We’re Playing Tag!

Bloggers are so much fun!  HR Maven blogtagged me. It’s a new game, at least to me, where you tell your readers six random things about yourself and then pass it on, along with the rules.

Here’s me:

1. Between the old stuff I’ve done and the system I architected (www.RightFitToolkit.com) I’ve assessed over 10,000 people

2. I only like metrics that are meaningful.

3. I really am working on my sixth book.  None of the others have taken this long but I didn’t have a blog then!

4. I did not learn to network until a few years ago.  Better late than never, and now I love it.

5. There is nothing better than a slab of brie and a crisp red delicious apple.  This is equally true whether we are talking about breakfast, lunch or dinner.  And it does not require cooking.

6. My husband is really, really cute.  Sometimes he reads my blog.

And here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I tagged:

Simon Meth

Cathy Martin

Dave Elchoness

Gerry Crispin

Jenn Barnes

Laurie Ruettimann

“We believed him, and he lied.”

John Edwards’ campaign manager said it the other day.  And so have many hiring managers I’ve known in the past.  This morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer subtitled their editorial on the Edwards scandal, “At least the hair still looks good.”  Doesn’t that say it all?

Elections are our national hiring olympics – the Triathalon of Rhetoric, Looks and Resume.

Maybe we can’t get politicians to take assessments before we vote for them but we certainly can do better at predicting workplace behavior in the other people we hire.

Stop hiring “former employee”s!

Another sad story about a “former employee” yesterday. The guy returns to the workplace, shoots and kills two employees who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why create more former employees when you can just not hire them in the first place?

Here’s someone who gets fired for bad attendance. My take is that everyone was happier the days he *didn’t* show up. He doesn’t like “ethnics” (I thought we all had ethnicity of one sort or another…) so that’s apparently how he chooses his targets.

Role-Based Assessment would have given you a hint that maybe this was not a guy who’d fit this multicultural workplace.

It’s tough enough, economically speaking, when you hire people who become ex-employees because they quickly find a better job. It’s worse when you have to fire people because they don’t like the job YOU didn’t give them accurate information on. But when you create former employees who return angry because their view of what this workplace should be is so radically different than the vision, mission and values you want your employment brand to project, and the outcome is murder, it’s just tragic.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

This blog is one year old today.  It deserves some recognition and a bit of celebration, if for nothing else other than surviving and growing.  Not much different than a human being.

People used to have shorter life spans, primarily because infant death was so prevalent.  Now it’s blogs that don’t last.  I don’t know how many abandoned blogs dot the blogosphere but a quick search yielded someone making money from ads on abandoned blogs, which sounds to me like putting orphans out to beg, a la Oliver Twist.  The one piece of data I found measured blog life by any activity in the past 90 days (like a post).  They gave the chance of survival at 50/50.

Survival is an organism’s first expression of power.  It’s power that motivates me more than anything else – the power to make change for the better – so no wonder this mini-obsession with blog survival.

Having gotten through this first year with entries on leadership, including the political and economic, I plan to celebrate this blog’s “terrible twos” by talking about motivation in action – people at work. I’m going to start with the full disclosure of how to measure Quality of Hire using the universal metric.

It seems like the right gift to give a blog.

Found in Translation

Dr. Anna Elisa enjoys her first Philadelphia cheesesteak!

There’s nothing like looking at your work through the eyes of someone else. Especially someone whose language you don’t speak.

This past week our guest at The Gabriel Institute was Dr. Anna Elisa Villemor-Amaral of Kienbaum in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who is our new affiliate.  They’re consultants in executive search, assessment and all that goes with helping businesses succeed through people.  Dr. Anna Elisa is their expert in assessment.  And, compared to me, she is an expert in communicating across the Brazilian Portuguese/Philadelphia English ([please no “yo Philly!” jokes here…) chasm.  Things are always lost in translation, as she bemoaned to me last night after consuming her first Philadelphia cheesesteak with a bottle of Philly’s native beer, Yuengling.

But we have a good start.  Because of the highly technical aspects of our web-based assessment process, getting translation is not a simple matter.  It requires bridging not only language but cultural gaps.

Culture is easier to bridge, imho, especially for the well traveled non-ethnocentric.  Maybe I feel that way because my brain doesn’t seem to retain words it doesn’t have links to or immediately understand, which makes learning new languages nearly impossible.  So it was in the sharing of culture that we connected best.  Divulging our experiences as women, as mothers, as researchers coming later in life into entrepreneurship, we found the connections that are stronger than the frustrations of there often not being quite the right words to say precisely what you mean that the other person will understand fully.

I am happy to report that, as with all good but complex things, more was found than lost.

On Appreciating Yourself

It’s so amazing to me how some wonderfully spectacular people have absolutely no appreciation of how special they are. Seems to me that all we do with long lists of “required competencies” – most of which have little or nothing to do with how you actually need to interact with others to accomplish the goal – is make people feel inadequate. So I hope you will understand how proud I was of Kevin, our fabulous VP of Sales, the other day.

Seems he sent an HR leader her own hiring report. Now usually we don’t do this, since who wants to read things that might be negative – things you don’t even want to change about yourself, even if, magically, you could. Apparently the HR leader read it and was not happy. (No one ever is, really, and mea cupla - it is we dumb “experts” who have caused it with our overemphasis on impossible generic “perfection”.)

But Kevin rose to the occasion and went through it with her, bit by bit, making sure she understood that for what she was expected to do there could not be a better fit – even though there are lots of jobs for which she would be a much less than perfect fit. Not that she would actually want to do any of them…

I know he must have done a great job. He shared this comment she sent him:

“I read this report again and was surprised to find that it really wasn’t that “bad.” I think I can live with this assessment! I intend to share it with my boss and see how useful he thinks it is considering what he knows about me from having worked with me for several years and/or whether he thinks it would be useful in making a hiring decision.”

What I love about this is how she moved from fear to appreciating how truly excellent she is for what she does, just by having some real feedback from a real person.

I hope you are appreciating yourself today!

Measuring Quality of Hire?

I did an episode of Human Capital Institute’s HCTV today, an interesting discussion on measuring quality of hire.  One thing we all agreed on was that the first step is understanding the real needs of the business and how people accomplish them.  Later in the day, Jack sent me this story:

Rick, fresh out of accounting school, went to a interview for a good paying job. The company boss asked various questions about him and his education, but then asked him, “What is three times seven?” “Twenty-two,” Rick replied. After he left, he double-checked it on his calculator (he *knew* he should have taken it to the interview!) and realized he wouldn’t get the job. About two weeks later, Rick got a letter that said he was hired for the job! He was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he was still very curious. The next day, he went in and asked why he got the job, even though he got such a simple question wrong. The boss shrugged and said, “Well, you were the closest.”

Seems to me that lots of old style assessments get you exactly that.  What you want is a description of how that person is going to behave, not an abstract score on something that may bear little relationship to the actual needs of the business.  So in that spirit, let’s return to Rick.   I think he’s actually pretty good, though I don’t know of I could say as much about the boss.

For one, even though he has a degree, he doesn’t make the assumption he knows everything.  We know this because he goes to an authority (his calculator) and checks.  Second, he doesn’t take things for granted and he doesn’t cover up when he makes a mistake.  We know this because he asks the boss why he got the job even though he made the mistake.  And from the same question we know he is curious and isn’t afraid to ask questions, which is probably the best kind of person you can hire.

Most important, he’s flexible.  Sometimes, an approximation is more useful than spending a lot of time getting exactly the right number to fourteen decimal points.

On second thought, I like the boss too.  He knows people aren’t perfect and they aren’t off-the-shelf ready on day one.  And he’s willing to be flexible and let people rise to the occasion.

Another good day.  I learned more than I taught.

Human Capital, Human Community

I love belonging to the Human Capital Institute community.  Being on the Measuring Quality of Hire Expert Panel gets me an invite to participate in their webcasts (and occasionally give one of my own).  Yesterday’s starred Kevin Wheeler of Global Learning Resources on the effects on quality of hire of assessment vs performance management.  By the end, a few things were clear.  First, to really measure quality of hire is extraordinarily difficult if you haven’t been schooled in research procedures.  Second, you really need to do both – assess before you hire and have some rational performance management system geared to what you’ve hired them for.  And third, it really is delightful to share ideas with experts who are receptive and responsive.  And most of all, it’s so nice to be welcomed by the people who turn a web and phone based experience that could feel so isolated into something that truly feels like community.  Kudos Bill, Amanda et al!