Tag Archives: Hiring

Types of People on Your Team?

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Over the years I have come to recognize that people typically fall into one of four different caricatures. These caricatures almost never fit someone in all situations and at all times. However, each of us most frequently behaves in ways that fit one of these four types, and that shapes how others commonly see us. I have named these caricatures Ostrich, Whiner, Solver, and Anticipator.

First, there are the Ostriches. These people drift through life seemingly oblivious to the problems and opportunities around them. They constantly get surprised by life and find themselves constantly reacting to events around them–often situations they could have avoided or leveraged to their benefit. Other Ostriches, whether out of comfort with the status quo and/or fear of an uncertain future, bury their heads and purposefully resist change. Fortunately, the pain Ostriches repeatedly experience tends to keep people from living in this state for too long, but there are some who repeatedly return to camp here. Avoid Ostriches in your life and business. Their obliviousness can produce collateral damage that harms others close to them.

Second, are the Whiners. These people are the most common. Whining requires no involvement or commitment and seemingly absolves them of accountability. These people love to point out problems but rarely offer solutions or pitch in to help solve the problem. Sadly, these people are often proud of themselves and proclaim that “I just call it as I see it” as some badge of honor. Unfortunately, technology, and therefore our culture often provides the anonymity that emboldens whiners. Get rid of the Whiners in your life and business. They are toxic.

Third, are the Solvers.  These people identify solutions to problems and/or willingly get involved in refining or implementing someone else’s idea. They do not get parochial or hog the credit. They just like getting things done that improve their own life and the lives of others. Friends and businesses love Solvers.

Fourth, and final are the Anticipators. These people are rare and exceedingly valuable. These people are able to identify problems or opportunities before others see them coming. They are helpful in avoiding, lessening, or eliminating problems before they adversely impact the individual or group. They can also spot emerging trends before the masses recognize them and gain the advantages that accrue to early-movers. Find these people and watch them closely. They can give you indirect clues to problems around the proverbial corner.

The most powerful combination is a group with a small number of Anticipators (sometimes just one) surrounded by a bunch of Solvers. The Anticipators do not always have the skills necessary to solve or exploit the trends they see. On the flip side, Solvers often cannot see a problem or opportunity until the pain hits. That’s why coupling these two skillsets can give a team huge advantages in the marketplace.

Stop Staring Out the Back of the Bus

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Why don’t they position the driver’s seat facing out the back of the bus? You can see the road. You can even tell whether the bus is between the lane markers. Of course, we all know that’s silly. Seeing the past does not allow us to anticipate or respond to what is coming down the road at us. Yet, that is what most managers do when they base a hiring decision on someone’s resume and inappropriate interview questions.

This post is the last in a three-part series on Hiring for Talent. The first post (“Too Many Corners on the Box“) exposed the fallacy of over constraining a hiring search by relying on long lists of experiences and skills. The second post (“I Hired Your Resume, But Unfortunately I Got You”) revealed the pitfalls of focusing on the past and made a case for concentrating more attention on forward-looking talents. This post discusses some methods for hiring talents.

You will never find what you have not first defined. As a first step we must identify the talents we are seeking to hire. Consider first company-specific talents. Since individuals frequently change jobs or roles within the same company the vision for the organization’s culture should overwhelmingly determine the talents you seek to hire. Yes, that means you must have first reduced your vision for the culture or company values to writing and, second, take that plaque, picture, or poster off the wall and really use it. Second, consider job-specific talents with your view out the front of the bus. Think in terms of the talents needed to tackle the challenges facing the person you hire.

But, that still leaves a question of how do we uncover a candidate’s talents? Resumes may provide clues, but almost never reveal answers. Poorly written resumes compound the problem by making isolated and unsupported claims of talent (usually in an overview section); such as Creative, Highly disciplined, Responsible, High integrity, Quick learner, High achiever, etc.

Here are three methods for uncovering and confirming a candidate’s talents:

  1. Trials. This method discovers talents from first-hand experiences during previous interactions. The most effective use of this method is when a manager hires someone they already know well from working together in a professional setting. However, this try-before-you-hire method is rarely suitable for hiring to fill most professional positions when the hiring manager and candidate do not know each other. Most candidates with exceptional talent will not assume the risk of a probationary hire.
  2. Testing. There exists a wide assortment of assessment tools; including instruments such as Myers-Briggs, DiSC, and Wonderlic to name a few. I have mixed opinions on assessment tools. These tools often reveal interesting and potentially helpful insights. However, they can get pricey and present logistic challenges to administer them. More importantly, the broad nature of many assessment tools can make it difficult to zero in on specific targeted talents. In my opinion, too many assessment tools attempt to provide a be all to end all solution and end up providing so much information that properly interpreting them requires a level of training and expertise that makes them impractical or unaffordable. Nonetheless, I know there are fans of various assessment methods…please feel free to share your views in the comments on assessments you’ve found effective.
  3. Talking. Not casual chatting about the candidate’s favorite food, team or vacation spot. Not surface-level conversation about where the candidate has worked and what they’ve done. Not a flag-waving recitation of the candidate’s amazing results. But rather, a structured and deep-level dialogue about what drives the candidate and fueled their accomplishments. It’s free; although it takes some work.

Using Interviews to Uncover Talents

A word of caution…Contrived or hypothetical scenarios shed less light on an individual’s talents and traits and may actually mislead the interviewer (in a hypothetical scenario I will always leave that last chocolate cookie on the plate). Google developed a reputation for off-beat interview questions, but has recently abandoned it (read more here). As a hiring manager I care little about what the candidate might do. I learn most from what they have done.

Since talents are innate or hardwired into our character as a toddler, the exercise of them rarely requires conscious thought or action. Consequently, our actions (human doing) indirectly reveal our talents (human being). In other words, a person’s behavior in real-life situations provides us a window to identify their talents. Consequently, we must use inference and pursue lines of indirect inquiry to uncover a person’s talents. Hopefully, you are now getting an appreciation for clearing understanding what you’re looking for in a new hire.

For illustration purposes, here are some behaviors for which you would listen if initiative were one of your target talents:

  • Identified a problem, trend or unexploited opportunity
  • Researched and presented potential solutions
  • Recruited an ad hoc team to pursue an opportunity
  • Got involved in a project outside their immediate work area
  • Volunteered time in nonprofit organization(s)
  • Founded a group or organization to address an unmet need in their local church, school or community

Finally, a few additional practical suggestions:

  • Use the same question set with each candidate to create a basis for meaningful comparison among the various candidates
  • The book “ Who” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street provides the best structured interview process guide I have ever used
  • Another great starting place is “The Most Important Interview Question of All Time” by Lou Adler

I Hired Your Resume, But Unfortunately I Got You*

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In the early days of moving pictures marketers quickly discovered the power of subliminal messaging. The human mind could subconsciously register a single image embedded within a movie projecting 24 frames per second. This advertising method gained favor among marketers, because it induced higher response rates among viewers than overt advertisements. The Federal Trade Commission deemed subliminal messaging deceptive advertising and outlawed it in the USA during the 1970s.

Repeated studies suggest that hiring managers are often heavily influenced by the subliminal power of first impressions. Too many of us will unconsciously make a go / no-go hiring decision in less time than it takes to watch a Super Bowl commercial. At that point, Confirmation Bias kicks into gear, and we spend the interview looking for things to affirm our initial subconscious impression.

Of course, you are smart enough to avoid that trap, or at least that’s what you tell yourself. However, unless you have a solid plan, you will end up looking at all the wrong things in all the wrong places when the time arrives to make your next hire.

Over the years I have often joked that a hiring interview is like a first date. We instinctively know that first impressions are important. We stand in front of the mirror to make sure we have the look just right. We apply extra diligence to observing social courtesies. We tell stories about our respective pasts with a focus on the positive. We talk about people we know, places we’ve been and events we’ve experienced. These fact-oriented discussions often do not tread into more sensitive topics; such as, why we act the way we do and what drives us.

Resumes reinforce this backward-looking, surface-level focus. In fact, the Latin root of resume means “to summarize” and “take back.” In other words, a resume summarizes the “what” of my past. When and where I worked. What I accomplished. A typical resume provides no sense of context; i.e. the external business environment, internal culture or surrounding talents and resources in which the candidate worked. The resume also gives no insights into the innate talents the candidate may have leveraged to deliver the results.

Granted, it’s important to understand the external/internal environments in which the candidate formerly worked, if for no other reason than establishing context for evaluating past accomplishments, but your environment is different to some extent than the candidate has previously experienced and changing all the time. However, the constant in this equation is the candidate’s talents. These raw abilities follow the candidate everywhere. When you hire a candidate you don’t get their past. Rather, you get their talents.

Unless you recognize this crucial distinction you may risk repeating the mistake of the hiring manager who lamented, “I hired your resume, but unfortunately what I got was you.”*

So, what talents are important? Most unique hiring factors are usually acquired skills (software coding) or related experiences (startups, R&D, finance, consumer goods, etc.). Talents typically have more universal applicability across projects, jobs and time. To illustrate the point, here’s a list of targeted talents I developed during my last startup:

1. Integrity. Managing becomes easy when I can count on people to say what they mean and follow through on their commitments. You don’t need lots of policies and rules if you hire people with integrity. You can trust them to do the right thing.

2. Intelligence. Experience is a weak substitute for raw intellectual horsepower. The business environment is constantly changing, and we wanted people with the smarts to solve the problems we don’t even know about yet.

3. Initiative. It is always easier to guide something in motion. Organizations waste tremendous amounts of energy just overcoming static inertia and moving into action. Besides, it is just plainly more fun to work with people who are willing to pitch in to solve problems.

4. Inquisitiveness. It is the best “I” word I identified to describe people who are curious about life and constantly looking for better ways to do things. Without people like this on the team, continuous improvement remains a theoretical concept.

In closing, here are some tips for integrating “hiring for talent” into your own culture:

  • Identifying the core talents and traits most important to your business culture takes time and careful thought; This may require researching the traits of successful people who have done similar work
  • Describe your target talents in writing–make your target hiring profile tangible; if not, we subject every hiring decision to the vague and subconscious biases of individual hiring managers
  • Develop methods for identifying and hiring people with your target talents…that’s the topic of the last blog post in this three-part “Hiring for Talent” series.
  • Talk about your target talents often; make them a visible part of your culture
  • Publicize and celebrate the linkage between those talents and the extraordinary results they produce
  • Align your reward system with your target talents

* Source, Jay Jordan in “Who” by Geoff Smart and Brad Street, pg 6

Too Many Corners on the Box

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Corners on a box define its outer limits and provide stability. However, if we continue adding “corners”, we eventually end up with a shape that approximates a soccer ball and which is both smaller than the original box and highly unstable. In the same manner, over constraining any problem-solving effort shrinks the potential solution set and yields unstable solutions prone to bouncing around from even the slightest external pressure.

I don’t have any empirical evidence to define a percentage effect, but my business experience informs me that once a manager has selected their team they have pretty well determined their fate. There is no other variable that comes remotely close to impacting performance as much as hiring the right team. Yet, there are few other management activities where the typical manager is less equipped to succeed.

The irregular nature of hiring means most managers practice this skill with insufficient frequency to remain sharp. Even managers (including me) who know some of the practices that will improve the odds of making an excellent hire are at times caught unprepared. Since we don’t have an existing funnel of candidates when an opening occurs without warning, we find ourselves in a reactive mode and compelled to publicly post a job description.

Since this Information Age vastly broadens the field of prospective candidates who learn of any job opening, any public job posting leads to a deluge of resume submittals. One common mechanized method for filtering this vast amount of input uses keyword search technology to winnow the stack of resumes to a more manageable size. Therefore, in order to feed the keyword search app, hiring managers develop a long shopping list of required skills and experiences. This check-the-box approach almost guarantees the hiring manager will receive a stack of resumes that tell him/her where a candidate has been (i.e. experiences) but will shed no light on the talents (core capabilities) that produced the results on that resume.

Candidates know the keyword game, too, and fill their resumes with buzz words. When you add our natural human tendency to assign failures to external causes and take excessive or even unwarranted credit for successes, you end up with experience statements on a resume that can mask a candidate’s contribution. An anecdotal example in the Atlanta market surrounds numerous claims by people supposedly involved in developing the Fridge Pack introduced by Coca-Cola around 2001. It’s important to understand whether someone got wet, because they made it rain or were merely around when it started raining.

If that’s not complicated enough, our dynamic marketplace guarantees that the challenges of today will change tomorrow. Consequently, the requirements for the job you fill today will change tomorrow. So when we hire on historical experiences alone we risk hiring built-in obsolescence. So, what’s a hiring manager to do?

A hiring manager must get beyond the numbers (results) to understand how the candidate achieved those results. A hiring manager must arm themselves to pierce the information fog by understanding the talents necessary to succeed in their market, firm and job and then make purposeful steps to discover candidates with those talents (sometimes called traits). Why concentrate on talents? The timeless nature of talents makes them applicable in changing circumstances. The portability of talents allows people to leverage them in any situation. Candidates who possess the desired attributes will bring them to the job just by walking in the door. Talents cannot be acquired via training. We must hire them.

In the next post, I’ll identify four inherent talents that I use to identify and hire exceptional people. The third post of this series will discuss how to discover talents undetectable using assessment tools.

Law. Liberty. Love.

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Liberty has an emotionally powerful appeal. We instinctively crave opportunities to choose our own way and resist boundaries that constrain us. This thirst for self-determination unceasingly appeals for freedom.

In its heroic embodiment, the pull of liberty compels some people to heroic actions that risk their lives and/or fortunes. Many Americans willingly laid down their lives to protect our freedoms. Yet, the license of liberty drives some to acts of callous disregard for others and even unspeakable acts of evil. Ancient writings speak of the chaos which results when every person does what is right in their own eyes and history is replete with examples of despotic power holders imprisoning, enslaving and killing millions of fellow human beings.

That contrast of outcomes suggests liberty is amoral. While often raised as a rallying cry, liberty alone will not produce stable families, societies or businesses. In order to avoid the risks of its worst excesses, we must somehow constrain liberty without squelching its productive nature. We may constrain liberty by external or internal forces.

External forces constrain liberty by cultivating fear and imposing physical force. A small element of a society (in extreme cases a single individual, such as a king or dictator) defines boundaries in the form of laws that prescribe the adverse consequences for unacceptable behaviors. These dictatorial lawgivers possess sufficient power to restrain lawbreakers and compel compliance through fear. In theory, a rational person will fear the negative consequence of breaking a law and instead choose to behave within the constraining boundaries prescribed by the laws of that society. When coupled with the human desire for liberty, this environment will encourage some to flirt with the lines of the law (i.e. how close may I get without getting in trouble?). Of greater and grimmer long-term consequence, the fear induced by the force of law reaps a risk-averse society or organization that squelches creativity and innovation.

An effective external constraint of liberty via laws relies upon several highly unstable presumptions in any society governed by fallible humans.

  1. Prudence — Laws prescribe a limited set of behaviors necessary for a safe and orderly society. Laws are few enough to remember and simple enough to understand such that each individual member of the society may moderate their own behaviors in full confidence of compliance with all the laws of that society.
  2. Reasonableness — Laws require no more than modest efforts to comply and are generally perceived as fair.
  3. Equality — Members of the society receive equal treatment under the laws. There are no exceptions or undue burdens for any element of society.
  4. Reliability — Laws are consistently enforced. Members of society know with certainty that they will get caught and punished for breaking the law and left alone when they comply.

The absence of any element unleashes increasing amounts of lawbreaking, which, in turn, causes the lawgiver(s) to deploy increasing levels of force and induce higher levels of fear. This societal death spiral will either choke the vitality of a society (consider the moribund Russian society under the yoke of the Soviet Union) or may induce rebellion (remember the birth of the United States).

Love for others as an internal driver can also compel us to restrain our exercise of individual liberty. We abandon other activities which may offer greater personal pleasure to care for our sick child. We moderate our language and even speaking volume around certain people or situations. We adjust our style of dress appropriate to the situation. We change our work style or schedule to accommodate the needs of the group. We give of our time, talents and treasure when others are counting on us. We make these choices voluntarily and often without immediate or even certain benefit to ourselves. Out of internally motivated love we choose to sacrifice our personal liberty for the benefit of those around us.

When we allow love to restrain our individual liberty we do not need long lists of dos and don’ts that cover every conceivable situation. We do not need bulging employee manuals or bloated legislation. We only need one beautifully and unforgettably simple guiding principle…Love your neighbor as yourself.

On the other hand, liberty constrained by law creates narrow spaces hemmed in by the boundaries of many laws and wastefully consumes attention and energy to understand and avoid those boundaries. The simplicity of liberty restrained by love creates vast open fields of opportunity for creativity and risk-taking. When I know that others have my best interests at heart I trust (not fear) them. This freedom from fear unleashes the innovative spirit within each of us.

Ask yourself this question…Do I personally and professionally cultivate relationships fueled by love or compelled by law?

Looking ahead…The choice to constrain liberty by law or restrain liberty by love impacts societies and businesses in innumerable ways and results in vastly outcomes. Present society defaults to liberty constrained by laws (including policies and procedures) to the point that “love” for others is rarely heard in the public square or board rooms. How societies and businesses might look if we constructively restrained liberty by love is the subject for a future blog post.