Identifying Where You Fit

Marshall Goldsmith recently posted on how to identify whether you’ll fit within a company.  The numbers he throws out are staggering.  Turnover rates for top execs are up 3x from the 1990′s and now sit over 50%.

Those are some very expensive mistakes for both the company and the individual.  Because Marshall’s post focuses on the individual, I will too.

The downside of being in a bad situation for individuals is that:

• you can lose your confidence which spills over into the other areas of your life (family, exercise etc.), into the interview process for the next company and potentially into your motivation once you escape
• it can derail an otherwise fast-tracked career
• you may have few supporters from the company that will recommend you for another gig
• the opportunity cost is a year that you could have advanced your learnings and position elsewhere

photo by Salinas | Photography

Marshall’s key points are a great top line overview but we’d like to provide some specifics to help people through this process.  We’ve naturally thought a lot about this at RoundPegg and hope to provide some help to both sides through this process.  Continue to stay tuned, we’re getting close.

It’s one thing to identify the ‘culture’ you prefer but we need to put more meat on that bone.  With that, some specifics around what we believe and have learned:

• What motivates you? Recognition, additional responsibility, money, titles, being the go-to person?
• Who was your best boss? What made her tick and what was the relationship like between the two of you?  Were you treated as a peer?  Did you have input into the decision-making process?  Was your boss a subject matter expert who leaned on you to support her ideas?
• Who would you never work for again? Identify why.  What was it about the individual, how they treated you and what the power dynamic was like between the two of you?
• What values do you unflinchingly hold? Print out a list of values (link opens a PDF) and narrow it down to your top eight.  It’s harder than you’d think.  It took me six rounds of cuts to figure out what really matters most to me.  But it forces you to be honest.  There will be a lot that are close, but just don’t make the cut.
• Pay attention to differences between teams and the company as a whole. Teams will have their own set of norms, values and communication styles.  Listen for differences in the way team members talk about the company.
• Ask others. Old co-workers, bosses and friends can be a good source of insight.  What are your strengths?  When do you thrive?  When is your excitement contagious?  Under what conditions are you at your best?  Worst?  Keep these around.  They’re also a good confidence booster when your morale is flagging.
• Ignore the values on the wall. Talk to people on the team.  Find former employees.  Talk to anyone willing to give you time and try to do so face to face.  Keep asking what gets rewarded within the team and organization.  Values are easy to talk about but they don’t mean anything unless backed by action.
• Be ruthless. Easier said than done when all you want is a job to put food on the table.  But you don’t want to be in the same position a year from now.  Do your homework and if anything is out of place, walk away from the opportunity.  Remember, you’re good at what you do and you owe it to yourself to find a position where you’re most likely to succeed.

With all of these don’t accept the first answer that comes to mind.  Keep asking what/why.  This isn’t an exercise that you should wrap up over a cup of coffee.

This ran a little long, but I hope it was helpful.  If you have additional thoughts for us to consider as we build out our tools please comment below.

How to Hire Great People

photo by jason lippa

RoundPegg held a roundtable on hiring this morning with some of Boulder’s most forward-thinking CEOs.  Needless to say, it’s a topic where everyone has learned a lot from their failures and the conversation was a lively one.

While it was universally acknowledged that how one fits with the company’s culture is directly linked to success, how everyone got to the point of whether a candidate ‘fit’ or not was interesting.

Here are a few of the more intriguing approaches:

1. Know what you’re looking for. Focus on those who are successful within the organization and find the commonalities between them all.  What are the shared values, communication styles, personality traits etc.  Once you know what makes one successful it’s much easier to identify that in others
2. Lean on your high performers. Ask those same high performers to interview the candidates.  We all naturally gravitate toward those who are ‘like us.’  If the high performers think highly of the candidate then the odds are better that the candidate will work out
3. Listen between the lines. You’re asking questions about the person.  But you learn more when they talk about others.  Do their greatest successes involve anyone other than themselves?  How do they reference others who contributed to that success?
4. Watch them live. Get the candidate out of the conference room and observe how they handle various non-work situations.  Travel with them (a stretch) or go out to a meal.  See how they treat the waitresses, gate agents etc.  People often let their guard down when doing the mundane.  If you’re particularly sneaky you can set up a situation – e.g. ask the waitress to overcharge the table or give too little change.  True colors will often come out.
5. Role play. Put them through a scenario that your company is facing.  Ask a product manager to spec out a new feature and lead a couple folks (e.g. engineers and marketers) to hone the concept and scope the work.  With so little time to work on it, look beyond the thought that went into the specifications and pay attention to how they work with others to improve the concept and get buy-in.
6. Interesting questions. A couple interesting questions arose.  One was to define leadership.  How they answer that illustrates the type of individual behind whom they would most likely throw their energy.  Another was to identify their favorite literary character and to describe the values that character held.  Again, you get a lot of insight into the types of values the candidate admires.  Finally, asking about their greatest successes and failures has proved helpful when you listened to the amplitude of their feat/failure, how they described their role, the role of others and what they took away from it.

It was a fantastic hour of discussion that wandered down other paths on culture, managing people and the like.  So I’m sure we missed a ton of great ideas.  What specifically works for you?

Secrets of a Moderately Decent Interviewee

Interviews are nearly worthless.

The fact that we put so much emphasis on them is a testament to our falling prey to our illusory superiority, aka The Lake Wobegon effect – ‘where all the children are above average.’

While we’d all probably agree that others are prone to being fooled by good interviewees, we’d rarely put ourselves in that same boat.  We think that we can intuitively get a sense for who a person is and how well they’ll work out on our team after meeting with them in person.

Yet, it’s worth pointing to again, but half of new hires fail within 18-months.  Failure, in this case, is defined as exiting the company.   You can bet the real failure rate is even greater given how slow many are to fire.  Interestingly, the vast majority of those people fail because of the interpersonal dynamics between manager and subordinate.

How can that be?  That’s a primary reason we conduct interviews.

Interviews fail because the interviewer is human.  It’s a likability screen and little else.

While I’m not an expert on interviewing from either side, I’ll disclose what’s worked for me in the past and it’ll be pretty easy to see why our human subjectivity is so easily tricked.

photo by kaptain kobold

My strategy falls from understanding the real reason we conduct interviews.  Most people want to see if the candidate is moderately personable (does the candidate make you feel comfortable?), moderately likable (can you see going to lunch with him/her a couple days a week?) and has a decent grasp on the job/industry (will s/he embarrass you?).

1. Talk as little as possible. The less I talk the more interesting and intelligent you’ll think I am.  Like meeting someone at a cocktail party, thinking they are fascinating and then realizing you know nothing about them.  You like them because they let you talk the entire time.
2. Find the connection. A good interviewee does their homework.  Not just about the job but about the people interviewing them.  They’ve found the point of connection.  Interviews are a likability screen.  Identifying a shared home town, grad school or interest is the first step.  Once identified it says ‘see, we’re the same.  We’re going to get along great.’  Asking open-ended questions around the topic also eats into the interview time and allows the interviewer to strengthen the bond by reinforcing the connection points herself.
3. Defer expertise. Take advantage of the interviewer’s lack of preparedness. Everyone is busy and it’s shocking how little preparation goes into interviewing people.  After all, the hiring manager is rarely evaluated on how well they hire.  Anticipating the usual battery of questions is pretty easy.  I, as the interviewee, like to get home-court advantage right away by asking the first question after we establish the point of connection.  If steps one and two (talk very little and make a connection) are done right, the interviewer has done a lot of talking and it’s only natural for you to speak next.  Ask them about how they’re addressing their challenges or about a specific action they’ve taken that you’ve recently read about.  This will give you an insight into how they’re thinking when they want to ask you the same question in return and allow them to feel good about themselves by proving their expertise.
4. Body language. Body language says a lot about you, particularly from people who think they are incredibly intuitive.  You don’t want to overdo it, but occasionally mimicking the interviewer’s body language (naturally) reinforces the subtle clue that we’re a lot alike.  When not mimicking, take an interested, open and slightly aggressive posture.  Lean forward to show you’re interested and ready, keep the hands open to show you’re not a threat and keep the shoulders back to show you’re confident.  Sounds too simple, but it’s amazingly effective when compared to someone who is sitting back with a slouched back.
5. Judo questioning. End questions with questions. Ending questions with questions reinforces that I’m curious about you and your company.  Plus it’s unnatural for someone not to answer when asked a question.  It disrupts the flow of the interview and turns it into a conversation.  It’s harder to negatively evaluate a conversation since the interviewer is responsible for half of it.
6. Show your work. I take several notes about the company, challenges and ideas I have to help out prior to interviewing.  Let the interviewer see that work.  I like a clip board because there is no cover on it.  It allows you to be very subtle about showing off what you’ve done.  It may all be rubbish, but the interviewer can’t read it (tip: make sure to put the name of the person and company in a font size big enough to read across the table).  The perception will clearly be that you know your stuff.

There are some who have been trained in the process and they can cut through these tactics and effectively evaluate, but those folks are a very rare breed (read: it’s probably not you.)

In sum, the interview isn’t going anywhere.  But we need tools that are objective, uniform and rigorous.  That’s what RoundPegg is all about – predicatively figuring out whether we’ll successfully work together.

Subjectivity has very little place in the hiring process.  When we rely on our ‘good gut instincts’ we barely beat the flip of a coin.

With that, like Christopher Columbus, I’ve burned my ships.  RoundPegg has to work out because I’ll now never successfully interview again.

Your Resume Sucks

What started as providing a few suggestions on a friend of a friend’s resume the other day turned into a soapbox rant about the worthlessness of the resume.  While I typically don’t write about resumes and finding jobs, I’m posting this so I can save myself time and refer people to this post rather than re-rant every time.

Resumes have become the dark suit, white shirt and ‘sincere’ tie of IBM’s days of yore.

If the goal is to stand out, why do we keep following the same boring template?  And following it poorly, at that.  We are not all the same so let’s get ourselves onto that meaningless invaluable piece of paper.

photo by bardinjw

A few thoughts on the traditional resume:

1. Results, not responsibilities. Presumably you are a bad ass.  Provide evidence of that.  The person hiring you doesn’t want a warm body to fill the space and merely complete tasks.  They want someone bright who will go beyond the job description, solve problems and accomplish great things.  You’ve done that in the past.  Talk about it.
2. Every bullet counts. Space is limited.  Make sure every line on the page counts toward promoting you.  This is derivative of the above but just as describing the job doesn’t do you any favors neither does a line or two describing the company you last worked for.  Who cares?  If they do exactly the same thing as the company to which you’re applying the new company should know all about them.  If not, why would they care anyway?
3. Unquantified successes. Another derivative, but you so often hear about providing metrics that quantify success (a good thing) that I wanted to point out other ways to do that.  Did you turn a low-performer into a high-performer that got promoted or won an award?  Unquantified success.  Did you talk others into doing something differently?  Unquantified success.  Sometimes just implementing change is enough.
4. Brevity. Unless you’re 147 years old or hold more patents than Ben Franklin there probably isn’t any reason to go beyond two pages.  You’re resume will be sitting in a stack of dozens.  Would you want to read a novella about yourself, not to mention someone you’ve never met?  It’s just going to piss someone off.
5. Objective, really? Isn’t everyone’s objective to land the job?  Don’t say you want a job at [flattering description of hiring company X].  If that’s all you’ve got, kill it.  What do you want to be doing in the next couple years?  In other words, why do you want the job?  Or better yet, incorporate #1 below.
6. Whitespace. This is short attention span theater at its worst.  Somebody will decide how comprehensively to read your resume within a second and based solely on looks.  If there is a massive block of text it’ll get skipped.  Having the right content doesn’t matter much if it won’t get read.  Indents and paragraph breaks are your friend, use them liberally.

And a few thoughts to improve the resume:

1. Know yourself. Describe the environment in which you work best.  If you don’t pass the screen, that’s a good thing.  Your odds of succeeding when you’re out of your element are low.  Outline your strengths.  What are you inherently good at?  What do you enjoy doing?  How do you work with others?  Focus on what you bring that is truly unique.  You’ll be competing against people as smart and with similar successes as you.  Our differences often come out in how we work.
2. Get personal. Lots of people don’t like the ‘personal’ section on a resume.  It may violate point number two above for some.  But I disagree.  Clearing that first hurdle and doing well in the interview means you pass the likability screen.  People often get offered jobs because they were well-liked.  So offer up some bullets that can help you make a connection.  What have you done that’s interesting and conversation-worthy?  What makes you smile?
3. Lose some history. Stop with the blow by blow of your professional career. In fact, ditch your early career.  You’re not applying for an entry level position, so why is that relevant?  Identify the highlights only (see: brevity) and focus on who you are, how you work and what you have to offer that’s unique (see: knowing yourself).
4. Get creative. If you’re not afraid of standing out, design something that looks totally different than all the other resumes out there.  Mix font sizes, put your name vertically instead of horizontal, whatever.  You want to give someone pause and pique their interest.  Unless you’re a Realtor though, please don’t put your picture on your resume.
5. Don’t rely on your resume at all. They are worthless.  The 21st century’s buggy whip.  Relentlessly tap your network to get in front of the right people.  But that’s a different post.

Your thoughts?

First, Know Thyself

photo by ljcybergal

We had a great conversation this morning with the head of HR at a local Boulder company.  While talking about the issues around hiring she had a very zen approach,  “know thyself.”

Her point was that you can’t hire great people if you first don’t know where you want to go and how you’re getting there.

Two companies may work on solving the same problem but they will take different paths to get to the finish line.  And in each case it will take people with different skills (both functional and interpersonal) in order to contribute successfully.

And while it sounds simplistic it’s incredible how often we don’t take the time to actually think through exactly what it is we need.  We’re dealing with people, not McDonald’s hamburgers.  There is going to be a lot of variation in two people that have held the same title.  Therefore, in order to evaluate them you need to have the yardstick by which to do so.  And that’s you.

• What do you want to accomplish?
• How do you plan on getting there?
• What types of people are needed to accomplish the goals?
• Are you sure?
• What are your company’s idiosyncrasies and constraints exist with which the new hire will have to adjust?
• What works so well you wouldn’t want to change it?

Knowing what needs to get done and how you want to accomplish it is the starting point for evaluating a potential new hire.  The last thing you want to do is get suckered into the trap of falling for skills you don’t need (even if they are expert skills) or making the hire just because you like the individual.

People succeed within your company because you put them in a position to do so.

First, know thyself.  It helps you make better decisions, it shows the candidates the respect they deserve and it helps them become successful employees.