Wednesday, June 24, 2015

How to Know if Someone is the Right Person for your Job - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #3 DATA VS. INTUITION

#3 Data vs. Intuition

First, the role of intuition: intuition is wrong a lot of the time.

Then, the role of data: data can be wrong, too, if you measure what is misleading or irrelevant.

How then do you decide?  

Answer: You insist on both pointing to the same decision.  Intuition and data need to agree, validating each other.

You like the candidate? NO.  The candidate has what you want? YES. 

If you feel weird about someone but the data say they are great, don’t do a thing until you can figure out how to reconcile the two.  

You like the candidate? YES.  The candidate has what you want? NO

If the data says they do not have what you need but you love them, do nothing until you understand why you love them so much or why the data say they don’t have enough skills.  

A friend of mine used to hire alcoholics.  They had bad job histories, but he loved them.  He figured out that he loved them because they were codependent and who’s nicer to you than a codependent who needs a job and who doesn’t like nice?  Data and intuition disagreed.  He hired them anyway.  He let them all go.

You like the candidate? NO.  The candidate has what you want? NO

If the data says they do not have what you need and your intuition agrees, then pass on them.  You have legal justification and you won’t feel bad about the decision later.

You like the candidate? YES.  The candidate has what you want? YES. 

If you think candidates are great and the data say they have all that you need, hire them, quickly, before they get away!


Here is a quality assurance tool Wentworth developed to make sure that you are listening to all the information.  It compares the candidate’s job related scores (can they do the job?) to their fit (do you like them?) scores.

If the yellow dot, the candidate, is in the top left corner, you love the person, but they don’t have the skills.  

If the dot is in the lower left, the candidate has neither skills nor personal magnetism.

If the dot is in the lower right, the candidate has great skills but is a misfit for your organization.

If the dot is in the upper right, the candidate has both the needed skills and the ability to fit with you and the organization.

We urge our clients to stick to people in the upper right corner.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can help you select employees who will be productive and stable, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

Friday, June 19, 2015

How to Know if Someone is the Right Person for Your Job- a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #2 HOW DO YOU MEASURE?

#2 How Do You Measure?


If you have specified your needs thoroughly, you are halfway to being able to measure candidates against requirements.  The next step is precision.

Why does precision matter?  It matters because not being precise can cause you to hire someone who might seem like the right person, but is not.

“I want someone who administers a Total Rewards program,” you might say. You find someone who does and you hire that person.  The person fails because you were not precise about knowing how big a Total Rewards system they needed to have administered.

As it turns out, your company is middle-size but your Total Rewards program is lush and, as a consequence, complicated.  You don’t recognized how complicated it is, however, because you are not a student of Total Rewards and you think that most TR programs are that complex.  You don’t specify the complexity of the program in your candidate measurement requirements.  You find a candidate and she says that she has done what you want.


You are choosing between two imprecise options: “they do” and “they do not” have the experience you want.  Your candidate does have TR experience but not at the level of complexity you need.  She fails.
 A better decision system would allow you to pick from five options.  The five choices might be:
Has managed a Total Rewards system that consisted of these elements: 1) compensation, 2) benefits, 3) work-life, 4) performance and recognitions, 5) development and career opportunities.

1.     Has no experience managing a Total Rewards system.
2.     Has experience managing a Total Rewards system that consisted of 2 of the above.
3.     Has experience managing a Total Rewards system that consisted of all 5 above.
4.     #3 + has helped design components of a Total Rewards system with all 5 above.
5.     #3 + has, with primary responsibility, designed a Total Rewards system with all 5 above.

At Wentworth, we create 30-35 requirements for each job, plus another 15 for workplace fit.  Each requirement is constructed like the one above.

The result of having a comprehensive set of requirements (described in the last post) and measuring candidates against the requirements very precisely is that you can filter out most of the candidates who will not work out on the job, raising the chance significantly of hiring a strong new employee.



In this diagram, you can see it in stop-action: the people in red are less qualified for your job.  The people in green are more qualified.  This careful filtering allows only qualified candidates through. 

We do this every day for our clients. The disciplined application of this methodology delivers precisely qualified candidates.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can help you select employees who will be productive and stable, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John


Monday, June 8, 2015

How to Know if Someone is the Right Person for your Job - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #1 WHAT DO YOU NEED?

#1 What do you need?


Your analysis of a job's success factors needs to be comprehensive and specific.



TASKS: Let's say you need a PHP developer, but you need someone who has worked on websites like yours because yours presents certain specific and unusual problems and you need someone to solve those problems. And let's say that you don't specify the exact experience that you need as a check-off requirement. You just say, "Needs X years of PHP experience." The chances are good that you will hire someone who has good PHP experience, but cannot solve those problems. You need to specify the tasks, abilities or experience precisely.

ABILITIES: Let's say you do specify that experience and you find someone who worked on a website that presents the same problems, but you fail to ask the candidate if s/he is a very detailed person. And s/he is not and makes mistakes because of it...and so is not very productive. That's what you will hire. You need to specify the underlying skills that suggest that the person CAN do the job.
  
TEMPERAMENT: Let's say you do everything else right, but you don't specify that the person still has a passion for software development, and you hire someone who doesn't. They will be gone as soon as they realize that they don't love what they are doing. You have to specify that the candidate wants to do the job.

CULTURE: Let's say you specify everything about the person and the job, but the person does not fit your company's culture. That won't work in the long term.

BOSS: And, lastly, let's say that everything else is there, but the boss just will not like the new employee's work ethic. There is no values alignment about effort. That won't work in the long term, either.

The Wentworth methodology attempts to measure the whole person against the whole job and work environment. We offer as many as 50 pieces of information (job related, organizational/cultural fit related, and workplace fit related) about each candidate.

In my next blog post, we'll tell you how to measure candidates against all these criteria so you can have clear, precise and easy to understand profiles of your pool of candidates from which you will pick an employee.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can help you select employees who will be productive and stable, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John