REWORK Hiring.

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Why Hire?

REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is the blunt common-sense business book that you have to add to your May 14th reading list!

This book will immediately get you thinking and doing differently about your business or job in a way that leads to higher profitability, productivity and satisfaction.

Rework gets you asking the fundamental question, “Why?” about things we’ve mistakenly assumed to be part and parcel of doing business successfully.

Rework has gotten me asking the question, “Why hire?”

Asking this may not always be good for the unemployment numbers, but will either save you some coin or help clarify what you’re looking for.

Fried and Hansson encourage us to stay lean and avoid mass as much as possible.  ”Mass is increased by… long-term contracts, excess staff, permanent decisions, meetings, thick process, inventory, technology lock-ins, long-term road maps, and office politics” (Fried and Hansson 62).

Notice “excess staff” is listed.  The good thing about recessions is that they burn away the excess, so don’t start mindlessly packing on pounds on the other side of it.

REWORK gets personal

“‘I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.’  Stop whining.  Less is a good thing.  Constraints are advantages in disguise.  Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got.  There’s no room for waste.  And that forces you to be creative” (Fried and Hansson 67).

Questions to answer BEFORE your next hire

So before you decide to start hiring, here are some good questions that will help you answer the “Why hire?” question:

  • If we decide not to hire, how would we do things differently?
  • If we don’t hire someone else, what won’t we be able to do?  Does that matter?
  • What’s our core business and true value we’re bringing to the marketplace?  Will this next hire actually add to this core business and value?
  • If this next hire is going to add to our core business and true value, what MUST this person possess, and be able to do and learn?

How do you decide when it’s time to hire?  Comment here.

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Killer Interview Tips

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Courtesy of eLearningExamples.com

Started following Jeff Haden’s Owners’ Manual column on Inc.com, and here are some great interview tips from two recent posts on interviewing, 7 Fatal Interview Mistakes and 4 Vital Interview Questions to Ask:

  • Make candidates comfortable and help them relax during interviews.  Haden writes, “When candidates seem nervous or uncomfortable, give them the benefit of the initial doubt… You might just uncover a diamond in the deer-in-the-headlights rough.”
  • Ask follow-up questions.  Candidates are ready for your initial question, but then drill past their canned response with simple questions like “Why…?” or “How did things turn out…?” or “When did that happen…?” or “What did you do next?”
  • Follow the 90/10 rule: Have the candidate talking 90% of the time while your mouth is only moving 10% of the time – max!
  • Only hire candidates who add to or multiply your department’s or organization’s capabilities or effectiveness – don’t hire mediocrity.  Haden writes, “Never settle for good enough.  If good enough is all you find, keep looking.”

What are some interview lessons you’ve learned or interview mistakes you don’t plan on making again?  Click here to comment.

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Lessons in Hiring and Business from Dick Clark

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Courtesy of AOL Music Blog: http://blog.music.aol.com/2012/04/18/dick-clark-dead-dies/

This morning I heard about the death of Dick Clark, “America’s oldest teenager” who made rock and roll mainstream with “American Bandstand,” and helped us usher in the New Year at Times Square for the past 40 years.

Every morning, I listen to The Wall Street Journal This Morning with Gordon Deal, and today TJ Walker was being asked about the legacy of Dick Clark.  Walker observed that when you put the spotlight on other people, like Dick Clark did for so many decades, you’ll actually stay in the spotlight for a long time.

Walker went onto share some insights about Clark’s approach to television and business that we can learn from as we build our own businesses and departments, which usually involves interviewing and hiring people:

  • He was a good listener.
  • He’d ask a question, and just let people talk.
  • He didn’t try to show everyone how smart he was by asking long complicated questions.
  • He wasn’t trying to put on airs; he was just natural: when he was young, he wasn’t trying to act old and sophisticated; and when he was old, he wasn’t trying to look young and hip.

Common mistakes we make when interviewing and hiring people usually involve:

  • Talking too much about the job, our company, or our department.
  • Trying to impress candidates with how much we know.
  • Listening to justify our first impressions instead of actively listening to discover who the candidate is, what they know, and what they’ve actually accomplished.
  • Being overly formal, and not letting candidates get comfortable in an interview and let down their guard.

So as we build our businesses and hire more and more people, let’s adopt Dick Clark’s approach of putting the spotlight on others, asking simple questions, and actively listening – it only kept him relevant for over five decades and made Dick Clark Productions, Inc. hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Screen out the Liars

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You just wrapped up your fourth interview.  The four candidates all have decent resumes and gave you favorable impressions during their interviews.

One or two of them are probably liars.

I wish I was lying, but the harsh truth is that 25% to 50% of candidates misrepresent themselves on their resumes and during the hiring process.

Besides polygraph tests (lie detector tests) or honing your lie-detecting skills; education and employment verifications, and structured reference checks are the best way to weed out the liars from the candidates with integrity.

Employment and Education Verifications

Employment verifications simply consist of faxing/emailing/calling up the previous employers and verifying:

  • Dates of Employment.
  • Job title.
  • Duties performed.
  • Circumstances of separation.
  • Compensation.

Education verifications entail contacting the listed institutions and verifying post-secondary degrees and certifications, or high school diploma if there are no post-secondary degrees listed.

Since employment and education verifications are administrative tasks, you can delegate them to an admin/clerical employee, or outsource this function to a company like Credential Check.

For all levels of positions, employment and education verifications are no-brainers; you only want to hire honest people and build a staff of integrity.  Have this done before you bring candidates in for interviews.  Why waste your time with candidates who misrepresented themselves on their resume or application?

Ask for the references YOU WANT to talk to

After the interviews, do three reference checks on the final candidates you’re considering hiring for the job.  Make it a formal policy, and let the candidates know this – that you will not hire them without conducting three reference check.

However, YOU TELL the candidates who YOU WANT to talk to as a reference – instead of the candidates giving you random references that they want you to talk to.  If you’re hiring:

  • An entry-level candidate out of college; ask to speak to a professor, the overseer of an organization or club that the candidate volunteered for, and a manager that the candidate worked or interned under.
  • A professional individual contributor; ask to speak to their manager, one or more colleagues from different departments, or a client reference.
  • A mid-level manager; ask to speak to their manager, a peer/colleague, and one of their direct-reports.

A Simple and Objective Approach to Reference Checks

Use standardized questions, but keep the conversations comfortable and as informal as possible realizing that if you can get the reference talking, they’ll probably answer more than one question at a time.  Here are some questions I’ve used:

  • What was your relationship with the candidate?
  • What’s your title?
  • How long did the candidate work for you?
  • How many people did that candidate supervise/directly interact with?
  • What was the candidate’s most significant contribution/biggest project?
  • What was one of the biggest challenges that the candidate faced?  How did the candidate respond?
  • What impressed you most about this candidate?
  • Why did the candidate leave?
  • Is the candidate eligible for rehire at this time?
  • If you were to hire/work with this candidate all over again, what would you do differently?

Lastly, either during the reference check or right after, document the responses.  And if you want to take it a step further, rate each response to the question.  If you assign a -1 (negative), 0 (average), or 1 (positive) to each response, you’ll be able to tabulate an overall reference check score for each candidate.

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When Employees Go Berserk…

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It’s been a stressful period for everyone at work, especially in your department.  The quarter’s coming to an end and everyone’s scrambling to hit their numbers.  Suddenly, Jack, a first-year employee slams the phone down, flings his chair across the open office, and works himself into an angry white-collar frenzy: throwing office supplies, ripping his computer out, pushing over a filing cabinet, while incoherently yelling things about health care reform, gas prices, and the end of the world.  A few of the guys run over to restrain Jack.  The rest of the staff is sitting in stunned silence; the new administrative assistant breaks down in tears.

JetBlue flight 191 diverted to Amarillo, Texas after captain exits cockpit, runs up and down the cabin in hysterics, and has to be restrained by passengers. Courtesy of The Guardian.

While this may seem far-fetched, it wasn’t for First Officer Jason Dowd, the flight attendants and passengers on JetBlue Flight 191, along with the rest of the JetBlue organization on Tuesday, March 27, 2012.  While flying from New York to Las Vegas, JetBlue Captain Clayton Osbon stepped out of the cockpit and started sprinting down the aisle yelling incoherently about September 11 and Iran.  Jason Dowd, the remaining pilot, calmly diverted the plane to land in Amarillo, Texas; ordered the flight attendants to pull together a few male passengers to restrain Osbon; and was able to get an off duty pilot on board to join him in the cockpit and lock Osbon out [Read more here].

First Officer Jason Dowd and the flight attendants on JetBlue flight 191 should be commended for their grace under pressure, reminiscent of Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger’s heroic efforts to safely land US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.

However, for our purposes today, let’s look at how JetBlue dodged a costly bullet – being liable for Osbon’s hysterical and potentially damaging actions.

From Yahoo!News:

“‘The law is if you are employed by a company and you do something that hurts anybody else, then the company is liable.’ said Juan Serrano, an aviation lawyer with Griffin & Serrano. If JetBlue had spotted a warning sign of mental strain in the pilot but failed to act, it might be the target of successful lawsuits, he said. Passengers could file a claim for emotional distress against JetBlue if they can claim some wrongdoing by the airline, like ignoring signs the pilot had mental issues, said Mike Danko of The Danko Law Firm. Danko specializes in aviation lawsuits. ‘If they had no knowledge and had done an adequate check into his history, then the company probably would not have any liability,’ he said.”

After reviewing a few different forums - FlyerTalk.com and Glassdoor.com, not surprisingly JetBlue’s hiring and recruiting process involves drug screening and background checks – not just for pilots.  While JetBlue’s stock took a temporary drop, they’re expected to rebound.

While we hope that we’ll never have to deal with an berserk employee who unexpectedly becomes a danger to himself and everyone around him; for the sake of our employees, ourselves, and our businesses, there’s no excuse for not paying the $30 to $90 (entry to executive level) it typically costs to have a background check conducted on a candidate before hiring them.

While background checks didn’t prevent the JetBlue incident from happening, or didn’t stop JBLU from falling 6.91%, or help JetBlue avoid refunding their flight 191 customers and giving them vouchers of twice the value of their original tickets; as far as I can tell, JetBlue’s pre-employment screening process did keep them out of  a number of costly long and drawn out lawsuits - at least this time.

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Moneyball or Moneyhire: Hire on Intelligence

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I recently saw the movie Moneyball, in which Brad Pitt plays Oakland Athletic’s GM Billie Bean who pulled together a competitive MLB team on a shoe string budget in 2002.  Billie found a statistics wiz-kid who helped him identify the undervalued KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to look for in ball players.

With this approach, Billie was able to pickup overlooked players for a song, who could make strong contributions to the team.

What does this have to do with hiring?

In last week’s guest blog post, Joel Capperella, Senior VP of Customer Solutions for the national staffing firm Yoh, referenced an infographic that Yoh put together, which shows that it takes one full year for most new hires to get fully ramped up and become highly productive.

Joel talks about the importance of reducing this “time to high productivity” in new hires, and rightly points out that a lot of it has to do with the sourcing and hiring process.

Joel’s solution for us as hiring managers is to focus on improving our relationship with recruiters, which I do believe is important.  You want to diversity your hiring instruments, and recruiters can certainly be valuable for sourcing.

Embrace the Moneyball or Moneyhire Approach

But you also got to embrace a Moneyball approach, or what I’m calling a Moneyhire approach to hiring because whether a recruiter feeds you 10, 20, or 100 good resumes; it is still up to you to do the interviewing and make the final decision.

For instance, when hiring the single factor that’s the best predictor of performance across all jobs is not personality, not interview performance, but intelligence.

How good is intelligence?  If you were just to select candidates based on intelligence, 65% of the time, you’d be selecting the top performing candidate out of your pool of applicants.  See Frank L. Schmidt’s chapter “Select on Intelligence” in the Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior: Indispensable Knowledge for Evidence-Based Management, 2nd Edition, 2009.

I’m not advocating only that you only use cognitive or general mental ability assessments, but imagine if you combine that with a structured interview – now you’re getting somewhere.

Guess what type of new hires have a shorter time to high productivity?

Smart ones!

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A 4 Point Checklist for a Healthy Recruiter–Hiring Manager Relationship

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Guest post by Joel Capperella. Joel is Senior Vice President of Customer Solutions with Yoh, a provider of staffing solutions including recruitment process outsourcing and social media recruiting strategies. Joel is also a regular contributor at The Seamless Workforce, a blog that covers the latest workforce news, and provides expert insight on staffing industry trends. 

My company recently commissioned a study to take a look at the impact of ongoing economic conditions upon hiring practices, and to gain a sense over the preparedness of the recruiting discipline in most organizations.  An infographic of the complete results can be viewed here.

One of the biggest takeaways from the study was:

Almost across the board most organizations believe it takes at least one full year before a new hire can be considered a highly productive member of the staff.

What is the implication of a 12 month duration between on-boarding a new employee and that same employee becoming a highly productive member of the staff?

Lost opportunity. 

Especially in an economy that seems as though it is on a steady, albeit slow, pace to full recovery.  After all, during periods of economic recovery there frequently exists better opportunities for those that are able to capitalize early when product or service margins are at their best.   Having a workforce in place ready to act on the hint of such opportunity can give the organization a significant competitive advantage.   Such a workforce requires there to be a dedicated and collaborative effort between hiring managers and recruiters to ensure that the process to source candidates is well ordered and will not only maintain a suitable time to hire rate, but is also lends itself to a better “time to high productivity” rate.

Ironically, the study also revealed that a contributing factor to a year long time to high productivity may be the commonly held belief by many organizations that their processes are well suited to quickly ramp up staff at a moment’s notice.  In fact nearly 60% of the respondents stated that their company is constantly looking for people with the right skills and talent.  The misalignment between the belief that current processes allow the company to ramp new staff quickly and the reality that it takes a new staff member up to a year to positively impact the effort clearly indicates that investing in improving the collaborative work between hiring managers and recruiters will have a direct impact on improving a company’s ability to quickly move a new hire to productivity.  This requires focus in the front part of the process, sourcing.

4 ways to improve your relationship with recruiters

This four point check list should help you to evaluate how well aligned you are with your recruiters or if you are a recruiter how well aligned you are with the hiring managers you serve.

  1. Is your internal process defined and ‘social’:  First and foremost the hiring process and search for new talent must be defined, which essentially means that it is written down somewhere.  But that is not enough, especially if no one knows where that ‘somewhere’ is.  Hiring managers absolutely must take it upon themselves to truly understand not only the steps of the process, but why those steps are critical to their effort to fill a talent need.    Recruiters, on the other hand, have to engage hiring managers beyond the written process.   This is the ‘social’ element to the process.  The conversation has to happen between recruiters and hiring mangers.  Not emails, not instant messages or five minute phone conversations, but scheduled one on one meeting with the objective of the recruiter gaining as much information about the need, the culture of the team, the objectives the new hire will have on their plate, and how it all connects to the strategic goals of the company.
  2. Is early stage feedback consistent?  Hiring managers very often hire on the subjective analysis of what they believe a candidate will bring to the table.  This is especially true if the recruiter has done a good job in developing a slate of very well qualified candidates.  Therefore there must be a method for hiring managers and recruiters to effectively communicate this subjective feedback.  Hiring managers must go to great lengths to disclose, to the best of their ability, the subjective measurements they seek.  Recruiters that fail to understand the subjective, risk not only a poor time to hire, but place at risk the possibility of successful on-boarding.
  3. Is there on-boarding Reconnaissance? This is perhaps the biggest area of opportunity.  The hiring process is sometimes disconnected from on-boarding, or at least from the complete on-boarding effort.  Recruiting will generally have responsibility for the micro level details of getting a selected candidate into the ecosystem of the workforce, but will not have visibility into the integration of the new employee into the team.  Hiring managers would benefit greatly from a reconnaissance effort that recruiting at least suggested.  One approach is for hiring managers to share with recruiters the 90 day plan that they will use to integrate the employee.  What this does is provide recruiters with the information necessary to first better identify the applicable candidate marketplace, but also takes a more aggressive role in eventual on-boarding by suggesting to hiring managers who else might be a good candidate to provide feedback in the hiring decision.
  4. What is the hiring postmortem process?  Sales teams are frequently required to conduct full win / loss analysis on their deals.  Is your organization doing the same in talent acquisition?  The appropriate way to evaluate performance is not only immediately after a candidate is closed on the opportunity, but also 6 weeks, 3 and 6 months after the date of hire.  Doing so provides reconciliation over the entire life cycle of the process and highlights areas that are easily improved.

The goal of improving the time to high productivity can be met by using these steps to evaluate the strength and collaborative efforts that naturally exist between hiring managers and recruiters.  It is a relationship that, if strong, will naturally result in not only a strong and talented workforce, but one that is ramped quickly to tackle the strategic tasks at hand.

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Spring Ahead with These Hiring Tips

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2 Tips to Help You Spring Ahead in Your Hiring Process

1. Start with the End in Mind.

This tip comes from Eric Herrenkohl’s book How to Hire A-Players.

First, start with the end in mind.  Ask yourself, what business outcomes do I want to achieve from a successful hire, and then work backwards from there in defining the A-Player you’re looking to hire.

To see an example of how I used this process to define the A-player I was looking for to fill a position, see Wouldn’t It Be Nice to… Hire an A-Player.

2. Screen and Interview Candidates for Work Ethic.

Read Seth Godin’s blog post entitled Sight Reading.

Godin rightly observes that we often interview candidates for their ability to “think on their feet,” and end up hiring the candidate who is the most “charismatic, clever, and quick — but most jobs and most relationships are about being consistent, persistent, and brave, no?”

So interview for people for something industrial psychologists call conscientiousness, and we know as work ethic.

For practical tips on screening and interviewing for work ethic, checkout What’s One Thing You Must Screen Applicants For?

Comment on this blog to let us know any other ways you think small and mid-size businesses can improve their hiring process.

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Are You a Talent Mixologist?

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This is a re-post from Philadelphia SHRM’s blog by Everett Reiss, PSHRM HR Thought Leadership Technology in the Workplace Chair, and editor of down2thehire.com.

Am I a Talent Mixologist?

This question popped into my head the other day, while reading Peter Cappelli‘s book Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty.

Cappelli writes how talent management is not an end unto itself, but exists to support the organization’s main goal, which usually has something to do with becoming more profitable.

A Talent Management History Lesson

Talent on Demand takes us through a quick 100+ years of talent management history:

  1. Before the 1980s  there was “The Organization Man” approach, which was characterized by:
    + Sophisticated forecasting.
    + Internal training and development programs.
    + Promote and hire managers from within
    This approach failed due to the unpredictable swings in the market that hit in the 1980s.
  2. In reaction, the “Just in Time” approach came onto the scene, which was mainly characterized by outside hiring, and a hands off management approach.

Cappelli calls for a more intelligent approach to talent management, which involves a more objective approach to determining the right mix of internal development and outside hires.

Say “Hello” to Talent Mix Management

This highlights a new human resource management skill that I’m going to call talent mix management, because now we have four human resource options to consider:

  • Internal development.
  • External hiring
  • Contract labor
  • Micro-contract labor

A Word About Micro-Contract Labor

Harvard Business Review calls it hyperspecialization in a recent article called The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization.

In this article by by Thomas W. Malone, Robert J. Laubacher, and Tammy Johns, they defined hyperspecialization as breaking down “work previously done by one person into more-specialized pieces done by several people.”

Another word for this is micro-tasking.

Two micro-tasking websites

The HBR article featured TopCoder, which breaks down IT projects into tiny pieces that they than offer up to their global network of 400,000 developers to accomplish.

Amazon has launched Mechanical Turk, which lets you post discrete tasks (e.g. edit this paragraph of content I’ve written) with a reward, which often range between $.01 and $1.00.  Amazon calls these HITs – for Human Intelligent Tasks, so you have access to a global micro-tasking workforce.

Micro-tasking is an emerging ingredient that’s not going away and that we have to start becoming familiar with so that we can consider adding it to our talent mix.

So, are you ready to become a talent mixologist?

Or, are you already a talent mixologist?

Comment on this post, and let us know how your seeking to find the right talent mix.

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Know What You’re Looking for on Valentine’s Day

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Inundated with thousands of resumes?  Don’t know what you’re looking for?  Need help defining the job for which you’re hiring?  If yes to any of these questions, then consider this video a Valentine’s present from me to you!

In How to do a Job Analysis for FREE, I mentioned two free tools that the U.S. Department of Labor has developed: Find Occupations and Job Description Writer on O*NET Online.

In the video above, I show you how to use the Find Occupations site to breakdown the specific jobs you’re managing and hiring for, and find relevant wage data.  Enjoy, Happy Valentine’s Day!

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