Recruiting Resources

As a recruiter, how would you describe the culture at Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, or at your own organization? Being able to distill the essence of an organization’s culture into a few well-thought-out adjectives is worth a lot. Sometimes I ask a wide variety of people to come up with a few adjectives that describe a company and then use a tag cloud technology such as Wordle or TagCloud to generate a tag cloud map. This will give you a pretty good idea of how people feel about an organization’s culture.

For example, Apple might be described as perfectionist, controlling, modern, and demanding, while Microsoft might be described as Yuppie, Gen X, brash, or arrogant. IBM as stuffy, old school, traditional.

Customers form opinions about an organization from its brand image, its presentation and packaging of products and services, but most of all from their contact with employees.

We often call the collective personality of an organization its organizational culture.

Many recruiters recognize the value of understanding the organizational culture and finding people who are good fits for it. However, until the specific traits that make up this culture are articulated clearly, it is very hard to know who the right people are.

Taking the time to define and understand the talent philosophy of your organization will enhance your success and improve the productivity and retention of the people you hire.

While you and hiring managers may instinctively tend to hire people who act or think in ways that are compatible with your organization’s culture, we often make mistakes and even misjudge what the culture really demands. And hiring managers often hire people who reflect their own style rather than that of the organization. We all know how disruptive it can be to hire someone whose personal style is at odds with that of the rest of the team.

Employee Treatment Reflects Your Philosophy

One of the surest ways to begin defining your talent philosophy is to ask how employees are treated. Many organizations have evolved philosophies that are easy to understand. IBM had a philosophy of hiring young people, usually right after college, and promoting them internally after a rigorous internal development process. They hired for certain traits: people who wanted to have a career, who were eager to learn and continue studying, who were open to new opportunities, who were willing to wait for promotion, and who were going to play by the “rules” of IBM. Whether or not IBM hired deliberately for these traits I do not know, but they were certainly reflected in the kinds of people who stayed and who thrived there.

Other organizations have philosophies that are much more difficult to decipher either because they have not really defined a common philosophy or because they have many sub-cultures within the organization. This is particularly true of newer firms who have not yet had the time to evolve a distinct personality. But, even in these firms it is possible to see some basic traits that are emerging.

What Is Real and What is Wish?

Frequently I work with organizations that have developed a talent philosophy that is attractive to candidates but not reflective or what they really do. It is often more a statement of what they want the philosophy to be rather than what it really is.

It may state how the organization is committed to employee development and internal promotion, yet they almost always hire new people from the outside. Or it may contain statements about work/life balance when in reality everyone works 60 hours a week.

A talent philosophy is very hard to create. It is generally an outcome of who has been hired over time and what those folks, collectively, believe, and how they act. It is very hard to change without the highest level of internal support.

Talent philosophies are complicated things. They are a mix of individual traits and a set of overarching beliefs and practices that usually have evolved over time. They are based on assumptions about how people behave or about what they want from the workplace. For example, it is typical to assume that everyone wants a long-term career when, increasingly, today’s young people want opportunities for advancement and learning and don’t care too much about a career in a single firm. Knowing what your assumptions are is essential for successfully defining your talent philosophy, yet it is very hard for those in an organization to determine those assumptions.

Very often it is necessary to bring in an outside consultant to help, but here are a few questions that you can use to help in the unraveling process. By setting up groups of people, maybe incorporating customers or others from outside the organization to help, and by trying to answer these questions in an unbiased way, you can make a good start at clearly defining what assumptions you are making and what critical traits new employees should have.

Ten Tough Questions to Answer

1. What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?
2. If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?
3. What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?
4. If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees’ personalities, what word would they choose?
5. If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
6. How do you deal with poor-performing employees?
7. Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?
8. How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?
9. What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?
10. What does an employee have to do/demonstrate in order to be considered for a promotion?

A truly honest understanding of your assumptions about people and their careers and a solid analysis of what common traits employees should have will go miles in improving the quality of the candidates you bring to the table.

How much should we let chance and circumstances define who we hire, rather than continue to invest time in tough screening and many interviews?

In the simplest terms, should (and maybe even does?) randomness play a large role in selection? Is it better to have a loose, easy-in and easy-out hiring practice than a much tighter and thorough upfront screening process?

Many of us have read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where he postulates that chance and “gut feel” may play a bigger role in our decision-making than we imagine. Another book, older and more rigorously researched, entitled Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb also takes a similar position.

It may be that candidates who meet certain basic criteria for a job are potentially able to perform that job equally well and, once those basic skills are determined, the only remaining need is to determine how well the candidate fits in with the hiring manager and, to a lesser degree, with the organization.

What would happen if an organization made a lot of hires quickly and then let on-the-job performance determine who should be kept and who should not?

When I think back much of the 20th century, recruiting was fairly straightforward. Most jobs were filled quickly from a large pool. The demand for credentials and specific experience were closely correlated with the type of work, and it was not hard to see why a specific skill or experience level was needed. Most jobs were filled after a brief interview with a hiring manager, who made his decision based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics. Most jobs could be learned quickly, and it was quite easy to see whether a job was being done well or not. It was easy to get rid of poor performers and plenty got fired right away. However, a lot didn’t.

There were many things wrong with this approach, but the most obvious was that it blatantly discriminated against anyone who did not fit the stereotype of the hiring manager. Greater awareness of discrimination and new legislation drove the growth of the recruiting profession and removed much of the potential injustice this system perpetuated.

But the recruiting practices had one virtue — they were simple and were built on a belief that attitude and performance were what really counted. Many engineers, doctors, and lawyers were trained in what amounts to an apprentice system right up until World War II. Formal skills training only gradually gained acceptance after the war, when thousands of GIs went back to school on the GI bill.

As we moved into the 1950s and 1960s, these more casual hiring practices were replaced by the development of job requirements: things like minimum levels of education or years of experience before a person would be considered for a position. This was seen as fairer and served as a screen against hundreds of people potentially applying for the same job.

The problem with this approach is that it is very hard to see how the defined requirements connect to actual performance. There was a presumption of fairness because the new requirements eliminated or reduced the ability to screen people out arbitrarily because of race or sex. However, we have learned over the past 40 years that people who qualify for jobs based on their education or experience alone are not necessarily good performers.

We now know that simply selecting people by generic measures like education and experience don’t work very well and discriminate against those with the real skills who do not have the required credentials. How many good performers are being denied jobs today because they lack a college degree, for example?

In a world with high unemployment and yet with a need for skilled talent, managers and recruiters are confused as to what is essential in a candidate. Is it better to go with a person who lacks a specific credential or skill, but has the right attitude? Is it best to have broad-based recruiting criteria or more and more specific ones?

So, what will we do?

Three rules seem to be forming around defining new positions as well as for redefining the more traditional ones.

Rule #1: Keep criteria simple

How much do you want to invest in perfection? Define a basic level of competence that most positions require, add on whatever minimum specific skills, experience, or education are really necessary to perform the job, and then decide based on attitude or cultural fit.

Design screening processes to be simple and flexible. Listen to your gut.

Rule #2: Be competency-flexible and teach hiring managers that development is part of recruiting.

Managers will be forced to accept that they will not be able to find candidates with 100% of what they want. Managers and HR will learn that development is a core function of the firm in the 21st century. IBM put in place a development-centered in the 1960s when they began hiring and developing new college grads because there were no people with the skills they needed. Remember there were no programmers when the first mainframes were produced, and so IBM had to develop them. Many companies have used development as a strategic edge; when you have people with skills and others don’t, you tend to win. Finding and developing current employees who have some, but perhaps not all, of the skills needed for a job will also become more common.

Rule #3: Have robust performance management systems in place.

By hiring people using broad competency descriptions, as I am advocating, you may hire some poor performers. And that’s okay. What is not okay is ignoring that and allowing them to stay in your organization. A good performance management system, based on whether people achieve realistic goals and meet the requirements of their position, is essential to success.

The hallmark of the best 21st-century organizations will be their approach to defining the people they need. Traditional measures of education, experience, attitude, and cultural fit may play a small part, but what will be significantly different is a quick, flexible approach to defining competencies combined with efficient performance management systems. This will result in more fluid and less well-defined jobs, but broader and more multi-skilled employees.