intent or activity.
Fast forward to this week: my new Account Representative called me 4 times over the course of a week – only bothering to leave a voicemail once (a hint: while we’re virtual we do have “real” phones that have caller ID). When Cortney, my Assistant, finally reached him to book our phone meeting, we were less than a week from our renewal. Here’s the breakdown of the conversation:
9:15 AM Central Time comes and goes (our agreed upon call time)
9:21 My phone finally rings. It’s my new representative. It’s clear he doesn’t understand how OCD I can be about the timing on phone calls. He starts the call with, “So how’s your business doing these days?” with an artificially chipper tonality. I politely asked if he had turned on the news in the last 9 months and then reminded him that we had 15 minutes booked for the call and we were down to 7.5 minutes left because of his tardiness.
9:32 I’ve had to explain, at length, what the entire situation was that had happened during the previous September. Apparently, the CRM system at Monster.com isn’t equipped to keep track of week-long legal boondoggles with clients that have paid them nearly $75,000 over 5 years. If you’ll remember, I mentioned earlier that Chris Shaw, our representative at the time, was a great advocate for us. Our new representative made it a point to remind me, at least 3 times during these 11 minutes, “Well, based on all of these exceptions that you benefitted from in the past year, you’ll clearly understand why Chris isn’t with our company any more.”
9:34 I’m now 4 minutes late for a commitment I made to call a prospective candidate for one of our biggest clients. As politely as I can muster, I shared with our representative, “Look, I appreciate that you’re not a fan of Chris. I also respect that you have a precious “rate card” that you’re allowed to discount from by 75% (side note, if a sales rep can discount by 75% off of a rate card, what’s the point of even having a rate card?), but unless you can wrap your brain around the fact that I’m VERY familiar with your legal contract and that I’m not willing to buy ONE seat (as he suggested) and pass around the username to everyone (which is in violation of their agreement) or 9 full, individual seats for our employees who spend about 1 hour per week each on your website, we don’t have much more to talk about. And I’m late for my next call. I need to go.”
9:36 It’s starting to get ridiculous. Every effort that I’ve made to be polite so that I can move on to my next commitment has been ignored. It’s as if I’m speaking an entirely different language. My representative has shared with me things like, “You know, 2 years ago we were only permitted to discount by 15%” and “What you received last September was clearly a one time thing and there’s no way I could get that approved again.” His arguments were as pertinent to our conversation as the amount of snow they received in the Napa Valley last year. ”I know we’ve gone a bit over our alloted time this morning Jonathan. Why don’t you let me go back to my managers and that Compliance Team from last September and see if I can work something out for you.”
3:10 Central Time – My representative called me back to share the news with me. ”Jonathan, what I’ve gotten approval for is to sell you 9 individual seats at 75% off of our rate card. This is a great deal. Can I send over the agreement?”
If you’ve hung with me and read all the way down to this part of this blog post I hope you’ll let me clarify something: My intent of this post was NOT to air the dirty laundry of my discussions with Monster.com. However, sharing that level of detail was critically important because this is what I want every company who acts as a service provider for us to understand:
- Our Core Values are NOT something that we just hung on a wall for everyone to ignore. Earning Trust, Having Balance, Adding Value and Respect play a significant part in every decision that we make every day.
- I (and We) will never apologize for or alter our decision to have hired the team that we have in place that just happen to work from their homes all around the country. Because we have Balance in our lives, the quality of the work that we do for our clients is TOP NOTCH. When we work, we work hard. And then we stop and spend time with our families. We don’t waste time commuting, attending pointless meetings or waiting in line for lunch in the same 15 minute period that everyone else has to run to the local fast food joint.
- We may need a concession or two from you, as a service provider, because we ARE different. Here are some of the companies who have acknowledged that and will be Partners of ours for a long time:
- Pioneer Bank in Dripping Springs, TX
- 8×8: the providers of Packet 8 Phones
- Apple
- Otherinbox
- 37Signals
- Jintech
- Clutch Creative
- Spross & Associates
And one final note to Monster.com: it’s 2009. It might be time for you to take a good hard look at services like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Recruiter’s Earth, Door64, Google, Craig’s List and a host of other websites that passed you by a long time ago. For me, I’ll take the $13,000 I just saved by not renewing with your service and I’ll spend it on training our employees on AIRS. After all, our commitment to our clients is that they’ll HIRE BETTER. Your website simply doesn’t help us do that any more.
Tags: 8x8, A-Players, AIRS, bad hires, career history, clutch creative, hire better, hiring, LinkedIn, Monster, monster.com, OtherInbox, pioneer bank, proactive recruiting, purchasing decisions, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, research, talent acquisition, talent vault, Topgrading, tweets, Twitter, unemployment, unemployment rate, virtual bench, zoominfo
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
Generation Y: You’ll Need Them
Great post this week from a woman named Penelope Trunk. She’s the self-named Brazen Careerist and a column writer for the Boston Globe. She writes a lot about Generation Y and I think that she’s touched on a very interesting topic today that employers need to pay attention to. She’s got a great BLOG for further reading as well.
High points from her recent post:
*Gen Y wants to constantly be learning. If they’re not learning, they’ll leave. “This is the generation that is steeped in SAT tutors, Spanish tutors, and private soccer coaching. So they expect to be learning every step of the way for their whole life.” If you’re not challenging them and helping them learn as an employer or manager, they’ll leave!
*Gen Y wants to work as a team. They grew up playing soccer, they attended the prom in large groups. This isn’t a generation of kids that played out on the playground by themselves.
*Hiring women costs more than men. For the first time in history, women in their 20′s are out-earning men and rightfully so. Get used to it.
*Gen Y is getting more done than you can possible imagine. Don’t be intimidated when they run circles around you while listening to their iPod, sending a text message and tweeting all at the same time.
Christina Harbridge, the founder of Allegory Training in San Francisco, is all over this topic as well. As a coach on public speaking she’s shared with me some remarkable things in the last few times I’ve seen her speak or had conversations with her. Some harrowing examples that scared me as a 30-something who considers himself pretty “hip”:
1. Young people today, when asked how often they check their email, said ‘Pretty often! At least once a week.’
2. It used to be considered rude to send text messages with your phone during a meeting. Today, the next generation need the distractions to stay focused.
This generation is moving into management positions quickly. Are you prepared to add them to your team and challenge them enough to have them elevate your company?
Tags: allegory training, blog, blog.penelopetrunk.com, boston globe, brazen careerist, check email, christina harbridge, facebook, generation Y, harbridge, harbridge-law, ipod, penelope trunk, SAT Tutors, soccer team, Twitter