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

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

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

How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #4 OUT RECRUIT YOUR COMPETITORS

#4: Out Recruit your Competitors

Companies get very frustrated when they cannot find people because there is a labor shortage of a particular skill.  The frustration is not necessary.  The solution to that problem is to become labor market competitive and then recruit more effectively than your competitors do.  It's a simple solution that is very do-able.

You might focus on the cost of becoming competitive.  We can help you do the calculations, but the cost of the work not getting done is often greater than the cost of paying competitively.

Pay is not the only issue.  The quality of work life, the technology, the management, the environment, all have been shown again and again by research to be stronger drivers of both attraction and retention than money.  But asking someone to work for a lot less than they are getting at their current employer probably will not be a winning strategy.  Once you pay "table stakes", more money delivers a diminishing return and you can often win the labor market competition with the non-monetary elements.

A lot of recruiting is not done well so just having a clear, warm and compelling recruiter goes a long way.  Research in fact exists that says you increase your chances of having your offers accepted if your candidate likes your recruiter.

Your recruiter also needs to understand what will attract your candidates.  Selling them something they don't care about does not work very well.  The vast body of attraction/retention research, including that done at Wentworth, gives you a clue as to what candidates want from their jobs, but asking candidates what's important to them is the best strategy, assuming that the company offers what the candidate wants.  If not, one backs away.  There is no deal to be made.

Here's a story to illustrate my point.  Years ago, we worked for a utility, recruiting information systems professionals.  IBM had just released a new database product.  This organization had upgraded their computer systems and had installed this database but was struggling to find employees who knew how to work on it.

We analyzed the situation and realized that they offered a very special combination of characteristics.  They were a utility, very stable and nearly 100% certain to be around for a long time.  At the same time, they were at the leading edge of computer technology.  We put the word out and attracted and hired just enough people who knew this new database to put one, as a teacher, in each major work group.  Then we changed our branding of the job, offering the stability of a utility and training in the new database.  We filled 51 jobs in the first year for about 10% of salary, approximately a third of what the utility had paid a contingency firm for the one hire they had achieved in the six months before they brought us in.

Other big organizations wanted the same people we were hiring, but we out recruited our client's labor market competitors.

There is more to good recruiting, of course, and the specific prescription for out-recruiting your competition will vary job by job.  Give me a call if you'd like to chat about how to do it in your situation.  I'm at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #3 THE MORALITY OF STEALING

#3: The Morality of Stealing

I remember when I first got a corporate HR job I was told that we could not direct source candidates. "It's against the rules!" people said. What rules, I wondered. And whose rules?

It turned out there were no rules. The rules were a myth made up by recruiters who were too shy or embarrassed (or lazy) to call candidates or sources of candidates. But there are still a lot of people today who feel direct sourcing is immoral.

Since I have earned my living by either doing or managing this poaching, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it.

My conclusion: it's a rough and tumble world. You either compete or you don't.

It's actually a little more complicated than that.

• I think it's mandatory to tell the truth. Lying about a job or a company is just unacceptable to me and to our consultants.

• I think it's important to value personal relationships more than recruiting, so we do not, for instance, approach employees of former clients within a very long contractually prohibited period...which usually means forever. Nor do we recruit from friends.

• It's also very important to pay attention to the law which can frown severely on inducing someone to break their employment contract while also committing a fraudulent act.

So we do not solicit candidates directly. We ask for referrals. If they offer up themselves, we ask if they are contractually bound to their employer. If so, we back off. If not, we proceed with that person.

It's important, I think, to focus on the candidate's ability to say no. The only people who move to a new job are people who are not happy with their jobs. They either were already looking for a job, thinking about looking or were presented with an opportunity that, after interviewing and thinking about it, seemed like a better fit than their current job.

But here's the big point, to me: capitalism is competitive and that competition extends to recruiting employees.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

John Wentworth | President | 310 732 2301 | johnwentworth@wentco.com
The Wentworth Company, Inc. / Wentworth Recruiting | www.wentco.com

How to Find Employees - a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #2 WHERE ARE THEY?

#2: Where are they?

A very useful way of figuring out where to look for candidates is represented by the "Spider Diagram" below.

Candidates are in certain networks, look at certain websites, read certain e-magazines and blogs, belong to certain associations, etc.

A recruiter can find candidates by accessing the places candidates visit. In our last post, we talked about discovering the organization of a professional community. This is how you do that.

I remember one of the very first searches I did as a vendor. The job was a manager of voice and data, analog and digital.

I had friends who were back-room technical voice and data network experts, most of whom managed positions like the one I wanted to fill. I wrote down ten names on a yellow pad (that's how long ago it was!) and started calling. I never got to the end of the list because the first people I called gave me so much help, including successful referrals.

(A former employee and I, on a long winter drive across Michigan, figured out that you should be able to find anyone with two phone calls. The first call just needs to be to the right person.)

My friends explained how voice and data networks worked and how both digital and analog technologies fit into the picture (this was in the 1980's and digital technology was new to telecommunications networks). They told me which companies were advanced and which were not. They told me the names of people who were in the professional networks and who knew a lot of potential candidates and the names of professional organizations whose leadership was knowledgeable of the membership.

In more current times, those same individuals would have told me about websites, blogs, etc. also.

Also in more current times, if I do not have the "starter" friends, I can find people to talk with on LinkedIn. All of this work provides an education as to how this community was organized, who the experts were, who the vendors are and where to find the user groups or other professional associations.

The next step, of course, is the hard work. We have, on occasion, looked at as many as 2500 individuals to find a very strong pool of candidates with a rare combination of qualifications.

This work helps us find the seam of gold: qualified, interested and affordable candidates...and the job gets filled.

Because we figured out where the candidates are.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John

How to Find Employees- a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #1 HARD WORK IS THE KEY

#1: Hard Work is the Key Finding qualified, interested and affordable candidates is not about technology or magic. It's primarily about hard work. We think that finding candidates is 85% hard work and 15% understanding the organization of a professional community. Every professional community is organized in a way that can be figured out. Certain companies are big and are leaders. We regularly do searches in which a great employee from a big company realizes they would be happier if they were a bigger fish in a smaller pond. This is not always just ego; often it has to do with their ability to make a high-impact contribution. Other companies are not leaders. Some of their top employees may long to be at the top. Often they can be enticed to move to a better or more prestigious company. The hard part is this: do they really have what the leader wants? The leadership of professional organizations, particularly leadership of local chapters, is often for us a great source of great referrals. The person giving the referral will likely be a seasoned professional who can tell competence from lack of competence. There are vendors whose salespeople know a lot of people. If you are looking for one of the people they know, and they know that person is not happy with his/her current job, you may get an excellent referral. From the salesperson's point of view: do a favor for the candidate now, make a sale to the candidate later. There are conferences. A clever internet researcher can find the speakers' lists and sometimes the attendee list. The speakers may be great referral sources and the attendees may be referral sources or candidates themselves. Some recruiters will just attend the conference. There are blogs and shared sites where technical people offer suggestions to hard problems. If they give good advice, they may be an excellent employee and worth contacting. We have filled untold numbers of IT jobs in this way. You can do more traditional recruiting, run ads, post jobs, or pull resumes off of Monster, all shotgun approaches that will get you a lot of chaff you have to wade through and, often, minus the best candidates. Not always, but usually, precisely targeted recruiting works better.  But you need to know how the community is organized so you know what to do, where to look and whom to call or email. A former employee used to tell me: you should be able to find anyone in two phone calls; the first call just has to be to the right person. Smart hard work is the key. Not magic or packaged tricks. If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301. Thanks so much. John John Wentworth | President | 310 732 2301 | johnwentworth@wentco.com The Wentworth Company, Inc. / Wentworth Recruiting | www.wentco.com