# Who: The A Method for Hiring - Type: #book - ASIN: B001EL6RWY - Authors: [[Geoff Smart]], [[Randy Street]] - Highlights - Unfortunately, focusing solely on the what means you will continue to feel stressed, make less money than you desire, and lack the time to do what you want. - I had to be on the phone and deal with e-mails, doing the job of people I had mishired. - Ultimately, who failures infect every aspect of our professional and personal lives. - Are unclear about what is needed in a job • Have a weak flow of candidates • Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates • Lose candidates they really want to join their team - Yet we accept at face value claims of high accomplishment that we know better than to fully trust. Due diligence, after all, takes time, and time is the one commodity most lacking in busy managers’ lives. - people who want a job badly enough can fake an interview if it lasts only a few minutes. - Gut instinct is terribly inaccurate when it comes to hiring someone. If you extend an offer based on a good gut feel, you are going to have a stomachache! - but knowledge and ability to do the job are not the same thing. - For one thing, he or she is not just a superstar. Think of an A Player as the right superstar, a talented person who can do the job you need done, while fitting in with the culture of your company. We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve. - In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. - Scorecard. The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well. - Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them. - “I think the fastest way to improve a company’s performance is to improve the talent of the workforce, whether it is the ultimate leader or someone leading a divisional organization. It just energizes the company and leads to positive things.” - Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role. - The first failure point of hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish. - some vague notion of what you want. Others on your - “In hiring, everything is situational,” he told us, “and no situation is entirely replicable. - hiring all-around athletes rarely works. By definition, they are generalists. That’s their charm. They are good at many things and can wear lots of different hats. But job requirements are rarely general. - you should be looking for narrow but deep competence. - As Nick Chabraja, the CEO of General Dynamics, puts it, “I think success comes from having the right person in the right job at the right time with the right skill set for the business problem that exists.” - “Each target and company has different needs for the CEO and any management role,” he says. “I look at our team almost like a football team. If I am hiring for a position, I ask myself, what is this person going to be doing? Are they a quarterback? A center? I don’t try to get the quarterback to operate like a center or a linebacker.” - Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance. - People don’t want to fail, and they don’t want to go through the dislocation of moving to another company, or possibly another city or country, if they know their chances of success are minimal. Set the outcomes high enough—but still within reason—and you’ll scare off B and C Players even as you pull in the kind of A Players who thrive on big challenges that fit their skills. - While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), - scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). - Competencies flow directly from the first two elements of the scorecard. The mission defines the essence of the job to a high degree of specificity. Outcomes describe what must be accomplished. Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes. - “Chemistry is always important for both the individual and the company,” Johnson said. “If I don’t have good chemistry with you, and you don’t have good chemistry with me, then skip it. Connecting with them personally is important. That becomes obvious in my initial conversations with a candidate. - If they are thinking about the next job, they will fail. They must be focused on the job they have. - Competencies work at two levels. They define the skills and behaviors required for a job, and they reflect the broader demands of your organizational culture. - Evaluating culture sometimes means removing people who are not a fit. The best salesperson in the world is the wrong hire if you value respect for others and he is openly disrespectful. Who cares how well he can sell if he is going to demoralize the rest of your team? - “Part of successful hiring means having the discipline to pass on talented people who are not a fit,” - Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. They encapsulate on paper the unwritten dynamics that make your company what it is, and they ensure you think about those things with every hiring decision. That’s time very well spent. - Scorecards translate your business plans into role-by-role outcomes and create alignment among your team, and they unify your culture and ensure people understand your expectations. No wonder they are such powerful management tools. - A good scorecard process translates the objectives of the strategy into clear outcomes for the CEO and senior leadership team. The senior team then translates their outcomes to the scorecards of those below them, and so on. - 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters. - In fact, these traditional talent sources are so overworked that most of the people left in them are not the ones you would want to hire. - ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates. - Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. This approach may feel scary and timeconsuming, but it is the single most effective way to find potential A Players. This is an instance where innovation matters far less than process and discipline. - Ryan’s approach is among the easiest we have seen. Whenever he meets somebody new, he asks this simple, powerful question: “Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?” Talented people know talented people, and they’re almost always glad to pass along one another’s names. Ryan captures those names on a list, and he makes a point of calling a few new people from his list every week. Then he stays in touch with those who seem to have the most promise. - But don’t stop there. Bring your broader business contacts in on the hunt, too. Ask your customers for the names of the most talented salespeople who call on them. Ask your business partners who they think are the most effective business developers. Do the same with your suppliers to identify their strongest purchasing agents. Join professional organizations and ask the people you meet through events. People you interact with every day are the most powerful sources of talent you will ever find. - “Say, now that I have told you what I do, who are the most talented people you know who could be a good fit for my company?” Do that, and you will turn a common social question into a sourcing opportunity. - Deputizing friends of the firm will create new, accelerated sources of talent, but you still need to pay attention to process, and you have to be disciplined. Make sure that the deputies are reporting in on a regular basis, and whatever incentive you choose, check and double-check that it’s sufficient so that busy people will participate. Remember, you want your recommendations to come from A Players. As the old playground taunt goes, it takes one to know one. - That’s part of what the best of the breed do. They educate you about the market for talent, much as a real-estate agent might take you around to multiple houses to gauge your tastes. Being open at the outset, sharing your scorecard, and doing everything else you can to bring an outside recruiter inside both streamlines the process and enhances the results. - One executive we know uses index cards, and he is methodical in the extreme. Along with their name, he writes down a few snippets he learned, such as a spouse’s name or a hobby or a topic of discussion. He routinely revisits these cards and follows up with the people on them. Those who know him marvel at how well he remembers details about their lives. - Many big companies use off-the-shelf tracking systems to sort and filter job candidates and applicants. We are not in the business of recommending particular vendors. Suffice it to say that a good system will enable all of the employees in your business to contribute names and other useful information to the company’s database of potential A Player candidates. - The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. - The conversation does not have to be long. We frequently begin with something simple like, “Sue recommended that you and I connect. I understand you are great at what you do. I am always on the lookout for talented people and would love the chance to get to know you. Even if you are perfectly content in your current job, I’d love to introduce myself and hear about your career interests.” - “Now that you know a little about me, who are the most talented people you know who might be a good fit for my company?” - “John and I traveled to many locations,” Crown recalled. “We met people who were not even interested. We took no as an opening bid. We explored two issues with the candidates: (1) the status of the bank and what they thought was needed, and (2) other candidate names—to learn about people we might not have considered or to source reference checks on the people on our list.” - If you don’t own the process, no one will. Talent is what you need. Focus and commitment will get you there. - The A Players you want will be those who have a track record that matches your needs, competencies that align with your culture and the role, and plenty of passion to do the job you envision. - To be a great interviewer, you must get out of the habit of passively witnessing how somebody acts during an interview. That puts you back in the realm of voodoo hiring methods, where you end up basing your decision on how somebody acts during a few minutes of a certain day. The time span is too limited to reliably predict anything useful. Instead, the four interviews use the time to collect facts and data about somebody’s performance track record that spans decades. - As with all the interviews we present with the A Method, we advocate a structured approach to screening interviews. - The commonality fosters consistency and accelerates your ability to discern differences between candidates. - Four essential questions will help you build a comprehensive fact base for weeding out clear B and C Players in a screening interview. - a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it. - We suggest you push candidates to tell you eight to twelve positives so you can build a complete picture of their professional aptitude. - cookie-cutter answers, simply say, “That sounds like a strength to me. What are you really not good at or not interested in doing?” Talented people will catch the hint and - Your balance sheet on a candidate will be incomplete if you can’t identify at least five to eight areas where a person falls short, lacks interest, or doesn’t want to operate. If you come up woefully short, if the weaknesses are all strengths in disguise, or if you see any deal killers relative to your scorecard, then screen the candidate out. - “How will they rate you when we talk to them?” - You are looking for lots of 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s in the ratings. Consider 7’s neutral; 6’s and below are actually bad. We have found that people who give themselves a rating of 6 or lower are really saying 2. If you hear too many 6’s and below, screen them out, but be sure to really listen to what is being said. If recruiter Andrea Redmond had pulled the plug on Jamie Dimon because he insisted he was “fired” at Citigroup, Bank One never would have come up with such a dynamic new leader. - While you don’t want to waste time with the wrong people, you want to make all the time necessary for the right ones. Conclude the call by offering the candidate an opportunity to ask questions of you. You’ll be in a better position to sell the candidate on the virtues of your firm based on what you learned in the first twenty minutes of the call, assuming you liked what you heard. - Remember, you own the process: you can expand or contract the time you allot based on how well the data you gathered in the call fit the scorecard. - “Do this person’s strengths match my scorecard? Are the weaknesses manageable? Am I thrilled about bringing this person in for a series of interviews based on the data I have?” You want to be excited about that possibility. You want to have the feeling that you have found the one. - If you have any hesitation, or if you find yourself thinking you want to bring candidates in just to test them a little more, then screen them out. Only invite in those whose profile appears to be a strong match for your scorecard. - fellow. Would you hire him for a key management job where a lot of change was needed? - The whole point of the screening interview is to weed people out as quickly as possible. We mentioned that before, but it bears repeating. - Better to miss out on a potential A Player than to waste precious hours on a borderline case that turns out to be a B or C Player. - Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Who Interview. - You own the hire. You will suffer the consequences of making a mistake. Your career and job happiness depend on finding A Players. And you want to be in the room when a candidate reveals the hundreds of data points that will enable you to make a great decision. - perhaps someone from HR, another manager or member of your team, or simply someone who wants to learn the method by observing you. - For each job I am going to ask you five core questions: What were you hired to do? What accomplishments are you most proud of? What were some low points during that job? Who were the people you worked with? Why did you leave that job? At the end of the interview we will discuss your career goals and aspirations, and you will have a chance to ask me questions. Eighty percent of the process is in this room, but if we mutually decide to continue, we will conduct reference calls to complete the process. Finally, while this sounds like a lengthy interview, it will go remarkably fast. I want to make sure you have the opportunity to share your full story, so it is my job to guide the pace of the discussion. Sometimes, we’ll go into more depth in a period of your career. Other times, I will ask that we move on to the next topic. I’ll try to make sure we leave plenty of time to cover your most recent, and frankly, most relevant jobs. Do you have any questions about the process? - The bad way to interrupt somebody is to put up your hand like a stop sign gesture and say, “Wait, wait, wait. Let me stop you there. Can we get back on track?” This shames the candidate, implies that they have done something wrong, and makes them clam up for good. You will really struggle to get the person to open up after that. The good way to interrupt somebody is to smile broadly, match their enthusiasm level, and use reflective listening to get them to stop talking without demoralizing them. You say, “Wow! It sounds like that pig farm next to the corporate office smelled horrible!” The candidate nods and says “Yes!” and appreciates your empathy and respect. Then you immediately say, “You were just telling me about launching that direct mail campaign. I’d love to hear what was that like? How well did it go?” - It is through maintaining very high rapport that you get the most valuable data, and polite interrupting can build that rapport. - People who perform well are generally pulled to greater opportunities. People who perform poorly are often pushed out of their jobs. Do not hire anybody who has been pushed out of 20 percent or more of their jobs. From our experience, those folks have a three times higher chance of being a chronic B or C Player. - The idea isn’t to gather dirt. That’s never the point of the Who Interview. If you come off like an investigative reporter or, worse, a gossip columnist, you need to seriously refine your approach. Think of yourself instead as a biographer interviewing a subject. You want both the details and the broad pattern, the facts and texture. That’s how you make an informed who decision. - We need people on our team who will never be satisfied with the status quo. They need to be results-oriented people who work toward continuous improvement. - 8:30 A.M.–8:45 A.M. Team meeting. Bring the interview team together for fifteen minutes at the beginning of the day (or the night before) to review the scorecard, the candidate’s resume, notes from the screening interview, and roles and responsibilities for the day. 8:45 A.M.–9:00 A.M. Have a team member greet the candidate on arrival and spend a few minutes orienting him or her to the day, and possibly to the company. 9:00 A.M.–12:00 P.M. Who Interview. The hiring manager and one other colleague conduct a tandem interview that lasts one and a half to three hours, depending on the length of the candidate’s career. 12:00 P.M.–1:30 P.M. Lunch. A few team members, preferably not involved in the interview process, take the candidate to lunch. We like to keep this informal—this is a pressure-packed day as it is—but if you or the candidate is pressed for time, you can continue interviewing while you eat. 1:30 P.M.–4:30 P.M. Focused interviews. One to three team members conduct focused interviews based on their assigned portions of the scorecard. (Note: Some companies conduct focused interviews as a second round of interviews only after a candidate passes the Who Interview in an earlier round. This enables them to save time if a candidate does not pass the Who Interview, but it does force them to schedule multiple interview days. Other companies do it all in one day.) 4:30 P.M.–4:45 P.M. Host thanks the candidate and explains next steps. 4:45 P.M.–5:30 P.M. Candidate discussion. Interview team convenes for thirty to sixty minutes at the end of the day to rate the scorecard and develop a list of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses based on the actual data gathered during the day. The hiring manager makes a go/no-go decision at the end of the meeting regarding whether to conduct reference calls or terminate the process. - In fact, 64 percent of the business moguls we interviewed conduct reference calls for every hire, not just the ones at the top. Unfortunately, far fewer general managers follow suit. Why? Pushback from the candidate is one reason; time constraints are another. - Third, conduct the right number of reference interviews. We recommend that you personally do about four and ask your colleagues to do three, for a total of seven reference interviews. - In truth, we believe, people don’t change that much. People aren’t mutual funds. Past performance really is an indicator of future performance. - For managerial hires, candidate has never had to hire or fire anybody. - Candidate seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself. - The five areas, which we call the five F’s of selling, are: fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun. - Fit ties together the company’s vision, needs, and culture with the candidate’s goals, strengths, and values. “Here is where we are going - Family takes into account the broader trauma of changing jobs. “What can we do to make this change - Fit means showing the candidate how his or her goals, talents, and values fit into your vision, strategy, and culture. People want to make an impact in the world. They want to be needed. They want to be part of something that feels right. Selling fit means showing a candidate how all of these needs will be met when he or she works with you. - Nobody who is worth anything is going to go into a company where they don’t see real potential with the company and a strong fit with their goals and abilities. - The most valuable commodity they have is their time. If they are truly an A Player, they are going to value the potential of the company.” - This is one of the great paradoxes of management. In reality, great leaders gain more control by ceding control to their A Players. They know they are bringing talented people onto their team. The scorecard tells them that, and the scorecard also tells new hires the outcomes by which they will be measured. Once it’s all out on the table like that, there is no need for micromanagement. Instead, you need to create an environment where A Players like these can thrive. George Buckley - “Maybe they talk too much. Maybe they are awkward in front of others. Nobody is perfect. It is not about immediate competency; it’s about confidence that builds that competency. If you know that I am confident in you, you are likely to take more risks, to work a little harder, because you know that I am not going to take your head off if something doesn’t work perfectly. That builds competence. Extend the hand of trust. And occasionally extend the hand of friendship.” Stacy Schusterman builds trust with her A Player candidates by encouraging them to evaluate her as a manager. - I encourage the candidate to do reference checks on me so they can understand how I work with people.” - Research shows that while money can be a disincentive if it is too low or not linked to performance, it rarely is the key motivator.\*2 - us, “If all you have to sell is the compensation, that is not good.” To be sure, money is one piece of the package, but it never stands alone. That doesn’t mean you can - The pay level you end up discussing inevitably is dictated by both the external and internal markets. Candidates will benchmark themselves against their current compensation and what they believe they can command in the external market. Managers, in turn, will try to apply internal compensation guidelines, which may or may not have been benchmarked against external sources. - “There is no such thing as a bargain in the labor market. It is easy to underpay or overpay. You can’t try to steal them because they will want to go somewhere else. And you can’t throw too much money at them because other people will find out and that will make them mad.” - Over the years, we have identified five distinct phases of the hiring process that merit increased selling effort on your part. Think of these as waves to overcome. If you don’t increase your sales energy, you won’t get your candidate over the crest of the wave to the next phase. The waves are: 1. When you source 2. When you interview 3. The time between your offer and the candidate’s acceptance 4. The time between the candidate’s acceptance and his or her first day 5. The new hire’s first one hundred days on the job - We asked these leaders what factors contributed the most to business success. They told us that “management talent” was over half the equation. - Get the talent side of the equation wrong, and you will always face rough waters. You’ll spend all of your time dealing with an endless torrent of what issues. - “A client in Mumbai will come to Barclays if they think our people are distinctive. Whether they are a corporate or personal customer, they want to be smart in their choice of provider. We want customers to come to Barclays because Barclays’ people are among the best in the world.” - Conventional wisdom holds that the sort of emotional intelligence Lambs show is the critically important leadership quality. In fact, our analysis argues otherwise. Emotional intelligence is important, but only when matched with the propensity to get things done. Too many executives have fallen into the trap of accentuating their Lamb skills at the expense of their Cheetah qualities. They work hard to stay in tune with their employees. They’re well liked on the shop floor and in the boardroom. There’s only one problem: they don’t produce value at anywhere near the rate Cheetahs do. - we recommend going with the fast and focused option. In this fast-paced age of business in which we all exist, it appears that speed and focus really count when it comes to delivering great financial results. - “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” - Unfortunately, focusing solely on the what means you will continue to feel stressed, make less money than you desire, and lack the time to do what you want. - I had to be on the phone and deal with e-mails, doing the job of people I had mishired. - Ultimately, who failures infect every aspect of our professional and personal lives. - Are unclear about what is needed in a job • Have a weak flow of candidates • Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates • Lose candidates they really want to join their team - Yet we accept at face value claims of high accomplishment that we know better than to fully trust. Due diligence, after all, takes time, and time is the one commodity most lacking in busy managers’ lives. - people who want a job badly enough can fake an interview if it lasts only a few minutes. - Gut instinct is terribly inaccurate when it comes to hiring someone. If you extend an offer based on a good gut feel, you are going to have a stomachache! - but knowledge and ability to do the job are not the same thing. - For one thing, he or she is not just a superstar. Think of an A Player as the right superstar, a talented person who can do the job you need done, while fitting in with the culture of your company. We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve. - In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. - Scorecard. The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well. - Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them. - “I think the fastest way to improve a company’s performance is to improve the talent of the workforce, whether it is the ultimate leader or someone leading a divisional organization. It just energizes the company and leads to positive things.” - Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role. - The first failure point of hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish. - some vague notion of what you want. Others on your - “In hiring, everything is situational,” he told us, “and no situation is entirely replicable. - hiring all-around athletes rarely works. By definition, they are generalists. That’s their charm. They are good at many things and can wear lots of different hats. But job requirements are rarely general. - you should be looking for narrow but deep competence. - As Nick Chabraja, the CEO of General Dynamics, puts it, “I think success comes from having the right person in the right job at the right time with the right skill set for the business problem that exists.” - “Each target and company has different needs for the CEO and any management role,” he says. “I look at our team almost like a football team. If I am hiring for a position, I ask myself, what is this person going to be doing? Are they a quarterback? A center? I don’t try to get the quarterback to operate like a center or a linebacker.” - Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance. - People don’t want to fail, and they don’t want to go through the dislocation of moving to another company, or possibly another city or country, if they know their chances of success are minimal. Set the outcomes high enough—but still within reason—and you’ll scare off B and C Players even as you pull in the kind of A Players who thrive on big challenges that fit their skills. - While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), - scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). - Competencies flow directly from the first two elements of the scorecard. The mission defines the essence of the job to a high degree of specificity. Outcomes describe what must be accomplished. Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes. - “Chemistry is always important for both the individual and the company,” Johnson said. “If I don’t have good chemistry with you, and you don’t have good chemistry with me, then skip it. Connecting with them personally is important. That becomes obvious in my initial conversations with a candidate. - If they are thinking about the next job, they will fail. They must be focused on the job they have. - Competencies work at two levels. They define the skills and behaviors required for a job, and they reflect the broader demands of your organizational culture. - Evaluating culture sometimes means removing people who are not a fit. The best salesperson in the world is the wrong hire if you value respect for others and he is openly disrespectful. Who cares how well he can sell if he is going to demoralize the rest of your team? - “Part of successful hiring means having the discipline to pass on talented people who are not a fit,” - Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. They encapsulate on paper the unwritten dynamics that make your company what it is, and they ensure you think about those things with every hiring decision. That’s time very well spent. - Scorecards translate your business plans into role-by-role outcomes and create alignment among your team, and they unify your culture and ensure people understand your expectations. No wonder they are such powerful management tools. - A good scorecard process translates the objectives of the strategy into clear outcomes for the CEO and senior leadership team. The senior team then translates their outcomes to the scorecards of those below them, and so on. - 1\. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters. - In fact, these traditional talent sources are so overworked that most of the people left in them are not the ones you would want to hire. - ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates. - Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. This approach may feel scary and timeconsuming, but it is the single most effective way to find potential A Players. This is an instance where innovation matters far less than process and discipline. - Ryan’s approach is among the easiest we have seen. Whenever he meets somebody new, he asks this simple, powerful question: “Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?” Talented people know talented people, and they’re almost always glad to pass along one another’s names. Ryan captures those names on a list, and he makes a point of calling a few new people from his list every week. Then he stays in touch with those who seem to have the most promise. - But don’t stop there. Bring your broader business contacts in on the hunt, too. Ask your customers for the names of the most talented salespeople who call on them. Ask your business partners who they think are the most effective business developers. Do the same with your suppliers to identify their strongest purchasing agents. Join professional organizations and ask the people you meet through events. People you interact with every day are the most powerful sources of talent you will ever find. - “Say, now that I have told you what I do, who are the most talented people you know who could be a good fit for my company?” Do that, and you will turn a common social question into a sourcing opportunity. - Deputizing friends of the firm will create new, accelerated sources of talent, but you still need to pay attention to process, and you have to be disciplined. Make sure that the deputies are reporting in on a regular basis, and whatever incentive you choose, check and double-check that it’s sufficient so that busy people will participate. Remember, you want your recommendations to come from A Players. As the old playground taunt goes, it takes one to know one. - That’s part of what the best of the breed do. They educate you about the market for talent, much as a real-estate agent might take you around to multiple houses to gauge your tastes. Being open at the outset, sharing your scorecard, and doing everything else you can to bring an outside recruiter inside both streamlines the process and enhances the results. - One executive we know uses index cards, and he is methodical in the extreme. Along with their name, he writes down a few snippets he learned, such as a spouse’s name or a hobby or a topic of discussion. He routinely revisits these cards and follows up with the people on them. Those who know him marvel at how well he remembers details about their lives. - Many big companies use off-the-shelf tracking systems to sort and filter job candidates and applicants. We are not in the business of recommending particular vendors. Suffice it to say that a good system will enable all of the employees in your business to contribute names and other useful information to the company’s database of potential A Player candidates. - The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. - The conversation does not have to be long. We frequently begin with something simple like, “Sue recommended that you and I connect. I understand you are great at what you do. I am always on the lookout for talented people and would love the chance to get to know you. Even if you are perfectly content in your current job, I’d love to introduce myself and hear about your career interests.” - “Now that you know a little about me, who are the most talented people you know who might be a good fit for my company?” - “John and I traveled to many locations,” Crown recalled. “We met people who were not even interested. We took no as an opening bid. We explored two issues with the candidates: (1) the status of the bank and what they thought was needed, and (2) other candidate names—to learn about people we might not have considered or to source reference checks on the people on our list.” - If you don’t own the process, no one will. Talent is what you need. Focus and commitment will get you there. - The A Players you want will be those who have a track record that matches your needs, competencies that align with your culture and the role, and plenty of passion to do the job you envision. - To be a great interviewer, you must get out of the habit of passively witnessing how somebody acts during an interview. That puts you back in the realm of voodoo hiring methods, where you end up basing your decision on how somebody acts during a few minutes of a certain day. The time span is too limited to reliably predict anything useful. Instead, the four interviews use the time to collect facts and data about somebody’s performance track record that spans decades. - As with all the interviews we present with the A Method, we advocate a structured approach to screening interviews. - The commonality fosters consistency and accelerates your ability to discern differences between candidates. - Four essential questions will help you build a comprehensive fact base for weeding out clear B and C Players in a screening interview. - a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it. - We suggest you push candidates to tell you eight to twelve positives so you can build a complete picture of their professional aptitude. - cookie-cutter answers, simply say, “That sounds like a strength to me. What are you really not good at or not interested in doing?” Talented people will catch the hint and - Your balance sheet on a candidate will be incomplete if you can’t identify at least five to eight areas where a person falls short, lacks interest, or doesn’t want to operate. If you come up woefully short, if the weaknesses are all strengths in disguise, or if you see any deal killers relative to your scorecard, then screen the candidate out. - “How will they rate you when we talk to them?” - You are looking for lots of 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s in the ratings. Consider 7’s neutral; 6’s and below are actually bad. We have found that people who give themselves a rating of 6 or lower are really saying 2. If you hear too many 6’s and below, screen them out, but be sure to really listen to what is being said. If recruiter Andrea Redmond had pulled the plug on Jamie Dimon because he insisted he was “fired” at Citigroup, Bank One never would have come up with such a dynamic new leader. - While you don’t want to waste time with the wrong people, you want to make all the time necessary for the right ones. Conclude the call by offering the candidate an opportunity to ask questions of you. You’ll be in a better position to sell the candidate on the virtues of your firm based on what you learned in the first twenty minutes of the call, assuming you liked what you heard. - Remember, you own the process: you can expand or contract the time you allot based on how well the data you gathered in the call fit the scorecard. - “Do this person’s strengths match my scorecard? Are the weaknesses manageable? Am I thrilled about bringing this person in for a series of interviews based on the data I have?” You want to be excited about that possibility. You want to have the feeling that you have found the one. - If you have any hesitation, or if you find yourself thinking you want to bring candidates in just to test them a little more, then screen them out. Only invite in those whose profile appears to be a strong match for your scorecard. - fellow. Would you hire him for a key management job where a lot of change was needed? - The whole point of the screening interview is to weed people out as quickly as possible. We mentioned that before, but it bears repeating. - Better to miss out on a potential A Player than to waste precious hours on a borderline case that turns out to be a B or C Player. - Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Who Interview. - You own the hire. You will suffer the consequences of making a mistake. Your career and job happiness depend on finding A Players. And you want to be in the room when a candidate reveals the hundreds of data points that will enable you to make a great decision. - perhaps someone from HR, another manager or member of your team, or simply someone who wants to learn the method by observing you. - For each job I am going to ask you five core questions: What were you hired to do? What accomplishments are you most proud of? What were some low points during that job? Who were the people you worked with? Why did you leave that job? At the end of the interview we will discuss your career goals and aspirations, and you will have a chance to ask me questions. Eighty percent of the process is in this room, but if we mutually decide to continue, we will conduct reference calls to complete the process. Finally, while this sounds like a lengthy interview, it will go remarkably fast. I want to make sure you have the opportunity to share your full story, so it is my job to guide the pace of the discussion. Sometimes, we’ll go into more depth in a period of your career. Other times, I will ask that we move on to the next topic. I’ll try to make sure we leave plenty of time to cover your most recent, and frankly, most relevant jobs. Do you have any questions about the process? - The bad way to interrupt somebody is to put up your hand like a stop sign gesture and say, “Wait, wait, wait. Let me stop you there. Can we get back on track?” This shames the candidate, implies that they have done something wrong, and makes them clam up for good. You will really struggle to get the person to open up after that. The good way to interrupt somebody is to smile broadly, match their enthusiasm level, and use reflective listening to get them to stop talking without demoralizing them. You say, “Wow! It sounds like that pig farm next to the corporate office smelled horrible!” The candidate nods and says “Yes!” and appreciates your empathy and respect. Then you immediately say, “You were just telling me about launching that direct mail campaign. I’d love to hear what was that like? How well did it go?” - It is through maintaining very high rapport that you get the most valuable data, and polite interrupting can build that rapport. - People who perform well are generally pulled to greater opportunities. People who perform poorly are often pushed out of their jobs. Do not hire anybody who has been pushed out of 20 percent or more of their jobs. From our experience, those folks have a three times higher chance of being a chronic B or C Player. - The idea isn’t to gather dirt. That’s never the point of the Who Interview. If you come off like an investigative reporter or, worse, a gossip columnist, you need to seriously refine your approach. Think of yourself instead as a biographer interviewing a subject. You want both the details and the broad pattern, the facts and texture. That’s how you make an informed who decision. - We need people on our team who will never be satisfied with the status quo. They need to be results-oriented people who work toward continuous improvement. - 8:30 A.M.–8:45 A.M. Team meeting. Bring the interview team together for fifteen minutes at the beginning of the day (or the night before) to review the scorecard, the candidate’s resume, notes from the screening interview, and roles and responsibilities for the day. 8:45 A.M.–9:00 A.M. Have a team member greet the candidate on arrival and spend a few minutes orienting him or her to the day, and possibly to the company. 9:00 A.M.–12:00 P.M. Who Interview. The hiring manager and one other colleague conduct a tandem interview that lasts one and a half to three hours, depending on the length of the candidate’s career. 12:00 P.M.–1:30 P.M. Lunch. A few team members, preferably not involved in the interview process, take the candidate to lunch. We like to keep this informal—this is a pressure-packed day as it is—but if you or the candidate is pressed for time, you can continue interviewing while you eat. 1:30 P.M.–4:30 P.M. Focused interviews. One to three team members conduct focused interviews based on their assigned portions of the scorecard. (Note: Some companies conduct focused interviews as a second round of interviews only after a candidate passes the Who Interview in an earlier round. This enables them to save time if a candidate does not pass the Who Interview, but it does force them to schedule multiple interview days. Other companies do it all in one day.) 4:30 P.M.–4:45 P.M. Host thanks the candidate and explains next steps. 4:45 P.M.–5:30 P.M. Candidate discussion. Interview team convenes for thirty to sixty minutes at the end of the day to rate the scorecard and develop a list of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses based on the actual data gathered during the day. The hiring manager makes a go/no-go decision at the end of the meeting regarding whether to conduct reference calls or terminate the process. - In fact, 64 percent of the business moguls we interviewed conduct reference calls for every hire, not just the ones at the top. Unfortunately, far fewer general managers follow suit. Why? Pushback from the candidate is one reason; time constraints are another. - Third, conduct the right number of reference interviews. We recommend that you personally do about four and ask your colleagues to do three, for a total of seven reference interviews. - In truth, we believe, people don’t change that much. People aren’t mutual funds. Past performance really is an indicator of future performance. - For managerial hires, candidate has never had to hire or fire anybody. - Candidate seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself. - The five areas, which we call the five F’s of selling, are: fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun. - Fit ties together the company’s vision, needs, and culture with the candidate’s goals, strengths, and values. “Here is where we are going - Family takes into account the broader trauma of changing jobs. “What can we do to make this change - Fit means showing the candidate how his or her goals, talents, and values fit into your vision, strategy, and culture. People want to make an impact in the world. They want to be needed. They want to be part of something that feels right. Selling fit means showing a candidate how all of these needs will be met when he or she works with you. - Nobody who is worth anything is going to go into a company where they don’t see real potential with the company and a strong fit with their goals and abilities. - The most valuable commodity they have is their time. If they are truly an A Player, they are going to value the potential of the company.” - This is one of the great paradoxes of management. In reality, great leaders gain more control by ceding control to their A Players. They know they are bringing talented people onto their team. The scorecard tells them that, and the scorecard also tells new hires the outcomes by which they will be measured. Once it’s all out on the table like that, there is no need for micromanagement. Instead, you need to create an environment where A Players like these can thrive. George Buckley - “Maybe they talk too much. Maybe they are awkward in front of others. Nobody is perfect. It is not about immediate competency; it’s about confidence that builds that competency. If you know that I am confident in you, you are likely to take more risks, to work a little harder, because you know that I am not going to take your head off if something doesn’t work perfectly. That builds competence. Extend the hand of trust. And occasionally extend the hand of friendship.” Stacy Schusterman builds trust with her A Player candidates by encouraging them to evaluate her as a manager. - I encourage the candidate to do reference checks on me so they can understand how I work with people.” - Research shows that while money can be a disincentive if it is too low or not linked to performance, it rarely is the key motivator.\*2 - us, “If all you have to sell is the compensation, that is not good.” To be sure, money is one piece of the package, but it never stands alone. That doesn’t mean you can - The pay level you end up discussing inevitably is dictated by both the external and internal markets. Candidates will benchmark themselves against their current compensation and what they believe they can command in the external market. Managers, in turn, will try to apply internal compensation guidelines, which may or may not have been benchmarked against external sources. - “There is no such thing as a bargain in the labor market. It is easy to underpay or overpay. You can’t try to steal them because they will want to go somewhere else. And you can’t throw too much money at them because other people will find out and that will make them mad.” - Over the years, we have identified five distinct phases of the hiring process that merit increased selling effort on your part. Think of these as waves to overcome. If you don’t increase your sales energy, you won’t get your candidate over the crest of the wave to the next phase. The waves are: 1. When you source 2. When you interview 3. The time between your offer and the candidate’s acceptance 4. The time between the candidate’s acceptance and his or her first day 5. The new hire’s first one hundred days on the job - We asked these leaders what factors contributed the most to business success. They told us that “management talent” was over half the equation. - Get the talent side of the equation wrong, and you will always face rough waters. You’ll spend all of your time dealing with an endless torrent of what issues. - “A client in Mumbai will come to Barclays if they think our people are distinctive. Whether they are a corporate or personal customer, they want to be smart in their choice of provider. We want customers to come to Barclays because Barclays’ people are among the best in the world.” - Conventional wisdom holds that the sort of emotional intelligence Lambs show is the critically important leadership quality. In fact, our analysis argues otherwise. Emotional intelligence is important, but only when matched with the propensity to get things done. Too many executives have fallen into the trap of accentuating their Lamb skills at the expense of their Cheetah qualities. They work hard to stay in tune with their employees. They’re well liked on the shop floor and in the boardroom. There’s only one problem: they don’t produce value at anywhere near the rate Cheetahs do. - we recommend going with the fast and focused option. In this fast-paced age of business in which we all exist, it appears that speed and focus really count when it comes to delivering great financial results. - “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” - Notes -