4: Fill Your Company With "A" Players
Every firm wants its employees to be highly effective - but have difficulty in accurately identifying the qualities that make a person an A-player. Hiring for heads-down skills is fairly straightforward, and it's what most companies presently do. And it's not working.
As such, the author suggests reconsidering the qualities you are seeking, and instead consider your A-players to be those who genuinely support your company's values and live by them every day. They are not necessarily "high-flying world-beaters," and they are not all leaders. Companies that perform well have their A-players on the front lines, people who care about getting the little things right. Because they do the real work, and because they interact most directly with customers, they have the greatest potential to make sure that companies become great.
The author avers that hiring great people is the most important thing a company can do. It's not just sticking warm bodies into chairs. And it's not hiring the best of those who apply (you may be attracting the wrong kind of people). There must be some basic standards expected by the organization, which it does not compromise because it is in a hurry to hire.
A company that makes a compromise on a hire is making a long-term compromise for the performance of the organization. Its long-term interests would be better served to wait to hire an A-player, or a strong B-player with the potential to grow, than to immediately add a C or worse. The C-player can do the job adequately, but will never become a high performer in your organization.
(EN: Here, as with other authors who write on the topic of employee qualities, I feel a bit disheartened by the author's acceptance of the notion that people are immutable - companies that cannot make good employees need to hire them from elsewhere, but no-one seems to know how to make good employees, so where do they come from? I'd agree that it is hard to make good employees our of lackluster ones, but disagree with statements of "can't" and "never." Simply stated, if you can only be a good leader when you have good people, then you're not a good leader, and should reconsider whether you should be dispensing advice about leadership.)
Current practices in recruiting and hiring are not successful in staffing companies with A-players. And so, leaders must adopt a new hiring philosophy if they intend to build and transform their organizations. They must learn to identify A-players, learn the skills to attract and recruit them, and learn the patience to wait for them. A leader must be willing to pass, always, on C-players.
Some authors suggest compromise - to fill key positions with solid performers, believing that their efforts in slots that have the highest strategic impact on the organization will be sufficient to carry the rest. In other words, they believe that filling leadership positions with A-players is sufficient.
The author feels this is entirely wrong. You should first seek to fill your front lines with A-players. A lackluster manager can easily achieve performance if he has a great staff, provided he knows enough to stay out of their way. An excellent manager will struggle to achieve goals if all his employees are dead wood. The staff that executes is more important to success than the staff than plans, given ample leeway to work around the weak spots in the plan.
The author speaks to her experience at Southwest Airlines, which was suffering from significant fallout -most of the employees they hired couldn't make it through training. The author applied a values-based hiring method that matched applicants to a behavioral hiring model, and the fallout rate dropped to single digits. This saved the firm millions of dollars in wasted recruiting and training costs for those who would shake out. The author also feels that this approach led to better employees overall, which in turn translates into operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Customer service is an area in which values-based hiring has the greatest impact. Having poor front-line employees interacting with customers is a guaranteed method of driving customers away. Just about everyone has a tale of customer service failure, in which they received such poor service they will never do business with a firm again. And more significantly, people love to share these tales with others, such that the impact of poor service spreads. The opposite is also true, that people receive such stellar service they become fiercely loyal and advocate for your firm - but it takes a lot more to impress than to disappoint, so this tends to happen less often. More to the point, it can only happen when the front-line employees who deliver service to the customer are A-players.
Most firms have a few A-players who shine all the more brightly because they are among a lot of dim bulbs. You may also have a lot of A-players in hiding, unable to excel in a culture that smothers and discourages excellence. But acquiring them is a matter of chance in a company that is not focused on the right things in the hiring process.
An aside: most employers consider the job market to be in their favor - that hundreds of people will apply for any opening and be desperate to come to work. That is entirely true for the C-players. Bad employees are always looking for work because they can't hold down a job. For the A-players, the job market is in their favor, and they know it. Holding down a job is easy, and finding another one is a minor inconvenience. As such, very few employers seem to recognize that when it comes to high-quality labor, it is always a seller's market, and while it's very easy to hire mouth-breathers, it's very hard to hire good talent.
Values hiring is far more effective in the long run than skills hiring, but it is entirely different are requires a different approach in attracting and interviewing quality applicants. Regardless of the labor market in general, you must make a concerted effort to get talented people who are a good fir to your organization. In this chapter, the author means to discuss how to go about it.
Values Hiring: A Strategic Business Responsibility
The author's key point is that hiring new employees is often relegated to the human resources department, and it's a matter that should be given much greater consideration and deliberation. A company is a collection of people, and the hiring process determines what kind of people the company is composed of. If hiring is done inattentively, a company will find itself staffed with C-players.
A few random anecdotes follow:
- One firm decided to interview a candidate at their home, to see what they were like in their natural environment
- Another firm conducts panel interviews with a group of employees, figuring their A-players could recognize others of their kind
- Another firm tied bonuses for managers on employee retention, which made them very circumspect in the hiring process
- One client reported success in asking candidates questions about what specific things they had done to win the accomplishments claimed on their resume
A suggestion for job postings: ads on recruiting web sites attract "a better class of applicant" when the values and behaviors are part of the recruiting message. That is, not just the skills required, but the attitude expected.
A suggestion for recruiting: put in place a system that asks your employees to give you the names of people to interview. On the same principle, you're A-players likely know and have contact with other A-players and will recommend people who are more likely to be a fit to your culture.
A suggestion for interviewing: let you're A-player employees participate in, or even run, interviews with candidates. Successful people know what it takes to be successful, and can recognize others who have those qualities.
The author sees interviewing as the centerpiece of a good hiring process, where her ideas about recruiting differ most from current practices. It focuses on behavior-based interviews, a technique that's been around for a few decades, but one which has not been focused on a particular end. Fundamentally, you must elicit information about attitudes and behaviors and match them to your desired values blueprint.
Candidates know that a job interview is a show, and that getting a job offer means convincing you that they are a good fit for your company. There's a lot of posturing and candidates are coached to be disingenuous. So you can expect a practiced response to the typical interview questions - which makes the candidate seem confident, poised, and professional but tells nothing of their true character.
Values-based hiring also helps to add some structure and logic to the interviewing process. The typical interview is described as "unstructured, rambling, and unfocused" and the interviewers fail to get a good sense of the kind of person they have spoken to. A values-based approach compares prospects to a scorecard of desired characteristics, and has been an effective way to find good workers than traditional interviews.
Creating A New Way To Hire Only A Players
The author describes a number of "action steps" that have been effective for her clients in improving the quality of employees they recruit. The immediate benefits are a dramatic increase in retention and a decrease in employee turnover, but the long-term benefits of having quality staff are much greater.
She also suggests a phased approach: attempting to do this all at once, company wide "would be chaos." Instead, train up a values hiring team in one department, refine and perfect it, and publicize the results - this will build enthusiasm in other departments such that they will recognize the benefits and be eager to adopt it, rather than having it pushed on them.
Step 1: Start with One Key Position in One Department
A good way to introduce values-based hiring is to apply it to a single instance in which the firm needs to fill a role that is both highly visible and has historically had high turnover.
This doesn't necessarily need to be a high-profile position. At one firm, they started with the custodial staff, figuring that maintenance and janitorial personnel are highly visible and the result of their work (a clean environment) is something many could appreciate - not to mention this staff has a high turnover rate: a third annually at this particular firm. The custodial staff was unhappy, other employees and customers were unhappy with the quality of their work, so it was a great place to start.
Southwest Airlines did the same, focusing on their pilots and cabin staff, which are critical to customer satisfaction. Improving the quality of front-line employees has an immediate impact on the quality of service and customer satisfaction scores, which resound throughout the organization.
Selecting the position and implementing a new and experimental recruiting process will require you to coordinate with HR and the hiring department, who may be wary of intrusion but, at the same time, are likely aware of the problem and will be interested in your help.
Step 2: Create a Values Hiring Team to Implement the Change
The author suggests assembling a team of five to fifteen people who will work on the hiring process - some will be behind the scenes, others will be more directly involved in interacting with candidates.
Supervisors who oversee the job function should be asked to identify their best employees to be members of this team, though you should be careful to ensure that it includes people of various tenure. Peer input should also be solicited to ensure that these individuals are respected by their colleagues (not just the pets of their bosses) and participation should not be compulsory, such that they are genuinely interested in serving.
The author stresses that this is a delicate step and you should invest time in choosing wisely.
Step 3: Determine the Key Attributes of the Position
Before considering candidates, it's crucial to determine the factors by which they will be considered: the attributes and behaviors of a person who will do well. It's of particular importance that these are defined by people who are already doing the job, and not handed down from management.
Ideally, this will derive from you company's values blueprint - consider how the values you want to develop would be practiced by a person in this role. You can also interview A-players, asking questions such as "what makes you good at your job?" You can also ask questions to identify negative traits to avoid, such as "What qualities have foiled other people who have not been successful in your role?"
In effect, these are interview of the A-players who are already doing the jobs, and can tell you from experience what you ought to be looking for. Interviewing people for jobs they already hold is good practice, and a good way to refine your scorecard for evaluating prospects.
Step 4: Create an Interview Guide for Values Hiring
An interviewing guide is useful - and critical - to successful interviewing. A good guide will keep interviews ...
- On track - having a written reference means interviewers aren't fumbling for questions to ask
- Focused - The pre-written questions can be carefully selected to ensure they are asking about the right thing
- Fair - Having a written list of questions ensures every candidate is asked the same questions.
The interview guide should have five sections:
- Background Questions - These are the typical questions to verify the skills the applicant has presented in their resume and application, and inquire about other skills that may not have been listed.
- Behavioral Questions - These questions ask the applicant to tell a story about their behavior in an actual situation, similar to one they might encounter in their prospective role
- Culture Match - Behavioral questions that are designed to determine whether a person practices the behaviors that are consistent to your corporate values
- Procedural Outline - An interview agenda that covers everything from greeting the candidate to saying farewell.
- Rating Worksheet - A form to be completed after the candidate is released that scores them against the desired skills and qualities as a method of comparing and assessing candidates.
A key to asking good questions. Rather than a "can you" question that elicits a yes/no response, as the candidate to list things, talk about how they handled a situation, asks how might they handle a situation, in a way that describes the actions they took. A disingenuous person will be exposed fairly quickly, because they will be making it up as they go along rather than relating actual experience and their stories will lack details.
It takes time and budget to develop a good interviewing guide - but having such a guide saves time and budget in the interviewing process and, more importantly, helps you to identify good candidates more easily and, ultimately, hire people who will do a better job and stay with your firm for longer. The return on investment is huge.
A side note: a well-conducted interview also puts candidates at ease. They have a clear sense that your firm is serious about hiring, the process is focused and comfortable, and they walk away with a sense they have been thoroughly and fairly evaluated.
Step 5: Leverage Peer Reviews
Traditional interviews are between managers and prospects and peers are not involved at all. However, "a lot of great brands" have leveraged peer interviewing, and the implication is that this is what has enabled them to improve their recruiting and ultimately their workforce.
She does not go so far as to suggest eliminating the hiring manager from the decision, but does suggest that there should be different interview guides for the peer, manager, and HR department, such that candidates are not asked the exact same questions with three different groups.
Managers who are accustomed to having complete authority and control often find excuses to get around peer hiring. While this stems from control issues, there are some valued concerns about group interviews being onerous, unfocused, and intimidating for the applicant. First, keep in mind that interviewing is not done for the sake of the candidate, but the sake of the company. Second, carefully orchestrating the interviewing process can mitigate or avoid the problems - it is not that a person is interviewed by a panel of five people, but that the interview itself is formless and random that is the cause of distress.
The author cites her experience with Doubletree, a hotel chain that was experiencing high turnover in housekeeping staff, and the practice resulted in reducing turnover to single digits. Two interesting observations: First, the interviews were more relaxed and convivial, because the applicant was dealing with people who spoke their own language - figuratively and literally. Second, employees were more involved in onboarding and mentoring new staff, presumably because they felt some personal stake in the success of a person they had helped to hire.
In another example, Southwest Airlines decided to have their pilots participate in the screening process - checking references. Their suspicion was that pilots are a tight-knit community and were reluctant to disclose negative information about their peers when an HR person or manager called to ask - but when the call came from a fellow pilot, they were much less reluctant to be candid.
Step 6: Train Interviewers to Evaluate Candidates
Traditional hiring practices are often based on gut-feel: a candidate is hired because an interview likes them in a social way or finds them to be physically attractive. Behavioral interviewing can mitigate those factors by focusing upon more objective criteria - the candidates description of their past behaviors provides more specific reasons to hire them than the general sense that "I like him" or "He seems like a good person."
However, interviewers need to be trained to be attentive to the "like" factor and break their old habits.
The author suggests mock interviews as a way of training interviewers. In a hospital setting, she once used nursing students to train interviewers through observation and coaching (and it benefitted the students as well to have practice interviews). The goal of this coaching is to get interviewers to learn to ask the right kinds of questions, follow up to draw out details, and interpret cues and red flags.
In general, it takes four of five interviews for an interviewer to settle into a comfortable and effective routine - and unless you use practice interviews, this settling in process will be done with real candidates, to the detriment of the hiring process.
That's not to say that traditional training is not useful - lecturing and discussion about interviewing provides useful information that might not be discovered accidentally through unguided practice - but merely that traditional classroom training is not sufficient, and practice is needed.
Step 7: Communicate the Change in Your Hiring Process
To reinforce the value of the new hiring process, you're going to need to champion it throughout the organization, with periodic refreshers to make sure people don't fall into old habits.
Tell people about the values process and explain why it is important. Back it up with statistics and testimonials about the benefit to performance and turnover.
Selling the New Hiring Mission
There's an old adage that suggest s if you keep doing the same things, you'll keep getting the same results. For a company that is suffering high turnover, low engagement, and poor quality, this should provide strong incentive for them to be amenable to trying new things.
One particular problem is that many firms think that they are already conducting behavioral interviews - the technique has been around for decades - but when you take a closer look, they often are not: they are attentive to the kind of questions they ask, but not to the purpose of asking those kinds of questions, and ultimately fall back on gut feel.
The author's advice is to break the mold completely: do not try to gently modify the existing processes, but present a new process to completely replace the old.
(EN: The author strays back through a number of the benefits she has already mentioned - faster and better recruiting, a speedy return on the cost of training interviewers to adopt the new way, a more comfortable and fair process for the candidates, etc. This is reiterative and introduces nothing new.)