The Jealous Girlfriend Interview Technique!

About a year ago Forbes had an article, Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only 3 True Job Interview Questions, that shared the “wisdom” of a handful of Executive  Recruiters on the only things that you should really have to ask a candidate.  There 3 questions where:

  1. Can you do the job?
  2. Will you love the job?
  3. Can we tolerate working with you?

Simple enough.  Straight to the point, and you can assume for the $75,000 you’re paying, this is probably the extent of their screening as well!

In my Recruiting/HR career it’s probably the single most often asked question I get:

“What are your best interview questions?”

Then, you get to hear their questions. About how Google has some really great ones. Even, how I heard once about a company that asked people if they were an animal which animal would they be? Or, if you only pick one vegetable to eat the rest of your life, would it be carrots?  It goes on, and on. Until you want to vomit!

The actual interview questions have very little impact in the success of the interview.

If you are interviewing anyone with some decent smarts, they are going to be able to ace your questions with little effort.  What is important in interviewing is what you allow the candidate to get away with.  I find that most recruiters and hiring managers to be way (I mean WAY!) to easy when it comes to questioning candidates.  See if this example sounds familiar:

Interviewer: “John, looks like you left your last next to last company in May, but didn’t start your current position until July. Can you explain that gap?”

John: “Sure, you know I was doing a great job and I didn’t see myself moving up in that company, so I wanted to go find somewhere I could move up the ladder.”

Bam! At this point, most interviewers move on to the next questions.  When clearly, John deflected, and someone needs to rip into some Gestapo interrogation tactics and find out what’s really going on.  But they don’t, it would be a conflict, he might think we are rude, and well, we’ll move on…

Follow-up questions to original answers during an interview is a skill in itself.  The only interview questions you ever need are the questions a Jealous Girlfriend asks when you come home on a Saturday morning around 3am.  Shoot, just hire Jealous Girlfriends as your interviewers! They’ll get to the bottom of a candidates background!

The hardest interview I ever had was with a woman that was eventually my boss, who was a former U.S. Army interrogator. It was exhausting! It was painful! It was Awesome! I actually lost my voice (after the 7th hour – True Story!).

She was the ultimate Jealous Girlfriend, in fact, I think she trains Jealous Girlfriends in her spare time.  There wasn’t an answer I could give her that she was satisfied with. She just kept at it, until I would slip and say something I really didn’t mean to. Once she smelled the blood, it was over.

The result? She hired the best talent (excluding me) in the entire organization by far!  Bad hired did not make it past here interviewing technique.

So, don’t worry about having the “best” interview questions. Really any will do. Just don’t accept the first answer you get!

 

Too Small, Too Slow, To Succeed

Regular readers of this blog know I’m a huge Michigan State fan, and a basketball fan. So, this week, when the Golden State Warriors won the 2015 NBA Finals I was excited.  Not because I’m a big Warriors fan, although I do love their style of plan, but because former Sparty, Draymond Green, is on the Warriors and played his butt off!

Three years ago Draymond was the National Collegiate Player of the year, then he got drafted in the second round.  Normally, a player reaching that level is a for sure lottery pick, but DayDay was told he was too small, too slow, didn’t have enough skill to play in the NBA.  What they didn’t measure was his ability to lead and his heart to win:

CBSSports.com’s Zach Harper captured Green yelling to his mother, Mary Babers-Green, “Mom, they told me I can’t play in this league!”…”That’s what they said,” Green said postgame. “I won the national player of the year award in college. Consensus all-American. I made every single first-team all-American [team] that you could possibly make. And I was a second-round pick and a lot of people said I could never play in this league. Too slow, too small, can’t shoot well enough, can’t defend nobody, what does he do well? He doesn’t have a skill that stands out. I got heart and that’s what stands out.”

Constantly, throughout the playoffs you heard the Warrior players and coaches say that Draymond was the heart and soul of this team.

That’s the secret sauce to hiring.  You need to hire more employees like Draymond Green.

Employees who appreciate the opportunity they’ve been given.  Want to prove to everyone they are better than other think, but confident in their own abilities.  Willing to work harder than almost everyone else to make it happen.

Sounds easy, right!?!

It’s not, it’s almost impossible to find individuals that have those traits and also fit within your culture!  The Warriors got lucky.  Second round picks in the NBA are throw away picks, most of those players never make an NBA roster.  You can get lucky as well.

Most of the traits you are looking for can be screened if you’re looking for them. The problem is we are usually screening for two or three main criteria when looking at candidates: Do you have the skills for the job? Are you willing to accept the salary we have for this job? Are you ‘hickey’ free? If yes to all three, move forward to hiring manager.

This is where we fail. Things like heart and passion and desire are the differentiators that make someone success. You still need to have the skill, but all skills being close, you then need the intangibles.  Too often we choose someone based on their skill was slightly better.  Once you get to a certain point in skill, a little more skill doesn’t make that much of a difference.

At that point you want to look someone who has a chip on their shoulder. Something to prove. To show the world, yes, I can do it.

“Mom, they told me I couldn’t play in this league!”  Said the man holding the championship trophy.

 

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.

The Path to Becoming a Highly Selective Employer

We all think it, don’t we?  We all want to believe in this notion that we only hire the best and brightest. We only hire quality.  We are ‘highly’ selective.

We’ll show our executives really cool data that shows how ‘highly’ selective we are.  Stats like number of applicants per hire. 25,000 people applied for this position, and we only took the best one!

Time magazine  took a look at college admissions at highly selective colleges. Schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc.  Schools that are super hard to get into because of how selective they are.  You know kind of like the hiring process of your organization. From the Time’s article:

“What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school…

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000,  only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges while 12% applied to seven or more.”

The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend;  the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.”

An illusion of increased selectivity…

You see, just because you turn down a high number of candidates doesn’t make you more selective. It makes you popular.  Too many organizations, and HR departments, are marketing that they are highly selective based on some simple numbers that give an illusion of being highly selective, when in reality, they’re just good at processing a high number of applicants. That’s different from being ‘more’ selective.  Just because you turn down 24,999 candidates doesn’t make you selective. It just means you have a high number of applicants.

So what does make you selective?

I would say Quality of Hire, but that measure is totally subjective in most organizations. Can you demonstrate with real measurable items that the applicants you’re hiring are better or getting better than those previously hired?  Most organizations can’t.

You need to being some sort of pre-hire selection science model that you and your hiring managers believe in. This science gives you measures that you can compare over long period of times and every applicant has the same measure.  This creates a real evidence that you’re becoming ‘more’ selective and on your way to becoming ‘highly’ selective.

 

The Number One Reason Hires Fail

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

Its about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over, and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert, sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills then upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens everyday in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category:  person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 4 hour training session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

T3 – Greenhouse.io @Greenhouse

This week on T3 I review recruiting and applicant tracking software Greenhouse. Greenhouse is one of the newer players in the ATS space having only been in the market about three years, but they’re making a ton of noise.  Primarily designed to be used in the mid-sized and under market, 1000 employees and under is their prime user base.  Heavily used in the startup and tech space (Pinterest, Uber, Twilio, Zenefits, etc.).

Greenhouse take a best in breed approach, partnering with some of the best talent acquisition tech vendors to deliver the best to their users. Companies like Entelo, HireVue, RolePoint, RecruiterFi, etc., all integrate seamlessly with Greenhouse.  I actually prefer this approach (for SMB HR & TA shops), because I like the best technology available, versus an enterprise ATS level system which is usually solid, but not fantastic.

As you can expect Greenhouse isn’t your Mom and Dad’s ATS.  Older designed ATS systems are designed around one core process and most fail because you don’t like that one process. Greenhouse is designed around the core principles of talent acquisition and all you need to do within that function, and you do it the way you want.  Greenhouse isn’t a talent acquisition software, it’s an organizational software, because everyone in your company as access, specific to their role.

5 Things I really like about Greenhouse:

1. The Interview Plan. One of the coolest things in Greenhouse is how they handle interviews. It’s a structured process that drives consistency, delivers interview kits to each interviewee, and describes their role and what they need to get out of the interview. This eliminates an interviewee interviewing with 5 different people and having them all ask virtually the same questions.

2. The Sourcing Plan.  Again, Greenhouse structures the sourcing plan in a way that everyone knows their role and what they are responsible for. They also have full integration with LinkedIn, if you have a LI recruiter license, to allow you to do all of that sourcing from one system.

3. Candidate Scorecard.  Greenhouse has designed a candidate scorecard that easily lets you compare candidates by more than just a rollup number, but by specific skills, cultural fit, qualifications and other details. This lets the organization make a more informed decision on who and why you should select one candidate over another.

4. Agency Portal. We all use staffing agencies. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to manage all that you use within your ATS?  Greenhouse does this, and actually will show you agency performance metrics to boot!

5. Data analytics are very robust. I really liked their pipeline stats feature which you can set up by individual or team. If a candidate is stuck at one spot in process, the system alert you that you need to go kick a hiring manager in the butt and tell them to get going on a certain candidate, etc.

It’s easy to see why Greenhouse has the buzz in the industry right now from an ATS perspective. If I was running a corporate talent acquisition shop right now, they would get high consideration from me as the tool we would be using.  An ATS is an ATS, but I love how Greenhouse has taken the traditional model of an ATS and made what an ATS designed in 2015 should be.  Easy to use, intuitive, great tech and works the way we need to work in today’s tight labor market.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Sometimes You Just Love Someone At First Sight

We aren’t supposed to be those people in HR.  We aren’t supposed to fall in love with a candidate the moment we see them. We tell ourselves we’re better than the rest, than our hiring managers.

The problem is, we do. We do fall in love. In fact, it happens all the time.

For the most part when you go to hire and you start interviewing, you either fall in love with a candidate or you don’t. There really isn’t any in between.  If you don’t fall in love, you never really feel comfortable making an offer, and if you do, you feel it’s probably going to eventually fail.

I’m not saying that those you fall in love with succeed all the time, because they don’t.  Without the love feeling, though, you never feel confident in the hire.

Here’s where I really start to think we might just be over-thinking this entire hiring thing.

If I fall in love with a candidate in the first 2 minutes, why do I need to go on with the interview process?  Do you ever fall out of love with a candidate, you fell in love with at first sight? I haven’t.  If I loved them in two minutes, I loved them after 2 hours of interviewing.  Sometimes you just know.

This doesn’t work for every position. Falling in love works best when you’re really hiring for organizational fit.  When you have a position that you could teach to almost anyone willing to learn, good work ethic, etc. If the primary goal to achieving a great hire is organizational fit, falling in love at first site usually works pretty good on the selection scale.

None of us in Talent Acquisition and HR ever want this to get out. It goes against our secret handshake to make hiring really difficult in our organizations. But, when you really go back and analyze your best hires, almost all of them will have the ‘love’ factor!

I believe in two things when it comes to hiring:

1. Do I really love this person as a hire?  If I can’t immediately answer that question, I need to keep looking.

2. Does this person scare the shit out of me?  Meaning, is this person so talented that eventually they’ll take my job! I hope so. I want to be scared, it makes me work harder. I want people who are better than me. Most people do the opposite. If the candidate is better than you, they pass, because they lack the confidence on how to handle that situation.

If I can answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above questions, I’m going to make some really strong hires.

 

What ATS Should You Select For Your Company?

If you read Monday’s post on Crappy Employment Brands, I told you I would answer the most asked question in HR and Talent Acquisition of all time.  It’s goes with the title to this post, and almost anytime I speak I get at least one person who will ask me this question during the Q&A:

What ATS (Applicant Tracking System) do you use?

The question is basically irrelevant unless the person asking me works in the exact same industry and business that I work in (IT and Technical contract staffing). Which they usually don’t. Usually, it’s a corporate HR or Talent Pro.  My ATS software is designed for something completely different for what they want.

But, more importantly, the question is asked because so many people believe that the ATS is the secret sauce to successful recruiting in corporate talent acquisition.  It’s not.  The secret sauce to great hiring is only expedited by your recruitment technology.  If you suck at hiring, the best ATS on the market will only make you suck at hiring much faster!

The best ATS systems will give you great functionality that includes CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation, talent communities, great sourcing tools, assessment/screening technology and interview technology baked into the product,  onboarding, etc.  The worse ATS systems give you a basic product that will allow you to accept applicants online and process them through some sort of hiring process.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ATS systems on the market.  Most people will demo three or less. There is an ATS that is right for you, but you have to be willing to look at a lot of them.

So, what ATS should you select for you company? I’ll give you some tips:

1. Select an ATS you can afford. That sounds obvious, but most HR and Talent pros over-buy on their ATS, for the amount of hiring they do. If you only hire a hundred people a year, you don’t need an ATS that costs $100K per year to own/rent.  You can great ATS software for a few thousand dollars per year.

2. Select an ATS that has the functionality your business needs.  Again, obvious, but missed by most new buyers. If you don’t need talent communities, paying for talent communities is a waste. If you organization won’t use video interviewing, why are you buying it baked into your ATS.  If you definitely need a pre-employment assessments baked in, you can find a system that will meet your needs. Don’t settle.

3. Select an ATS that most closely fits your hiring process. This sounds stupid, but the majority of ATS failures have nothing to do with the ATS and everything to do with you not willing to change your process. You take the ATS and force them to do all sorts of changes to fit your broken process, and in turn break their proven best practice process. In the end, you fail and blame the ATS. Save yourself the headache and find an ATS that does the flow exactly how you want it. Some are very configurable and will allow you to change and keep changing your process. Some aren’t configurable at all.

4. Select an ATS that you feel you could start using immediately after the demo. ATS systems should be very easy to use. If you feel overwhelmed by the demo, it’s not the right system for you.

5. Select an ATS you can grow into. If you aren’t going to grow, you don’t need to worry about this, so don’t get talked into it.  Most ATS systems are designed for a certain level of hiring. The best vendors will be honest and tell you, the worst will tell you what you want to hear. Find out who their clients are that are your same size and demand to talk to them. If they don’t give you that access, run.  The good vendors will bend over backwards to get you to talk to their current clients.

If you don’t have an ATS, you should be fired. There are literally four or five major players in ATS technology that will give you a one user system for FREE (and only a few hundred dollars to add other users)! Of course, you get what you pay for, but you need to start somewhere! No company that is hiring should not have an ATS. The prices range from Free to millions of dollars.

What ATS systems do I like?  There are bunch: Workable, Jobvite, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Taleo, Newton, The Resumator, Silkroad, iCims, SuccessFactors and Gr8People, in no specific order.

Here’s the funny thing. Some of you use one of these from above and hate them! That’s ATS technology. Most people think everyone elses ATS is better than what they’re using. The reality is, most do about the same thing – post jobs, accept resumes, some stuff in between, BAM you’re hired.

T3 – Workshape

This week on T3, I’m reviewing a new company in the Talent space called Workshape.  Workshape is a new technology that is attempting to change the way we describe human work, and that is no small feat.

Think about all the changes we’ve seen in recruiting and HR over the past 50 years.  What one thing is still constant, and probably shouldn’t be?  The resume! That little piece of paper almost all organizations still rely on to understand what someone’s background is, and what they might be able to bring to your organization.Workshape.ioTalentmatchingfortechstartups20150220111417

Workshape’s technology describes work without using text-based documents. Workshape describes work using times and tasks.  In a major way, Workshape has uncovered a great way for your organization to ensure an organizational fit between a candidate and a hiring manager’s expectations for a position.

Workshape works by both the candidate and hiring manager using a super-simple interface to tell each other what they want from the position. A candidate might want to spend 50% of their time in front-end development and only 10% of their time in testing when in reality the hiring manager is looking for the exact opposite. This is what Workshape does, without the candidate knowing, so they don’t try and ‘cheat’ the system.

The candidate will give you a great, realistic overview of how they would prefer to spend their time in a position. Workshape’s technology then gives you a spider diagram that shows you how the candidate and the position match or don’t match.

5 Things I really like about Workshape

  1. Ultimately, this technology could be a great tool to help companies hire better for fit, not to the organization, but to positions. For some companies, this is a huge issue, that Workshape could solve.
  1. I love the fact that this technology doesn’t allow candidates to tell you what you want to hear. It forces the candidate to tell you what they really want, and ultimately, that might give you great data on whether they would be a great fit or not, for your opening.
  1. The user interface that the hiring manager uses to choose what they want from the position, literally, takes seconds to use, and it’s super easy and engaging for hiring managers.
  1. The results of the match give you a range on closest match, so even if someone isn’t perfect, you can easily see where they didn’t match and make a determination how important that is or isn’t.
  1. You get to find out from candidates what they want to do, and not to do. I can foresee this technology being used for internal mobility as well to match for succession.

Workshape is currently set up as an open market place so anyone can use it and try it.  Currently, their focus on technology in three major metro areas: San Fran, New York and London, from a candidate pool standpoint. But, like I mentioned above, the technology has much more of market, eventually, from a fit standpoint within your own hiring process.

Definitely worth a look, and a try if you’re in that market. If you would prefer to look at how you could implement into your own hiring process for fit to position, reach out to them, I’m sure they would have interest in speaking about that as well.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Job Title Killers

You know what position I would love to apply for!?  Jr. Human Resource Manager, said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on job titles, because job titles just scream, “Personnel Department”, but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters.  Recently, I came across a classic job title mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a, wait for it, “Jr. Industrial Engineer”.  I almost cried.

Really!  No, Really!  “Jr.”  You actually took time, typed out the actual title, and then thought to yourself, “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!”  Don’t tell me you didn’t, because that’s exactly what it says.  “But Tim, you don’t understand we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’.  What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No, I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer”. You’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this, (but why you won’t) just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer”, from $38K to $100K.  Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.

This is why you won’t do it. Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

Please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going, “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!”

If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in half, in front of them, like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line.  That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.