Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2014. The examples of staff moving between Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo reflect the tech scene around 2014.
Until now, when a company has wanted to fill a position, it has posted a job offer and set its human resources department to sift CVs, interview and discard candidates. In this process even the most serious HR departments have come close to absurdity in their attempts to be more innovative, with awkward questions and brainteasers copied from companies such as Google and JP Morgan, or by following a manual written by supposed psychology experts, all in the hope of spotting that “diamond candidate” who, over time, turned out to be a “lump of coal”.
HR often makes the fatal mistake of preparing an interview designed to find the candidate’s flaws, and so loses sight of their strengths. In the same way, it forgets that many executives who are not suited to the job may well be more than smart enough to sell themselves to the interviewer, and the interviewer buys it (falls for the con), which only shows that some “unsuitable” candidates were smarter than the interviewer.
That is why, in the middle of the age of innovation, some HR directors are starting to change their thinking, because innovating does not mean taking Google’s questions and asking a candidate how many balls fit in a bus. Who the hell cares? Google itself admitted that, over time, it realised those questions were a waste of time.
Other, more “advanced” interviewers play at being Sigmund Freud and set their candidates traps or psychological games based on the Murphy method. Do you want to find real talent for your company? The first step is to avoid many of the biases interviewers themselves fall into, because, being human, it is practically inevitable that they make biased decisions. On the other hand, there is no better way to find out what a person is really like than to interview them without them knowing it is an interview.
Let’s learn from the big listed companies
When a medium-sized or large company is looking for a CEO, it often looks for one who is already working at a big company. It pitches a new project to them or offers better conditions. Yet, inexplicably, when we are looking for a salesperson or a junior executive, we usually post a job ad. What if you want to hire the guy who is crushing you at the competition? What if the salesperson you are looking for is the one who convinced you to buy your office supplies? What if the person you need does not meet all the requirements you think are necessary?
If we look at the big listed tech companies, their staff practically rotate among them: Google engineers who end up at Facebook, LinkedIn developers who end up at Google, or Google executives who end up at Yahoo. They know what they are looking for, not from a list of requirements but from the person’s work. And they also know where to find them.
Another big mistake companies make is failing to put a person’s abilities and skills ahead of certain silly requirements. In sales it often happens that people think someone who is good at selling screws could not be good at selling wheels, or that to sell aspirin you must have studied something related to medicine.
For one of my first jobs as a sales rep, they were looking for a building engineer or someone with knowledge of architecture. I could not help laughing and asking whether they wanted to sell bridges or build them. I told them that if they were looking for someone to build a building or a bridge, I honestly did not know how to do it (I had never tried), but I did know how to sell the product they had, or sell the bridge once it was built. And the architect would know how to build a bridge, but could they sell it…? Funnily enough, they hired me despite my ironic streak.
Find talent at related events, in a café or in all sorts of places
Crystal Huff is head of human resources at a company in Boston, and she says she attends all kinds of events and bases her talent recruitment on chance encounters: someone sits down next to you, and after talking to them for 10 minutes you discover they are exactly what your company was looking for. Clearly, if you are looking for a salesperson, you are more likely to find a good one at a sales conference than at a chiropractic massage event.
At other times, the person you are looking for to fill the post may be the one who has breakfast at the same café as you and is currently unemployed. She also often turns to LinkedIn to find people who might have the profile the company needs.
Sometimes the perfect secretary may be hiding as a waitress serving coffee in a café, kindly attending to people who are sometimes rude, working six days a week, Sunday included. That person might be very grateful to a company that took her out of the hospitality trade so she could work in what she once studied, a field in which no company dared to hire her because she had no previous experience.
Bill Ackman, the famous fund manager, is known for recruiting talent anywhere. Part of his investment team does not come from Wall Street. He hired his tour guide and a taxi driver, because he saw in them the kind of talent that some university graduates trying to get into finance lack. And the truth is that his particular way of recruiting talent has not worked out badly for him at all.
Look for personality
Richard Branson himself has explained that you should not make the mistake of hiring a CV; you have to hire personality. The truth is that there is no perfect CV or résumé that is ideal for every job, but every company needs talented people with personality who fit the company’s culture and mission. Any skill you can think of, you can probably teach a new employee if you are a good leader, but training someone’s personality would be truly difficult.
In short: find ways to dig into the qualities that cannot be shown on a CV and do not come across clearly in a job interview, such as intellectual curiosity, the capacity for self-criticism, a commitment to continuous self-improvement, professional and personal humility, aspirations in life and work, or creativity.
Look for that, and perhaps the requirement for advanced English so someone can deal with a foreign visitor once a year will stop seeming so important.
Some qualities are easier to spot in 30 minutes over a coffee with someone than in a two-hour job interview.
“Even to recruit talent, the recruiter needs talent.”
Further reading
Featured image: NEXT Conference from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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