6
Recruiting for Your Brown Shorts
Collectively, we’re doing a lousy job of attracting great talent. That’s tough to hear, especially since it happens to be true. But I didn’t say it first; you did—via the collective voice of your peers. While I’ve been writing this book, Leadership IQ has been conducting one of the largest talent-management studies ever done. We’re looking at executives from more than 1,000 companies, folks strategically selected to represent every company size, every industry, and every major country. Our goal is to learn what’s working—and what’s not working—across the full talent-management continuum (recruiting, hiring, developing, engaging, leading, and retaining). It’s a massive undertaking that’s already presented us with tremendous amounts of information. And one thing that’s coming through loud and clear is that the current trends in recruiting are definitely not working.
We asked the executives participating in the study to evaluate their companies’ talent pipelines. And we asked them to consider in particular how successful they were in sourcing the following four categories of talent: executive, professional, technical, and unskilled. We received poor feedback, and this is what I mean by that. For each of the four talent categories, fewer than 10 percent of the companies said they were doing an excellent job at sourcing that talent. Plus, at least 65 percent of the companies said they were average or below average in sourcing talent in each of the four categories. Though these numbers show little overall success, we were able to observe that companies do the best job at sourcing professional employees, followed by technical employees, then executive employees, and finally unskilled employees. (The most up-to-date data on this study can be found at www.leadershipiq.com/hiring.)
Now some people look at that 65 percent for average or below average and say, “Well, I could live with being average—it’s better than totally stinking.” And to some extent that’s true; technically speaking, being average is better than totally stinking. But average isn’t good enough to get the talent you’re after. This is an issue I see so many organizations getting wrong that it’s worth taking a closer look at.
I don’t care if you’re hiring a housekeeper, an engineer, a nurse, or your next CEO, you want somebody in that role who “gets it”—who wants to be great at whatever the job entails. I didn’t title this book Lowered Expectations: A Guide to Hiring People That Aren’t Totally Awful for a reason. This book is about hiring high performers, the people who have the right skills and the right attitude to succeed at your organization. But the people you want to bring to your organization, the ones who are going to knock at your door and say, “Hey, look at me, I’m happy to wear your Brown Shorts and I want to work for you,” aren’t so easy to reach.
High performers aren’t looking for an average job opportunity, a place to go five days a week just to kill some time and get a paycheck. They want more than that; they want ongoing success. They want a job where the culture fits their personality and where the clear path in front of them leads to being a high performer. But these great people aren’t just sitting around waiting for your call. Generally, they’re employed someplace else. Or even if they are in a career transition, you can bet they are going to choose their next job very carefully and not just jump at the first place that offers a steady paycheck.
Oh, you might get lucky and find that your next high performer is in a weakened negotiating position. Maybe he’s been out of work for a while or is just entering the workforce. Or maybe you found a true diamond in the rough whom nobody else has discovered yet. But I wouldn’t make hope or luck the foundation of your talent strategy.
Thinking competitively is a fairly typical and, for the most part, accepted mind-set in the sales world. You have competitors and those competitors have customers that you will most certainly try to steal away. You’ll identify those customers, try to find where they’re hurting, figure out how to solve that pain, understand what drives their purchasing, hone your pitch, highlight your advantages, and call, call, call. Welcome to Sales 101.
We understand and even celebrate this need for competitive differentiation and pursuit in the world of sales. But when it comes to sourcing talent, we often operate as though millions of high performers are sitting around with nothing better to do than jump at our job ads. We act as if all we have to do is describe our open positions and, voilà, the best of the best will line up outside our door.
The following example illustrates how great we are at selling ourselves in the sales world (and by “ourselves” I mean our companies), and what a lousy job we do of selling ourselves when it comes to sourcing talent. Imagine you’re the CEO of a software company that makes video games, and you’ve just released a new game called Hurts-SoGood.
When you announce Hurts-SoGood to the marketplace, and the gamers at your press conference ask why they should buy your game, you of course have a strong pitch, maybe something like this:
Aren’t you frustrated with your current video games that aren’t photorealistic, load too slowly, run too slowly, and don’t inflict actual pain? Don’t you want to play in the game instead of playing near the game? Isn’t that why you abandon games after an average of only two weeks? I know I want a real rush from my games, and I’m sure you do too. Hurts-SoGood solves all that with lifelike graphics, loading speeds under two seconds and running speeds even faster, and each copy comes with a set of hospital-quality electrodes that attach to your temples so whenever your character gets shot, you feel the actual pain. This is how warriors become warriors! So get off your feet, plant your butt on that couch, and become a warrior!
OK, so maybe that’s not your exact response, but whatever your pitch sounds like, it’s going to be compelling. You’ll give a great answer that sells. You’ll highlight the frustrations gamers feel with their current games, paint a vivid picture of why your game solves all those frustrations, and show folks how quickly they’ll be enthralled with this game—shooting and getting shocked and whatever else. Everyone who hears your pitch will be awestruck.
Now, still imaging yourself as CEO of this software company, let’s turn to your job ads—after all, you’re going to need some pretty top-notch programmers with a great deal of moral flexibility to keep products like these coming. Based on reviews of thousands of real-world job ads, I distilled the data to find the average ad showing what your job ad probably looks like.
If you are a C++ Engineer with great
math skills and experience developing
video games, please read on!
What you need for this position:
• C++ Expertise
• Object-Oriented Design
• Foundation in Game Programming
• Strong Debugging Skills
• Strong 3D Graphics Skills (Open GL or Direct 3D)
• Foundation in Mathematics (vector, discrete)
• Experience in Developing with Version Control
What’s in it for you:
Competitive salary and benefits, flexibility to work with multiple languages of your preference, sunny warm weather, and free lunches. So if you have heavy C/C++ experience, please apply today!
Wow, what happened? Your sales pitch to get people to buy the game was so compelling. I want to buy that game because you tapped into my current frustrations with all my other games (lousy graphics, too slow, no physical pain). You painted such a vivid picture of how the new game will make me feel like a warrior that I must have it now! I’m pumped up just thinking about it. But your pitch to get me to apply for the job offered none of that. The ad tells me what skills I should have, but why should I apply? The best benefits offered are competitive salary and free lunch? Seriously?
Why didn’t all that great sales energy make it into the job ad? Most job ads sound more like the instruction manual to a VCR (oops, sorry, I mean a Blu-Ray player) than they do a compelling sales pitch. And that’s a problem—the high performers you want all have better opportunities. They’re not sitting around waiting for you to post some ineffectual job ad. In fact, they’re not even going to notice that job ad. Most people who are going to notice that ad (and who will likely respond to it, thereby taking up your valuable time) are the folks you don’t want—the people sitting around, reading generic job ads, and responding to any and all with an e-mail blast of their résumé. And believe me, there’s a bad attitude story lurking behind almost every one of those candidates.
The high performers you’re trying to recruit to make (or sell, or conceptualize) your products are as challenging to attract as are the customers you want to buy those products. So to get the candidates you want, you’ve got to put the same marketing effort into selling the “product” (in this case, the job and your organization) as you do when you market your products to the customers you want. And yet, when you look at most job ads (and really, recruiting pitches in any media look pretty similar), there are a lot more words devoted to “this is what we require for you to work here” than there are words about “this is why you’re going to love working here.” And even worse, all those requirements you list sound just like the requirements every other company lists. There’s nothing to set you apart, to grab the attention of the right high performers so they stop and say, “Wow, this job sounds like something that might be even better than where I am right now. I should check it out.”
Please note that I’m using the “job ads” in this chapter as a proxy for the overall recruiting message. Also, the job ad is the place in the recruiting chain where you typically have the greatest control over both the message and the delivery. If you can’t get the message right in your ad or job post, you’re definitely not going to get it right anywhere else (like job fairs and social media).
So unless you want to remain trapped in a world where fewer than 10 percent of leaders have excellent talent pipelines, you’re going to have to change the way you recruit for the talent you want. The good news is that with all our research, we’ve distilled the probability of attracting high performers to apply for jobs at your company into this very simple formula. (See Figure 6.1.)
Figure 6.1. The Formula: P = A + U − S
P: Probability That High Performers Will Come to You
In a nutshell, the probability that high performers will find your organization appealing enough to exert the mental and physical effort required to apply for a job there is a function of the following three things:
1. High performers have to feel an attraction to your unique culture (your Brown Shorts). This means that they have to understand the two big dimensions of your Brown Shorts: number one is what differentiates your culture from all other organizations and number two is what separates high and low performers within your organization.
2. High performers need to feel some urgency to leave their current situation. If they’re truly happy and fulfilled at their present job, they won’t leave. So we need to help them understand and reflect on both the demotivators they now face and the motivators that are missing from their current situation.
3. You can make all the pitches you want, but high performers are quite good at sniffing out subterfuge. Any whiff of inauthenticity (for example, your pitch doesn’t match your reality) is going to raise their suspicions and significantly detract from any attraction or urgency they may feel. This then lowers the probability that they’ll apply for the job with you.
It’s critical to fully grasp the P = A + U − S Brown Shorts Recruiting Formula, so I’m going to break it down and explain each piece of it. After I do that, I’ll show you how the formula works in action. (We’ll dissect an example of a typical job ad and then write a better one.) And finally, we’ll talk about other recruiting situations, such as internal recruiters, networking, and social media.
A: Attraction High Performers Feel to Your Organization’s Brown Shorts
Why would you leave a place where you’re perfectly comfortable just to go someplace else that’s indistinguishable from the place you are? Or, to put it another way, if you’ve just been seated at a restaurant you know you like, why would you immediately get up and drive across town to another restaurant that offers an identical dining experience? But what if you suddenly hear there’s something different about that other place, something that intrigues you? In that case, you might make a hasty excuse to your server and run right over there to check it out.
It’s a fascinating exercise to read your own job ads and ask “How many other companies could say the identical thing that we’re saying?” In other words, how much incentive are you giving high performers to leave their comfortable environments and go somewhere else? While writing this chapter I needed a break, so I took an hour (or two) and started clicking around CareerBuilder.com to read some job ads. (When I party, I really party!) CareerBuilder.com is the largest online job site in the United States. It’s very easy to search, so I had some fun. (Later I’ll tell you about some cool recruiting research their company president, North America, recently gave me.)
I did a search for programmer jobs and selected a bunch from major companies. Then I started reading. And reading. And reading. And then my eyes started glazing over. After a while, I couldn’t tell any of these companies apart because each sounded exactly the same as the others. Some of the ads were written, some were delivered with slick videos, but holy mackerel, regardless of format, they all sounded the same.
To ensure I wasn’t just imagining the similarities I clipped the key phrases used in the various ads so I could hold them up against each other and scrutinize their similarities. You know how most job ads begin with a paragraph about why we’re wonderful (when we were founded, how many clients we have, how big we are, how many awards we’ve won)? Table 6.1 compares four of those big brand-name companies’ terms, highlighting why they’re different from everybody else. (Note: Company 1 and Company 2 are competitors, and Company 3 and Company 4 are competitors.)
Table 6.1. Comparison of Key Phrases from Online Job Ads
To be honest, it’s possible I got mixed up and put some of those phrases under the wrong company. But can you blame me? Someone with a contentious nature could make the argument that there are subtle differences among them. But come on; let’s be real—these companies are all pretty much saying the same thing. My memory’s usually pretty sharp, and I devoted significant time to reading these job posts. And yet, I really couldn’t tell you which company was which. The good news for job seekers is that fantastic opportunities abound, with all sorts of passionate coworkers, endless career opportunities, jobs that really make a difference, and all done on a global scale. (Once again, I hope my sarcasm is coming through.)
I’m fairly certain these companies distinguish their products and services better than they do their job openings. After all, they have billions of dollars in sales that would suggest a competent sales message. But if you’re an employee at Company 1, with dedicated passionate coworkers, a focus on exceptional customer service, and tremendous opportunities for professional growth, where’s the giant magnet in Company 2’s potential, passion, growth, opportunities, and possibilities that’s going to pull you away?
I have no idea what phrases like “dedicated passionate coworkers” or “tremendous opportunities for professional growth” really mean. For instance, what does a dedicated passionate coworker do that’s different from what a coworker who’s neither dedicated nor passionate does? Now, left to my own devices, I could make a list a mile long: dedicated passionate coworkers don’t make excuses or point fingers when things go wrong, they work as long as necessary every day to complete the day’s projects, they volunteer to take on new projects, and they generate at least 10 feasible ideas for improving efficiency every month. That’s my list, and it may have nothing to do with Company 1’s definition of dedicated passionate coworkers. But because they’ve given me no specifics on what these behaviors look like, I have only my own interpretations to rely on.
Remember what I said about Behavioral Specificity back when you were discovering your Brown Shorts, and how important it was to define specific behaviors and not fall victim to fuzzy language disease? And remember the quick three-part test I gave you to assess if you’re getting enough Behavioral Specificity?
• Have you identified the specific behaviors?
• Could two strangers have observed those behaviors?
• Could two strangers have graded those behaviors?
If you’re going to catch the interest of the high performers, your job ads have to include Behavioral Specificity, and they have to be able to pass this same three-part test. High performers want to know what differentiates your culture from all the other organizations out there. But those top candidates aren’t going to get that with the indeterminate language found in most job ads.
In fact, I just searched the phrase “opportunities for professional growth” using double quotes (“/”) so that my search engine would consider only the exact words in that exact order without any change. Even so, I still got 672,000 results. And without quotes, I get about 13 million results. I also did the same search on Bing and got 59 million results. No matter how you slice it, pitches like “dedicated passionate coworkers” or “tremendous opportunities for professional growth” are bland and generic. They aren’t words that provide any real meaning, and they’re not going to attract the right attention. Pitches like this are also one of the big reasons why only 10 percent of executives can say they are doing an excellent job at sourcing the right talent.
The most important lesson that came out of my little stroll through CareerBuilder is the need for Brown Shorts in your recruiting efforts. The first rationale driving the Brown Shorts concept is that these characteristics make your culture distinct from everybody else’s. And that distinction is what you want to sell in your job ad, not some bland and generic description that makes you sound like everyplace else.
The second rationale driving the Brown Shorts concept is that these key cultural characteristics distinguish between your high and low performers. High performers are as unique as the organizations that call them high performers. So there aren’t many universal truths we can say about high performers. But we can say with confidence that all high performers want to remain high performers, so you need to tell them all the great things that being a high performer in your organization means. And that includes all the low performer traits your organization simply doesn’t tolerate. High performers don’t like working with low performers, and they want to know that you don’t like working with them either.
Think back for a moment to Chapter 3 on developing Brown Shorts Interview Questions. Table 6.2, a repeat of Table 3.1 shown here for your convenience, summarizes Company X’s Brown Shorts.
Table 6.2. Review of Company X’s Brown Shorts
Looking again at these two lists gives me a clear picture of what makes Company X different from every other company. I understand what it takes to be a high performer in its culture. From just this short list of Brown Shorts characteristics, I know that if I’m the kind of person who wants to work for a company that will hand me training, skills, and professional opportunities on a silver platter, I’m not going to be happy at Company X. But if I’m a collaborative, self-directed learner with a penchant for problem solving who shows up to work every day with a positive attitude, I’m going to be interested. And my interest gets even stronger when I perceive that this culture doesn’t tolerate the kind of low performers (those looking for the silver platter treatment) who annoy me and make my work experiences less pleasant. I certainly didn’t get that insight when I read a job post boasting: “opportunities for professional growth.”
Of course, there’s a reason why so many companies use these generic, overused, and uninspiring phrases in their job ads. Self-destructive recruiting tendencies lead organizations to try to sound appealing to every job seeker on the planet. They think if they’re bland and inoffensive enough everyone will want to work for them. You see this coming through in proud announcements such as “Today was a great day—we got 100 new applications in response to our ad.” I’ve even witnessed celebrations taking place over record numbers of applications received. However, it doesn’t matter how many people apply to a job posting; the only thing that matters is how many of the right people apply, make the initial cut, accept your offer, and turn into high performers. All companies track how many people apply, but how many track those other objectives?
Including your Brown Shorts in your recruitment efforts will attract the right candidates. Some people still argue that using Brown Shorts in recruiting is too exclusionary, and they don’t want to chase away potential applicants. “If I’m not a self-directed learner,” they’ll say, “I’ll be put off by that characteristic and I won’t apply.” To which I say, “Great!” You don’t want people who are wrong for your culture to even apply in the first place. So the sooner those folks get cut out of the picture, the less work it means for you, and the more time it allows you to focus on potential high performers. So go ahead and use your Brown Shorts in your recruitment efforts because not only are your Brown Shorts going to attract the attention of the people you want, they’re going to chase away the people you don’t want.
Let’s return to first part of the Brown Shorts Recruiting Formula, P = A + U − S. To increase the Probability of high performers applying to your company, your recruiting message must hold an element of Attraction. And the best way to do that is to use your Brown Shorts (who you are as a culture and what separates your high and low performers) as part of the main focus of your recruiting message.
U: Urgency High Performers Feel to Leave Their Current Situation
If a high performer is already working someplace that she considers truly outstanding, attraction alone isn’t going to be enough to woo her away. You’re going to have to provide an extra push that makes her rethink just how outstanding her current situation is. The good news here is that most companies don’t do a great job at engaging and fulfilling their high performers. So you actually have a shot at influencing someone who thinks she’s happy at her job to suddenly feel an urgency to go someplace better. You just need to help her understand her Shoves and Tugs.
Everybody has Shoves and Tugs, and it’s a technique Leadership IQ commonly includes in our leadership training. Shoves are those issues that demotivate you, drain your energy, stop you from giving 100 percent, and make you want to quit (they “shove” you out the door). Tugs are those issues that motivate and fulfill you, make you want to give 100 percent, and keep you coming back every day (they “tug” at you to stay).
This concept seems simple enough. But here’s the twist: Shoves and Tugs are not flip sides of the same coin. Just because somebody has lots of Tugs coming up this week does not mean he doesn’t have any Shoves.
Let me begin with an “out there” analogy to help clarify this issue. Like Shoves and Tugs, Pain and Pleasure are also not opposites of each other. The opposite of pleasure isn’t pain; it’s just the absence of pleasure. Similarly, the opposite of pain isn’t pleasure; it’s just the absence of pain. If somebody is hitting my foot with a hammer, that’s pain. And when they stop, that’s not pleasure, it’s just no more pain. If I’m getting the world’s greatest back rub, that’s pleasure. When it’s gone, that’s not pain, it’s just no more pleasure.
Here’s the lesson: if I’m getting a great back rub, it does not preclude somebody from hitting my foot with a hammer. And if that happens, the pain in my foot will totally detract from the pleasure I’m getting from the back rub. Here’s a corollary lesson: If you walk past me one day and see someone hitting my foot with a hammer, you cannot fix the pain by giving me a back rub. In other words, you can’t decrease the pain of my Shoves by trying to placate me with Tugs. The only way to stop the pain in my foot is to stop the hammer from hitting my foot. The only way to alleviate my work dissatisfaction is to take away my Shoves.
I told you this was a weird analogy, but here’s why it’s relevant. Every day, in organizations around the world, employees’ feet are being hit with hammers, and their boss’s solution isn’t to stop the hammering (eliminate the Shove), but rather to give them a back rub (offer a Tug).
Consider, for example, a software development team in Silicon Valley led by a manager named Chris. The department was on heavy deadline to finish a new product, and more than a few of the organization’s high performers were frustrated with the situation. Chris’s recent anxiety had caused him to start micro-managing and instituting numerous useless meetings. He was also concerned because one of the low performers on the team had complained about the emotional intensity in the department, so he decided everyone would have to take a one-hour lunch together to decompress. The net effect of this situation was that the high performers were having to make up the work at home.
Instead of relieving stress, Chris’s group-lunch mandate sparked even more unhappiness and grumbling. And as the grumbling grew, rather than ask his team about the source of their frustration (in other words, inquire about their Shoves), Chris decided to take the whole team to Catalina Island for the weekend to relax (he brought in a Tug). He figured it was a great way to offer a nice reward and get everyone’s brain back into the game. When he made the announcement, you could almost see a few of the programmers’ heads exploding. The last thing they wanted was more time with each other just hanging out and not working. They wanted to finish the project, to hit the deadline, and then go home and see their families. They wanted to stop wasting time at work and just get the job done.
Chris made the mistake of trying to fix a Shove with a Tug, and it couldn’t have backfired more. Yes, Catalina Island is beautiful, and perhaps in another circumstance it would have been a nice reward. But his team was getting Shoved by too much time away from actual programming, and then came the boss with a Tug that actually involved even more time away from programming. Not only was the Tug a poor choice, but Chris’s credibility was shot; he seemed obtuse and insensitive for not understanding what was really demoralizing his team.
A similar situation occurred in a hospital experiencing a major nursing shortage. Management implemented mandatory overtimes which made everyone tired and stressed. In an effort to make things better, management threw a big picnic for the nurses, something that, before the shortage, had made their nurses really happy.
But in the face of the obvious Shoves, the Tug didn’t work. Attendance at the picnic was spotty, and those who did attend could be heard saying “Why couldn’t they have taken the money they wasted on this picnic and hired a new nurse?” and “Do they really think they can buy us off like five year olds with a picnic? Do they really think we can’t tell the difference?”
Both these examples show that when good employees encounter Shoves such as working with low performers, fighting through roadblocks, or enduring a terrible working environment, it’s like getting hit on the foot with a hammer. And great Tugs like autonomy, having control over a process, and the opportunity to work on innovative projects aren’t going to mean a thing until the Shove pain is taken away.
Clearly, this is an area where you’ve got some recruiting opportunity. Amazingly, a lot of the high performers who will tell you that they’re happy in their current positions often feel Shoved and not very Tugged. Or, as we saw in the examples, they feel like the boss tries to minimize their Shoves by delivering Tugs instead of just making those Shoves go away. In other words, they could be happier—they just hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. But if you can get them focused on the frustration they feel over their Shoves and Tugs, you’re going to create a crack in their happiness, and they might think about finding someplace that offers a better ratio of Tugs to Shoves. Conveniently, since you’re the one who got them thinking along these lines in the first place, you’re also right there, front and center, saying “I feel your pain and I can make it go away.” You just have to be able to speak to those Shoves and Tugs issues clearly, and it will resonate with any high performer currently feeling the imbalance of those issues.
Even CEOs have Shoves and Tugs. The Executive Director at ExecuNet shared some fascinating research with me. (ExecuNet is a membership organization dedicated to helping executives make smart career moves and better business decisions.) In a 2010 study of nearly 1,500 executives, ExecuNet found that 92 percent of CEOs and 94 percent of all other management respondents say leaders can be engaged in their work and with their employer but still open to considering new career opportunities with other organizations. Whether you’re recruiting for the front lines or the executive suite, Shoves and Tugs will direct you to the right message.
Of course, this leads to two big questions: First, how do you discover the Shoves and Tugs of the people you’d like to recruit? And second, can you really work this information into a recruiting pitch like a job ad?
The first question is easily answered. If you want to know people’s Shoves and Tugs, you just need to ask them. And the following two questions are typically all it takes:
1. Can you describe a time(s) in the past few months when you felt demotivated (or frustrated or emotionally burned out or whatever words sound like something you would say)?
2. Can you describe a time(s) in the past few months when you felt motivated (or excited or jazzed up, or however you might naturally express this)?
So, to whom do you ask these questions? Well, your recruiters can typically access this information fairly easily. If your recruiters are out chatting with folks, building relationships, and deepening your talent pipelines, they’re already in direct communication with the kind of people whose answers to these questions will mean something to you. And not only can your recruiters ask these questions, but what they learn from the answers allows them to recruit more effectively. Of course, as you aggregate the answers to these questions, you’ll know how your recruiting pitch needs to sound in order to elicit an emotional reaction from the folks who are living these Shoves and Tugs.
If you don’t have recruiters, or even if you do, there’s another pool of folks who can answer these Shoves and Tugs questions: your current high performers. Most of your high performers probably came from somewhere else. Ask them about the Shoves and Tugs they experienced before they joined you. Remember, your high performers all share the same Brown Shorts attitudes. They aren’t clones of each other, but they do have many sensibilities in common, and Shoves and Tugs are some of them. Your high performer data pool is particularly interesting because these employees did ultimately join you, and that allows you to get both before and after pictures. Knowing what Shoves caused them to feel enough urgency to apply to your company tells you what kind of recruiting pitch you should be making to attract other high performers like them.
Parenthetically, in the course of asking your high performers these questions, you may discover that they are experiencing Shoves and Tugs at your company. You’ll want to address that issue before a recruiter from another company uses this same technique on your people. To learn how to do that you can read my book Hundred Percenters or go to www.leadershipiq.com/elearning and check out our training modules.
After you get a group of data points, you’ll see some patterns. You may discover that the high performers you want to recruit experience lots of Shoves about a lack of meaningful goals, or a lack of coaching and mentoring, or a lack of communication from senior executives. By the way, those aren’t hypothetical Shoves; those are some of the big ones we discovered in our Global Talent Management Survey (see the full report at www.leadershipiq.com/hiring). Or you may learn that the high performers you want to recruit aren’t getting enough Tugs about seeing the end result of their work, or assuming leadership roles, or learning new skills, or having more autonomy.
The Shoves and Tugs you’ll hear are going to vary wildly from group to group. That notwithstanding, the following three Shoves are common among high performers.
Shove Number 1: Being a High Performer Stinks
Imagine it’s Friday afternoon at 4 P.M., and the board requests a major report due on Monday at 9 A.M. This report could derail your career if it’s not done right, and you’re going to need help getting it done. You and someone else are in for a rough weekend of hard work, but a deadline is a deadline. So who are you going to turn to for help, the employee who gives 100 percent effort, or the employee who gives 50 percent effort? Obviously, you’re going to turn to the high performer who gives 100 percent effort.
Now, say a similar situation happens again the next week. Who do you call on to make the painful sacrifice this time? Once again, it’s the high performer. And what about the next time, and the next, and the next? You’re always going to lean on your highest performing employees.
Now, answer this question: Who has the worst job in your company (and any company)? Say it with me—the high performer.
Shove Number 2: The Boss Can’t Tell the Difference Between High Performers and Middle Performers
Imagine you’ve got two employees who just met a deadline for a very tough project. Leslie is a high performer who did an incredible job and gave 100 percent effort. Pat, on the other hand, is a middle performer who did a passable job. He didn’t make any glaring mistakes, but he didn’t do nearly as good a job as Leslie. Now they’re both standing in front of you waiting for your feedback. Here’s what the typical manager says: “Leslie and Pat, thanks for getting this done on time. Good work.”
So what did Pat and Leslie just learn? Pat learned that giving 50 percent and doing passable work is totally fine. He’s thinking, “Heck, giving 100 percent must be for chumps if we get the same feedback.” And Leslie learned that giving 100 percent doesn’t get noticed. She’s thinking, “Why am I beating my brains out to give 100 percent when the boss seems to think 50 percent is just as good?”
Leadership IQ doesn’t just teach hiring; we’re also a leader in the world of employee engagement surveys. So we have data from hundreds of thousands of employees about just this issue, and we know that more than 70 percent of people consistently say that high performers should receive more rewards and recognition than others. But our data tell us that fewer than 20 percent of employees say that’s what actually happens. This is a huge potential Shove, just sitting there waiting for you to take advantage of.
Shove Number 3: The Bloom Comes Off the Rose
While I’m discussing employee engagement, there’s one more Shove you should know about. This year, Leadership IQ released a study about the link between employee engagement and employee tenure (like our other studies, you can read the whole report at www.leadershipiq.com/hiring). We analyzed more than 100,000 employees surveys, and we found that engagement scores generally drop steadily for the first 10 years of employees’ tenure.
Please note, for background, our employee engagement survey uses a seven-point scale (I noted in Chapter 5 why you should use this instead of a five-point scale), so all these scores are out of a possible 7.
As can be seen in Figure 6.2, the typical employee is fairly engaged during Year 1 of work, with scores around 6.2 out of 7. But it’s all downhill from there. By Year 4 the typical employee’s scores have dropped to 5.4 (not the worst ever, but not great). Then the scores pop back up for Year 5 to a whopping 5.6. But then they drop every year after that until they bottom out at 4.9 at Year 10. That’s not a good score, and it represents a roughly 27 percent drop.
Figure 6.2. Employee Engagement
People talk about a seven-year itch, but the Leadership IQ data show it’s really more like a ten-year disengagement. Assuming you have employees who have been with you longer than 10 years, the news gets better; scores start going back up. In fact, they go all the way back up to a 6.1 at Year 14. Unfortunately, they then start going back down again.
Additionally, when we crossmatched the tenure data to the age of those employees, we found that the 30 to 40 year olds with 6 to 10 years of tenure at a company had the lowest engagement scores. These folks just weren’t motivated to give 100 percent effort, nor were they particularly inclined to recommend the company as a great organization to work for. The bloom had come off the rose.
Two big lessons come out of this. First, if you’re not analyzing your employee engagement data like this, you should be, or you need to call somebody like Leadership IQ to do it for you. Because while it’s great to recruit and hire high performers, it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good if their engagement steadily drops year after year.
The second lesson is that while this could be seen as bad news, it could also be seen as a recruiting opportunity. Knowing that more of the bloom is coming off the rose every year for the first 10 years of an employee’s tenure can help you narrow your recruiting pool. And it can help you identify people who might be sufficiently Shoved at their current employer so that they can be Tugged by you. Bear in mind that just because these folks are disengaged at one place does not mean they’ll automatically be engaged for you, but it’s still good data to have.
I still have to answer the other big question posed earlier: can you really work this Shoves and Tugs information into a recruiting pitch like a job ad? The short answer is yes, and here’s how.
Imagine you’re out on a date. Now, let’s say you really want to win that date over, become the only person in the room he or she can see or hear. We’re talking full-blown smitten here. How do you think you should start out—by talking about yourself or by talking about your date?
Almost everyone answers the question correctly. Of course, you talk about your date. But here’s the shocker. In the recruiting world, another place you want to quickly capture the positive attention of another person, almost everybody gets it wrong. This destroys a lot of recruiting pitches. Let me prove it to you: More than 90 percent of job ads begin with a paragraph like this:
Jobs at the ACME Corporation
ACME Corp. is a top-tier solutions firm that provides information technology, systems engineering, and professional services to customers in the public and private sectors. With 30,000 professionals worldwide, the company has the customer knowledge, technical expertise, and proven performance to manage large-scale, mission-critical IT programs. With fiscal year 2010 sales of $XX billion, ACME Corp. is the third-largest company in our industry. Our vision is to be our customers’ first choice in each and every market we serve. To earn our customers’ trust and meet their individual needs, we will provide valued solutions with the best prices, products, and services that make our customers’ lives easier. But we’re not finished. We’re on our way to even bigger and better things. Providing superior customer service requires superior people.
Unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this opening is terrible. You don’t even have to read every line to feel the automatic turnoff. This ad is all about “us”: when we were founded, how many clients we have, how big we are, how many awards we’ve won. In the blind-date equivalent of this ad, you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived. It doesn’t matter if you’re recruiting one person or a thousand; the only way to grab high performers’ attention is to open your pitch by discussing the issues that matter to them, and whether or not you can meet their needs.
Neurologically speaking, the opening paragraphs of your ad (the first few minutes you have someone’s attention) are the most important. Your candidates form their opinions about you during those first precious moments. Then their brains decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to what you have to say.
Let’s jump back to the dating scene for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I’m not there trolling for dates. However, as a researcher, I am impressed with their statistics. OkCupid has an advanced statistics shop, called OkTrends, where they study the hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions. In one study they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women in order to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. If you’re not familiar with how online dating works, basically, you check out people’s profiles on the website, and if you like what you read, you send that person a message and hope you get a response. (And then, maybe after that, you meet for an actual date, like we used to do in the olden days.)
You can just imagine the cheesy messages that the study revealed don’t work, meaning that women did not reply to the man’s message. But “you mention,” “noticed that,” and “curious what” all generated positive responses. (Statistically, messages with those phrases received double the normal response rates.)
If a man appears to have read a woman’s profile, and shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good message would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you travelled to Italy. I am curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine.” That’s the kind of guy we fathers might let our daughters date. (I also have a son, and when he hits dating age, he will be forced to read all this research.)
Whether you’re dating to find the perfect match or recruiting to find the perfect match, always start your interactions by talking about the other person and his or her interests. Let people know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction, and that you care about the same things that they care about. And again, if you don’t know what their interests are (their Shoves and Tugs), you need to do some research and figure it out.
Potential candidates are interested in learning how you can offer the Tugs they want and eliminate the Shoves they’re suffering. This sounds like heresy, I know, but they really don’t care how long you’ve been in business or how many awards you’ve won. At this point let’s look back at the terrible example paragraph from ACME Corp. shown on Page 168.
Is somebody not going to apply because you don’t have enough employees or awards? Are they really sitting there thinking, “Well, I would have applied, but they only have 30,000 employees and $10 billion in sales and I have a strict rule that I will only work for companies with over 40,000 employees and over $15 billion in sales”?
People care about whatever they care about, and that’s what you need to give them. Meet their needs, and you’ll attract them. Don’t and you won’t. In a little bit you’ll see an example of a Brown Shorts recruitment pitch—a much better way for you to start.
S: Suspicions They Have About Your Authenticity
The final piece of the Brown Shorts Recruiting Formula is the extent to which the people you’re trying to recruit harbor suspicions that your claims may not be true. Sure, they may think your culture sounds great, and you seem to understand their Shoves and Tugs. But does this all sound authentic? Is this what it’s really like to work inside your organization? Or is it just a smoke screen you’re blowing to make it sound like an attractive place to work?
Authenticity is a simple concept—just show who you really are. This is easier said than done, of course, but it’s an important concept nonetheless. The good news is that if you stay focused on engaging people with Brown Shorts and Shoves and Tugs, you’ll eliminate any suspicions about your authenticity.
Suspicions mostly arise when we use language that isn’t specific enough. (Go back to everything I’ve said so far about the need for Behavioral Specificity.) It’s easy enough to see this in the bad example job ad we’ve been using on Page 168. Look it over again at this point.
Does that ad sound like it was written by, or even reflects the feelings of, real employees? Or does it sound like corporate MBA gobbledygook that means nothing even though it went through about 20 committees, 10 lawyers, and a week of off-site developmental meetings? I’m going to vote for the gobble-dygook. Ad copy like this always begs the question “Why can’t the real people tell us what they actually think?”
Authenticity isn’t just a huge issue for job ads, it’s also critical if you intend to recruit with social media. I mentioned earlier that I spent some time with Brent Rasmussen, President of North America for CareerBuilder. Brent shared some fascinating data from a few of the recent studies. Based on a 2010 CareerBuilder survey of 2,800 workers who use social media, the top issues job seekers want to see on company social media pages are:
• Job listings—35 percent
• Fact sheet on the company—26 percent
• Career paths within the organization—23 percent
• Something that conveys fun about working for the organization—16 percent
• Employee testimonials—16 percent
And from that same survey, the top turnoffs are:
• Communications read like an ad—38 percent
• Failure to respond to questions—30 percent
• Failure to regularly post information or blog entries—22 percent
• Removed/filtered comments—22 percent
• Inconsistency in messaging in different social media sites—19 percent
The lesson: Be real, be authentic, share your Brown Shorts, and don’t worry about appearing attractive to the people who don’t want to wear your Brown Shorts (they’re not a good fit for you anyway). Don’t try to be something you’re not in your recruitment efforts, or you’ll fail to attract all the high performers who would fit your culture.
And don’t think those high performers won’t find out if you’re not being real. One of CareerBuilder’s hot new applications is called Work@, which enables employees to share open jobs at their company with personal and professional contacts within their Facebook network. It’s a pretty open and transparent world right now, and it doesn’t look as if that’s going to change anytime soon. So remember—be authentic, and you’ll be OK.
PUTTING THE FORMULA TO WORK
Here again is the P = A + U – S formula broken down into its component parts. Review it and then let’s return to our bad job ad example on Page 168. Let’s see if we can fix it using what we’ve just learned.
Clearly there aren’t any Brown Shorts described in the ad that could Attract potential candidates. There’s also nothing that increases the Urgency (Shoves and Tugs) someone might feel to leave his or her current situation. And this ad actually increases my Suspicion because it is in no way linked to employees’ everyday reality. So our formula tells us that there’s a frighteningly low Probability that a currently employed high performer will exert much (if any) effort to apply for a job with us.
So how do we fix this ad? Earlier I said that an opening paragraph should talk about the candidate and not present a list of boring and narcissistic corporate mumbo jumbo. Let’s pretend you did a little digging with your recruiters and your current high performers, and you discovered some Shoves and Tugs your potential recruits are probably experiencing. You learned that in their current jobs they’re feeling Shoves in time wasted by people playing politics with blame and finger-pointing. They’re also being Shoved because they’re working with low performers who spend more time picking apart ideas than developing solutions. And they’re not getting the Tugs from working collaboratively on teams that brainstorm and implement solutions because of the politicized and territorial workplaces they’re currently in.
Let’s further pretend that you’ve discovered the Brown Shorts in your own company and you know that high performers are:
• Highly collaborative. They help each other out without being asked and without any expectation of recognition or reward.
• Empathic toward customers’ and colleagues’ needs They don’t get angry or blame, they sincerely and earnestly try to understand and help.
You also know that low performers:
• Want individual recognition. They don’t want to share recognition with the larger team.
• Blame others—colleagues and customers—when things go wrong. They give excuses such as “I couldn’t get it done because …” or “It’s somebody else’s fault.”
In addition to all that insight, let’s assume this job ad is for a programmer and that an absolute requirement is a B.S. in computer science (this was required for the real-life ad). So let’s rewrite that first paragraph using our Brown Shorts in the following way.
Join the ACME Team!
Wouldn’t you rather be writing code than playing corporate politics? Did you get a degree in computer science so you could design amazing software or did you do all that hard work so you could waste time finger-pointing in a mind-numbing meeting? At ACME Corp. our thousands of computer scientists and engineers work together and share credit. In fact, glory hogs don’t last very long here. Nor do people who tear down others’ ideas instead of developing their own. When smart people collaborate instead of compete, amazing things happen. If you haven’t had the chance yet, check out our XYZ Software that runs 87 percent faster than anything else on the market. We also collaborate with our customers. We bend over backwards (and maybe do some flips) to make sure they’re happy. We don’t screen their calls—we love hearing from them.
We’ll be honest; ACME Corp. isn’t for everybody. If you hate collaborating and sharing credit, or if spending hours with customers annoys you, then we’re probably not for you. But if you’ve got a big brain and you’d like to use it for making cutting-edge software (and not for making excuses), then you need to apply. Now.
To be sure, this pitch isn’t for everybody. If a pitch like this doesn’t match your Brown Shorts, if it doesn’t reflect the Shoves and Tugs that your candidates are experiencing, then, it’s useless. But for the imaginary ACME Corp., it would work very well.
As I noted earlier, don’t get hung up on this being a job ad. This isn’t about job ads; it’s about recruiting pitches. Bland corporate speak gobbledygook doesn’t work when delivered by a recruiter, in a video, at a career fair or networking event, or posted on LinkedIn and Facebook. In fact, a bad pitch will get your company killed in the social media world.
According to our Global Talent Management Survey, employee referrals are the best source for hiring high performers. The best. I had two reactions when I saw the statistics. First, employee referrals work so well because they fulfill the formula (P = A + U − S) better than anything else. By definition referrals are authentic—how could they not be, since they come from actual employees. My second thought was that if we put the culturally specific and authentic messaging into our job ads and recruiting, we could improve their effectiveness as well.
By the way, there are some other people who are making the same points that I’m making here. In a 2011 study of 5,600 workers nationwide, CareerBuilder asked about factors that made people less likely to apply for jobs. The first three factors were failure to include salary range, unclear or nondescriptive job titles, and failure to include company name. The fourth issue, which is relevant to our discussion here, was a dull job description.
You don’t have to (nor should you) take my word for any of this; you should test it for yourself. At Leadership IQ we test these types of pitches for our clients all the time. We discover their Brown Shorts, build their Brown Shorts Interview Questions, create their Answer Guidelines, and then we revamp their recruiting strategies, tactics, and messaging. We test every step. Parenthetically, while job ads may not be the only channel you use, they’re the best one for testing your message quickly, quantitatively, and inexpensively.
In another example very similar to the previous one, we used the organization’s original job ad as a control and then conducted a split test with a rewritten Brown Shorts ad to see which performed better. For background, a split test is a simple experimental design whereby you run two versions of a job ad (or marketing brochure, landing page, or whatever), altering certain aspects in each to see which performs better and why. The trick with split testing is ensuring that the samples are perfectly split without any sampling errors or contamination. Once you get through split testing, you then move on to multivariate testing—testing multiple variables simultaneously—but that would take a statistics chapter alone to explain thoroughly. So we’ll stick to split testing for the moment.
We ran this split test with the original (or generic) ad versus the Brown Shorts ad, and these are the results (rounded numbers):
Let’s summarize the results. The Brown Shorts ad received more views, meaning more people clicked on the ad and ostensibly looked at it, or at least quickly skimmed it (12,000 vs. 10,000). But the Brown Shorts ad had fewer people apply for the job (500 vs. 800). Clearly, when you write a job ad with some exclusionary language (like “we’re not right for everybody”), you will exclude some people. But as I’ve said, your goal isn’t the grand total of applicants, it’s getting applications from high performers who will be a great fit in your organization.
Now, while the Brown Shorts ad had fewer responses than the generic ad, the applicants it did attract were of much higher quality. In fact, with the Brown Shorts ad, three times as many people made it through the first round of the hiring process (20 vs. 60). Sure, the generic ad got more people to apply, but they weren’t the right people. The HR/recruiting team had to do a lot more work sorting through all those applicants with a lot less payoff. Additionally, the Brown Shorts ad had six times as many people get to the finalist stage (3 vs. 18), which led to eight times as many job offers (1 vs. 8) and six times as many accepted offers (1 vs. 6).
METRICS FOR HIRING
It’s your choice as to how you measure success, but I tend to like results-oriented measures. I want to get high performers hired, not just reading my ads. Of course, helping our clients doesn’t stop here; our measures keep right on going throughout the employee life cycle. Some of the metrics that we’ve found particularly useful include the following:
• Quality of hire: How effective are your new hires? You can measure this easily enough with your performance management system or even a survey. We usually recommend assessing at 3-, 6-, and 12-month intervals because this not only gives you on-the-job performance, but it also tells you how quickly these folks got up to speed. Note, though, that your performance management tool must include measures of attitude, not just technical skills.
• New hire engagement: With today’s sophisticated employee engagement surveys (and yes, I mean the kind that Leadership IQ provides) it’s simple to determine the engagement levels of your new hires. And since our definition of engagement includes the extent to which an employee is motivated to give 100 percent effort, engagement absolutely drives bottom-line results.
• New hire tenure: It’s great to get new hires, and it’s terrific for them to be productive and engaged, but it’s even better when they also stay with you for a while.
• Manager satisfaction: How happy are your managers both with their new hires and the process used to get those new hires? The most common way of getting this data is with a short survey of your managers.
It’s important to break down all of these measures by each recruiting channel. For example, you’ll need to know how quality of hire compares for employees found through job ads vs. through recruiters vs. through career fairs vs. through employee referrals. This is how you’ll make the smart decisions about where to focus your time and money.
RECRUITING CHANNELS
What recruiting channels are available to you? Well, there are quite a few, and some are more effective than others. In our Global Talent Management Survey we asked more than 1,000 companies which recruiting channels they found most effective for delivering high performing frontline employees. Here they are, starting with the channel deemed most effective at delivering high performers, and then working down from there.
1. Employee referrals
2. Networking
3. Online job boards
4. Company career portal
5. Company recruiters
6. Outside recruiters
7. Social networking sites
8. Career fairs
9. Job ads in print media
10. Research services
We also asked which of these channels did the best job at delivering high performing executives. You’ll see the rankings changed quite a bit.
1. Networking
2. Outside recruiters
3. Employee referrals
4. Company recruiters
5. Company career portal
6. Online job boards
7. Social networking sites
8. Research services
9. Job ads in print media
10. Career fairs
These lists are always interesting, but they’re even more interesting when you cut the data more deeply. For example, for companies that have thoroughly defined what differentiates their culture (Brown Shorts), these five channels were rated significantly more effective for recruiting frontline high performers:
1. Employee referrals
2. Networking
3. Online job boards
4. Company career portal
5. Company recruiters
For companies that have better financial performance than the companies in their industry, these four channels were rated significantly more effective for recruiting frontline high performers:
1. Employee referrals
2. Networking
3. Online job boards
4. Company career portal
And these same four channels were also significantly more effective for cultures with highly engaged employees.
The most important point I’d like everyone to take away from this is the extent to which defining and using your Brown Shorts can make all recruiting techniques significantly more effective. Throughout this chapter I’ve been showing you how your recruiting efforts, including job ads, can be made exponentially more effective. And I’m not the only one delivering this message.
Let’s return to CareerBuilder’s research. In their Applicant Experience survey of more than one million workers, Career-Builder asked respondents about their perceptions of their interactions with representatives from various employers when applying for jobs. While 35 percent had a better perception of the employer after speaking with a company representative, 20 percent had a worse opinion. One in five workers (21 percent) didn’t think the company representative was enthusiastic about the company being an employer of choice.
Soak that in for a minute. Not only aren’t we fully selling ourselves, but we might actually be turning off potential candidates. The risk isn’t just that we’re not doing enough to effectively recruit, it’s that we could be doing actual damage to our brand.
WEAR YOUR BROWN SHORTS EVERYWHERE
To sum this up, when you do everything I recommend, you get to wear your most comfortable clothes—your Brown Shorts—every day. Effective recruiting isn’t about manufacturing a message; it’s about revealing who you really are. Sure, you want to do that in a clever and compelling way, but it’s better that your message be less produced and more authentic than the reverse.
I’ve probably watched more than a thousand corporate recruiting videos. Overwhelmingly, they’re overproduced manufactured fluff pieces that don’t give any sense for why this company is different from any other company. Nor do they explain why a high performer might want to join that company. Even worse, these videos are rarely tested for effectiveness. For example, do you know how many additional new hires came because you had a video? What were the performance evaluations of those new hires like a year later?
When you wear your Brown Shorts, whether it’s in videos, ads, or a recruiter’s spiel, you don’t have to manufacture anything. You are who you are. (How’s that for a tautology?) You already have high performers who fit your culture, and you want more people just like them. But the only way those high performers will want to join is if they can see the real you. Brown Shorts may not seem like haute couture, but they’re all you—and that’s what counts.
Here’s one final statistic from our talent management study. Companies rated as having thoroughly defined what differentiated their Brown Shorts (culture) were able to hire their first-choice candidates 24 percent more often than companies that hadn’t defined their Brown Shorts. The lesson here? The more clearly you define who you really are, the more you get the people you really want.
For free downloadable resources including the latest research, discussion guides, and forms please visit www.leadershipiq.com/hiring.