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Putting the Great back in Hiring

By Bryan Johanson, November 15, 2006

Fortune magazine ran an article in their October 28^th edition on "What it takes to be Great". If you haven't had a chance to read it, it is well worth your time. I quote liberally from the article below. On one hand, the article has nothing to do with hiring. On the other hand, the article has everything to do with hiring. Everybody wants to hire "great" employees and many managers have a vision in their minds of what would make the perfect employee, but few truly understand the essence of greatness as it relates to a particular job.

One of the exercises we do in our hiring manager and recruiter workshops focuses on defining what "great employees" actually do on the job. We ask the participants to list these on the white board. The list is always interesting and quite predictable. Below is a sampling of the typical answers we see: Great employees . . .

Get things done on time and within budget!
Work harder than average employees.
Solve problems.
Work well with the team.
Constantly learn and improve themselves.
Don't complain.

This simple exercise sets the stage for the entire full-day training event because it forces managers to consider their hiring process in the context of what a "great employee" actually does on the job. While this list is always easy to create, it's amazing how many managers make hiring decisions based on totally different criteria. The Fortune article challenges our thinking about how to measure greatness.

Case-in-Point
Several years ago Lou completed a project with Verizon Information Services. The nature of the project was to create custom interviewing tools to help them hire better telephone sales people to renew $75 yellow page ads and up-sell clients to a larger ad. When we first engaged on the project Lou asked the woman, who had been leading the online sales team for over 21 years, what she was looking for in top performers. She gave the typical answer, "We're looking for people who are aggressive, who don't take no for an answer. We want people who are willing to just keep dialing for dollars all day long. That's what they need to be successful." We then asked her to think of the top two or three people on her current team and compare their performance to what she just described. She paused for a moment and then exclaimed, "Oh my. . . They aren't like that at all." She went on, "They certainly work hard, but they don't make the most phone calls; nor are they particularly aggressive. Instead they are just friendly, engaging, and they get people to stay on the line and talk with them for several minutes." Interestingly, their close rates were 70% compared to 15-20% for the typical sales person at Verizon. This is just one example of the mis-match between our vision of "greatness" and the reality. Below are a few insights from the Fortune article that might prove useful as you assess great talent going forward.

"British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, 'The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.' " Now this is interesting. Hiring great people isn't about the talent they possess, but it's actually about what people do with the talent they have and how they develop that talent over time. I was surprised to discover in the article that "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." Talk about breaking down accepted stereotypes. There may be hope for my chess game after all. So if talent isn't the essence of greatness, what is? According to the article it stems from one thing.

"The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call 'deliberate practice'. It is activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition." There you have it. Hard work focused on improving one's skills and abilities.

Thirty years ago my piano teacher used to tell me, "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." That's true in golf, most sports, and - as the Fortune Magazine article points out - in business.

"The authors of one study concluded, 'We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.' Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, 'Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why.' "

The good news for us is that we don't have to answer "why" to make a great hire. We just have to use the Performance-based Hiring system to understand where people have taken the initiative, gone the extra mile, and - taking a lesson from the Fortune article - "have consistently made improvements in their capabilities through deliberate practice". Once we understand a person's track record of achievements and improvement, we can match this to the performance required for any position. This is how you measure greatness and hire great performers.

We hope your next hire is truly "Great"!