Resumes: Is It Always Good to Get Noticed?

photo via huffington post

Every few months there is a resume that makes the rounds online that gets people talking.  Remember the video resume for the guy applying to UBS showing him bench pressing 400 pounds?  That didn’t turn out too well for him.

The Huffington Post recently posted Eric’s resume (seen above) and asked whether it was a ‘win or fail.’

Standing out and getting attention is a great thing (almost always).  Especially when someone is going to be weeding through hundreds of resumes – more than half of which are completely irrelevant for the job.

Eric’s resume is moderately amusing and it had the potential to be good.  But, it’s not.

Simply by focusing on one or two themes and twisting a few things around he could have gotten just about any entry-level job he wanted.

Rather than tying his attributes and experiences back to something even remotely relevant to working, he went beyond non-sensical and landed in the ‘don’t trust me not to run with scissors in my hands’ area.

At first glance he could have gone the route of saying he’s a quick learner with tremendous focus (e.g. mastered MarioKart in one 18-hour marathon session).

And ‘trust me’ isn’t a great response for explaining away a lack of past drive, focus and success.  There aren’t too many gigs that ask for people who are proficient at ‘daydreaming out window (sic).’

Moral of the story: don’t be afraid to be different.  Sometimes it’s the best way to get noticed.  But make sure your irreverence is intelligently irreverent.  Make the person reading your resume think ‘this person is pretty funny, I’d like to meet him/her,’ not ‘wow, I hope someone’s keeping an eye on this kid making sure he’s taking his meds.’

Resume Fail.

Company Culture: Weeding Out Diversity

photo by akean2

A couple posts ago we wrote about a poll RoundPegg had posted (login req.) on LinkedIn asking whether people would be willing to complete a 25-minute assessment to help identify how well they fit the culture of the company to which they were applying.

There were some strong opinions in the comments, both pro and con.  The takeaway is that many people who are against assessing whether they fit a culture have a different understanding of what culture is altogether.

“Homogeneity and lack of diversity are bad.”  That rebuttal may sound compelling but it has nothing to do with company culture (at least not how we define it).

What they mean is that you don’t want a company who thinks alike or, even more cynically, doesn’t hire people of certain races, genders etc.

First, let’s clear a few things up:

• * Culture has nothing to do with the color of your skin, your age or what associations you have
• * Culture is not what or how you think
• * A homogeneous ‘culture’ doesn’t mean that everyone blindly agrees

Culture is about values.

A company rewards what is collectively valued (e.g. being decisive).  And individuals are motivated by what they value.  You WANT those two to be aligned.  Desperately.  A lack of diversity/homogeneity in values is a good thing.

When people are rewarded for doing things that motivate them, they will work a hell of a lot harder and produce far better results.  They find themselves swimming downstream instead of up.

With respect to diversity, nobody should be discriminated against because of race, sex, age, disability – absolutely.  But that doesn’t mean you get better results when you mash people together with wildly different values (see: Congress).  Nor does it mean you get people who think alike.

Everyone comes to the table with different life experiences, different work experiences and different interests.  All of those create the diversity of thought both sides of the conversation desire.

Imagine we both value ‘being decisive.’  Without talking about it beforehand (ground rules are rarely set for our work conversations) we have implicitly agreed that we need to make a decision quickly and move forward.

But because we’re both seeking a quick decision that doesn’t mean we agree on the solution.

Sharing a value system creates a strong foundation upon which to constructively disagree.  We both understand the motivational forces behind the others’ argument.  So when I abruptly deliver my solution you aren’t going to see my curtness as a personal slight.  It’s not that I don’t value your opinion.  But I value our time more.  We can discuss it rationally (but quickly).

All those things we call ‘politics’ are lessened when we share a common set of values and we can now focus more on solving our business’ challenges instead of deciphering what the other meant in our last conversation.

When we talk about company culture let’s put aside the automatic reflex to fall back on diversity and start critically thinking about what culture actually means.

Company culture is what is valued and what is rewarded.  Period.

Company Culture and the Rockstar CEO

photo by michellerocks

It’s almost universally acknowledged that a company’s culture matters.

Some companies go to great lengths to ensure that they maintain their core values and it truly is the work of everyone in the company to set the social norms and out undesired behavior.   Often though, the ‘good cultures’ become inextricably linked to a ‘visionary’ CEO.  Even when their motivations are pure, so much of their time becomes dedicated to writing books and giving speeches that it makes it difficult not to get a little cynical. 

(note: we’re big fans of any CEO touting treating employees like intelligent, full-grown adults, but we don’t want their public ubiquity to make it easy for others to dismiss the importance of their words because there are lessons to extract.)

Cynicism aside, there are two massive issues with the rockstar CEO that tend to get overlooked:

• Culture usually starts at the top so the praise isn’t unjustified.  But it’s time we give credit to the people who manage the culture over the long haul.  The line managers who promote the right behaviors and admonish the wrong ones, the HR teams who build the internal programs to highlight core values and the hiring managers who do a better job than most of identifying those who ‘fit.’ A lot goes into building and maintaining a culture.  The fact that these CEOs have paid as much attention to it as they have is a testament to their understanding of what drives their business forward, but they get too much credit.

• Furthermore, there is no one right culture.  These guys wouldn’t be able to make as much money on the books if they said that but look at the list below.  Almost every one of them has/had a different style.  There is little in common between Jack Welch and Tony Hsieh other than their success.  But, each made it work by fostering a culture that worked for them and their business.  And each was ruthless in their own way of ensuring that the values stuck.

[Just a few off the cuff examples - Lee Iacocca, Yvon Chouinard, Jack Welch, Gary Erickson, Tony Hsieh, Gary Hirschberg, Herb Kelleher...and we could go on and on and on.]

Celebrate your culture and live it everyday – just don’t forget that in order to lead you need to have people willing to follow.

A Fear of Machines in the Hiring Process?

photo by racatumba

We recently created a poll on LinkedIn (requires login) asking people whether they’d be willing to take a 25-minute assessment when applying for a company if it helped identify how well they fit to the company’s culture.

After 118 responses only 11% have said they would not complete an assessment because either they felt like it wastes their time or because it could be used against them.

But the comments from some of these 11% are interesting.

“…it all seems to me to be a substitute for quality in the recruitment decision making process.”

“Why wouldn’t the Interveiwer [sic] be capable of determining these things and compiling a valid report of interveiw [sic]?”

Why is it that the use of analytics in the hiring process causes some to react negatively to the HR people behind them?  Operational line managers who use numbers to improve their decision-making ability are lauded for their objectivity and quantitative prowess.  And yet in a function that is rife with subjectivity a handful of folks find it reprehensible that a good hiring manager can’t figure what makes complex human beings tick strictly by using their gut instinct and some well worded questions.

Hiring without objectivity is ludicrous.

It is subject to too many biases to count.  Height, weight, attractiveness, firmness of handshake, attire, gender, race, eye-contact…and that’s just the beginning of the visual biases before the candidate opens her mouth.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (courtesy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink) noticed this after holding auditions behind a black curtain for the first time.  Historically, the best musicians had always been men.  Lo and behold, once they held auditions behind a black curtain and the ‘interviewers’ were judging them solely on the sound of the music, it turned out that the best musicians were actually evenly split between men and women.

Quantifying the hiring process is only one piece of the puzzle.  It is not and nor should it ever be the ultimate arbiter.  After all it’s people and not the machines that have to work with the new hire.  But adding some objective rigor into a process long dominated by subjectivity can only help. Particularly given that collectively hiring managers are barely better than the flip of a coin.

Ultimately, it’s to the benefit of both parties.  It provides an inside look at what a company’s culture is actually like (not just what they post in the lobby) and can make expectations and behaviors known at the time of hiring.  Two things that people often struggle to put into words even when they are defined. It also helps people avoid landing in jobs where they stand little chance of succeeding.

Are people’s fears justified?  Perhaps, if objective measures are used as a short-cut.  But the real ire should be raised over how much we tolerate mediocrity and subjectivity in today’s existing hiring practices.  Just because we don’t have a machine saying that we weren’t hired because we had a limp handshake doesn’t mean that it’s not the case or that we shouldn’t be furious.  Even though we can’t see the bias, it is still there.  Don’t blame the machines for making one part of the process transparent…finally.

Culture Matters: Business Is Social

photo by jronaldlee

Company culture matters to your business.  That’s not a terribly bold statement.  But why?

Culture matters because business is social.

These days most of us work interdependently.  Your success is likely predicated upon exchanging ideas with your peers and receiving intellectual inputs from several different departments.  True individual contributors are few and far between in a knowledge-based organization.

A crude example is the evolution from waterfall to agile technology development.   Ideas and new products are created in highly interconnected and iterative processes rather than via assembly lines.  Which gets us back to culture.

We need to know how to exchange information with one another.

Culture sets those norms.  It establishes how we interact, how we make decisions and what’s deemed worthy of reward.

When employees’ value systems are aligned then so too is the company culture.  It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle because everyone interacts and rewards according to their own value system (no matter what the annual performance evaluation sheet says).

A well-aligned culture allows people to communicate freely because the norms are well understood. The ground rules are implicitly agreed upon by everyone who has elected to work there and they are reinforced with every interaction.

When values systems are out of line, cultures ‘go bad.’  Rewards seem arbitrary, nascent ideas are used against their authors or credit is co-opted.

Culture fosters trust (even in cultures that are aggressive and competitive).  In a game of repeated interactions it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to not want to work with a peer again.  Or to withhold your best when dealing with them.  Self-preservation will almost always win out over doing what is best for the business.

The better we all communicate the greater the likelihood of achieving success.  And since we’ve already optimized processes, slashed workforces and off-shored as much as we can there aren’t too many places left to squeeze out more profits.  Optimizing communication and aligning culture isn’t easy, but it’s the next frontier in driving business success.