Realistically, however, making a well crafted elevator speech can be just as valuable to employees, prospective employees, and really anyone who’s attention you have for three minutes.

Why?

Yes, shortened attention spans are a reality, but a concise elevator speech forces you to boil down the value of what you do and even your role within a company.  In a meeting that lasts an hour, spending 25 minutes on “Who we are and what we do” takes valuable time away from real discussion.  When you’re interviewing prospective employees, sure, you could take all the time in the world — but hearing their elevator speech is really more valuable.

So treat everyone like a CEO and assume their getting off that elevator in just a few minutes.  Besides, it’s good practice for when that really happens.

Need help building your elevator speech?  Here’s a handy tool from the Harvard Business School:

http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/

Jason Fried, president of 37signals, a software firm in Chicago, has a solution.   Run a flat company:

Instead of rewarding high performers with managerial responsibilities—which often drives people further away from the job they are actually good at—we reward with responsibilities closer to the work. We also throw in above-market salaries and generous benefits, including four-day workweeks in the summer, as much time off as they would like (within reason, of course), and plenty of freedom to make their own decisions about the projects they’re working on.

There are obviously some issues particular to his company that make this approach easy to dismiss. First, it’s small.  That makes everything easier to implement.  Secondly, he is in the software development business; highly skilled ‘doers’ are core to his business.  OK, so what?  Even in a more service based business aren’t there still managers and ‘doers’?  If someone is great at customer service or sales or media relations, should they be promoted to management?  Will that even make them happy.

The flip side of this is that, management itself suffers from these promotions.  Top performers who are not top managers are a double whammy to a company.  You’ve lost a great ‘doer’ and gained a bad manager.

Totally flattening your company may not be possible, but rethinking how employees are rewarded is certainly worth examine.  What do they value?  What are their goals?  Have they considered the problems that come along with a management position?

Read Fried’s full article here:  http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/jason-fried-why-i-run-a-flat-company.html

I don’t think that recruiting is any different than any other decision process in a company. You’re never really going to know how somebody is going to perform in the role, how good of a cultural fit he or she is going to be and how motivated they’re going to become until they’re on the inside.

I’m not arguing that no screening is required. There are obvious questions you have give staff to get a gut feel on cultural fit, intelligence, aptitude and the like.

It’s interesting because he’s not actually talking about hiring more quickly.  He’s actually talking about creating a framework that gives you information beyond simple qualifications.  He calls this cultural fit, intelligence, and aptitude.  And he’s pointing out a fact about hiring and recruiting that’s not often talked about:  even if you find a perfect candidate on paper, they may not work out in the realities of every day life in the company.

Call it what you want: company culture, ability to adapt, or simply like-ability — these are important elements that are often ignored in the vetting process.  Working with a recruiter or through HR, you can outline questions that will give you the information you need to satisfy your gut feeling about how someone will perform, adapt, and ultimately produce the results. you need.

One story from the trenches tells of a manager that would take potential hires out to lunch and insist that they drive.  He could tell a lot from the appearance of a person’s car and also the style of their driving.  Too cautious signalled they might not fit with a fast paced sales culture.  Too reckless meant that they might be impatient with the slow sales cycle.

A drive test might not be important to you, but creating a framework to evaluate candidates beyond simple criteria is vitale.  How do they react under genuine pressure?  What is their personality like once the ‘interview mask’ is dropped?  How adaptable will they be when situations change?  How will they fit in not with your personality, but those people around them?  Will they be a positive influence

Perhaps the best question to ask is the following: Is the employee they’ll become in 6 months better than the one that is qualified today?

So many times we focus on qualifications and not quality.  Suster is pointing out that it all needs to go into the mix at a startup c0mpany.  Should it go into the mix at every company?

Read Mark Suster’s full article here:  http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/26/startup-mantra-hire-fast-fire-fast/

Five Reasons to Care

1. Gives You a Great Depth of Information on Candidates
2. Connects You with a Community and Not Just Individuals
3. Organizes Information
4. Creates a Human Connection Over Great Distances
5. Enables More Casual Conversation About Positions

Five Reasons Not To Care

1. Everyone Else Is Doing It
2. You Have to Be Part of Every Conversation Out There
3. It’s Free
4. Candidates Will Think Less of a Company If They’re Not Engaged
5. All The Good Candidates Are On Social Media

There is a lot of advice out there on social media.  You’ve heard it.  Start a conversation.  Have an ongoing dialog.  Be personable.  Be transparent.  But these are all, more or less, common sense approaches anyone would take for granted in the real world.

Social media allows us to connect with people more efficiently and allows them to connect with us.  It also gives us a broader, more enriched sense of who candidates are.  A sensible approach can simultaneously take much of the fear and the hype out of the process.  Basically you should care about social media as another tool to building a stronger workforce, but don’t change your bedrock ideals of doing business — those are ultimately valuable using any technology.

NESCO is sponsoring a Monster.com webinar The Myths and Power of Social in Acquiring the Best Talent on Wednesday, May 25 from 2PM – 3PM ET.  Click here for more information.

Charney is a complex figure. His website, filled with photos of him and provocative shots he took of the company’s young models, tells the story of his immigrant family, religion, creating the company as a teenager, philosophy on sexual freedom, and politics.

He is quoted as saying:

“I think it’s a First Amendment right to pursue one’s affection for another human being.”

All well and good, but O’Brien rightly points out that when one person has power over someone’s career and salary, can there really be consent?  And this is key.  While we don’t live in a puritanical society, we have an ethical obligation to uphold fairness in the workplace.  Company policy should make it clear that no personal relationship, sexual or otherwise, should be leveraged against salary or promotions.  In other words, having power over how much someone gets paid and what their title is should never be used to motivate anything other than work performance.

O’Brien’s article on this topic as well as her article on how Mark Hurd’s failure to disclose a relationship he had with a consultant while he was CEO led to his downfall, are both excellent analyses of the ethics of power and sex.  She also makes the case that good ethics equals a strong work force and, ultimately, strong business.  It’s also important to point out that, while it’s all well and good to chastise the bad behaviors of a few CEOs, companies need to look at their policies and their implementation carefully to see if it’s realistic, and productive.

At hrworld.com they’ve put together a useful guide of resources covering everything about interviews from what question to ask to which ones are illegal.  But this kind of guide, and many other out there like it, point to a basic problem in the interview process: getting the right group of people with the right qualifications in the room is more useful than the questions you ask or even how they answer them.

That process starts with a lot of homework on what qualifications your looking for, what you can pay, and who will fit into your company culture.  Working with HR or a search firm, you should be able to narrow down that list before you even place an ad in Help Wanted.

Asking the right interview questions may be necessary to choose the best candidate, but, fact is, every candidate in front of you should be able to do the job or someone hasn’t done their job correctly.

Before looking for guides on interview questions, spend some time expressing the absolute qualifications a candiate needs to have when they sit down for an interview.  The rest is really determining if there is  a fit for company culture, determining the longevity of the relationship, and measuring character.

Don’t get us wrong:  interview are incredibly important.  But they are also only one part of the hiring process.

“There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”

This was no Diva clause.  Van Halen had an technically complex show and this clause helped them determine if their entire contract had been read.

Dan and Chip Heath write about this clause at FastCompany.com:

Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we’re smart, we won’t need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it’s exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won’t be outwitted by the guy who sang “Hot for Teacher.”

Where’s the brown M&M in your business?

In essence, the entire job interviewing process is one big brown M&M test.  We can’t gather every bit of information on someone to determine how they’ll perform 40 hours a week for many years.  So we look for clues about who they are and how they’ll perform.  But do we rely on too many clues that are too general?

For example, typos and tardiness are probably the quickest ways of failing an interview process.  ”If they can’t take the time to use spell-check or get here on time, how can I trust them to work here full time?”  Fair enough.  But those clues may be arbitrary.  Does your best salesman roll in at 9:25 and could spell his way out of a bee hive?  The brown M&Ms are only helpful if they’re linked to something telling.

The first clue is to look at your successful employees past and present and see what traits they share that make them successful.  Also look at the traits they possess that would exclude them from your current criteria.  For example, did your successful employees have relavant experience or were they from different backgrounds?  Did they have experience when they started?  Do most successful candidate engage in personal conversation about  your family pictures or get right to the point?

The larger your company, the more you can rely on broad statistics.  You may think you need an MBA but statistics show that most MBAs in your company move on in two years.  You may want to hire outside your region but learn the 50% of out of state hires don’t work out.

Actually, the Heaths identify this option in their article as well:

Some Johns Hopkins University researchers, frustrated by the high-school-dropout rate, went looking for early-warning signs among students in Philadelphia. What were the telltale markers of a student who wouldn’t graduate? Their analysis came back with astonishing clarity. Poring over eighth-grade attendance records, they found hundreds of students who had missed more than one out of every five class days. Of those frequent absentees, 78% eventually quit high school. Similarly, of the eighth graders who had failed either English or math, three out of four dropped out. No other factor — gender, race, age, or standardized-test scores — had the predictive power of those two patterns.

In the hiring process, this type of thinking may be more helpful that the Van Halen method.  Rather than relying on simple clues to identify potential problems, it may be easier to look at what traits successful and unsuccessful employees share.  This kind of research can help your recruiter or HR department identify candidates that are most likely to succeed.

At focus.com, they’ve put together  a handy ‘cheat sheet’ that is aimed at covering the basics for managers.  And it’s pretty basic:  stand up straight, keep you hands out of your pockets, smile.  These are not tips that are going to build a ‘best and brightest’ team.  However, this article does point out the need to supply your managers with tools they need to succeed.

You may not be able to pick only ‘great leaders’ to head up different parts of your company.  You may, instead, have to choose people who have the right experience and are respected within an organization.  And so the conundrum is whether or not to choose natural leaders over those with the right experience and skill set to manage a certain area.  The right answer largely depends on the situation at hand: a new social media campaign may call for a young, ambitious go-getter, but safety issues definitely call for the even handed of experience.  And this is the point exactly.  You probably don’t have the choice to pick your ‘dream management team’ so it’s important to recognize those who lack leadership skills and help them along.  A cheat sheet for these folks may not be a bad idea.

In the end, good management is about results.  Managing managers is, more than anything, recognizing the different styles of leadership that are all valid pathways to success.  A cheat sheet might help some folks manage more effectively, but they need to know that they have the trust and support of the corner office to ultimately lead in a way that they think is most effective to achieve the results you expect.

Read the all 101 tips here.

Finding and hiring bodies to occupy desks is actually pretty simple. Filling those desk chairs with genuinely talented individuals is extraordinarily difficult.

How Hard Can It Be?
For many job seekers, this dilemma seems unbelievable. With unemployment over 9% and millions of people actively looking for jobs, how tough could it be to find the right employee? Shouldn’t the biggest problem be selecting only one of many qualified candidates?

Regrettably, the answer is No.

While job seekers focus intently on communicating their professional qualifications – their degrees, certifications, and specific technical skills – employers are looking for personal qualities like work ethic, loyalty, commitment, passion, eagerness to learn and devotion to excellence.

What Do We Want?
As the CEO commented, there are two types of people in the world: people who can’t bear to watch the ball hit the ground and people who don’t care if the ball hits the ground. She only wants to hire the former. But they’re hard to identify and harder to hire because they’re in the greatest demand.

The CIO agreed and related that her recent employee selections for a necessary layoff were determined by the employees’ personal attributes not by the lack of any specific talent. Because every manager knows that an employee’s personal qualities are extraordinarily difficult to change, while new skills are relatively easily acquired.

Both lamented the lack of any foolproof method to ensure that a new hire would possess their desired qualities and would continue to demonstrate them while employed. No personnel test has worked, behavioral interview techniques aren’t certain, references don’t necessarily reveal motivation and even a proven record of success doesn’t guarantee future accomplishment.

Finally, the Secret Revealed
So, what’s the secret to finding and hiring talent? As far as we can tell, there isn’t one. But suggestions are welcome.

That’s why it’s essential for companies to look outside their own organizations to bring in talented individuals who have proven their ability to nurture innovation and guide organizational transformation. But, when the recruitment process is turned over to HR, do their established policies and procedures aid in the recruitment process or actively repulse creative talent?

I was reminded of these organizational conflicts last week when talking with an executive who had recently been approached by a large public company whose CEO determined that the company needed to emulate successfully innovative companies like Whirlpool and Apple to fuel their company’s growth.

Overcoming Organizational Memory
Recognizing that their current staff was likely incapable of crafting and implementing a dramatic shift towards an innovation culture, the company directed their HR department to recruit talent to help direct these new initiatives.

What followed was a laughably complex, lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful attempt by an entrenched HR department that followed their carefully choreographed hiring processes that served two purposes: to consolidate HR’s central role in the hiring process and to repel precisely the type of candidate they desperately need in-house.

The Process
The steps followed over the course of months (yes, months) was:

1. contact by internal recruiter
2. conversation with internal recruiter to determine nature of position and corporate commitment
3. conversation with senior recruiter to review candidate’s qualifications
4. requirement by HR for candidate to apply for the position through their unnecessarily complex online process
5. request for candidate’s resume, despite the fact that the company approached him and his entire portfolio, blog, references, presentations and public appearances were all publicly available online
6. follow up interview with senior HR recruiter to confirm level of interest (which was waning sharply by this point)
7. telephone interview with hiring manager
8. follow-up interview with senior recruiter
9. second telephone interview with hiring manager
10. in person interviews with hiring manager and four other executives lasting over half a day
11. request for personality assessment and permissions for assorted background checks
12. interview debrief with senior recruiter with promise to provide an answer within a couple of weeks, after they had processed several other candidates as well
13. silence

For those people involved with corporate HR there’s probably nothing surprising about the length or detail of this hiring process. And that’s exactly what repels the corporate innovator. After all, if the corporate processes to bring in a single hire are so complex and embedded, how sclerotic is the rest of the organization and how likely will any individual change, or even shift, an entire corporate culture?

The entire hiring process so repelled this executive that he ultimately abandoned any interest in the organization.

Do your hiring processes communicate what’s best about your organization or are you losing the competition for talent because your initial contacts turn off the best and brightest?