Author: Mary Ila Ward

“At Google, we front- load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing and cultivating new hires.”  – Work Rules!

Let’s face it, hiring is where your organization starts. It’s where HR starts its job and quickly proves or disproves its value, and it is where, as I saw through digging through lots and lots of research and writings by those who are winning in business, where you need to be focused on intently if you are going to be able to have an innovative workplace.

But we’ve all made a bad hire and we know it.  Sometimes we feel like we are playing Russian roulette when we hire, despite our best efforts, never knowing if we are picking up an A player or a bench warmer at best.

If you want to innovate in the workplace and you want to win at being a best place to work, you need to start by being the best at whom you let in the door.

Here’s how to do it:

1 DEFINE.

• Clearly define your culture.  I recommend you do this through values.
• Clearly define what makes your A players- A players across the organization and in particular roles.  For example, A players’ characteristics across the organization are probably going to be directly linked to the values you’ve defined.  They may even be competency based.  Characteristics that define A players for particular roles may be more specific to the knowledge, experiences and/or skills they have that lead to success. These could be different from position to position.

2. DESIGN and MEASURE your hiring process against the standard you’ve created in the first step. 

Many often tie this standard to FIT. As Laszlo Bock, Author of Work Rules! says “Superb hiring isn’t just about recruiting the biggest name, top salesperson, or cleverest engineer.  It’s about finding the very best people WHO WILL BE SUCCESSFUL WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR ORGANIZATION, who will make everyone around them more successful.”  (emphasis added).  Google calls it “Googleyness” and with that, I’m not sure I’d be a fit there.  Would you?

3. Look at the research to understand what selection methods predict work performance and employ them in your hiring process. Check out this gem of 85 years of combined research on the topic here.

In case you need the quick cliff notes version, it found that work sample tests (29%)- which also could be called realistic job previes- are the best predictor of job performance followed by cognitive ability (26%) and structure interviews (26%).  Employing these, except in the case of cognitive ability, only works if you’ve been able to do step 1 by defining what these methods should measure.  However, a combination of these methods, or a multiple hurdles approach, is better than any single method.  So stack them up in your process.

4. GO find the best.

Actively go and find the best talent; don’t post and pray.  This starts with building your social capital.  If you need help doing this, check out these posts:

• 6 People You Need to Build Social Capital With
• Social Capital How-To: 5 Steps to Build the #1 Competency You Should Be Developing
• 3 Reasons Why Social Capital Should Be the #1 Competency You are Developing
• Don’t Network, Develop Your Social Capital

5. TRAIN people on how to interview for Pete’s sake. And its no one’s fault that they don’t know how to do it, this isn’t a born trait. Interviewing is a learned skill that gets better with research grounded guidance and practice. Provide tools, like structured interview formats and the scoring mechanism that goes along with them, but train people on how to use them.  Use case studies, examples, and data to back up your points so that hiring managers want to use the tools you are giving them instead of feeling like it is one more hassle to fool with.

6. Use DATA.  Track your hiring against performance and see what trends arise.  Do you need to change your process? More clearly define your standards?  Train a certain department or group on better hiring practices?  Constantly improve what you are doing by seeing what your outcomes are and how you can let that inform your inputs.   And as you will see below, this data should also include benchmarking for diversity goals through hiring.

What about diversity?

But “whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” you say. This all sounds all well and good, but I thought the title of this post said to hire for fit AND diversity.  You’ve read (and if you read the gem of a meta analysis linked above, you caught on to this) that some of things I am advocating for, like cognitive ability tests often discriminate against anyone that isn’t white and male.  And there’s a lot of information out there about how hiring for fit limits diversity.  Even Harvard Business Review said such, and who argues with them? Ouch.

But I believe where there is a will, there is a way, and you can hire for fit and diversity. And you need to because the combination of the two leads to innovation.  You don’t get it without them both.

Here’s some ideas on how to make sure your intentional about hiring for diversity:

1. Create collaborative hiring teams. Teams that are made up of different people along different traditional diversity lines (age, gender, race, etc.) but also along departments, tenure with the company etc.  No one person should be able to make a hiring decision alone.
2. Just like you need to train people on how to interview, you need to talk and train openly on unconscious bias. What it is, how to spot it, and how to avoid it.  You also need to teach and train on the value of diversity and how the topic can be much deeper than how society plays it.  Some things to look at to help you do this are:

• Microsoft unconscious bias training
• Diversity Inc
• com
• Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• Privilege Walk Activity

These lists may seem overwhelming, but you may be able to check off some of the things you are already doing.  Once you’ve done that, start with one thing at a time and work from there.  It’s worth it.   Innovate or die.

Like this post?  You may also like:

• Your Match Made in Heaven… Organizational Fit Trumps Job Fit
• Tech Hiring Trends Right Now
• Why You Should Hire for Culture Fit, Not School Credentials
• How to Hire for Culture Fit
• Samantha Bee has the solution for Hollywood’s diversity problem: “Just hire people”
• How Tech is Changing the Game for Diversity Hiring

We had a fun time at #ALSHRM16 learning from some HR thought leaders. In keeping with our tradition to learn more, not only from the conference presenters but also from attendees at the conference, we asked people to respond to the question, “What are your biggest HR pain points?”

 

Although in no way a scientific study, here is what we got:

First of all, as a comparison to last year’s pain points gathered at  #ALSHRM15 we see:

• Compliance training lost the number one spot by a landslide to one of last year’s number two contenders- Employee Development (thank goodness, employee development as we call at Horizon Point, is “fun HR” instead of legalistic HR)
• A rise in concern over Benefits (ACA issues anyone?)
• Other categories seemed to remain consistent, with leadership training continuing to be high on the list and a slight uptick seen in challenges related to talent sourcing/acquisition AKA- recruiting

 

How do we address these pain points? 

The list of challenges and the list of potential solutions in any field, not just HR, could be endless, but one theme emerged from the conference that could potentially help address all areas, in particular the top two pain points of employee benefits and employee development. And this is to FOCUS ON STORY. Help tell your company’s story and get your employees to tell theirs. 

Whether it was the “Black Guy in the C Suite”(Marlin Smith) talking about diversity challenges, the hysterical Kristin Scroggins talking about addressing generational issues in the workplace, Laurie Ruettimann talking about what HR should measure or Cord Sachs discussing recruiting, all emphasized the human side of HUMAN resources, which starts with story.

• Want to address benefit issues, do you know what benefits your employees find valuable? This is found in their story. Who are they? What do the need and want for themselves and their family? You’ll be likely to find a variety of responses if you have a diverse workforce. So, design an al a carte benefits plan where employees can self-select what they want and need, but select benefits that are in keeping with your company’s culture in that list of options (see the recruiting challenge bullet). This can help you save on benefit costs and definitely control rising costs.  Give employees a pre-defined amount they can spend on benefits and let them self-select. A good podcast on this concept can be found at HR Happy Hour.
• Want to develop employees, it goes back to the same point, find out who they are through the solicitation of their story. For resources on how to do this, see below. When you know the answer to “who” you can then better design the “what” and “how”.
• Having trouble with talent acquisition? Define your company’s story and focus on relational recruitment by sharing this story at the beginning of the recruitment process and getting the candidate to share theirs.  Is there a fit? For example, job postings at Kenetix tell a story- case in point, this one.
• Make sure your numbers/analytics tell a clear story. Measure and address the numbers that can be predictive, not backward looking. This helps shape your company’s story by letting numbers give credibility to that story. Numbers can tell a story about what benefits you should and shouldn’t offer as well as what type of employee development needs to take place.

Here are some tools that help you convey the importance of story and/or solicit your company and employee’s story. We suggest you incorporate some of these into any employee development, teambuilding and/or leadership training you utilize:

Story and Empathy

The Privilege Walk

Wildsparq Leadership Development Platform The first module of this platform starts with STORY.

Project Implicit

Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work The appendix of this book has great questions designed to engage people in a discussion of their story.

 

What’s your story? What’s your company’s? Are you allowed to tell it?

As I wrote about earlier, I took a week long vacation, and vowed for the first time in five years to completely disengage from anything and everything work related. As we know, in our hyper-connected society, many of us have the ability and flexibility to work from anywhere in the world at anytime, and this can be a good and bad thing.  In fact, while on my unplugging venture, reading this article about work/life imbalance and the workplace flexibility paradox stood out like a sore thumb.

After staying true to that promise, here are some lessons I learned:

1. The people you work with support you unplugging. The aren’t angry, resentful or frustrated that you are taking time away, they are glad for you and are willing to support and even hold you accountable for doing so. Case in point, one email I got from a client when I got back said, “You better not be reading this until you get back from vacation!”

2. Unplugging helps you reconnect with what you truly enjoy doing; realize these enjoyments need to be incorporated into your daily life.  I took time to read, run, cook and most importantly just play with my family while gone. I do all these things at home, but not as regularly as I should. Making time to do them while in the throws of the routine of work and home is important and helps with not hitting burnout mode.

3. Leaving the temptations at home helps. I left my laptop at home, and this kept me from feeling like I needed to check email or work on something. Had I had it with me, I’m not sure if I would have stayed true to the commitment. Find a time, even if it is not a vacation in the true sense, to leave your work temptations someplace else and regroup.

4. Email is not that important.  I returned to almost 500 emails. I was surprised to see that only about 1-2% of the emails I received while gone were all that important. Also relevant to this fact was the lesson I learned- if you send fewer emails, you receive fewer.   I’m working now to not be ruled by my email. I’m only checking it once or twice a day and thinking before I send one. Is it really necessary?

Have you unplugged lately? What did you learn?