January 2007: Strategies for Talent Acquisition

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

The other day I was watching a programme on TV entitled Hell's Kitchen. It's similar to Donald Trump's Apprentice programme. There are two teams and they cook to keep gusts happy, and at the end of the show the lowest-performing team member of the losing team gets kicked out.

The interesting fact was that there were people on both teams with formal culinary schooling, and they were some of the lowest performers.

They new theory but when the heat was on, both from the cookers and the Chef Ramsey, they crumbled. There was a guy who was a former prison chef, and he proved to be one of the best. When Chef Ramsey tested / tasted their individual creations, this former prison chef proved to be one of the best.

Yet, What Do Most Consulting Firms Look For In New Candidates?

They are looking for perfect resumes. This is amazing. I moved to Canada from the UK, a practical country. Over there the question is this: "We have this problem to solve or this opportunity to seize. Can you help?" And most employers' don't give a rat's arse how many degrees you have. If you can demonstrate that you can help an employer to acquire more clients, but all you have is some vocational training in lion-taming, you still can get the job.

In Canada, on the other hand, you must be certified and licensed even to take a deep breath. Of course, the authorities are crying that certification and licences are needed to make sure that people do a good job. Personally I believe that the quality of work people do depends on their own ethical and moral standards and has nothing to do with certifications.

In his book, A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto lists 9 assumptions about schooling (http://www.spinninglobe.net/9assumptions.htm). If you have anything to do with hiring, you'd better read it. It may just open a new world for you about schooling and certification. And then tread the whole book.

When I came to Canada, I took a job while setting up business here. The BC Children's Hospital hired me to take care of their Y2K issues. I had an extensive biomedical engineering background, so the match was as obvious as a ham sandwich. My boss, Martin was a Registered Professional Engineer but no code of ethics held him back from buying medical equipment for the hospital from a company where he was the chief financial officer. His company "happened to offer" the best deal. And when I caught up with the project he had fallen behind on, he fired me. So much about ethical conduct and certifications and association memberships.

At one point The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC (APEGBC) threatened me with legal action for calling myself an engineer in my documents. The representative told me I was not allowed to call myself an engineer until and unless I joined the association and the association gave me the title "Professional Engineer."

Just to gain a perspective and scrutinising the process of hiring, I frequently respond to ads looking for consultants. And I can tell you the process is rather pathetic.

Why?

Here are some reasons…

Many firms use recruitment agencies to hire new talent. They say people are their most important assets, but they are tool lazy to acquire those new and valuable assets. It's like telling a dating agency, "Bring me a woman and I'll accept her blindly and marry her on the spot."

Many firms that don't use recruitment agencies hire through their own HR (Human Repression) departments. Most HR departments' objective is to manipulate, suppress, tame and control people and mould them into rigidly - and often stupidly - defined systems. They have no intention (never mind expertise) to seek out and acquire top-tier talents. And they don't care either. Their job is to fill the company with warm bodies with impressive resumes who are willing to sit in their Dilbert cubicles 40 hours a week. They are looking for easy-to-manipulate "workers" with perfect resumes and paths of schooling who are willing to work for competitive(ly low) wages.

Hiring based on job description and task lists. Using medical language, this is the situation when patients tell their doctors what skills they seek in their doctors but refuse to reveal what symptoms they experience. The hiring firm has a problem which it wants to solve by hiring a new person. So, it's only fair that candidates ask, "What problems do you want to solve or what opportunity do you want to seize by hiring this new person?" And what is the typical response from firms? "We're looking for someone with an MBA (specific schooling) who can use Maximizer, Sugar CRM and the Joomla web content management system (specific tactical knowledge)." This approach is as retarded as hiring some new salespeople to increase sales, while the existing salespeople operate in second gear with the hand break halfway on.

Most job ads are like the general who tells his soldiers to keep shooting 8 hours a day Monday to Friday to earn their hourly rates, but doesn't tell them the target. Luckily generals are a touch smarter than that. Hopefully gradually more and more retired soldiers end up in HR departments and bring a bit of pragmatism to their bosses.

Believing the old and erroneous mantra, "Past performance is the best predictor of future performance." That's horseshit. Just read the biographies of Lincoln or Churchill. It's not past performance but the environment. There are several studies that prove that after-surgery patients heal faster at home surrounded by the tender loving care of their families, as opposed to apathetic, but licensed, doctors and nurses. In general home-schooled kids are mode educated than kids schooled by certified and licensed teachers. John Taylor Gatto writes in A Different Kind of Teacher that the top 10 US private schools have one thing in common: They all refuse to employ certified and licensed teachers. They regard them as the bane of education.

Here is a section from Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google... (http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/reasons.html). Here is a company that has become world-class in a pretty short space of time by ignoring the conventional wisdom of the IT industry: "Only experts need to apply."

Good company everywhere you look. Googlers range from former neurosurgeons, CEOs, and U.S. puzzle champions to alligator wrestlers and former-Marines. No matter what their backgrounds Googlers make for interesting cube mates.

So What's The Alternative

Here are some hiring practices that I've found valuable...

Recruit people who will be slow learners of the corporate dogma ("This is how we do things around here"). If you keep looking for people of "your kind", that is, the same skills and attributes you have, sooner or later you create such level of incest in your firm that you end up wiping yourself out. Hint: Look at some Royal families in the world.

Recruit people who are better than you. Yes, you can put together a team in which you are the genius, but then you stand on the shoulders of dwarfs, and the limit of your vision is the tip of your nose. Attract people who are better then you, stretch you with their weird perspectives and oddball concepts, and you stand on the shoulders of giants. To do this you must tame your ego, but in return, you may just see much further.

Recruit people who occasionally piss you off. It only means those people think differently, thus bring new perspectives to your firm. If you recruit only people you like, because they are just like you, you are multiplying your own flaws. If you are an accountant who is allergic to selling, soon you will have a neat group of bankrupt accounting geniuses.

Recruit people whom you are willing to compensate well. As the Brits say: If you pay peanuts you get only monkeys. And since the universal law of attraction says that, "like attracts like", if you attract monkeys then you have a monkey business in which you are the chief monkey. That makes you a five-star imitator. And high calibre people with do their best to avoid you.

Yes, money is not the greatest motivator, but lack of money is the greatest demotivator. Just imagine, you have to live the rest of your life in fear of losing your best people, because a better firm has seduced them with better opportunities, including but not limited to better compensation. And when they go to the competition, they take your deepest secrets and many of your clients with them.

You may say that stealing clients is unethical, but since the professional service firm is the only form of business that is based on one-to-one relationships, many clients automatically move with the professionals with whom they have one-to-one relationships. And, besides swearing and shaking your fist to the high heavens, there is not a sausage you can do about it.

Now you may say your people signed non-disclosure and non-competition agreements. You can't be so naive, can you? There is one more thing here: How can you ask - almost - minimum wage - people to go out and sell your premium services? Minimum wage people develop minimum wage mindsets and minimum wage performance. Potential clients will be able to read this sign and it is very repelling.

Recruit people you don't need yet. Recruiting good people is just like "recruiting" a spouse. Just as you can't go out saying "I must fill the vacancy for a wife by Friday 5:00PM", you cannot find good people that way either. You recruit good people whenever you bump into them. Many firms make the mistake of growing linearly. The idea is to start with the end in mind and working backwards. If your vision is to develop a large multi-national firm, then abandon your small business management practices, that is, let's save money by building our own websites and cleaning our own toilets. If you want to grow, show it.

Also growth starts on the inside. First you have to develop the performance capability within your firm, and then that capability turns into performance and new revenue. It's like farming. First you have to plant and then harvest. You can't start the farming cycle by getting paid $1 million for your corn which you haven't even planted yet.

Use job interviews as idea generation, not only to screen candidates. The fresh perspective of the "ignorant antagonist" can take your level of thinking to a much higher level. Most people in most firms become the big bosses' yes people. Bring in people who dare to oppose you. That is how great concepts are created. You need people who dare to say: The emperor has no clothes.

Encourage your people to be mavericks. This is very hard. Most firm owners, especially owners of small joints are breathtakingly ego-driven, and want to take control without realising a basic fact as Nicole Kidman bluntly put it to Tom Cruise in the movie Days of Thunder: "Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody controls anything." They have the "My way or the highway" mentality. You can buy people's time, their muscle movements, but you must earn their respect. You can control labourers by prodding them to shovel more horseshit from one pile to the other, but you can't control professionals to provide higher quality services. And one must be an Olympic-grade idiot even for trying. Just accept that your people are good at what they do, and give them freedom to practise their crafts. Focus on that you create an environment of honest, ethical high quality work, and your people will step up to your expectations.

Heed this: It may be your business per se, but your people probably have more control over it than you can imagine, and rest assured if you piss them off, they can ruin it for you before you can say Jamina Puddleduck.

Over the years I have asked this questions from people at professional service firms: "If you were dismissed unjustly, what could you to take revenge on your firm?" Here are some responses:

• "I would take the firm to court."
• "I would write a news release about my firm's dirty practices."
• "I would start laying out the firm's dirty laundry."
• "I would get in touch with the media: newspapers, radio, TV, and off I go on a crusade."
• "I would set up my own firm and would continue servicing my own clients."
• "I would file an official complaint against my firm at its professional association."
• "I would request a tax audit on my firm on the very strong suspicion of tax fraud."
• "I have contacts at the Hell's Angels. Use your imagination."

So, if you believe you have the upper hand on your people, then you had better get real. They have the upper hand on you, and if you piss them off, there is no doubt, they will know how to use it to destroy your firm. So, you had better respect your people a little bit.

Hint: Do you know why so many consultants never put their best clients into their firms' databases, and protect their identities like junkyard dogs? And I bet some of them would even kill if someone got too close to their clients.

Why Do You Think That Happens?

Consultants know that only very few firms are worth investing a long-term career in, so they grow their own assets within their firms. It is basically their firms' cultures that force them to build their own careers covertly, and when they are ready to jump, they go into competition against their former employers. Who can blame them? Nobody. Their former employers "made" them do it by working in a competitive as opposed to a collegial and collaborative environment.

When you talk about money, watch your candidates like a hawk. Watch both for verbal and non-verbal cues. If, after a boring discussion, their eyes light up, then you had better run very fast and very far, unless you run a consulting whore house and manage by "billable hours" and "making quota."

Focus on people who have never worked in an environment you have. Ignoring this concept can lead you to a collection great - for instance - doctors with amazing content knowledge but with no emotional skills, who cannot work with people beyond giving basic orders: "Bend over!... Next!"

Over the years the fitness industry has turned itself into a cheap commodity because most of the facility managers have focused on hiring personal trainers and instructors with advanced fitness degrees but no business knowledge. Consequently, most fitness facilities don't know sweet Fanny Adams about how to operate profitable businesses that offer longevity and overall well-being.

Ignore your firm's past. You can't build your firm's future by constantly looking at the rear view mirror. As the saying goes, you can never discover new oceans until you have the courage to lose the sight of the safe and secure shore.

Here you can ask two questions:

The tactical question is: "What can we achieve through who we are, with what we and by what we do… today." That is, you have some rigid tactics and keep the strategy fluid. This is retarded. This is like a ship's captain saying, "Where can we go by steadily sailing south-east at 5.6 knots." Here the strategy is subservient to the tactics. As Stephen Covey says, "You're busy climbing a ladder but you don't know what it leans against." In this approach "How?" (Tactics) is given and the "What?" (Strategy) is haphazard.

The strategic question is: Who do we have to become and what do we have to do to achieve our objectives? Note that the "What?" (Strategy) is given and the "How?" (Tactics) is flexible.

Discovering Your People's Natural Strengths?

To make the most of your people, you have to make sure they play to their natural strengths. Your strengths are the direct result of the natural talents you were born with. These talents have been honed and sharpened through life experiences, education and the skills you've developed over the years. If you determine your people's strengths, you can really build a strategically focused firm that has a competitive advantage. In order for you to clearly identify your people's strengths it will be helpful to look at what constitutes strengths.

Strengths = Talents + Education + Experiences + Skills

Step 1- Talents

It all starts with your inborn talents. Your talents are the special abilities that you were either born with or developed within the first 3 years of your life. Talent is a consistently recurring pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that can be applied productively. These abilities can take many forms:

• Thinking abilities (strategic thinker, a marketing mind, visual or spatial thinking, genius thinking, creative thinking, linear thinking, curiosity, etc…)
• Feeling abilities (intuitive, empathetic, passion, confidence, determination, spontaneous, etc…)
• Behaviours (working well under pressure, being responsible, ability to focus, being a good listener, good negotiator, good bluffer, eye-hand coordination etc…)

Your talents are the foundations of your strengths. To achieve mastery, to be really excellent at anything first requires that you were born with a foundation for it. If you have the foundation, then you still need to receive the education, experience and skill training to convert the talent into a strength. If all these elements come together you have a strength.

Step 2 - Education

This derives from schooling, working with through mentors, reading, attending seminars, audio programs, and every other way you can bring in information that is already prepared for you in some form or another. This is the result of explicit learning.

Your education can either supportive or antagonistic to your natural talents. If a naturally talented musician like Mozart had studied accounting, that would have been antagonistic to his natural talents. Ideally, your education should work in synergy with your talents. If you're a naturally born analyst, then study accounting.

Step 3 - Experiences

What you've learned throughout your life and pulled out as your observations and conclusions on how to do things. As a result of your experiences, your work becomes more and more intuitive. Hint: You can't go to school to become the next Picasso. You may want to read more about this in Malcolm Gladwell's book, entitled Blink.

Step 4 - Skills

Skills are the steps by step instructions that experts have refined for you to more easily learn specific activities. While learning skills will help you improve your performance in any area, the areas where you have foundational talents will show exponential growth in your ability.

An example might be golf. I would imagine that no one has ever played at a pro level the first time they picked up a club. But some people take lessons for years and while they improve they still kind of suck. Others though show incredible progress from lesson to lesson. The difference between the two is inborn talents.

Before You Are Hiring Your Next Person

Step 1: Define the Position

Purpose: This is the "Why?" you want to hire this person. You must have a better reason than we have lots of projects and need new people. First reach the point of having much more demand for your firm than it can provide, so you can cherry pick your clients. And hire only when you have overwhelming demands for your services at premium fees.

Objectives: This is the "What?" you want to hire this person. What is this person expected to achieve in the new position?

What is this person responsible for? Do you expect this person to achieve results or mark time, be busy and perform pre-defined tasks?

What authority will this person receive to achieve the expected outcomes?

Describe the type of relationship this person is expected to work in both with clients and other associates of your firm.

Describe the environment this person is expected to operate in.

Step 2: Job Performance

The person: Remember, his book, in Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes about personality traits to achieve success, not specific skills to master, courses to take and certificates to collect. So, you'd better select this person based on character traits. Everything else can be taught and learnt. Many firms kill themselves by employing apathetic geniuses. What also works against you is that statistically, some 86% of employees hate their jobs and/or bosses.

Rewards: How do you reward this new person? Forget about hourly rates. That's retarded and it rewards incompetence.

Repercussions: How do you deal with people who refuse to act in the in the best interest of the higher good and goes on self-serving crusades?

Step 3: Measuring Results

Expected vs. Actual: Basically you measure and chart your projections against your actual results.

Differences: This gives you your delta, the difference between the projection and actual outcomes.

Corrections: And based on your delta, now you know what to do with it. That is, what sort of corrective action to take to get back on track.

There are two factors you can measure. Does your measurement relate to the process or the outcome? And is the measurement qualitative or quantitative?

So, you measure...

Quantitative Outcomes: These are the numerical changes your firms achieves by hiring this person.

Quantitative Process: This is the measure of progress. In project management these are your milestones.

Qualitative Process: This is about how your new candidates feel about the process of change that your firm initiated by hiring them.

Qualitative Outcomes: This section measures how your new candidates feel about the end result they are expected to create.

So, what are the lessons here? One is that you should focus on character not schooling. This especially important if you consider that...

...According to the study "Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs: The Prevalence, Causes, and Proposed Actions", reported by The Toronto Star, 56% of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the last year, compared with 47 per cent of non-business students.

"The study, which included 5,000 MBA students from 11 graduate business schools in Canada and 21 schools in the U.S., was conducted by management professors at Rutgers, Washington State and Pennsylvania State universities, and due to appear in the next issue of the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal. Researcher Donald McCabe also noted "Those numbers are probably under-reported."

This study points out an ongoing trend that lying and cheating in the world of business is just normal and they are here to stay. So, students learn at an early age that since business is based on lying and cheating, using lying and cheating in studying business is acceptable and perfectly normal.

In a 2005 study by analysts at Wetfeet, over 800 students, who pursued careers in management consulting, were asked: "Please select up to 3 factors that make your top ranked company appealing to you." Only 2 (0.25%) people said that "Ethics" was one of their top 3 factors for choosing a consulting firm. (Even the category "Other" was rated more highly than "Ethics.")

So, this is it for this month on hiring good people. A few things to think about.

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Recommended Reading: Exceptional Selling

By Jeff Thull

If you believe that a good salesperson can sell anything, then you may be wrong. If you believe that a B2C (business to consumer) salesperson can thrive in the B2B (business to business), then you may have to think again. In this book Jeff clearly outlines that selling is not what it used to be. Selling anything has changed over the years. Selling consulting services has been set upside down.

For instance, many fee objections are created by consultants, not by buyers. By consultants by the way they sell. Traditional heavy-handed approaches create heavy-handed responses from buyers, including but not limited to, "I have to think it over", "Your price is too high", "Can we have it sooner for less money?"

In this book Jeff lays out a complete selling plan for from the first contact to the completed project. All you have to do really is to plug in your information, and Bob's your uncle. You can go and sell your services.

Jeff also explains the biggest problems with traditional selling. If raising your project fees and being treated as a trusted advisor (as opposed to a fungible vendor) are important to you, then get this book and read it a few times.

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