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Google’s stock climbed past $1,000 in 2013 — a boon for Googlers, all of whom are stockholders. CEO Larry Page urged them to be “audacious,” especially in philanthropy. Google donates $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers. Last year a new program sent employees to Ghana and India to work on community projects.
Employees
Total US Employees 42162
Total Employees outside the U.S. –
Jobs
New jobs (1 year) 4236
FT Job Growth in the past Year –
% voluntary turnover –
Number of job applicants past 12 months excluding current employees –
Number of Openings (as of 1/2/14) 4000
Pay
Job function or title of largest number of FT salaried employees Software Engineer
Total Compensation for Salaried Position –
Job function or title of largest number of FT hourly employees –
Total Compensation for FT Hourly Position –
Benefits
Offers Fully Paid Sabbaticals No
Offers Onsite Childcare No
Health
Pays for 100% of Healthcare Costs No
Offers onsite fitness centers Yes
Subsidizes Offsite Gym Memberships Yes
Work-Life
Offers job sharing No
Offers compressed work weeks No
Diversity
% Minorities –
% Women –
Training
Hours/Year
Average hours of training per year that regular FT salaried employees receive –
Average hours of training per year that regular FT hourly employees receive –
Hiring is no easy task. When it comes down to the hiring process, HR professionals and Hiring Managers are posed with one of the most difficult tasks in the corporate world – finding and enticing the best talent. However, the most difficult task is not finding, vetting, or even interviewing thousands of candidates. The real struggle is in hiring to build strong group dynamics.
What are group dynamics?
Group dynamics is a term coined in the 1940’s by Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist and change management expert. Mr. Lewin had noticed that people often take on distinct roles and behaviors when they work together in a group. Group dynamics is the effect that these roles and behaviors have on other group members, and how each group member contributes to the unit as a whole.
With this in mind – hiring instantly becomes a much more intricate and critical task for any organization. In order to promote the success of your company’s internal teams, HR professionals and hiring managers must now hire for technical ability AND the ability to contribute positively to their group dynamics.
There are many ways in which poor group dynamics can negatively affect the performance of your employees.
What are some causes behind negative group dynamics?
Lack of leadership: A team without a strong leader can lead to a lack of direction/priorities
Group Thinking: When there is a higher desire for consensus over each individuals desire to reach the proper solution.
Freeloading: When other team members take it easy and let their fellow colleagues to the majority of the work.
Peer Apprehension: This occurs when a team member feels that they are being judged by their peers.
Walls: Walls or “blocking” occur when team members’ behavior disrupts information flow. There are many types of group roles that can put up “walls”, including:
The Aggressor: One who often disagrees with other team members
The Hermit: One who does not participate in group discussion/communications
The Naysayer: One who is often overly critical of others
The Trophy Seeker: One who is overly boastful/domineering for recognition
How do I improve group dynamics?
Provide personality assessments when hiring/building your team. Keep in mind how different personalities will work together, and what this means for the productivity of your organization.
Be familiar with your team. Knowing how your team works individually and as a unit will help you prevent future issues in your group structure.
Be vocal. Providing feedback is critical, as it will allow you to show each team member the impact of their actions, and encourage positive change.
Utilize team building exercises. Building a great team takes more than just picking the right personality types – if involves nurturing healthy relationships. Even great group dynamics require some development.
There is no secret formula for building great group dynamics. However, it is an important factor to consider before you issue an offer letter to your next hire. The next time you are conducting an interview – ask yourself these two questions:
Can this candidate perform the job?
How will this candidate perform the job on our team?
Hiring for the right cultural fit can be more important than focusing on technical skills alone and can help companies improve employee retention, engagement and loyalty.
As organizations struggle to adjust to the new growth economy, finding top talent is one of their biggest challenges. According to a recent study from Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2014, “Critical new skills are scarce — and their uneven distribution around the world is forcing companies to develop innovative new ways to find people, develop capabilities and share expertise.”
But equally important is retaining talent once you’ve found it — making sure that your efforts to identify, recruit, hire and develop talent aren’t in vain. Sourcing and hiring with retention in mind requires companies to focus less on skills and experience and more on cultural fit and development potential, says Chris Duchesne, vice president of Workplace Solutions, Care.com.
“At many forward-thinking companies, the leadership and hiring teams understand that technology changes so rapidly that, more important than discrete skills, is an employee’s cultural fit and their ability to transfer their skills, experience and values to new technology, new endeavors, new paths to the organization. You can always teach and/or acquire new skills and gain new experiences, but it’s hard to ‘teach’ culture,” Duchesne says.
The Importance of Culture
The book “Tribal Leadership” by David Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright emphasizes the importance of workplace culture and how it can contribute to a more successful workplace. The authors found that organizations that stress cultural fit find that, within their workforce, “fear and stress go down as the ‘interpersonal friction’ of working together decreases; people seek employment in the company and stay, taking the company a long way toward winning the war for talent; organizational learning becomes effortless, with the tribe actively teaching its members the latest thinking and practices; People’s overall health statistics improve. Injury rates and sick days go down; and most exciting … is that [employees] report feeling more alive and having more fun” in such a workplace, according to the book.
“Hiring for cultural fit above skills is a great idea, because you never know how much an employee will be developing, growing and changing over time — they could be in a completely different role by next year.”
Identifying talent that fits culturally within your organization can be a huge step toward employee engagement, satisfaction and long-term retention.
Identifying Your Culture
Workplace culture is, at its heart, making sure that your employees’ values, mission and personality align with those of your company, says Todd Raphael, editor in chief of recruiting site ERE.net.
“Hiring for cultural fit above skills is a great idea, because you never know how much an employee will be developing, growing and changing over time — they could be in a completely different role by next year,” Raphael says. “And it makes sense to do so based on the industry and market you’re in, too: If you’re an accounting company, for instance, you don’t necessarily want to hire someone who’s chaotic and extremely creative. If you’re a cutthroat, uber-competitive, cutting-edge company, you don’t want to hire someone who’s very laid-back and not as driven by competition, for instance,” Raphael says.
How do you identify someone who’s a good cultural fit? For some organizations, it’s as easy as noticing what they wear, says Care.com’s Duchesne. One large manufacturer of snowboarding equipment, for example, advises potential candidates not to wear a suit to an interview; in fact, if someone does arrive wearing a suit, they’re instantly discounted as not being a good cultural fit, simply based on how they’re dressed, Duchesne says.
For startup Grammarly.com, an automated proofreading tool for English-language writers, making sure new hires are a good cultural fit means candidates are assessed based on the acronym EAGER (Ethical, Adaptable, Gritty, Empathetic and Remarkable), says Grammarly’s CEO Brad Hoover.
“We codified our culture profile with one word — EAGER. Assessing skills is relatively straightforward, but culture fit is much more difficult, especially if the culture is not defined, so that was priority number one for us,” Hoover says.
“Our hiring process is much more efficient because of this filter — we spend much less time getting to a final decision and we’ve been really successful at making the right hiring decision,” he says.
Putting EAGER to Work
The acronym EAGER stands for all qualities Grammarly.com looks for in its employees. Potential hires are introduced to and approved by the company’s executive team, and then hiring teams are formed based on that potential employee’s role and who they’ll be working for and with, Hoover says.
The first letter stands for Ethical, and Hoover explains that “with an ethical team, we can trust each other and put lots of responsibility in the hands of everyone on the team.”
“Something like 89 percent of people leave a job because they’re not happy. Even if that statistic is overblown, even if it’s only 50 percent, that’s an epidemic. And it’s as bad for the employees as it is for business.”
– Sean Storin, CEO, One Degree
This is critical in a startup with only about 70 team members split between offices in San Francisco and Kiev, Ukraine. The second letter stands for Adaptable: the ability to embrace change and learn in order to evolve and succeed, Hoover says.
“Our people must apply a positive, problem-solving attitude to whatever they’re doing,” he says. “They’ve got to be looking out for potential problems and proactively thinking — either individually or collectively — about how to solve them.” The G is for Gritty, Hoover says, which emphasizes the need for both passion and perseverance when going after long-term goals.
“This is especially important for a startup to do whatever it takes to get the job done whenever it is necessary,” he says. “As tech companies grow, teams can’t grow as quickly as the user base, so it’s hard for the hiring and onboarding process to keep up as demand for the product grows. We want our people to have the grit to persevere, even when it’s difficult.”
The second E, for Empathetic, simply means treating others as you want to be treated, to work more effectively as a team, Hoover says. Active listening and constantly ‘putting yourself in another’s shoes’ are key elements of empathy, he says.
“We care about this because of the implications for communication. At a foundational level, that requires mutual respect, and that’s based on empathy,” he says. Finally, the R is for Remarkable. Being remarkable, Hoover says, involves being recognized for being exceptional but also humble.
“We want our people to be exceptional in their own right, but also to seek out others and learn from them. It’s hard enough to find remarkable people, but the ‘humble’ part of it involves the recognition that there are so many things you don’t know, and then finding a mentor or teacher to help you learn those things,” he says.
Throw Out the Resume
A June 2013 Gallup poll of more than 150,000 U.S. workers found that a whopping 70 percent of respondents either hated their jobs or felt disengaged, and of the main reasons cited, “poor management” and “poor cultural fit” were at the top of the list.
Sean Storin, CEO and co-founder of recruiting and networking site One Degree, says these statistics are what prompted him and his team to develop One Degree to address the staggering number of bad hires and try to identify better employees based on culture, mission and values, he says.
“We’d heard that something like 89 percent of people leave a job because they’re not happy. Even if that statistic is overblown, even if it’s only 50 percent, that’s an epidemic,” he says, “And it’s as bad for the employees as it is for business.”
One Degree is an online career network that claims to place culture, values and mission above all else when matching candidates and potential employers, Storin says. The site does not include resumes, nor does it include job postings; instead, he says, candidates sign up and answer questions based around cultural categories to find companies and roles that would best fit for their interests, values and their lifestyle.
There are three distinct ecospheres that lead to good hiring, Storin says, what a candidate knows, how the candidate lives and what the candidate wants.
“Skills are obviously where companies begin — the ‘What I Know’ piece — because you need someone who can execute tasks, who’s familiar with tools and technology. But skills alone aren’t solely what makes companies pull the trigger to hire,” Storin says.
“The ‘How I Live’ piece outlines the type of personal values a candidate has, and how that translates into their fit into your organization. And the ‘What I Want’ piece is an opportunity to express exactly what would make candidates happy in a work environment. The last piece is extremely important, and it’s something candidates are not often faced with — it’s empowering for them to have this be a major part of the hiring conversation,” Storin says.
One Degree does use search, networking and messaging functionality like that found in traditional job search sites like LinkedIn, Storin says, but it also incorporates algorithms to identify cultural traits and alignment with specific industries, companies and roles, Storin says. The model was similar to algorithms like those used in music discovery and playback software Pandora.
“We looked at companies doing things very well in other capacities; Pandora, for instance, is using all these metrics and algorithms to match users with music they might like based on things like syncopation and beats-per-minute. We felt like this was the key to the future of employment search and answered the question of how to integrate culture into the equation,” Storin says.
Storin says the information gathered by One Degree’s questions is also beneficial for hiring companies, and that while candidates can fill out the site’s questionnaires in under five minutes, most users spend around four to five times that amount of time on the site — a conversion rate of 40 percent.
“It’s a coup for these huge companies to know these things about their potential hires,” Storin says. “And we already see a much greater level of engagement and interest from candidates because we are based on culture,” he says.
“Recruiters should be addressing cultural fit already, and some of them are, but as far as it being a general practice, they just don’t have the time or the bandwidth,” Storin says. “So many are reduced to just scanning resumes, looking for keywords and plugging holes, and then companies wind up with bad hires, unhappy employees and disengaged workers, and that equals attrition,” he says.
“If employees are engaged and feel like they are part of a larger entity that mirrors their beliefs and values, they are more likely to stay when presented with a challenge,” Storin says.
As the Android landscape expands, developers must test even more than before. Having the right skill sets for today is crucial for Android developers. A great app developer also is able to build an app with the consumer purchase in mind. What sets apart successful apps than the others is the ability to return a high installation rate from the app.
Ubuntu
User experience and user satisfaction is a highly important element. Being an Android developer in the 21st century delivers plenty of new opportunities. A product that is desirable to consumers and listening to customers is crucial. It is very important to build a customer based influence model that would maximize its marketing impact
Many correlations are similar to developers having to be much like an artist. Because developers have to be able to deal with code this is a skill one should be educated with and have an experienced level understanding of the specific tools. Being able to transfer and deliver to the organization’s culture is where that urge for being artist can be significant. The process is common formulations within the sciences.
The marketing and cross functional departments have been working with Android and app development but still its recently. These areas focus on raising questions that concern the customer. So they are more creative questions based on business outcomes – What are our customers talking about? Is the response positive or negative? When you reference the educational backgrounds of the technical and marketing departments, from the CTO to the CMO and from the Engineer to the Marketing Specialist the backgrounds are from having degrees in marketing to having degrees in computer science.
An Android developer in business should be adaptable to that organization he may be working for. A hiring organization should look for someone with the right technology skills, objective oriented, detailed and task focused. In business today, if a developer can deliver value and provide more, his being able to improve on and do more with apps ROI rather than simply building it is a desired skill. Finding a mentor within the industry is crucial for new developers within their field. Having both formal education and experience combined helps, but success can come from within and the developers ability to adapt to the evolving space as well being able to be creative, interpersonal (from a management perspective) and think out of the box as well be highly technical is important.
Too many people confuse reporting with analytics–and underinvest in making sure they are asking the right questions.
Standard-issue reports about monthly employee turnover rates and average compensation per employee are important glances in the rearview mirror. But today’s savviest chief human resources officers (CHROs) do not spend time obsessing over such reports.
Instead, they are looking for ways to go beyond analyzing the data they expect. They seek real insight. They want to know what they don’t know. They want to discover those elusive flashes that management can use to hone the organization’s competitive edge. They want to create value for customers and shareholders alike.
As highlighted in the Economist Intelligence Unit report entitled “In search of insight and foresight: Getting more out of big data,” predictive analytics were most valued by the 373 global executives surveyed. The main drivers for ROI on analytics investments were found to be the quality of the questions being asked and the availability of talent to look for the right business challenges to solve. The availability of effective technology, potentially useful data, and endlessly curious data scientists asking the right questions are the three legs of the stool.
Going beyond the expected is essential to the practice of analytics and is the fundamental difference between true analytics and reporting. And to achieve this end in HR, you need to hire a scary person.
Known as data scientists or quants, these whizzes can be scary to more-traditional CHROs and HR leadership teams, because they don’t think or speak in traditional HR terms. Nevertheless, their innate curiosity, business knowledge, and supreme skills in finding insights or “signal” in data make them masters of uncovering new strategies for reaching core business goals. In short, they’re the ones asking and answering the question behind the question behind the question.
Here’s a hypothetical. An HR quant may probe the depths of data about what attracts high-performing sales talent in a particular industry and, conversely, what causes these overachievers to leave a company. Using predictive models, this data scientist may identify areas in which an investment of $500,000 could cultivate new talent capable of increasing revenues by $10 million in the coming year. When you start initiating discussions like this, don’t be surprised if the CFO says to you and your quant, “You’d better be able to back this up—but in the meantime, let’s hear what you have to say.”
Some HR applications today provide excellent and easy-to-use functionality that can predict turnover and performance and even model different scenarios to gauge the impact of different actions on predicted outcomes. This functionality can be deployed on mobile devices, requires no training, and delivers unprecedented decision support to front-line leaders, but it should be viewed as just the start.
With the right data wizard and a reliable foundation of human-generated information, CHROs will be on solid ground and well on the way to turning the HR department into a strategic business asset. The critical distinction is that the scope of inquiry should not be limited to traditional HR systems and data. More value can be created when other sources of human-generated data—including location data, activity data, sensor data, financial data, unstructured sentiment analysis, and many more—are in the mix. Although many of these pose potential HR compliance questions, they are too valuable to dismiss and should be considered possible sources of insight.
The Perfect Quant
What makes quants so scary? They exhibita freakish combination of traits that are rare in any single person. They have a deep and innate curiosity about data, probabilities, and mathematical modeling. They’re also fired by a passion for business. Even more surprising perhaps, they welcome the opportunity to collaborate with HR leaders to develop and answer the questions that will help the business grow.
Data scientists aren’t necessarily the people CHROs already employ to create standard monthly reports. Data scientists perform vastly different roles. They are much more focused on asking “how” and “why” questions than on carrying out typical reporting functions. The same people who provide reporting on core processes and talent reviews may not be the ones who can identify the specific actions needed to elevate the quality of talent in an organization.
So where do you find these endlessly curious, business-focused data geniuses? If you track some HR quants’ careers, you’ll likely find résumés that weave in and out of various business functions. These people may have spent time in finance, developing analytical skills. Then they may have moved to product development and gained a deep understanding of target customers. The latest stop is quite likely the marketing department (take a look at my last post for more on that), because CMOs have hungered in recent years for the right mix of data and analysis to enhance the customer experience and predict and influence human behavior. Who better to satisfy that appetite than a quant?
Time to Transform
With the help of a handful of quants, CHROs can continue to evolve their roles to meet today’s new realities. My Oracle ORCL-0.34% colleague Bob Evans sees a similar transformation occurring among CIOs. “CIOs have never had such a glorious—and challenging—opportunity to deliver significant, enduring, and transformational business impact and customer value as they do today,” he writes. But he also warns that IT leaders who measure their success by server uptime and service-level agreement (SLA) enforcement “should consider swapping out the CIO title for a new one: senior director of infrastructure.”
The same is true for CHROs. If they don’t find a quant to help HR ask the question behind the question behind the question, they also may soon be changing the title on their business cards. And that’s a prediction that can probably be made today without the services of a data scientist.
Jack Welch isn’t alone in this opinion. Many of today’s most successful business leaders agree — culture is a powerful force that can make or break a business.
So, what is this elusive culture thing, anyway?
It is a topic the TalentCulture community obviously takes seriously. (After all, it’s at the core of our identity.) But even among culture specialists, the concept isn’t easy to define. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as an experience — created and shaped by the collective values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of your workforce.
You can’t necessarily “see” culture. But evidence of it is often easy to spot. Similarly, culture can’t be manufactured, manipulated or imposed upon employees. But without clarity, consistency and communication, it can rapidly erode.
Looking Closer Look at Corporate Culture
MIT Management Professor, Edgar Schein, presents culture as a series of assumptions people make about an organization. These assumptions occur at three levels — each is more difficult to articulate and change. Schein’s three-tier structure includes:
• Artifacts (Visible)
• Espoused Beliefs and Values (May appear through surveys or other narrative)
• Underlying Assumptions (Unconscious beliefs/values. Not visible; may be taken for granted)
The Business Case for Culture: Zappos
In recent years, Zappos has become known for its deep commitment to culture as a competitive advantage. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, often speaks about the importance of workplace culture, and why it is his company’s chief priority.
Below are Zappos’ “10 Commandments” — the core values that drive culture, brand and business strategies:
1) Deliver WOW through service
2) Embrace and drive change
3) Create fun and a little weirdness
4) Be adventurous, creative and open-minded
5) Pursue growth and learning
6) Build open and honest relationships with communication
7) Build a positive team and family spirit
8) Do more with less
9) Be passionate and determined
10) Be humble
What do you think of “commandments” like these? How does your organization articulate and reinforce cultural norms across your workforce? How effective are your efforts?
Beyond Zappos: 100 Great Company Cultures
Of course, Zappos is only one of many organizations that invest deeply in culture. Last week, Fortune Magazine offered 100 other examples in its 2014 “Best Companies to Work For” List, developed by Great Place to Work Institute.
Even before the list was revealed, Great Place to Work CEO, China Gorman, shared several key observations about the cultural characteristics that help great companies attract top talent.
Being a recruiter, I am constantly engaging candidates: passive, active, willing, unwilling, able and unable, viable and non-viable. These “candidates” for various positions are as varied in their personalities as they are in their professional backgrounds. Working in healthcare, something I learned early in my career was that if at the end of any interview, I was on the fence regarding a specific candidate’s skill set, I ask myself a simple question.
“Would I trust this person caring for a sick relative?”
If the answer is no, they don’t advance regardless of the scarcity of their skill in the market. This has served me very well in my career, has served the companies I have worked with, and most of all has served the patients they will ultimately impact either directly or indirectly. I have found in my nearly decade of recruiting, that it is the best way for me to end my filter if there was any shred of doubt.
Lately I have identified another tool. I call this “Don’t call me candidate.” At the beginning of each interview, I remind myself that this person is not just an applicant for a job. This is a person; a professional, a mother, a father, and above all a client. “A client?” you ask? Yes, this person is my client above all. They have the unique potential to make or break my career and reputation, enhance, or diminish the culture of a department within my company, and most importantly impact a patient’s life either directly or indirectly. I remind myself that this human being’s unique skills and attributes hold importance, and has the potential to change the world.
By reminding myself at the beginning of each interview that this person is a client of mine, and someone I am here to serve, it allows me to remove my preconceived ideas about them, and allows me a moment of clarity in my review of their fit for my company and my patients, and is ultimately someone who can make a lasting positive impact to the people they serve.
The cybersecurity industry is immature but growing rapidly. There’s no standardization of job titles or classifications — an “Information Security Analyst” and an “Information Security Engineer” might perform the same functions for two different companies. Is cybersecurity different from information security? There are as many opinions as there are ways to spell “cybersecurity” (or cyber-security or cyber security or Cyber-security).
So how do you obtain a security gig for which you’re not a perfect “10″? Here are some tips for landing the job of your dreams even if you’re more a Dudley Moore than a Bo Derek.
Tip 1: Read the job description closely. Now read it again, and ask yourself this question: “What does this company need someone to do?” Not, “What does it need someone to have?” Then decide whether or not you can do whatever “it” is. Now comes the difficult part: You have to prove it, in writing and in person (or over the telephone), and that requires getting a foot in the door. Draft your resumé and cover letter to focus on why you can do the job that’s advertised. When you’re not a Bo Derek, you really need to broadcast the other qualities you bring to the table — you’re a hard worker, ethical, you live close by, you have industry-specific knowledge or experience, perhaps you know someone who works at the company or an industry superstar who will provide a glowing reference, or maybe you can pass a background check that would make a proctologist blush.
Tip 2: Avoid human resources. HR professionals are expected to recruit a variety of skills and cannot possibly understand the details of what makes one person more qualified than another. Unfortunately, the majority of the time, it comes down to a keyword search match — a game of concentration. It’s extremely difficult to stand out from a pile of electronic submissions unless your experience (resumé) includes all or a majority of the keywords called for in the published job description. Don’t waste time throwing your resumé into that black hole unless you’re a Bo Derek.
Tip 3: Appeal directly to the hiring manager. Seems logical, but it’s not always easy. Be a detective. Use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google to find out who is the likely hiring manager and send her a note. Remember Tip 1 — if you can do the job, you have to be able to prove it in writing. So do it. Write an email, make it brief (and grammatical, please). Explain in broad strokes why you are the one for the job. Ask for the opportunity to speak in person or on the phone for five minutes. Hone your “elevator pitch,” because if you can convince someone in five minutes, you will earn another five, then 10, then an in-person interview, then a job offer.
Tip 4: Use a laser, not a shotgun: Have you seen the future? Well, I have, and in the future the weapon of choice is a laser. Scattershot approaches are out; if you want to succeed in your job search, become the laser. Block out distractions. Focus on what you want and why you’re qualified. Select the opportunities that are of the most interest to you, and customize communications that will get you in the door. And when you fail (because you will fail) learn from it and refine your approach. Ask for feedback. Eventually you will succeed.
Tip 5: Live the dream. Don’t just dream it. Become part of the cybersecurity community where you live. Join the local ISC2 chapter, ISACA, ISSA, InfraGard or your local Security Meetup Group. You will meet people, network, make friends, and learn about companies and opportunities. Motivational guru Harvey Mackay says, “All the technology in the world will never replace a positive attitude.” Show this side of yourself and you will be amazed at the results. Some people will see the value in a positive attitude and the desire to break into an industry.
Tip 6: Ask and you might receive. Know how to get a date with a Bo Derek? Ask. What do most (all) people do when they look for a new job? They wait to be asked (read: look for a job posting). Don’t waste your time. Use your new contacts in the industry to find a company where you want to work. Do your homework about its systems, culture and challenges, then target that org for an opportunity. Explain to a potential boss why you’re someone he should get to know. There are plenty of job opportunities that are not advertised or that are not yet approved because the hiring manager is waiting for the right candidate or frankly too busy to begin the process. So make the first move. Remember Tip 1? Make the pitch that you’re someone he should speak with. Remember, as Wayne Gretzky says, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Tip 7: Say yes. If someone accepts that your experience is less than perfect and still offers you the opportunity to move in the direction you want to go, take it. Remember, the Bo Derek candidate does not exist, and neither does the perfect job. As long as you’ll be learning, give it a shot. Take a risk. Obtain some experience. Absorb as much as you can from the opportunity while proving the company right for having taken a chance on you.
And if you’re a hiring manager, remember what happened at the end of 10: Dudley Moore’s character realizes that Bo Derek is actually not so perfect after all. She didn’t have the right attitude. Consider giving a shot to someone with a desire to learn and a good outlook.
HR is the owner of a ton of transactional data. We have reams of data on recruiting like candidate sources, knowledge, skills and abilities. We have a treasure trove of data in our performance management systems on things like competencies and average employee performance scores. Not to mention the engagement and turnover data that is just lying around just waiting to be analyzed and used for great decision-making.
I just read an article in this month’s HR Magazine that state that HR’s big data is here to stay. The issue is not that HR has big data, it’s that HR has been scared to death of data for decades. For the non-analytical HR person it can be a little overwhelming. However, as my colleague Dr. Scott Mondore, Partner, Strategic Management Decisions, states, “You don’t have to be a PhD in order to GET HR analytics, you just have to be a good consumer of data.” In other words, there are many data analyst inside and outside the organization that can do all the geeky magical stuff with the data. HR just needs to understand what drives outcomes for their business and be able to tell a great data story.
According to Josh Bersin, currently with Deloitte, there are is a hierarchy when it comes to HR data:
If you ask where most companies are in the hierarchy to the right, the majority state they are still at the operational reporting level, tracking transactional metrics like cost per hire and time to fill. According to Bersin, only about 14% of the companies surveyed in a study on HR Analytics were at level three and four where all the organizational insights take place.
The big question becomes how to you move from time to fill to strategically linked metrics?
There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to solve a business issue using data that you already have. Take a metric like turnover. We use it in a very transactional manner currently. HR reports monthly, quarterly and yearly turnover rates. What the business really needs to know is who is leaving? Is it good or bad turnover? Why are they leaving? How much is this costing the business?
Think about this, what if HR analyzed turnover by performance scores and engagement scores and found out that the highest turnover (17%) was coming from those that are the most engaged and those performing at the highest rates. Upon further examination, analysis revealed that the high performers were dissatisfied with the lack of career development and growth opportunities within the organization. By analyzing the turnover cost data, HR was able to determine that each high performer that leaves the organization was costing the company $38,000 in HARD costs.
Using this data you can be “predictive” about your high performers leaving. Wouldn’t you business leaders want to know if your high performers are at risk for leaving the organization? Now, that’s a level four example of how you can use data to be strategic and discover something the company leaders didn’t necessarily know.
To continue the example, it would make sense for HR to create a career development program and/or a succession plan for high performers. You could even calculate an ROI for these programs by tracking turnover due to dissatisfaction with growth. By assigning a dollar value to the turnover decrease, HR no longer is viewed as tracking activity but adding to the bottom line in a real way.
The demand for HR analytics is higher than its ever been. HR professionals have a huge opportunity with the data that they already have in their own databases and HRIS systems. By understanding the business you are in and the challenges the business face, HR can truly have influence and impact on the organization by analyzing the right data and telling a great data story
Flipboard For You is our bi-weekly series highlighting how different groups of people can make the most out of Flipboard. This edition is focused on how anyone with an interest in business—from the job seeker to the CEO, the casual reader to the laser-focused entrepreneur—can employ Flipboard to stay up on important news while furthering business goals.
1. Connect to LinkedIn: Tap the red ribbon, then Accounts to connect Flipboard to LinkedIn. Quickly browse the latest business news in your LinkedIn feed and Groups, and check out LinkedIn\’s “Industry Today” feeds to get a snapshot of articles being circulated by professionals in the field.
2. Solidify your expertise: Claim your position as an industry expert by curating a magazine. In addition to collecting articles, photos and videos from prominent sources, like trade magazines and influencers in your field, you might also want to flip in your own blog posts or social media musings—it can be a seamless way to inject your (or your company\’s) voice into a wider conversation. (To incorporate your own blog content into a magazine, host it on a platform like WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr, and then search for the blog on Flipboard. When viewed on Flipboard, each of your posts will have a + by it, allowing you to flip it into your Flipboard magazine. You can also flip posts from the Web using the FLIP IT button.) You can even create a hub for experts in your field by inviting your colleagues and others to curate with you.
3. Promote your company, product or event: A magazine can tell the story of your company, a new product’s journey to market, and much more. Think about the story you want to tell, and document or collect elements that support that story. For example, use Instagram to chronicle behind-the-scenes processes, and favorite consumer feedback you like on Twitter. Use the + button within Flipboard or “Flip It” button on the Web to add these items into your magazine. You can also mix in press mentions, product reviews, demo videos—anything that gives color to your story. The Flipboard Editor on the Web allows you to re-arrange items into a coherent flow, and you can share the whole magazine out via email or social media at an opportune time—during a launch, a press event, etc.
4. Complement your resume with a magazine: Present what you’ve accomplished thus far in your career in a magazine that includes pieces you’ve written; blog posts, press coverage and photos of your projects; social media commentary and anything else you’d be proud to display. Share with prospective employers and/or include a link to it in your resume.
5. Keep up with business news, trends and insights: Flipboard is partnered with many of the preeminent names in business journalism. Publications like the FT, Forbes, The New York Times, Fast Company, Marketplace and Harvard Business Review have all been “made for Flipboard”—meaning that their pages have been customized for Flipboard for a print-like reading experience. Use the search bar to find any of them, or search for topics of interest. Flipboard’s business readers are ardent curators, and they’re making magazines about leadership, management, marketing, career advice, personal finance, small-business issues, and the future of you-name-it. The Flipboard team itself curates a one-stop shop for all the business news you need to know now.
6. Listen to your customers: Because you can search for anything on Flipboard, you can make a magazine-like feed of all of your company’s mentions on Twitter, for example. (Tap on the search bar, enter your search term, and scroll down to “Tweets mentioning”) This is a great way to track, in real-time, what people are saying about you or your brand. You can respond, favorite and retweet from your Flipboard, and it will also appear on Twitter. Flipboard reader Gerry Moran, the Head of Social Media at SAP in North America, recently wrote a blog post targeted to Sales people, with more great ideas on how Flipboard can help make your “time spent on social media listen more profitable.”
Nearly eight out of 10 executives say diversity is increasingly important in helping them achieve business goals — and they’re demonstrating strong support for it. There are external social and legislative pressures driving this emphasis, but the bottom line is that diversity is good for business. CEB research found that in a more diverse and inclusive workforce, individual discretionary effort improves by 12%, the number of people who say they intend to stay at their firm increases an average of 20% and fully 50% more employees say they are committed to their team and that their teams collaborate well.
So it’s no surprise that even during the economic downturn, organizations tended to maintain or even slightly increase their budgets for such diversity and inclusion initiatives as mentoring programs, training, affinity groups, diversity councils, and scorecards. Our research shows that 74% of employees are aware that their companies are working to promote diversity and inclusion in the workforce. But most also say that don’t see much effect from these efforts. That means organizations are making potentially massive investments to gain only marginal improvements. Few organizations have succeeded in creating highly diverse and inclusive workforces.
What’s going wrong? The CEB research indicates that one of the key problems is that qualified, diverse candidates are not getting due consideration for leadership roles, owing to unconscious (and sometimes conscious) bias in hiring and promotion decisions. Leading companies suggest that the answer to this difficult and age-old challenge is not to try to purge all biases but rather to lead as an organization in implementing mechanisms or processes to neutralize biases in selecting for key talent management positions.
How can you neutralize bias in situations where a candidate’s gender, ethnicity, age, or other identifying characteristics cannot be concealed and managers feel they know everyone? At Duke Energy, managers and HR representatives identify slates of potential successors for specific positions through a process that helps ensure objectivity. Managers submit a list of candidates for designated positions. HR analyzes the fit of designated successors for a position based on matching the detailed position profile and the candidate’s talent profile. Then HR runs a query for alternative qualified successors based on the position profile, and candidates from both lists are considered in all talent reviews. The goal of this effort is to ensure the successor slate includes only viable candidates and that all qualified candidates are being included, even those not known to the hiring manager.
And what about in cases where the company is so big that knowing all candidates is impossible? At Mexico-based CEMEX, one of the largest cement producers in the world, rapid growth and international acquisitions made it impossible for managers to keep track of the knowledge and skill sets of the organization’s employees. This lack of information made it difficult to make informed, objective decisions for succession planning and leader career development.
CEMEX created a data-driven tool that helps identify the best-qualified set of candidates for open leadership positions. It assesses four major families of factors in a leader’s profile — knowledge, experience, performance and potential, and personal profile — all weighted to reflect the relative importance of each factor for successful performance at a specific level. These leader profiles are created through a rigorous process that includes a 360-degree review, a performance and potential assessment, a personal-profiling exercise, and an emotional intelligence test. Every leadership position has a position profile that details the requirements for success, developed in part from an interview with the incumbent. By matching leader and position profiles, the tool performs a very sophisticated fit analysis of candidates for open positions.
A valuable aspect of this tool is that it allows CEMEX to conduct real-time succession planning. All of this information is contained in a database and run off of a search engine. Just enter a position title, and the system will identify the currently most qualified successor candidates throughout the organization.
“Objective-fit analysis” tools (such as these developed by Duke Energy and CEMEX) mitigate the natural biases — conscious or unconscious — that affect leadership choices and could limit the pool of qualified diverse talent in leadership pipelines. Organizations need to lean in to the reality that given the business benefits of a diverse workforce, as well as the importance in getting the right fit for the most challenging roles, the typical review of names and faces is just not the best way to get the right man or woman for the job.
Why don’t managers pay more attention to recruiting? Of all the questions I get from HR professionals, this is by far the most common. Managers often fail to put much time into recruiting for a variety of reasons. Why do managers fail to pay attention to recruiting? Delays by managers in screening resumes directly slows the time to fill a job by as much as 25 percent! Because the cost of a vacancy in technical positions can be thousands of dollars per day, is essential that HR professionals learn how to overcome the managers’ resume-reading roadblock! Why managers are too busy:
The hiring process takes so long and thus there is a weak connection (in the manager’s mind) between the effort put forward in the hiring process and the reward they get for hiring a great employee.
Too many rules, guidelines, legalities and procedures, all of which either intimidate or frustrate most managers.
They don’t see the immediate business impact or the ROI of great hiring.
It used to be easy to find good candidates, and now it’s hard!
HR doesn’t do its job. They always give me crummy candidates!
Flooding managers with resumes In this piece I’ll focus on the last issue listed above…”HR always gives me crummy candidates.” Many recruiters operate on the principal that more is better. In other words, the more resumes you give to a manager the better. In fact, nothing can be further from the truth. If you physically watch a manager go through a stack of resumes you’ll find some amazing things. Not all managers are the same but in general, this is what you’ll observe:
They postpone looking at “stacks” of resumes. The volume alone is intimidating.
Eventually they will pick up the stack and take them home with the best intentions of reading them. In fact, it usually takes a minimum of five days for them to find time to read them.
They never find a block of time to review resumes in a single sitting, resulting in uneven assessment, depending on their mood at the time they read that “batch.”
They often review them in a location and at a time that are less than optimal for concentration. There are often distractions in the background (TV, on the plane, when they are tired etc.).
Managers get angry and give up on the process easily. Frequently it occurs when they come across one or two resumes of obviously “unqualified people.” I call these resumes “uglies.”
The solution: “Five greats, no uglies.” Managers seldom realize that they are the No. 1 factor in slowing the speed of hire. Their willingness to postpone resume screening and interviewing can be deadly in a war for talent where the top candidates are all gone within ten days. Most HR departments exacerbate the problem because they don’t take a scientific approach to managing and manipulating management’s behavior. If you want managers to screen resumes rapidly here is a proven solution. At Agilent, we call it “five greats, no uglies”!
Never give a manager a “stack” of resumes. Five is the maximum at any one time. No exceptions, no excuses. Their attention span is just too short for a stack. It’s OK if they ask you to provide them with access to more “less qualified” resumes–but don’t mix the two bundles of resumes.
Never give a manager an “ugly” resume. An ugly resume is defined as varying by more than 25 percent from the basic education, experience or key competency requirements. When managers get “an ugly” they often react dramatically, call HR a name, and they then invariably stop reading the rest of the resumes. “Six sigma” applies to resume sorting also!
Attach to the stack of five resumes a half page “scorecard.” The sheet assures the managers that all of the included resumes meet the minimum requirements. It includes a chart showing how each of the 5 resumes meets or exceeds each of the minimum qualifications.
Test your resume sorters. It is essential that you continually test and re-test those that sort the resumes into the five great, no “uglies” stack to insure a near-zero error rate. Ask a few technical managers to blindly force rank a pile of the resumes of your current employees. Then train and re-train your sorters until they can pick out the five best resumes, with no “uglies” every time!
Attach a manager “satisfaction” rating sheet in order to assess the quality of each group of 5 resumes that are sent to managers. Ask them to assess whether the “five greats, no uglies” criteria was met. Reward recruiters based on the managers satisfaction and on their accuracy on the resume sorting tests.
Summary Given the limited time and attention span that managers have, it is essential that HR understands precisely why managers are slow at reviewing resumes. By regulating both the volume and the quality of resumes you can increase hiring speed by as much as 25 percent. The key is to “front load” the process with a quality resume sorting and screening process. If you do that well, managers will take it from there!
Last week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was interviewed at the Wired Business Conference on a range of topics, but the question on everyone’s mind (including interviewer Steven Levy) was her impossibly unpopular edict against telecommuting.
I surely don’t have to rehash what happened when Mayer enacted the New Law against working from home. It was eventually reported that she allegedly caught wind of it when she determined people weren’t logged into the company VPN for enough hours of the day to be “working.” The backlash has sparked a furious debate on the merits of WFH, and whether Mayer has it right or is simply another victim of CEO paranoia, convinced her employees are “ripping her off” by slacking when they should be grinding out work at their desks.
Last week Mayer attempted to clarify her position, arguing that it had been misinterpreted and that Yahoos can still work from home, provided it is at night or on the weekend. (Hey, thanks!) She then gave an example of how a new mobile app called Yahoo Weather (it tells you the weather) came to be. Yahoo’s newly collaborative environment, she said, made it possible for someone from the Weather team and someone from the Flickr team to encounter one another serendipitously on the Yahoo campus. And that’s the magic of how the app came to be.
But the most important thing Mayer said is that she isn’t particularly against telecommuting, just that it is “not right for us, right now.” She has a point. Telecommuting doesn’t work for 100 percent of companies 100 percent of the time, but the positioning is a little ironic given Mayer’s earlier decisions as CEO. As one of her first orders of business last year, she gave every employee a new smartphone. In her announcement to staff, she explained the generosity saying, “We’d like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.”
Well, not exactly. Sixty-three percent of employers now allow workers to telecommute, according to the Families and Work Institute. That figure that has nearly doubled in the last eight years. Yahoo’s users can work from home, but its workers can’t. It’s an increasingly unsustainable position, and Mayer’s resolve behind it is simply out of step with reality.
Sure, we can all understand why any company would want to keep its workers under lock and key. A few bad apples always spoil the WFH bunch, disappearing for hours or cutting out early with regularity. It’s a problem just like folks stealing printer paper or Facebooking on company time—and is best solved by careful hiring and firing, not the institution of draconian terms of employment that impact the people who play by the rules.
As small business is concerned, telecommuting is becoming not only a popular option, but an essential means to compete. Virtual workforces are making innumerable businesses possible that can’t afford traditional office space or can’t find qualified workers in the area, and the ability to manage a mobile, remote workforce is now de rigueur for any business leader. Failure to offer telecommuting perks limits the overall size of your employee pool, too.If it isn’t obvious, I take personal umbrage against the policy. I worked for Yahoo as a daily blogger for over four years, almost exclusively from home. I stepped into the corporate offices in Sunnyvale maybe five times total, and I figure I saved well over two thousandhours of driving time during those years by being able to telecommute. I’m afraid to consider the money I would have spent on gas, the lost productivity, and the toll all that driving would have taken on my sanity—and I can also sympathize with those Yahoos who couldn’t deal with the corporate VPN, a buggy thorn in my side that I avoided whenever possible.
The irony is that Yahoo knows all this. Its future lies completely on mobility, with Mayer herself calling getting Yahoo on every mobile device the company’s “moonshot.” Apps like Yahoo Weather are, I guess, a step in that direction, but I’d be concerned about the deeper issues a no-telecommuting policy might be covering up.
If people running into each other in the hallway is the only way problems are solved at your business, you’ve got bigger problems than whether someone works at home one day a week.
What is the best way to ensure a sustainable, highly productive and engaged workforce?
Imagine you are the incoming CEO of a struggling company. The board of directors has hired you to turn the company around as soon as possible. What are you going to do?
Obviously, you have to start with big questions regarding strategy, structure, product development, sales, cash management and culture. You will probably shuffle the top management team and provide a clear vision of what and how the enterprise has to change. You need to improve cash flow pronto.
You might get control of IT’s massive investment by moving toward cloud computing. Eventually, you reach the human resources function. You are smart enough to know the issue is not the 1.5 percent of operating expense that goes into running HR. For the company to be successful, turnover must slow and productivity must grow.
You’re not an HR professional, so you aren’t burdened by traditional thinking or a warm spot in your heart for those nice people who labor there. You start with an objective view of human capital management just as you did with management of cash, products, sales and information.
It’s probably a good idea to find out what kind of data you have on workforce productivity. Has there been any analysis at either the strategic or tactical level in the past? You could form a small analytics function to help study questions of capability, performance and past human capital investments. Nothing beats having accurate and relevant objective data on which to base the tough decisions ahead.
So, what is the best way to ensure a sustainable, highly productive and engaged workforce? A large part of the question is where should the various HR functions reside? Form should follow function.
Should they all be in a central unit or spread throughout the company where they can be agile and responsive, not to mention accountable for value generation?
You decide that, as CEO, you are ultimately responsible for the workforce, so you make strategic workforce planning, including succession planning, your responsibility. You give a senior HR executive that job and have him or her report directly to you.
A recruiting strategy is next, and where should that reside? How about putting it under the COO — the person responsible for company operations?
Next comes compensation and benefits.
Should that go to the CFO, who is accountable for cash management, or do you put that in operations as well? Maybe you carve out health and welfare benefits to finance and leave pay and incentive compensation with the COO.
Now, how are the people best developed? Should development be part of your central workforce function? Pieces such as leadership and engagement likely should go together, but where to put them?
You have short-term problems such as engagement and long-term questions of succession. It’s complicated. You can’t just toss them all together like in the past. That didn’t work.
Who is going to keep employee records and deal with governance requirements? This is sensitive stuff and getting more so every day. What about general employee relations problems? Should they be pushed back to line management where they started 150 years ago? Isn’t that what fostered the birth and growth of labor unions?
Maybe you should leave the old structure in place and just give it new marching orders. But if you take a car that isn’t running well and repaint it, does that make it run better? If HR was not a value-adding function when you arrived, can you afford to leave it as is while you redesign the enterprise? Just how important is workforce management in your new scheme?
I’m sure you will figure it out, but one thing is certain. You have to change the fundamental concept that has driven human resources and human capital management in the past. It did not serve the company well during periods of rapid change and may have been a major reason the enterprise was foundering.
After all, nothing happens unless a human being acts — all other assets of the enterprise just lay there waiting to be leveraged. It seems as though you have to give HR new consideration, because it is so important.
Why do we inevitably support the underdogs in a sporting event, those that are perceived as really having no chance at all of getting the prize but somehow made it to the finals?
Because we can see ourselves.
The big stars of the game are far removed from our reality and we can’t compete at their level, but bring in the underdog, and we instantly see something there that could be us, the weekend warrior, Joe Public, the lucky few to be in the spot competing where they are now. And because we see ourselves it makes it real and achievable to us with our “if they can do it, so can I” attitude.
It doesn’t stop there though; there are more instances we look for ourselves subconsciously.
Take the true story about a CEO whose company had some pretty tough staffing issues. He took himself and the majority of his team through a behavioral profiling process and found that each one of the team was an identical profile type to his own, he had employed 20 people that were all like him! Can you imagine how their business was running internally, the frustrations involved with no mix of behavioral styles? Have you ever said during an interview “You remind me a little of myself when I was younger”? I know I have, and because we see ourselves we go ahead and employ.
Take a group photograph with you included in it. Who do you look for first? You. Try it if you don’t believe me, its really hard not to seek yourself out first.
James Blunt sang “You’re Beautiful” which sent many women swooning. He made you feel like he was singing directly to you, and you only, you wanted to be the person he was singing to and so you saw yourself. Am I right?
Dale Carnegie encourages us to talk about the other persons interests, to get them talking about themselves rather than us talking about ourselves. If we spent 10 minutes talking to a stranger having answered only questions about ourselves, we think the person we have been talking to is interesting, even though we know nothing about them simply because they encouraged us to talk about ourselves.
We are not being selfish when we do this, but somewhere in our subconscious, it registers. There is something inside us, the way we are wired maybe, that makes us think about ourselves but not selfishly so. Call it an interest, call it human nature, call it hog wash, I don’t know I can’t explain it, but its there.
Try this for your next hire: have a manager come up with a list of about 20 different traits she’d like to have in the new employee who’ll take the job. Consider the work environment and performance expectations: What skills and traits does an employee need to possess to excel at the job? Be specific.
After the list is complete, you and the manager can go back and put a letter “T” next to the ones in which you are able and willing to train. Of the remaining traits, circle the ones that are non-negotiable, must-have traits. From the ones circled, put a star next to your top five.
You can always train a new employee to perform a task (if you are willing), but hiring an employee who doesn’t possess the same values as you or your organization will be problematic in the long run. After aligning your values and attitudes, focus on the individual’s skills and abilities. Competencies to look for include reading comprehension, math skills, computer skills, decision making, flexibility, and interpersonal skills. Consider which skills are essential, which tasks are performed occasionally, and which are not necessary for the job.
Determine how much experience and education are needed to fill the position and address specific needs. Some jobs can allow for a training period, while others require the employee to hit the ground running almost from Day 1. Even the employee with the best credentials will need a period of time to get adjusted to your organization’s specific culture.
Some people were made to be accountants, some to be salespeople, and others to work with their hands. Putting people in a position which is not the right fit for their skills, abilities, and personalities is sure to create coaching needs in the future.
Here are 23 possible scorecard measures as a starting point for that discussion. Note: the highest-impact factors are listed first in each of the four categories.
Category I — High business impact measures to consider
These business impact metrics should make up the majority of any strategic hiring manager scorecard.
Quality of hire/retention rate — this is the most important of all measures because it shows the business impact of new hires. Although most use the term “quality of hire,” a better title is “the on-the-job performance of new hires.” The easiest way to measure it is by tracking the average performance appraisal rating of new hires after 6-12 months and then compare it to the average for new hires in that job or job family (note because hiring managers give appraisal scores, there is some subjectivity in this measure). A superior but more difficult approach is to measure new hire employee output directly. An alternative but more subjective measure of quality is to survey the manager who the hiring manager reports to in order to determine this executive’s satisfaction rate with the quality and the fit of the new hires (or alternatively, the percentage of new hires that met their expectations). A quality hire can also be reflected in a high retention rate, so also consider tracking the average turnover rate of a manager’s new hires within the first year and compare it to the average.
Number of hires from target firms – if your firm identifies high-talent firms to recruit from, track the number or the percentage of new hires by this hiring manager who came from “targeted” competitors or high talent firms.
Diversity hiring percentage – diversity hires may be harder to land and because they may have a high impact, track their diversity percentage out of the total number of an individual manager’s new hires.
Candidate experience – a bad candidate experience can negatively impact future recruiting. So, if you expect an excellent candidate experience, survey a sample of applicants and new hires to determine the percentage who were satisfied or dissatisfied with their treatment by this hiring manager. The percentage that are very satisfied or above and the percentage dissatisfied are the comparison measures to use.
Revenue loss due to vacant days – there is a direct and measurable dollar loss for every day that revenue jobs are vacant. If possible, work with finance to estimate the dollar loss due to each vacancy day in these positions. Then track the number of days that revenue-generating jobs under this hiring manager are vacant.
Offer acceptance rate — this metric can indicate weak candidate closing skills on the part of the hiring manager. Recruiters can sometimes manipulate this metric to make themselves look good.
Percentage of new hires from referrals — referrals generally produces the highest quality hire. And because hiring managers can greatly influence members of their team to make referrals, this measure can indicate whether a hiring manager is encouraging their team members to be “talent scouts” and to actively seek out quality referrals.
Category II — Lower-business-impact measures of hiring manager effectiveness
These measures get a lower priority because they generally cover items that have a lower level of business impact.
Legal compliance and process adherence – if compliance is a major issue, track the number of discrimination complaints, EEOC, or legal issues related to this hiring manager that were raised during the period. Also, because many hiring managers prefer to “wing it” throughout the hiring process, measure their actual adherence to the corporate recruiting process. Or alternatively, have recruiters estimate each manager’s percentage of adherence in a survey.
$ of external search spent — because the excessive use of external search may be unnecessary, track the percentage of this hiring manager’s hires who required the use of outside agencies, and their total dollar spent on agency costs.
Percentage of new hires who must be terminated — a new hire who must be terminated or asked to resign must be considered as a hiring failure, so the percentage should be tracked. But since the hiring manager makes the termination decision also, you should be aware that this metric is also likely to be skewed.
The number of unfilled positions — this metric can indicate that critical work is not being done because of excessive unfilled positions. The measure can also be problematic because not all positions have an equal negative impact when they go unfilled.
The quality of the applicants you did not hire — some recruiting leaders worry that individual hiring managers are somehow missing high-quality resumes or are failing to hire high-quality candidates. If this is your concern, you can randomly sample rejected or passed-over applicants to determine the percentage that were extremely high quality in both fit and qualifications but for some reason were not hired. Google actually revisited some of these “misses” and hired them later.
Employer brand contribution — if you expect individual hiring managers to help build the employer brand image through writing and speaking, periodically measure this manager’s visibility to applicants through a Google search of their name or by their PeerIndex or Klout scores.
Category III — Hiring manager efficiency and timeliness measures
Although these are not strategic business impact measures, they do indicate whether hiring managers are prioritizing recruiting. Provide hiring managers with a separate section of a scorecard covering “efficiency and timeliness.”
Total time from resume slate received to hire — rather than measuring overall time to fill, instead measure the portion of hiring that the manager has the most control over, which is the number of days between when they receive their initial slate of resumes to the offer acceptance date for each position.
Applicant-to-interview, interview-to-offer, interview-to/hire-ratio — these ratios can indicate a failure to prioritize recruiting or weak skill levels on the part of the hiring manager.
Response time after resumes received — the average number of days that it takes a hiring manager to read and respond to a group of resumes presented by the recruiter is an important indication of how high the manager prioritizes recruiting.
Time from first interview to last – managers can unnecessarily stretch out the interview process, resulting in the loss of some high-demand candidates. As a result, the average time that it takes to complete all interviews should be measured.
Time to complete the position description — because managers are routinely slow to finalize their position description and hiring requirements, this time period between requisition approval and completing the position description should be measured. The number of times that the position description must be updated can also be measured.
Category IV — Hiring manager cooperation and communications measures
If you expect your hiring managers to be cooperative and communicative with recruiters and other hiring managers, track and report measures under this area. Provide hiring managers with a separate section of the scorecard covering “cooperation and communications.” Some of those possible measures to include in it are:
Satisfaction and responsiveness to recruiters – most recruiting leaders expect hiring managers to continually communicate, to provide rapid feedback, to share competitive intelligence, and to be responsive to your recruiter’s questions and requests. To measure their responsiveness, periodically survey the recruiters who they work with and track the average satisfaction rate with the manager’s responsiveness and the support provided to their recruiter. The percentage who are very satisfied or above and the percentage dissatisfied are the comparison measures to use.
Providing input into the sourcing strategy — because hiring managers are experts in their field, they should proactively provide their recruiter with help and advice on the best sources for seeking top prospects. A survey of recruiters that covers their satisfaction with the sourcing help provided by the hiring manager and their team is the easiest way to measure quality of their sourcing input.
Completing documentation – managers are notorious for failing to complete hiring documentation. As a result, the percentage of new hires where the manager completes the documentation requirements on time should be measured.
Cooperation and best-practice sharing with other hiring managers – if you expect your hiring managers to be cooperative and share best practices with other managers, you must measure it. Do that by surveying all hiring managers. Have each rate the individual hiring manager on a 0-to-100 scale on “their degree of cooperation and best-practice sharing.”
Lead time provided to recruiters — sufficient lead time before a requisition is final can allow recruiters to build a talent pipeline. As a result, managers should be assessed in a survey of recruiters on how frequently and how much lead time they provide.
And Finally, It’s Time to Consider a Service-Level Agreement
After you have determined the performance expectations for both your recruiters and your hiring managers, it only makes sense to go the next step and to develop a service-level agreement. Service-level agreements went out of fashion a handful of years ago when hiring levels were reduced, but with the war for talent returning in many areas, it is time to revisit them.
An SLA is a shared agreement where both sides agree to perform at a certain stipulated level. It tells hiring managers what specifically they should expect from their recruiters, but it also simultaneously spells out what hiring managers are expected to contribute to the hiring process. Most SLAs cover minimum and maximum timetables, key deliverables, dos and don’ts, and any other administrative expectations.
Final Thoughts
Unfortunately, the state of metrics in recruiting is not good. This is primarily because many recruiting leaders get bogged down in philosophical discussions on what can be measured “perfectly.” All metrics have weaknesses, so perfect metrics should not even be a goal. The goal instead should be to continually improve and to spread best practices rapidly as a result of the different effectiveness scorecards. I you don’t like the metrics and the hiring manager scorecard formats that I have provided, feel free to create your own. There will be resistance from the whiners who are “too busy to keep score” but don’t let them slow you down.
Hiring managers should not be allowed unlimited freedom to do whatever they want, and a hiring manager scorecard is one way to gently guide them toward the right course of action. If you are really bold, work with finance to put a dollar value on hiring miscues and bad hires, so that you can include the actual costs of weak hiring behaviors in your report card. I have calculated the estimated cost of a bad hire can be up to 10 times their annual salary and weak hiring manager interview practices and candidate treatment can also severely damage your employer brand. Compared to the cost of a weak or bad hire, the traditional cost-per-hire calculation can only be classified as insignificant!
You may have suspected that those peculiar interview brainteasers made famous by Google, Microsoft, and enough other companies that Glassdoor is able to come up with an annual list of 25 were, well, a waste of time.
You were right. And no less an authority than Google’s own Laszlo Bock says so. He’s Google’s senior vice president of people operations and in a New York Times interview he bluntly calls “a complete waste of time.” “They don’t predict anything,” he told The Times. “They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
So the Google question that made this year’s Glassdoor list — “How many cows are there in Canada?” — has no probative value when determining whether the person being interviewed can do the job. Another of Bock’s frank admissions is that college grades and test scores have almost no correlation to future job performance. No longer does Google ask for college transcripts, except for brand new college grads. For everyone else, Bock told The Times, “We found that they don’t predict anything.”
A haven for PhDs, Google these days is hiring workers who have no college degree at all.
What happened to change Google’s hiring methods is its ‘big data’ analysis of employee performance and the criteria used in choosing candidates. A study comparing tens of thousands of interview scores against the selected candidates’ job performance found “zero relationship.” What did correlate, Bock reported, is the behavioral interview.
“What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, ” he said, explaining:
The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.
This isn’t the first time Bock has talked about the hiring and leadership selection process at Google. A few months ago, at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Forum, he said the key determiner in deciding among candidates is “capability and learning ability.”
“We actually would rather hire smart, curious people than people who are deep deep experts in one area or another,” he told the forum audience. Why? Because experts tend to come up with answers that replicate what they know, rather strike off in new, potentially better, directions.
Plus, he said, Google takes its time selecting candidates and all hiring decisions are collaborative. “We don’t let hiring managers make a hiring decision.”
