An interesting blog item (and WSJ article) on a zealous recruiter gave me pause to think about some of the ways our business community regards the individual. Here’s an excerpt from the item:

You can run but you can’t hide when Perry’s on the prowl.

According to Sarah Needleman of The Wall Street Journal, David Perry is a rogue recruiter.
I can’t see why. Just last week, I spoke to Jennifer McClure, a Cincinatti recruiter who insists that she only approaches potential candidates via members of their trusted networks. But if your network isn’t all powerful and you want to find someone special, you have to do some detective work and make a direct approach.

The thing about David Perry is that he’s so ballsy — and wily, too.

The first time I met him he told me that he had once rented a coffee truck and sold donuts at an industrial park until he got the name of a target who worked inside.

The “rogue recruiter” illuminates a frequently occurring flaw in Western business thinking. Reading how David Perry operates, I have to think there’s an ethical (and possibly legal) line there somewhere, and it sounds like David Perry may be crossing it at times. That’s not good, but his business is also evidence of the mistaken idea that some people are so superior to others that they are worth expensive and extreme efforts to recruit.

Is the “Star Player” a business myth? Certainly people have different abilities, personalities, etc., but to over-emphasize that point and ignore the impact of environment, corporate culture, business and market conditions, etc. on the individual is a mistake. Quite often the star performer achieves that status in a setting conducive to their particular attributes, before they are were identified as a “star”. Being regarded as a “star” may actually impede them from repeating previous successes. For instance, they may acquire an overblown ego, stress problems, or an oversensitivity borne of overly high expectations, with an attendant risk of frustration and depression.  Worse yet, once they are labeled as a star they can be promoted to a level or position they are not prepared for much more quickly. This kind of fast-tracking has produced mixed results in business, at best, from my observations.

There’s much more behind individual performance than the traits of the individual. In my experience the performance of any individual is as greatly affected by their work environment, the corporate culture, the expectations they perceive, and how they are treated by their superiors and everyone else around them, as by their personal skills, experience, and motivation. People who excel are often in the right place at the right time with the right stuff, a combination that may not exist elsewhere. Recruiters and others can lose sight of this and put people on a pedestal they don’t deserve, or in a new place that isn’t as conducive to that person’s success, with the kind of results we see in business all the time: the rising star winds up part of a business debacle of one sort or another.

Every recruiter has an incentive to behave as their client expects and bring back the best prospects, but that’s no excuse for compromising good principles. The best businesspeople achieve prolonged success because they stick to common principles of constructive, collaborative behavior and respect for others. Compromising good ethical and moral principles may achieve a short term result, but will create a bad image (self image as well as public) that will work against one in the future, and decrease the probability of repeat business and future successes.

The rogue recruiter may make money from clueless managers, but they may not be among his most successful clients. I don’t see David Perry as having any incentive to think about the understanding or motivation of his clients, and fully expect that some of the people hiring him are pretty clueless. As an experienced manager I believe it is far more important to concentrate on giving people the right environment, incentives, resources, training, and expectations. The results of doing this are usually far better than spending big money having people like David Perry run down a “star” who may not, in the end, perform as well as expected (or as well as a well chosen and groomed team). Most people have the ability to be stars when put in the right position and managed properly, pivotal skills for any manager.

Be wary of the “star performer” label, as it introduces problems into an organization. An organization that “fast-tracks” or otherwise glorifies what it sees as star performers risks demoralizing the rest of the workforce, which can cost far more than any gains to be produced by the “star”, though the losses may be difficult to measure. Fast-tracking often moves a prospective manager far too quickly through different parts of the organization, resulting in a person who knows too little about a lot of areas and may have serious misconceptions about important aspects of the business, often based on hearing too much of the top management view and not enough “in the trenches”. In general, a candidate for promotion is often evaluated solely on past performance instead of suitability for the job they could be promoted to – a major management mistake.

Where does the “star performer” concept come from in our culture? The concept of the “star performer” is an aspect of the American/Western “gunslinger” fallacy. While gunslingers existed in the American West of the 19th century, and were glorified in popular culture through literature and cinema, they were never the as important as our culture would have us believe.  When you look back in history the big successes in the Old West were produced by communities, not gunslingers, and that lesson carries through to modern day business.

The recruiter can’t be faulted for being part of a system that may ultimately harm a company. Given that the recruiter may be only following simple orders, they may not be able to see what is behind their mission, and thus have no responsibility for the result and only an incentive to score their commission. If they work for the company, however, they have a greater ability to understand the dynamics of the situation and a responsibility to at least suggest more appropriate recruiting to their superiors and constituents.

I expect that recruiters like David Perry are a small minority, and that’s a good thing. Recruiting is far too important a function to be taken lightly. The long term view of business success focuses on building high performing teams from well-chosen individuals who will stick around and sustain the company in the long term, even as they advance their careers. The fast movers and highly visible star performers are not often the best people to achieve lasting success for a company. At first I was thinking that David Perry is an anachronism, but more likely his tactics will always be present in some form. In the end it could be said that he profits from clueless managers who gamble with their company’s future, probably based on a misunderstanding of some past success.

As always, I welcome your comments. – Tim

The hummingbird identifies and harvests food sources with great but regulated energy, while the shrew forages furiously in a constant battle for survival. For purposes of discussion I will consider only the grass-roots startup company, not spin-offs or startups sponsored by existing companies.  Companies, like the people they are made of, exist on a continuum. Nobody is at the extreme or exactly in the middle of any range, but I will address relative extremes here to illustrate my point that well-planned and disciplined operations work best for the startup as well as the established company. The hummingbird illustrates the company that maintains and evolves a plan, and works to make the plan happen, while the shrew illustrates the company that operates on inspiration and enthusiasm, and often seems to be always late and scrambling, or operating as if in an emergency.  How does the startup company’s style of operation affect its prospects for successful growth and future prosperity?

A good business plan and process for evolving it, along with the discipline to follow it, permits a startup company to operate more like a hummingbird. Some startups operate like a hummingbird, busy but planned, while others operate like a shrew, foraging for opportunities that can be attacked and consumed in a frantic fight for survival that can risk burning out the participants. A good business plan, and the discipline to stick to it and evolve it on a regular basis, can provide a regulated, long term path to success for the company and all involved.

The hummingbird company, with a good plan to grow its business, can think and act with the long term in mind. Since the hummingbird, at least in the temperate region where I live, must migrate south for the winter, it must go through ordered phases of finding food sources, nest building, finding a mate, raising a family, and building up its energy reserves before the annual migration. Nature has evolved it to do these things in a timely way, and provides it the abilities it needs to not only do them but to adapt to changes in its environment. A surprisingly large proportion of its time is spent resting, which permits it to expend large amounts of energy in its daily forays to find food, though less than 15% of its time is typically spent in this activity. An intelligently run, hummingbird-like startup company similarly operates with realistic expectations as to the use of time, with substantial time spent on planning, recruiting, and other important support activities that enable the creative processes and “forays” to find and secure the customers it needs to survive. All activities are carried out in the context of intermediate and long term goals, which are typically established in a business plan of five or more years.

The shrew company, often without thinking, tries to substitute intensity for good planning. The shrew does not migrate, and seems more reactive in the way it lives. The shrew also lacks the mobility of the hummingbird, so it must find food in a smaller area, and it must find and often kill its food to survive. Both creatures have large daily energy requirements – each typically must consume 80-90% of its own weight each day to survive – but the hummingbird is better able to pace itself, map out and revisit its income sources, and survive in a more orderly way. The shrew company may come from a base of great inspiration and prospects, but often operates in a more haphazard, event-driven way that provides significantly less potential for long term success.

Failing to allow sufficient time for recruiting and interviewing can impede growth in a number of ways. A good long range plan, well-followed and including resources and time for the acquisition and training of new employees, can minimize thrashing and grow the company in an orderly way. Frequently a startup company’s operations are focused on landing those first customers or finishing the development of an initial product offering under significant time pressure, and activities such as staffing are not planned out. When the organization is responding to needs for more people in a reactive way, the process of interviewing and bringing new people in can be an extra and unplanned burden for people already fully absorbed in generating revenues or a first product. The result can be overwork and burnout for those responsible for new customers and/or products, with the result that those customer relationships or products may suffer from poor quality or omissions in their designs. Worse yet, the new employees selected may not be the best candidates, as their selection was rushed, or may have trouble quickly adapting and becoming productive as the existing employees don’t have time to bring them up to speed.

Maintaining a reasonable work week enables more effective performance over the long term. It is easy and natural, in the enthusiasm and big challenges of a startup environment, to work long hours and over-commit to the enterprise. It is an exciting thing to pursue new ideas and the promise of great success, and can stimulate high levels of adrenalin and other hormones, making one oblivious to the passage of time. People operate best, however, when they have had proper rest and are not struggling to manage their personal lives on top of their work. Working at high intensity and for long hours over too long a period can lead to burnout, with greatly reduced effectiveness on the job, and increased probability of personal crises that can take one away from the work entirely.

Startups that maintain realistic plans and reasonable expectations for their employees have better prospects in the long run. The 40 hour work week allows a planned and well-managed life, and provides the energy and distraction-free time to focus on the work and produce superior results. Sufficient sleep is essential to effective learning and good memory function, as well as the stamina needed to work with intensity throughout the day. The 50 hour or more work week can “stretch people thin”, leaving them sacrificing personal matters or their rest to keep up with the job, “contaminating” their work hours with excessive personal matters, or working at lower performance levels due to lack of rest or high stress. Travel times to many jobs effectively extend work hours, and highway travel in particular is stressful and exhausting. Many people in North America live an hour from their work, meaning that a 5 day, 40 hour work week is actually a 50 hour week, and overtime extends that even further. The hours in which they can maintain their homes and families and get adequate rest are compromised when overtime becomes the norm.

The thrashing and dashing operations of the “shrew” startup can extend to its later business phases. I have worked for companies of a hundred employees or more where, at least in some parts of the firm, shrew-like operations had persisted well past the startup phase. Sales departments, for example, may keep that hyper-intensity and “forage and kill” behavior pattern, burning out salespeople and resulting in a high turnover and lackluster results. Engineers and designers may work six and seven day weeks for months or years, leading to increased dissatisfaction, demoralization, mediocre performance, and high turnover, with negative impact on product quality and customer satisfaction.

A good business plan enables a better product and higher probability of long term success. A planned pattern of market expansion and sales growth integrated with a strategically managed product development effort can be much easier on the participants and much more productive. A realistic approach and good planning allow new customers and employees to be identified, contacted, groomed, and integrated in a much less stressful way, and product development to proceed in a way that minimizes cost and yields optimal quality. A staff operating under realistic expectations can be motivated and involved in the company’s success instead of driven to perform and overstressed by an environment of anxiety and demand, and can draw on their reserves when needed.

The startup that plans well and follows the hummingbird model will always do better than the model that thrashes reactively in a shrew-like way. Startup companies have differences from later stage organizations, including higher levels of intensity and demand on employees, but the hummingbird model allows the intensity to produce optimal results, and to be summoned when needed over the long term. Appropriate attention to planning and discipline, along with realistic expectations, will inevitably outperform pure inspiration and enthusiasm in the intermediate to long term, and short term performance doesn’t help if it doesn’t add up to long term success.

As always, I welcome your comments.  – Tim

Recent experience reviewing job listings shows most have room for improvement. Having been laid off from my automotive industry assignment of the past ten years in mid-July, I have been spending a lot of time perusing the job listings at places like monster.com, indeed.com, careerbuilder.com, the state of Michigan’s Michigan Talent Bank website, and many other similar places. The first thing I noticed about a lot of what companies posted was the frequent mistakes in grammar, word usage, and just plain poor writing. That’s not bad, just careless and (sadly) commensurate with the increasing prevalence of poor English skills in the United States. Then I also noticed that there was often evidence of a certain clueless-ness about how to attract the best candidates and “sell” a position. Needless to say, looking clueless is not a good thing, so how can you avoid it?

Humor can be good, even in job listings, but not when it is unintended. As usual, it was an item that made me laugh out loud because it was so ludicrous that got me thinking. Note: making people laugh out loud frequently DOES have them thinking more about what you said afterward, if for no other reason than they remember it because they enjoyed it, and it gained a good association for them, both with the speaker/writer and the matter being described or explained. Still, in a serious matter like advertising for a skilled employee for your firm, unplanned humor may not make the best first impression.

Listings with unrealistic expectations are unlikely to find the desired candidate. The item in question was from what appeared to be a small company in a nearby town, possibly only a few years from startup (but that’s not truly meaningful as I’ve seen listings from multinational corporations that were, sadly, no better). This particular listing advertised that they were looking for a quality systems manager who would interact with their production department and help them certify for ISO9001 and an alphabet soup of other, similar quality standards, about half of which I recognized (I spent years in that arena), over the next year. Then they described the requirements for the position: a high school diploma and 5 years of experience. <thud> I couldn’t help myself – I burst out laughing. My first thought was that I would be surprised if they could find a high school graduate who could understand what they were reading in most of the standards they listed. Then I realized what they were really after: a world class expert who would work for ten bucks an hour.

Poorly thought out job listings can have unplanned costs. My next thought was that (A) they would have a tough time certifying for just one of those standards in a year even with truly expert assistance, and (B) if they did find someone who would work for the kind of money their requirements suggested, they would be advertising for the same position again within two or three months, essentially having lost those months except for learning more about what they really needed. Sometimes lost months equal lost market windows and other hard-to-quantify but very significant costs.

There are some basic pitfalls in the job listing part of the hiring process. My next revelation was that many of the ads I was looking at were doing the same thing, but not as blatantly. Many had apparently approached the hiring process from the standpoint of identifying their needs and wants first – a logical thing to do – and then figuring out what their ideal candidate would need as far as knowledge, skill, and experience to do the job effectively. There are pitfalls in this process unless it is managed correctly.

Pitfall number 1: Unclear or unrealistic expectations. Many of the job listing writers got carried away in the process and “blue-skied” the job description almost to the point of suggesting “able to walk on water, move mountains before lunch, and turn water into wine”. This has the effect of diluting the job description and skewing it away from what could realistically be expected. It also will make what they are looking for a lot less clear to the prospective candidate and cause them to receive applications from many who aren’t what they are looking for and wouldn’t have applied if the description was more accurate. More savvy job seekers will read the listing and recognize that either the company doesn’t know what they need, which doesn’t say much for their management team, or they don’t understand how to hire very well. That may further suggest that, if one got a position with that company, one might be surrounded by others who were less than the best at their jobs because of the company’s poor hiring processes. I don’t think, when you are looking for skilled help, that you want to make everyone think you are a poor quality organization, unclear about your needs, or at least not good at hiring, as it could dissuade the very best and most savvy candidates from applying.

Pitfall number 2: Focusing on cost rather than value. While it is natural for any manager to want to get the best people possible for the least cost, suggesting extremely low requirements for a position to try to avoid having to pay too much (whatever “too much” means) is not good. Like pitfall number one, it suggests the hiring company is unclear about the current pay structure for the job in question, what they need as far as candidate capabilities, or the nature of the job itself. Looking deeper, it suggests the hiring company are skinflints who will not pay market rates for a good employee and that, should one find employment with them, one might be surrounded by poorly chosen workers who are unhappy about their pay and possibly other conditions at that firm.

The best candidates may infer a lot from a job listing. While I would agree that a lot of candidates won’t think that deeply into what they read, the more experienced and savvy ones – the best people that company might find – are most likely to do so. Just as a job applicant’s appearance and demeanor are the first impression they make on a prospective employer, the job listing may be the first impression a company makes on a prospective employee. As a hiring manager, you owe it to yourself and your company to think about these things and check how your jobs are described and advertised.

Pitfall number 3: Getting carried away with the company description. The description of the hiring firm should not be too long or overstated. I’ve seen many listings where the description of the hiring company went on for a half a page or more, made up more than half of the listing, or read like glowing marketing hype. I’m sure the writers in some cases were trying to impress the prospective candidates with what a great company they represented, but if I got bored with it and started skipping down, I might just skip the whole listing altogether, especially since it was probably the three hundredth one I had read that day and my eyestrain was getting pretty bad.

First, the job description should be realistic and focused, like the applicants you want to attract. If you aren’t sure exactly what the job will involve you need to do more homework, lest your listing bring a flood of applications that are far off the mark and bury within the pile the applications of the candidates you really want to attract. With the on-line job search now an established standard, you can expect to receive large numbers of applications, especially in economic downturns, and anything you can do to reduce the deluge and narrow the field is a good thing, both for you and your human resource department.

Second, be realistic about the requirements of the job and what you can expect to pay for varying levels of experience and skill. Don’t lowball the requirements in an effort to keep your costs down, or you will get what you ask for: unqualified applicants who are desperate for a job rather than workers with appropriate skills and expectations. Describe the range of qualifications and experience you would consider and, if you need a real hotshot for the position, don’t let anyone think it’s an entry level position. If paying for the services of an experienced professional who can make that job really perform seems like too much, then you need to rethink the job itself and consider redefining it. In some situations there are no substitutes for high levels of skill and experience, and you should be realistic about the cost of such help. Also keep in mind that the real hotshots not only spread their expertise to those around them, but probably have knowledge and experience that will help other parts of the company as well.

Third, describe your company in succinct and realistic terms, and avoid cutting and pasting the marketing hype. Make sure the prospect knows what the company does, what the employing division or department does, and where the job would be located, for example. Many listings leave me unclear about these simple details, and don’t attract me to the possibility of a job with that company. Making the critical details clear to the prospective applicant will make you look good, and save time and money for both you and the applicant. If the marketing hype is pretty solid and straightforward, you might include some of it, but in most cases it will need to be toned down at least a little.

Good job listings save you time and money, and bring you the best candidates. To summarize, if you recognize the importance of writing good job listings and take the time to do them well you will receive higher percentages of good applicants, reduce the overwhelming flood of applications that are so common today, and get those top notch applicants in for an interview more quickly (hopefully before the competition does). The last thing you want is for prospective candidates to burst out laughing when they read your job listing.

As always, I welcome your comments, and thanks for them in advance. – Tim