Introducing HR3.0

photo by mysza831

RoundPegg was mentioned on NPR’s Marketplace program last week talking about HR3.0 in the context of the hiring process.  (Disclaimer: we may very well have made up the term.)

Despite that, we fervently believe in the idea behind it and want to define it a little more detail.

HR3.0 introduces transparency to the job search/hiring process.

Even with more of the hiring process moving online, we are only just now beginning to catch up with where the process was in the offline world 15 years ago.

That’s not to say the digitization and transition online hasn’t improved the process some.  But it’s mainly recreated what’s already existed into 1s and 0s and improved things at the margins (see after the jump for a brief history of the online job industry).

HR3.0 marks the day when the power of the Internet is brought to bear to actually do things that were difficult, if not impossible, to do in the offline world.  HR3.0 starts the process of changing the game.

At its core, it is about transparency.

Transparency to ultimately figure out whether you can work successfully within a company or whether a job candidate will return you a positive ROI.

That includes peppering who you know and their contacts for information on working at a company or peppering shared contacts to get the real scoop on a candidate.  It also means having the ability to drill deep into a company’s real culture or a team’s sub-culture or drilling into whether a candidate will be able to work well with a team.

Changing jobs/hiring is a massive commitment and one where the deal is typically sealed after a three dates.  If a job seeker makes the wrong decision the downstream effects could derail the individual’s career path for a couple of years.  And a bad hire costs a company a ton of money (~150% of compensation) and has ripple effects throughout the team.

The commitment for both sides though is largely psychic though.  Will a new hire ruin a team’s chemistry?  Will a new gig and manager make your life miserable?  Team politics (used neutrally – every team has them) can be crushing for a new individual who doesn’t quite fit.

Being able to put more of that work-style information in the hands of the players involved means better decision-making (usually).

LinkedIn and apps like BranchOut have made it much easier to be proactive in the process.  It’s much easier to collect information about potential managers and candidates alike to begin painting the picture of what working together may be like.

We at RoundPegg are taking an exhaustive, objective approach to help companies understand their culture and who best fits while GlassDoor has started on the other end and offers candidates a peek behind the wizard’s curtain.

Ultimately it all paints a better picture of whether the grass really is greener.  Calling provided references is a joke and asking your uncle’s college roommate what it’s like to work at GloboCorp is a silly, invalid data point of one.

The Internet is helping reveal the true drivers of workplace success and providing both sides the opportunity to do things differently (and better).

Welcome to HR3.0.  This is just the beginning.  It’s going to get really damn exciting especially when these approaches start to converge.

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Do Pre-Hire Assessments Affect The Applicant Pool?

People Don't Mind Assessments

This was a question we wondered about too.  For good reason, obviously.

Turns out, despite the fears of some, administering pre-hire assessments do not significantly diminish the applicant pool.

The fears are highly justified, but the bigger story here is that candidates want to avoid landing in a bad job as much as you want to avoid a bad hire.  After reading the comments it was clear they overwhelmingly supported the idea that applicants are not just willing, but hungry for something that will also help them identify whether they will fit a company’s culture prior to joining just as much as HR professionals and hiring managers.

The results (seen above) show that only 10% of applicants claim to flat out refuse to take a pre-hire assessment. [Though when push comes to shove, I'd guess not all of them will hold that line.]

Even better for hiring managers is that over a quarter will only complete the assessment if they are truly interested in the job.  This means pre-hire cultural assessments are a quick and painless way of lopping off the portion of the applicant pool who may have the skills and even be a good fit, but they just aren’t that into you.

Moral of the story: You may experience 1 in 10 people refusing to complete the assessment, but you’ll save time not having to weed through 1 in 4 who aren’t that serious or interested in your company or the job.  Even better, by administering pre-hire assessments you can tip the odds in your favor of hiring top performers who fit your culture.

[NOTE:  Given the number of respondents these results are accurate at a 95% confidence level +/- 3.56%.]

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.