The Big Picture Thinker, or Making Candidates Tap Dance

When trying to find the best candidate for the job, how many interviews are too much?

When do your standard questions become a little insulting or the screening surveys you have carefully crafted go too far, and in the process turn away candidates with the background and qualifications you are seeking, but feel taken aback by having to prove themselves during your application process?

I started to think about this while reading a recent post on The Daily WTF blog, a site normally centered around tales of dodgy computer programming, clueless end users, and mostly amusing but not really cruel hijinks and frivolity for the geeky set. Every so often The Daily WTF shares a job interview story, and while normally kind of fun, the 'Big Picture Thinker' yarn is one of the best I have seen.

So the story goes something like this:

After an in-person technical interview for an unnamed development, (or possibly managerial position), the company sends a standard, (but simple), technical aptitude test to the candidate. The test is meant to help gauge written communication skills. But in this case, not only did the hiring manager forget to attach the test to his email, he surprisingly found himself dealing with a candidate that clearly did not feel it necessary to 'prove' himself by taking the test. Take a look at the candidate's response:

----------------------------------------------------------

From: Thomas B-------
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 10:37 AM
To: James S------
Subject: RE: Written Test


When a big picture thinker with nearly 20 years of experience in 
IT sends you a resume and cover letter like mine and says that he 
can help you win a client that is pulling in 1.3 Billion per year, 
here's what you don't do:  

  1. Set up an interview with a couple of in-the-box thinking 
     Microsoft drones with questions on minutia.  

  2. Hand him a test to see what his "style", attention to 
     detail, and problem solving approach is.  
     
Here's my style: I am certain that I can run circles around your 
best developers with my own, original, incredibly efficient model; 
but more importantly, I am a director that can help them run 
circles around their own current misguided misconceptions.  But I 
am thankful for this lesson, as I have learned that I need to add 
a cover to my cover letter that reads:  If you are an in-the-box 
thinking Microsoft house, and you find yourself regurgitating 
terms like OOP, MVC, TDD, BDD, Cucumber, etc..., without really 
understanding what it all means and how much it is actually 
costing your company to have bought into that industry pushed 
bullshit, then DO NOT contact me.  I'd save you too much money, 
and you obviously do not want that.

So the question now is:  Did I pass the test?

The answer is: Fuck yes I did.

Thomas B-------

PS. You forgot to attach the quiz.  

Do this: Print out a copy of it, ball it up, and throw it at 
your own forehead, because that's what I would do if I were 
there.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Classic, and kind of instructive. Sure, Thomas B. the candidate in question is quite likely a pompous jerk, and doesn't seem like the type of employee that would be a great addition to the team. But it is also likely that he probably did possess the basic technical qualifications for the job, and that his experience and resume details would have borne that out. 

I get the need for organizations to be careful, thorough, and sure, (or as sure as you can be), before pulling the trigger on a new hire. The stakes are high, the pressure to find top talent is palpable, and the costs of making a bad hire are high. But at the same time making candidates unnecessarily jump through hoops, answer incredibly basic questions, and otherwise put them into a kind of disrespected and subservient position is not really warranted either.

So the next time you are about to administer that 'test', think about whether or not you too should 'print out a copy, ball it up, and throw it at your own forehead.'

New Technology for Recruiting - on the HR Happy Hour tonight

Tonight at 8:00PM ET on Episode 99 of the HR Happy Hour show, (can you believe Episode 100 is just one short week away?), we will be joined by Ty Abernethy of Zuzuhire, and Craig Fisher the genius behind TalentNet Live and a million other cool things in the recruiting and technology space.

You can listen to the show from the show page here, using the listener call in number 646-378-1086, or using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

At the recent HRevolution event in Atlanta, Craig led one of the most popular sessions about 'Cool New Tools for Recruiting', and Ty has actually created and operates one of those tools at Zuzuhire. If you had not had a chance before now to check out Zuzuhire, give it a look - it provides an innovative and fun way to create online interviews and applicant screening processes that can incorporate video and audio response, text, and simple multiple choice questions.

But beyond the 'cool factor' of these new tools, tonight we will also dig a little deeper as to how corporate recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions around technology in the hiring process, and even how candidates can better prepare themselves and make the most effective presentations in this rapidly changing space.

After all, cool is only cool if it helps us hire better, faster, and more efficiently.

It should be a fun show and I hope you can join us live, and be sure to follow the backchannel on Twitter using the hashtag #HRHappyHour.

Whoworks.at - See your LinkedIn Network as you browse

Whether you are a job seeker researching organizations that you would like to work for, a recruiter seeking talent from competing firms in you industry or region, or a sales professional examining the websites of customers and prospects - one thing is for certain - it sure helps to know someone at the target company. Having an 'in' of some kind, some kind of plausible way to connect with an actual person inside, as opposed to filling out a generic 'contact us' web form, or submitting an anonymous resume into what can sometimes be the black hole of the ATS.

No doubt being able to connect, most optimally by leveraging an existing and hopefully trusted network seems to offer one the best opportunity to get the job application noticed, to find a potential candidate to recruit, or to connect with a real decision maker in a sales process. But sorting out who you might know, or might be connected via other friends and colleagues, typically meant a scan through email contacts; a local CRM or ATS system; or, increasingly, a trip to LinkedIn to perform a quick Company search. Kind of tedious process, but necessary.

This week a new Google Chrome browser extension called Whoworks.at launched, that makes the entire 'Who do I know that works here?' question much easier to answer. After you download and install the Whoworks.at extension, simply click the extension icon just to the right of the Chrome toolbar, and immediately you will be presented a pop-up window displaying all your LinkedIn contacts and extended network that connects you to whatever company whose site you are currently browsing.

Here is a screen shot of my Whoworks.at information for Oracle Corporation:

And here is the view of my LinkedIn network connections at the NBA, (sadly, my network there is not nearly as robust):

I still can't believe LeBron has not accepted my LinkedIn invitation yet.

From within the Whoworks.at pop-up, you can also browse LinkedIn data for recent hires and promotions at the target company, and click on any LinkedIn profile name to be taken directly to that person's LinkedIn profile page.

Whoworks.at is a really neat and useful tool to add to Google Chrome and that makes the task of seeking and reaching out to connections at companies of interest that much easier. And it does get kind of addictive after a few minutes, there is a little bit of a curiosity factor that sets in as you browse around on the internet, sort of wondering if you know anyone at a given company.

Check it out and let me know what you think, simply go to Whoworks.at and provide your email address and a beta invite link should show up in your inbox really quickly.

Happy stalking!

Figuring Out Whom to Recruit First

Admission - the title for this post is an almost complete lift from a recent piece on the MIT Technology Review blog titled 'Figuring Out Whom to Please First', an examination of the growing importance and integration into traditional customer service processes of so-called 'social influence' measures, specifically the Klout score.

The MIT article postulates that in addition to the segmentation of customers based on level of spend or history of past purchasing behavior, that more companies are and should consider newer measures of relative customer importance and influence in their customer service strategies.  This consideration and awareness of social influence, (assuming for the moment you believe the Klout score does indeed, measure influence), is made more manageable and possible by the integration of the Klout measure into existing CRM systems and processes, as well as newer third-party tools (Hootsuite, CoTweet, etc), that are used by both customer service representatives as well as corporate PR and communications folks.

From the MIT piece:

Several providers of customer relationship management (CRM) software have incorporated Klout into their applications in the past year. If a customer calls up a company that is using such an application, the phone rep can get a quick readout of the person's score—assuming the rep has key pieces of information, such as the e-mail address that the customer uses on Twitter or Facebook. Citibank, McDonald's, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that can pull up a Klout score, according to Jesse Engle, the CEO and cofounder of CoTweet, which incorporates Klout into its CRM software and counts those four companies as customers.

And with the incredible growth and use of the social networks, and the getting-too-many-to-count examples of major social media PR disasters stemming from poorly handled customer service situations, more companies are keenly aware of the potential harm that even one highly aggrieved and motivated customer can cause on the social web, a situation that is potentially even more risky when that customer in question can effectively connect to a wide audience of friends and followers. 

So does or should this new and emerging ability to attempt to quantify 'influence' impact organizations in the recruiting and assessment processes? More Applicant Tracking Systems are delivered with pre-built and simple to deploy integrations with the social web for a variety of purposes, (sending referrals, looking for common friends, porting job listing to social outposts), so incorporating a candidate's Klout score would likely be a simple matter of inserting a small bit of Javascript. 

Could we see a time where it made sense to include these kinds of scores in conjunction with more traditional screening processes, and not just for the kinds of roles that 'require' some kind of social chops, but really any rank and file job throughout the organization?

If you buy in to the notion that employees from any part of the organization can be your best brand ambassadors, then wouldn't it make sense to think about influence scores and a given candidate's potential to help communicate, promote, and define your company brand? All things being equal, would companies be more interested in 'influential' candidates? Or is there a down side to online influence and popularity that could actually work against the candidate? 

We know not all customers are 'equal'; anyone who has walked past all the premium status passengers in first-class on the way back to seat 29B gets this. All candidates are not equal either, but figuring out which ones get the upgrade to the front of the plane seems to be getting more complex all the time.

Have a great weekend!

The Company Soundbite

Recently the Tech news aggregator Techmeme, launched a neat little sidebar titled 'Who's Hiring in Tech', that contains a list of some of the biggest names in the tech space that are actively looking for talent.

Not terribly interesting on the surface, many companies, especially tech enterprises are facing targeted talent shortages, and increasingly pitched battles to duke it out for the best developers.  But the cool aspect of the 'Who's Hiring in Tech' ads, are the little soundbite messages that follow the company names, that according to Techmeme, are written by the hiring companies themselves.

Take a look at the image on the right and see what you think of some of the even-shorter-than-a-Tweet taglines that attempt to answer the 'What's it like to work here?'  or the 'What do we actually do here?' questions. 

What taglines seem to connect and resonate with the most?

I kind of like Zynga's - 'It's fun over here. Let's play.' and Foursquare's funny URL redirect that actually takes you to their home page, (it might have been smarter to have the kitten URL redirect to their Careers page, but still it is kind of neat).

It is interesting to see these mostly recognizable and complex organizations try to distill their employment branding message down to a short phrase, and kind of instructive as to the aspect of their company that they decide to emphasize, when clearly the format allows only an incredibly targeted focus.

I would think it would be a good exercise for those corporate recruiters and talent pros to undertake, to see if you could distill the essence of your unique employer value propostition to a short phrase. 

I suspect if your phrase comes easily to mind, or if you ask 10 people to craft one, and 7 or 8 of them are really similar, then you likely have a pretty good idea of what your company offers current and prospective employees.

On the other hand, if you struggle to come up with your tagline, or if their are widely divergent opinions on what the tagline should read, then it may be time to step back and sort out what you do indeed want to portray to the outside world of candidates and prospects.

What do you think? Does it even make sense to try and sum up an EVP in about six words?