WEBINAR: Why you shouldn't pick your talent like you did your sorority sisters

I think the biggest scam going in the HR/Recruiting/Talent game right now is this idea of 'Hiring for Cultural Fit'.

I've written about it a few times on the blog (most recently here), but the main point I keep coming back to is that 'Hiring for cultural fit' is simply code (and a convenient excuse) for 'Hiring more people that look/act/think/come from/share the same college just like us.'

I think it takes the focus off of what is usually more important criteria that needs to be considered in the hiring process, AND, it puts HR/Talent pros in a position where they are set up to fail.

For the geeks out there  - I'd say it is the Admiral Ackbar take on hiring - 'It's a trap!'

But fear not, O true believers, there is another way out of this trap. And my friends over at Fistful of Talent are ready and able to step in to help you learn how to focus on what really matters when making selection decisions in the hiring process.

Why is this important?

Because people have an innate and subconscious tendency to hire the most attractive, smooth-talking candidate when making a selection decision. But having the most attractive pledge class on the block may not always prove to be the best hiring strategy for driving your house’s bottom line.

That's why FOT'ers Tim Sackett and Kathy Rapp are going Greek this summer with the FOT webinar FOT’s 2013 Rush: Why You Shouldn’t Pick Your Talent Like You Did Your Sorority Sisters, brought to you by the team at Chequed.com.

Join Join your hosts Tim and Kathy on July 17 at 1pm EST and they’ll hit you with the following:

1. A deeper look at the old way of hiring paralleled to sorority rush. Skit Day and behavioral interviewing, matching interview polos and Lily Pulitzer-laden ladies, Pref Day and the final offer… sorority rush has bad HR written all over it. But adding more steps does not always lead to the best hire; that’s why FOT is giving you an actionable plan to align your hiring process with your desired candidate profile.

2. FOT’s complete guide to dumb things your hiring managers do when making hiring decisions — and how to change them. In order to break the mold you have to know what the problem is, right?  We’ll cover items like hiring based on alma mater, handshake, favorite flavor of fro-yo, etc. in true FOT fashion. You guessed it — we’re calling out common biases and aligning them with your favorite Greek characters from pop-culture for easy reference when making your next hire.

3. We’ll explore the cliché “Hiring With Your Gut” and breakdown when that good old standard makes sense, when it’s lazy and when it may get someone fired (for a variety of reasons). While the paddle is optional in this section, not having a defined hiring process tied to an underlying job profile is not. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered in this section.

4. Five rush strategies to end the Stepford Wife plague in your house today. Ready to mix up your pledge class? We’ll show you how to go from the House Bunny to a balanced group of team members in 5 simple steps.

5. We’ll wrap this webinar by bringing in an industry expert from Chequed.com for a little game of “It’s the freakin’ science, dude.” Hiring isn’t an art—it’s a science. We’ll give you the cliff’s notes on why so you can ace your next hiring exam.

Forget what you learned in college, and put FOT’s rush system to work at your company for a more balanced team today. Who knows, we may even get crazy with an FOT rendition of Shout to close this thing out right…

Register today:

Recruiting the ninth best guy on the team

Note: Yes I am posting about sports again. If you are sick of it I am sorry, you can quit now and go somewhere else to read ANOTHER post about employee engagement or culture or some such. Tell me truly that you aren't sick of those too.

In college and professional sports 'stunt' recruiting demonstrations- mocking up team jerseys, creating fake pictures or scoreboard videos with the player in the new team colors, or imagined play-by-play calls of a player hitting a big shot or winning a championship for his or her would-be new team are not really new or all that novel anymore. 

College teams especially, and sometimes professional ones too, use these kind of demonstrations to try and impress the candidate/recruit, to get them to more clearly envision themselves joining the team, and to play into their egos somewhat - not only will they come to the school or team for the expected reasons, (get an education, make some money, etc.), but they will also achieve their bigger dreams as well - win titles, be idolized, create a legacy - that kind of thing. For big-time and highly sought after recruits these kinds of displays are kind of expected and probably don't do all that much on their own to sway the recruit's decision. After all, once the 5-star high school running back sees about a dozen of these same kinds of pictures/videos from every major college program in the country the effect of any of them is pretty diminished. 

But where these kinds of gestures can still be effective I think is at the next, or even next-next tier of recruiting - for those candidates that are not All-Stars or Top Talent or whatever expression you prefer. For the players/candidates that might only be solid contributors, important to the overall cause but not the most important factor, perhaps just a little bit in the way of treatment typicall reserved for the big time prospects can be the most effective lever the recruiter can pull.  

Take a look at this piece, Chris Copeland signs an offer sheet with Indiana after the team Photoshopped him into an ESPN Mag cover on the Indiana Pacers efforts to sign the former New York Knicks and now free agent Chris Copeland - a guy who just broke into the league at 28 years old, and on a good team like Indiana figures to be the 8th or 9th most important player.

From the Yahoo! Sports piece:

This isn’t a new exercise, teams have been Photoshopping potential free agents into would-be uniforms as part of a free agent pitch for years, but it’s still cool to see. Chris Copeland has signed an offer sheet with the Indiana Pacers, and before doing so the Pacers sent him this gift box (pic at right).

Copeland is a D-League alum that couldn’t even hook on with some of the better leagues that international basketball has to offer, playing in outposts like Belgium and the Netherlands before catching on with New York as a long range shooter and active defender.

Indiana’s biggest weakness in its run to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals was its depth, and in acquiring both C.J. Watson and eventually Copeland, the team has smartly shored up that pine with players that should fit right into (Pacer Coach) Frank Vogel’s system. 

Again, not that big a deal, I suppose, teams can and have been doing these kinds of stunts for ages. But what is distinctive in this example is the approach and attention paid by the Pacers to a guy, Copeland, who will almost certainly not be a star on the team, and will not even be a starter on the team. Sure, the actual contract offer ( 2 years for $6.1M) reflects that, but making the player feel as wanted and as needed as a big time recruit with the simple little photoshop magazine cover, (that probably took someone all of 20 minutes to do), shows that the Pacers understand what is important when working with talent.

There will probably be a few games next season where the contributions of bench players like Copeland mean the difference between a win and a loss. The NBA grind is relentless, and often teams have to get better-than-expected efforts from the 8th or 9th best guys on the team when the stars are not playing well or are tired or someone in the starting lineup gets injured.

By showing the ninth best guy on the team that he is still important, that he is wanted, that he too, can envision himself on magazine covers the Pacers teach us all a lesson about making talent feel important.

Even those who are not so-called 'Top Talent.'

Have a great Tuesday everyone! 

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 166 - 'Can I get a referral?'

HR Happy Hour 166 - 'Can I get a referral?'

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, hosts Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane welcomed Ziv Eliraz, Founder and CEO of the social employee referral management platform Zao.com, to talk about the changing and evolving role ot technology to power and support employee referral programs.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and as always on iTunes - just do a search in the podcasts section for 'HR Happy Hour'.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on BlogTalkRadio

While we ALL know that the employee referral is generally cited as the 'best' source of hire for external hiring, it is also true that creating, managaing, and monitoring these programs has often been an administrative challenge, and keeping employees engaged in the process and referral program can also be a challenge.

Zao helps solve a few of these common challenges, and even if you are not thiking of automating your employee referral process, Ziv shared some ideas and best practices gained from their work with organizations all over the world.

Thanks to Ziv for the time and the insight about the role of technology to empower and extend the classic employee referral program.

Have a great weekend!

My resume is spotty and I don't interview well, but...

Everyone in HR/Talent/Workforce land has bee ALL OVER the recent piece in the New York Times that featured a conversation with Google's head of people operations Laszlo Bock and dug into some of the data-driven insights about hiring, management, leadership, and overall talent management at one of the world's most innovative companies. 

By now you've seen or read the headlines, or 'tweetable' moments from the piece. 

College GPA doesn't matter. College degrees may not matter as much as we've always thought. The classic Silicon Valley 'brain teaser' type interview questions like 'How many golf balls would fit into the Empire State Building?' serve the interviewer's ego much more than they serve to help identify talent. And finally, with rare exceptions, most managers are really bad at interviewing, or said differently, at 'spotting talent.'

Everything in the Bock/Google piece seems kind of intuitive, and kind of validates what probably lots of HR/Talent folks have thought all along - but were or at least felt kind of powerless to to butt up against. 

Posting job specs that say things like 'Bachelor's degree required, MBA preferred' or 'Ten years progressive experience in exactly the same field/industry/discipline that we are currently hiring for, culminating with five years performing exactly the same job somewhere else that we want you to do here', are much more the norm that the exception. Most of us can't, like Google seems to have been able to, 'prove' that college GPAs and specific degrees are not that relevant and predictive of performance so we are kind of forced back into what we feel, or think, or what is most easily defensible when a 'bad hire' occurs.

"Well, he had a 3.7 from MIT in Electrical Engineering - he should have been able to hack it here." You get the idea.

Create rigorous (and potentially exclusionary) enough job requirements and then you're covered - anyone who actually meets those specs and for some reason doesn't turn out to be successful in the organization - well that is their fault not yours. I get why that is comforting to organizations but in the long run, and as eloquently described by Google's Mr. Bock, really doesn't help the organization in finding (and unearthing) the talent they need to thrive.

Recently, I had a conversation with an old friend - an accomplished professional, the holder of an advanced degree from a great institution, but who has had some career ups and downs over the last few years.

While we were talking, one thing specifically stood out to me. He said, 'Sure my resume has a couple of gaps, and once I had to take a job that I was really overqualified for just to keep the bills paid , but I tell you, my main problem I think is that I am just not great at interviewing. Let me in there, give me a chance to show what I can do and I will be fine - but the show, the performance, the song-and-dance that interviews seem to be, well, I just don't do that well at them.'

Our pal Laszlo at Google, for all the data-driven insight that he is applying towards the hiring process isn't advocating scrapping interviews, and my friend here probably wouldn't benefit too much from ditching the kinds of criteria he'd always relied upon - like the 'right degree'.

But I do think the key take away from the Google experience is that questioning long-held beliefs about what makes for a good candidate (and a good hire), is more important than ever. 

For your shop it might be degrees, or years of experience, or 'nailing' the interview. Whatever criteria you have, maybe it's time to take a closer look to see if that criteria does more than simply week people out, but rather actually helps to identify people who will succeed, while not unnecessarily casting people aside.

Your Top Ten Most Wanted Recruits

Earlier this week the FBI announced the capture of one of the fugitives on its 'Top Ten Most Wanted' list, a man named Walter Williams, who had been sought for a number of accused crimes and interestingly had only been named as a 'Top Ten Most Wanted' person one day prior to his capture.  The surge in attention and interest in Williams' case once he was placed on the Top Ten list was considered the primary reason for his rapid arrest, but even at one day, he doesn't get the distinction as being the 'fastest to be apprehended after making the Top Ten' - back in 1969 a man was captured a mere two hours after being named to the list.

Overall, including the now in custody Williams, a total of 500 people have been on this list over the years, with 94% of them eventually getting captured. And while not all of that success can be directly attributed to the attention and following upsurge in tips and calls from the public that generally stem from a case being featured on the list, it certainly has become an extremely effective tool and mechanism for the FBI to bring widespread attention and focus on individual fugitives, and does in most cases lead to their capture.Excellent.

The Top Ten Most Wanted list is successful as a policing tool because it is well known, it rallies the public behind an important cause, there are often monetary rewards attached to successful apprehensions, and finally, and I think most importantly, it is extremely precise in what it asks. The FBI asks the public for help in finding specific, named individuals. They provide the most recent picture of the fugitive that they can. They publish the relevant details of the fugitive's back story to help paint a more full picture of what citizens should be on the watch for.

Simply put, the FBI  asks for help in finding this very person - not someone like him or her, or someone that might have a similar background as someone else unrelated to the case but may be more familiar, or even to find someone who would have been likely to do the same kinds of things that the Top Ten fugitive is accused of doing.

What's the point you might be wondering? (If you have hung on this far, and thank you if you have).

It's that when most organizations go about hiring, and particularly when they try to engage their exisiting employees in the hiring process via referral programs, they are usually not at all precise about what they are looking for. They ask open and murky questions like, 'Do you know anyone who might be a good fit here?' or 'We need to add a few more engineers - here is the job description - do you know anyone who has that kind of background?'

Only in pretty rare circumstances do we or can we engage the organization's current employees to help in finding and attracting specific individuals or can provide candidate profiles that are so precise that employees themselves can more easily identify potential candidates on their own. It would be pretty cool if instead of asking employees to do the kinds of mental and historical exercises that are required to actually succeed at providing hireable referrals, we instead could post a list of Top Ten 'most wanted' recruits like the FBI does.

HR or Recruiting could then slap the list up on the break room wall next to the minimum wage laws poster with a big sign that reads 'Know any of these people? Help deliver one of them to XYZ Corp and a $10,000 reward is yours'.

Could you even create that kind of list do you think? Or maybe you have it already - the Top 10 dream recruits you'd love to convince to come to your organization. And if you do have that kind of a list, is it tucked away in a file on your PC or in a folder of your ATS or is it plastered all over the company in hopes of enlisting your 'public's' help?

Happy Thursday.