Category Archives: Hiring Talent

Identifying Talent

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“How do you identify emerging managers in your organization? As you look around your team, what do you observe, what catches your eye?” I asked.

Wendy spoke first, “I watch them in meetings. I look to see, when they speak, do other people listen? It’s funny; I am not listening for something brilliant to come out of their mouth. I observe others’ response to them. For a person to be a leader, someone has to follow.”

Marion was next, “I look for someone who asks questions. It’s easy for a person to just spout off, how much they know about this or that. But if someone is asking questions about purpose, why we do things, what is the impact of a process? Not dumb questions, good questions.”

Jeremy raised his hand, “I look for someone who is thinking ahead. We may be working on something right now, but this person is two or three steps ahead, laying out material, staging equipment for the next setup, even if the next setup is tomorrow.”

I am curious. How do you identify emerging managers in your organization? As you look around your team, what do you observe, what catches your eye?

Our online program, Hiring Talent 2013, kicks off January 25. Pre-registration is now open.

Can He Do the Work?

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“The profile on this candidate is outstanding,” Rory explained. “It will take a special person to fill this role, and by golly, I think we have found the right person.”

“The profile is outstanding compared to what?” I asked.

Rory looked askance. “What do you mean?”

“It’s nice that he has a personality, but can this candidate do the work?” I pressed.

“Well, the profile says he is suited for this kind of work. Besides, everyone on the hiring team has interviewed him and they really like him,” Rory defended.

“It’s nice that he is a likeable person, but can this candidate do the work?”

“His resume attracted our attention. It says that he has experience in our field and he answered all of our technical questions. He really speaks our language.”

I let Rory squirm for a minute. He had already made his decision, and was waiting to see if I would support it. Without asking any hard questions. “Rory, this role is for a VP of Operations. It’s nice that he understands the technology, but can this candidate do the work of an Ops VP?”

“I don’t know where you are going with this?” Rory shook his head. “I was hoping you would get on board with this guy.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I get on board. Can he do the work? It’s a big role, integrating your sales, your sales forecast with production. You have six month lead time raw materials, tooling that changes, building to stock, assembling to order, staging, logistics. This guy will be coordinating teams of people in meetings, resolving communication paths, working on bottlenecks, manicuring system constraints. It’s nice that he understands the technical mechanics of your product, but can he do the work of an Ops VP?”

For a VP, What Is Necessary?

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“This hire is for a Vice-President,” Cooper explained. “And there is no one inside that I can promote. So, we have to go to the outside, likely have to go outside our industry. It’s a scary proposition, bringing someone in at the level without our specific industry background.”

“Why is it scary?” I asked.

“It’s a lot of money. It will likely take this person several months just to understand the way our company works in the market. If we make the wrong hiring decision, it’s not only expensive, but we lose time. Not to mention the impact on the people in this division.”

“What will be your decision criteria?”

“We have a job description, and several resumes. In fact, do you want to look at the resumes while you are here?” Cooper baited.

“I wouldn’t know what to look for?” I replied.

“Sure, you would. You know our company, and you would know a VP when you see one. Just give me some direction, a screen, a filter,” he pressed.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t recognize someone with VP potential, but they still might not be the right person. I don’t know your critical role requirements, because you haven’t defined them. When you look at this role, and its parts, its Key Result Areas, what is necessary?”

A Decision Based on Hope?

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Sylvia was perplexed. Difficulty trusting her judgment. “I have this gut feeling that Porter would make a good supervisor. But, he is our best technician. If I promote him and it doesn’t work out, I might lose my best technician.”

“Why do you feel Porter has the potential to be supervisor?” I asked.

“Intuition,” Sylvia replied. “The only thing I am concerned about is his people skills. As a technician, he is a good producer, and whenever anyone has a question, he is the lead guy. Whenever anyone has a problem, they talk to Porter. When anyone has a decision to make, Porter gets consulted. He has a knack for knowing what needs to get done next. I can see his planning skills, always looking ahead. He knows when materials are supposed to arrive, when we need to order, even for the longer lead time stuff.”

“Then what is your hesitation?”

“Sometimes, his people skills are a little rough,” she explained. “I don’t want to promote him and then find out he is a dictator.”

“Rather than assume, or guess, or hope that Porter has the potential to be a supervisor, how could you find out? How could you find out before you promote him? How could you confirm that he is not a dictator?”

“I guess I could talk to him,” Sylvia searched.

“And, so, he tells you he is not a dictator. Is that enough? Is that enough evidence to make a firm decision to promote him?” I pressed.

“Well, no.”

“Then how? How can we create tangible evidence that he has the potential to work effectively with other people?”

“I guess I could give him something to do where he has to work with other people in the capacity of a leader?” Sylvia tested.

“Not a permanent role assignment, but project work. Give Porter a project where he is the project leader for a specific task that requires him to use the resources of other people on a project team. If he fails, you have a broken project, big deal, you can manage that risk. If he is successful, you will have tangible evidence on which to base your decision. Not a hope, a wing and a prayer, but tangible evidence.”

Potential is There, If You Know How to Look For It

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
Really enjoyed your last post on Discovering Potential in an Interview – I find this quote particularly interesting: “Potential does not live in the land of hypothetical. Potential lives in the land of discretion”. Might you be able to elaborate? My take on is that in order to assess that someone has potential you a) need fairly concrete evidence of some kind rather than “what if’s” and b) you need to locate subtleties in their interview to demonstrate evidence of this – this could be completely wrong though?! I work with a number of project managers and assessing and approximating someone’s potential is fascinating to me.

Response:
Looking for potential, you are quite right. I don’t hope on a wing and a prayer, I look for concrete evidence of potential. And I don’t think it’s subtle. If it was a snake, it would bite you.

Ask this simple question. “How does a person with potential, behave?” Now, interview for that behavior. And listen.

Potential lives in the land of discretion. It’s all about decisions. How does a person, with potential beyond their current role, make decisions?

A person with potential beyond their current role, when faced with a decision, –

  • Will ask questions about the context of the decision, assembling surrounding factors
  • Will generate alternate paths to the goals, contingency plans in case something unexpected happens
  • Will take responsibility for the decision, NOT give the decision to someone else, or ask the decision be made for them
  • Will be able to talk about (articulate) their internal process for making one decision over another
  • Will create visual representations of their decision making process, either checklists or flow charts identifying elements of the decision

In the interview, ask questions about specific projects where decisions were made and interview for these behaviors.

Tell me about a project where things did NOT go as planned, where you had to make a decision that changed the direction of the project?

  • What was the project?
  • What was the length of the project?
  • What was the purpose of the project?
  • What happened, that required you to make a decision?
  • How did you identify that things were going wrong?
  • What decision was made?
  • When was the decision made?
  • Who made the decision?
  • Who was accountable, if the decision turned out to be wrong?
  • What factors did you consider when making the decision?
  • How did you communicate the decision to others involved in the project?
  • What was the impact of the decision?
  • What was the result of the decision?

You will either get answers from the candidate or you will get blank stares. Ask about more than one project. Every project has decision points. There is concrete evidence of potential, one way or the other, if you, as the interviewer, will look for it.

We kick off Hiring Talent – 2013 in January. Watch for details.

Discovering Potential Capability in an Interview

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Quick excerpt from a candidate interview –

“How are you given work assignments?” I asked.

“Well, I meet with the PMs on a weekly basis, just to catch up on progress completed the prior week, update them on logistics for this week. I have to coordinate with our manufacturing shop to make sure the manufactured cabinets and installation components are all coming out to staging at the right time to be installed. So, I really have to figure things out based on piecing together all these moving parts,” the candidate replied.

“How often are you given work assignments?” I pressed.

“Well, even though I recast everything on a weekly basis, I am really trying to run, believe it or not, one year ahead of schedule. In my role as project scheduler, I use a project management software to book out the jobs based on various schedules and the contracts. It’s not really my job to dissect everything, but I do it anyway, just to double-check, make sure no one is asking for the impossible. It’s only when I plan out a year, especially for some of our big jobs, that I can schedule in all the smaller jobs. Things get very fluid at times. It’s easy to get in the weeds.”

This candidate was currently in a Stratum II role. It was his job to publish details in a 60-day look forward production schedule. To do that, he had to accumulate data from several sources and coordinate people, materials and equipment. From one week to the next, there were significant changes to that schedule that required constant coordination and re-coordination. To be effective required solid S-II (Cumulative) processing.

The question on the table is potential. What is this candidate’s potential? Is it possible that the candidate has greater potential capability than is required by his current role?

I always examine the difference between prescribed duties and discretionary duties. Prescribed duties in this role required a 60-day look forward, a published schedule. As long as that 60-day schedule was published, no one had complaints.

But it’s in the world of discretionary judgment that effectiveness lives. “It’s only when I plan out a year, especially for some of our big jobs, that I can schedule in all the smaller jobs.”

“Oh, really. Tell me more,” I wondered.

“You can’t just schedule projects one after the other. Project schedules have their ups and downs. We have a committed crew on a large project, but we might get a project delay waiting for another trade to finish a segment. If that happens, I have a crew that I can temporarily shift to a smaller project. If I can do that, sometimes I can accelerate the schedule of the smaller project, knock it out and get ahead.”

As I listen to this description and ask more drill-down questions, it appears this candidate may be moving in transition from S-II (Cumulative) to S-III (Serial) applied capability. He is planning “what-if” scenarios, alternate paths to the goal, and truly working a 12-month schedule. I don’t make this judgment based on a hope and a prayer. I make this judgment based on real facts and behavior.

Potential does not live in the land of hypothetical. Potential lives in the land of discretion. How does this person make decisions? What is the Time Span of those decisions?

Interviewing for Potential

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
Many proponents of Requisite Organization claim that a person needs to have work commensurate with their potential capability to be engaged and fulfilled at work. They claim that being required to work at a level of work that is below one’s potential capability can lead to high levels of stress and negatively affect a person’s health. Assuming this is true, how do you assess a person’s potential capability in an interview? If you ask questions about their past experience to assess the level of work they have done before this may not reflect their potential capability (because they may not have had the opportunity to do work commensurate with their potential capability before). Doesn’t this approach entail the risk of hiring someone who will be frustrated, stressed or bored by the level of work in the position?

Response:
You make it sound like working below one’s potential capability is devastating. Everyone works on Time Span task assignments all over the place. What is necessary is that a significant portion of one’s work be fully challenging. And understand that this is ALWAYS a moving target. People constantly grow and mature, we are constantly changing, our Time Span capability constantly increasing. Matching the Level of Work with capability is, as Elliott puts it, always a “work in progress.” So, we do the best we can. As managers, we do the best we can to make this match.

Conducting a candidate interview is likely the most difficult assessment challenge we face, as managers. In most managerial situations, we can observe behavior and output, we can have managerial conversations with our team members, we can ask very direct questions about problems that have to be solved and decisions that have to be made. It’s a walk in the park compared to the candidate interview.

Hiring Talent always carries risk. Making the wrong hire is expensive. It costs dollars, time, energy, morale. I will only make hiring decisions based on evidence of work output based on past experience. I will not speculate, I will not hope, I will not assume. I will only hire on evidence. This means I will restrict my questions to real situations that can be observed and verified.

Does that mean I might miss potential? Perhaps. But I don’t use the interview to assess potential capability. I use the interview to assess applied capability. I am not a clinical psychologist, I am not a soothsayer, I am not a fortune teller. I am a practitioner.

And, as a practitioner, here is one method to get an accurate picture of the prospective candidate.

I take the resume and work it chronologically. This means, I start at the back and work forward, because resumes are typically presented in reverse chronology. I have difficulty seeing patterns and progress in reverse, so I start young and work forward. This simple chronological method reveals natural progress of increasing capability as someone moves through their career. Gets me really close to their highest level of current applied capability.

I have some other thoughts about interviewing for potential capability, so let’s pick that up tomorrow.

Don’t Interpret

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“I still think it is a valid question,” Raymond remained adamant. “I want to know where they think they will be in five years. I think I can interpret a lot from that.”

“Raymond, I don’t want you to interpret anything in the interview process. The likelihood that you will misinterpret the response is too high for that to be a valuable question. It will give you minimal insight and introduce confusion into the interview process. You will make a hiring decision based on something you are trying to interpret. Your interpretation is likely to be wrong and it will tend to color the rest of the interview.”

Raymond’s face betrayed his stomach. He remained defensive. He had hung so many interviews on that one famous question.

“Raymond, you end up relying on your gut feeling, because you have not established anything else in the interview process on which to base your decision. It is no wonder you are not satisfied with the candidates you have hired in the past.”

Amateur Psychology

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“How many of you took a psychology course in high school or college?” I asked. A few hands went up. “And how many of you have a degree in psychology?” Most of the hands go down, still leaving one in the air. “And are you certified by the state to practice either as a psychotherapist or a psychoanalyst?” The single hand dropped.

We were talking about hiring and the tendency of the manager to try to climb inside the head of the candidate to discover motivations and intentions. “Stop trying to play psychologist! You are not qualified to do it,” I said, looking straight at Raymond.

“But, I think it is a valid question,” snapped Raymond. “I just want to see where their head is at.”

“That’s the problem. You are not trained to make that kind of psychological evaluation. Listen,” I continued, with another question, “How many of you, as a manager, can spot positive behavior out on the floor?” The hands were tentative, but every hand in the room went up. “And how many of you can spot negative behavior out on the floor?” All the hands rose higher. “And how long does it take for you to spot it?”

“Immediately, on the spot, right away,” came the replies.

“Here it is, then. Stop trying to play amateur psychologist, you are not qualified. Play to your strength. You can spot positive and negative behavior in an instant because you are a manager. Play to your strength as a manager.

No Real Work Experience

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From the Ask Tom mailbag

Question:
I am interviewing a lot of college hires that possess limited if any relevant work experience. While I am very comfortable interviewing candidates with experience, I find it very difficult to translate the Hiring Talent approach to those without any real experience in the field I am interviewing for. In some cases there is barely a internship to ask questions about.

Response:
They have work experience, they just didn’t get paid for it. Work is comprised of these two things –

  • Making decisions
  • Solving problems

Here is the sequence –
Look at the typical task assignments in the open role.

  1. Identify the Level of Work.
  2. Identify the critical role requirements, keying in on decision making and problem solving.
  3. Create questions based on the critical role requirements.

“Tell me about a time when” – this could be a student project, coursework, volunteer work, extracurricular activities, a hobby, a contest.
Let’s say the critical role requirement is to create and maintain work schedules for seven people on a project team where the duration of the project is thirty days.

  • Tell me about a time when you had to maintain some sort of written schedule on a project?
  • What was the project?
  • What was the purpose of project?
  • How long did the project last?
  • What did you have to schedule (people, project elements)?
  • How many elements (people, materials) did you have to schedule?
  • What information did you have to gather before you entered elements into the schedule?
  • After you created the initial schedule, did it ever change? How often?
  • Before you changed the schedule, what information did you have to gather?
  • Were your schedule changes ever challenged? How did you resolve the situation?

I am listening for decisions they made and problems they solved. And I don’t care if it was a pageant for the school choir or volunteer work at a hospital.