Well Managed

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 3)

Here are part one and part two of this series.

When hiring, never, ever, compromise on character, personality, and aptitude.

If a candidate has extensive, directly relevant experience and several degrees from prestigious universities, but has poor character, a lousy personality, or weak aptitude, don’t hire him. You’ll be so sorry if you do. Experience and education simply can’t make up for those flaws.

On the other hand, if a candidate has excellent character, a great personality, and strong aptitude, you can often overlook scanty experience and a lack of education. Ideally, you’ll compensate by creating your own in-house training.

Consider carefully what kind of character, personality, and aptitude you need in each position in your organization. I’m lucky that my business needs require me to hire people who are honest, diligent, curious, verbal, smart, likeable, and energetic. It makes for a delightful working environment.

Not all organizations need people like these. I’ve heard of companies, for example, who administer standardized tests to candidates for sales positions to determine whether they’re sufficiently immoral to perform the job successfully. They reject candidates whose test results indicate they are too honest to do the work. I’m glad I don’t work in an environment like that, but at least they know what they’re looking for.

So, for example, if you need people to perform repetitive, routine work, don’t hire inquisitive social butterflies. Think carefully about what your actual needs are and how to identify candidates who will meet those needs. Don’t kid yourself.

Let’s wrap up this series by addressing the four potential objections to this strategy that I noted in the previous post:

1."This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."

I think training is hugely important. I still meet every week with one of my directors and the training manager to continually expand and improve our training program, and I still personally present some training topics to new hires. I understand that not all managers are in a position to create an extensive formal training program, but you can certainly provide new hires with an experienced mentor, a how-manual, and your own personal training. Make training one of your highest priorities and create the best solution your circumstances allow.

2."I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."

My father was a college professor with a PhD and my mother has a Master’s degree. Higher education is a big value in my family. So when I first became a manager I "knew" that employees with more education performed better work and I set out to prove it so I could justify raising the educational requirements in our hiring standards.

Try as I might, I could never make the numbers match my theory. The truth is, every time I’ve done this research, I’ve found little or no correlation between education and performance. I manage by facts, not by personal prejudice, so now I set low educational requirements and focus on aptitude. This is not compromising quality at all. In fact, by paying less attention to pedigree I’m able to hire higher-quality people. Many of them have bachelor’s or graduate degrees and some of them don’t. They all do great work.

3."How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."

Well, it’s hard.

That’s why most companies focus on experience and education: it’s easy to do and it makes them feel like they have high standards. A manager who wants too feel like he has high standards can slap a "must have ten years of experience and an MBA" onto a job description in about two minutes if he doesn’t take the time to figure out whether those requirements actually matter. This is a prime example of what I call "False Selectivity." It’s a lazy substitute for the real thing.

I’ve been looking for a standardized test that reliably predicts character, personality, and aptitude but so far I haven’t found one that works very well. My company uses a couple of screening tests in our hiring and they help a little but you can’t rely on them.

The best solution I’ve found is to identify people who have the knack for spotting these qualities in others and including them in conducting interviews. I’m pretty good at it myself and I have a few people working for me who are also good at it. Some of my best managers don’t have the knack at all; they’re willing to hire even obvious turkeys. So just because someone is a successful manager doesn’t mean he should be involved in hiring.

(I should confess that I’m quite spoiled in this regard. My company has an excellent recruiting department that fills most of our positions and they send us a steady stream of great new hires. It’s much better to have a professional recruiter doing your hiring than relying on a mechanical HR process. A good recruiter can spot personality and character problems with a fair degree of accuracy.)

The other thing you can do is to realize that the hiring process doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the job. I’ve trained my managers to view new people as "candidates" for the first 90 days they are with the company. The supervisor assesses the new person’s behavior at frequent intervals and if we see red flags for poor character, personality, or aptitude during that time we promptly "unhire" them. This gives you an excellent opportunity to assess the new person thoroughly and accurately. It’s much better to nip these problems in the bud than to have to deal with a lousy employee a year or two later after they’ve caused a lot of trouble and maybe poisoned other employees with their bad habits and attitude.

4."Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

That’s true. I have some positions like that. That’s when you just have to recruit diligently and creatively until you find that one great candidate. We have a job for which extensive experience and a specific degree are truly necessary and we’ve been trying to fill it for about a year and half!

Well, that wraps up this series. I hope I’ve given you some useful nuggets. Good hiring!

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

When you’re trying to hire great people under pressure, you need to think strategically. You’re competing with other employers in the recruiting marketplace. You’re also working against the clock. You can’t waste your time and energy looking for people who have characteristics that your new hires don't really need to have. You have to focus on finding what truly matters.

Let’s break down the factors we all look for when recruiting new employees:

• Character. Traits such as honesty, reliability, maturity, work ethic, and tenacity.
• Personality. Whether a candidate is fun-loving or serious, gregarious or shy, optimistic or pessimistic, and so forth.
• Aptitude. The innate strengths a candidate possesses, including things like general intelligence, mathematical ability, or a gift for music.
• Skills. These are the abilities a person gains through experience or education, such as writing advertising copy, working with Excel, or playing the flute
• Experience. Whether the candidate has previously done the same job for another company.
• Education. What degrees or certifications the candidate has earned through formal education and from which schools they were earned.

If your company is like most, your recruiters are probably focusing too little on the items at the top of the list and focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list. There are two problems with this:

1. Almost every other company in the world is also focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list, because most companies place far too much weight on credentials and pedigree. So you’re competing with everyone else for the same limited supply of candidates with experience and education, making it harder for you to hire good people quickly.
2. The items at the top of the list are way more important than the items at the bottom of the list. So even when you finally do hire experienced, educated employees, you may not be hiring the people who can best help you succeed.

In a nutshell, the smart strategy is to focus your recruiting efforts on the first three items on the list, and then, as much as possible, substitute your own excellent training program for the bottom three items.

Let’s take a closer look at the factors to see why:

Character, Personality, and Aptitude. This is where your focus needs to be in hiring because hiring is the only way you can get these traits into your organization. The only way to get sound character, delightful personality, and strong aptitude into your organization is by hiring it. You can maybe improve your employees’ character and personality a little bit through coaching, preaching, and role modeling, but if you hire poor character and negative personalities you’ll be fighting an uphill battle, while if you hire sound character and positive personalities everything you do as a manager will be far easier and more successful. And aptitude is a fixed trait. You simply can’t increase an employee’s baseline intelligence and ability through coaching and training. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Skills. These are handy in a new hire, but they are less important than the first three in recruiting because they are not fixed qualities. You can add skills to your employees after you hire them by providing your own high-quality classroom and on-the-job training. This was the primary solution we used in the situation described in the previous post. We built an extensive training program of exceptionally high quality. It combines classroom, mock office, and on-the-job training over a one-year period. It took a lot of work to build and we suffered through some short-term sacrifice while we built it, but it has proven to be the foundation of our long-term success. It allows us to focus on hiring people with outstanding character, personality, and aptitude. This gives us a huge advantage over our competitors in building an excellent staff.

Experience. Previous experience in a similar position is less important than skills. If we happen to hire someone who already possesses relevant skills it’s a bonus, but usually those skills were acquired doing a very different job. For example, even though we're not a medical provider some of our positions require medical knowledge, so if someone previously worked in a clinic or hospital that's an advantage. However, previous experience doing the same job we're hiring for is often a negative. In fact, for certain positions we're extremely reluctant to hire anyone with directly relevant experience. It’s easier for us to train someone from scratch. They aren’t full of lousy ideas and bad habits from previous employers.

Education. It’s highly likely that you and your company are currently placing too much emphasis on educational credentials in your hiring, because almost all companies do. You can immediately start hiring better employees for most positions by requiring less education. It’s painful for me to say this because I’m a big supporter of higher education, but it’s true. I’ve done my own internal research and proved it to myself. When my competitors require college degrees to even apply for certain positions I’m delighted, because it means there's a huge pool of smart, hardworking, wonderful people who can only work for me.

You may be thinking:

• "This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."
• "I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."
• "How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."
• "Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

These are all good points. Tune into the third and final installment of this series of posts, in which I'll address these and other items of interest.

Here is part three of this series.

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 1)

My current company hired me six years ago to build a new division. This would require setting up a number of specialized departments and the operation would have a substantial impact on the company’s profitibility, so there was a lot on the line.

I started out with only about a dozen employees. Fortunately, three of them were gifted individuals who became my management team. However, to build the division we needed to do a lot of hiring.

We faced three challenges in hiring:

• Quality. Our goal was to create the best operation in the industry so we set our hiring standard very high.
• Skills. Our industry requires employees with strong technical knowledge as well as skills in communication, decision-making, and planning.
• Speed. Our business was growing rapidly so we needed to hire a lot of people in a hurry.

We initiated an aggressive nationwide recruiting campaign for experienced employees. At first we got lucky and hired some superb people with great experience and skills. Then the talent pool went dry for a while and we kissed a lot of frogs. (Is that a mixed metaphor or just a slightly flawed one?)

When we hired our first employees we told them their workloads would be lower than at other companies but the expectations for quality and results would be extremely high. They enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to do their jobs right rather than just churn work. Unfortunately, as we went through the hiring drought our business grew a lot faster than our staff and our employees’ workloads started to climb above the level we had promised them.

Several times we went to them and said, "Look, we know you’re carrying some really heavy burdens, and we want to keep the workload commitments we made to you. When it gets too tough just give us the word. All we need to do is lower our standard one notch and we can hire some pretty decent people to help you out and bring the workloads down." Every time, our employees told us the same thing: "Don’t ever lower the standard, not even a little. We can take it. Keep looking for the right people."

That’s one of the reasons we have such a great staff today. It’s also why I think of those folks, many of whom are now in supervisory positions, as not just my employees but also my heroes.

But at the time, we were in a tight spot, caught between our need to staff up in a hurry and our commitment to maintain a high hiring standard and build a selective organization. I can tell you we managed to pull it off. How? For the answer to that question, tune into episode two of this series.

Here are part two and part three of this series.

Never Hire the Best Applicant

Sometimes I'll present a management idea in a way that sounds a little crazy when you first hear it  but makes a lot of sense after it's explained. This grabs people’s attention and makes the idea more memorable.

For example, here's a rule I tell my managers to follow in the hiring process: "Never hire the best applicant."

Of course that sounds pretty counter-intuitive because hiring the best applicant seems like a good thing to do. However, if go into the hiring process thinking that your goal is to hire the best applicant, then it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming your goal is to hire the best applicant who applied for the position.

This is a trap because you lose control of your hiring standard. You let the marketplace set your hiring standard for you, and that standard is "the least unqualified person who happens to apply." This happens all the time. A company opens up a position, ten candidates apply, and the best candidate gets the job. But what if the best of the bunch isn’t really the right person for the job?

To achieve success through selectivity you need to consciously stay focused on hiring the right person rather than the best applicant. If none of the candidates is truly the right person for the job, even if one of them comes very close, don’t hire any of them. Keep looking.

Like all other aspects of the selectivity process, this takes discipline. Sometimes it will seem very urgent to hire someone as soon as possible. Never give in to that pressure. The short-term pain of taking the time to find the right person is always better than the long-term pain of hiring the wrong person in a hurry. Just keep telling yourself, "It’s never too late to hire the right person."

You need to continually remind your managers, and yourself, of this because it’s so easy to forget. Every once in a while I fall into the trap myself and hire the best candidate who applied. And I always end up regretting it.