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/

Wanna know what real businesses are doing with digital marketing? Here’s a few of the findings:

81 percent don’t (that means DO NOT) use social media
37 percent are not using their website to expand their business
84 percent don’t sell their products or services online
62 percent don’t use email for marketing purposes
65 percent do not use online advertising

We got a long way to go kids…

Oh really?  Do we?  The thing that these numbers show is how disconnected many analysts and technologists are from the realities of most businesses.  Since Citibank surveyed small businesses, they probably have included many contractors, house painters, plumbers, etc.  Even those providing a more sophisticated product or service, may have a very limited online presence.

Here’s why:  most business are more like plumbers than Nike.  Most business, large and small, is based on complex interactions that weigh economics, trust, efficiency, quality, and some amount of personal connection.  The problem with most branding ideals is that they are based, for the most part, in consumer products.  These same ideals are often applied to web-based marketing as well.  Most business do not sell anything through their websites, they invest in face-to-face customer relationships, and they rely heavily on word-of-mouth.  So whether you’re a plumber or a supplier to the aerospace industry, most advice about web marketing and social media is irrelevant.

Of course, this is not to say that there isn’t value in social media or web-marketing.  It just needs to be carefully considered to fit your particular business needs.  So, kids, do we have a long way to go?  Maybe.  Let’s just make sure we’re going in the right direction.

For many large companies, like Toyota, providing their own healthcare system provides workers with great care at a low cost reducing downtown and preventing illness.  Many companies like General Motors have even employed weight loss and quit smoking campaigns recognizing that, essential, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

But many small and medium sized companies cannot provide such large scale programs.  Technology may be able to help. Marianne Kolbasuk McGee at InformationWeek writes about how many insurance companies are providing portals that are a wealth of information and may streamline healthcare for many employees:

Health insurers have been early adopters of Web portals, providing help checking the status of claims and locating doctors in their health plans. But some insurers are taking those services further, making it easier for members to find other information, such as information on illnesses, treatment cost comparisons, and physicians in a certain zip code that care for a particular condition.

These portals go far beyond the typical list of providers in network:

Aetna, which for years has had relationships with Harvard Medical School and Columbia University College of Dental Medicine to provide content for Aetna’s site, is expanding search capabilities on its Web portal, said John Bahl, Aetna’s head of digital media strategy in an interview. Rather than having to click through long lists of search results or on multiple places on a website, “we’re offering one-stop shopping,” for portal visitors to find medical information, Bahl said. With fewer clicks, portal visitors can more quickly and easily track down the information they’re seeking, he said.

That includes advanced search services for the general public looking for information aboThreaded searches and connections to medical taxonomy are making it easier for members to find information related to health conditions in the context of what’s most relevant to them, based on their gender, age, zip code, as well as the information about other conditions in their Aetna personal health record, he said. For instance, if searching for information on migraines, portal visitors can also easily pull up a list of doctors in their region who treat the headaches.ut a particular medical condition and its symptoms, but also more conveniences for Aetna members who have health coverage through the company.

Portals like this can help companies large and small integrate healthcare into the lives of employees.  It is foolish to believe in a strict separation between health and work.   Encouraging health maintenance to take place and streamlining efforts particularly for preventative medicine reduces downtime and more serious illness down the road.  A health portal isn’t going to cure anyone, but it is a technological tool that can save time and money.  And that’s not only a health issue — it’s a business issue as well.

Read the full article in InformationWeek here.

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.

I wanted Fog Creek to have a salary scale that was as objective as possible. A manager would have absolutely no leeway when it came to setting a salary.

But as he describes the system more, it doesn’t sound so radical.  Basically, Fog Creek determines a level for everyone based on Experience, Scope, and Skill.  Experience being how many years an employee is bringing to the table, scope being how much management they need or how many folks they’re managing, and skill being what they’re actually able to do.  Basically, every employee is assigned a pay level based on an average of Scope and Skill.  That average is  then compared to a sliding scale based on years of experience.  There’s an infographic in the article here.

Splosky is pretty convincing at heading off arguments about salary inversion — that’s when the market determines that rookies are worth more than current employees when labor markets are tight and demand for workers with certain skills are in high demand.  He basically says that employers should bite the bullet and give everyone a raise or determine other workplace incentives to keep employees.

There are a couple of possible issues here, the first being that Splosky’s payscale system seems geared toward the software industry.  While Skill, Scope, and Experience may seem like universal measures, they may be more difficult to apply to an accounting team or marketing department.  Second, it seems that even this simple scoring system could get complicated very quickly and many of the measures are subjective, essentially eliminating any fairness and transparency that was originally intended.

Still, this system is admirable in that it exists.   Many companies give raises (or don’t give them) based on whether or not they want an employee to stay and as a motivational tool.  Since most managers don’t have a system for giving raises, it becomes a shoot-from-the-hip, gut reaction game.  That’s just not good business.  Splosky found a system that works for his company.  Creating one for your company is also important, but it’s important to:

1.)  Keep It Simple:  Creating extra work and bureaucracy isn’t going to help anyone.  Even a simple three part rating system at Fog Creek can get complicated.

2.)  Realize It’s Not a Cure All:  Employees are motivated by all kinds of things and, for the most part, crave fairness.  A system like this will promote fairness, but will not be completely fair in and of itself.

3.)  Don’t Fear Transparency:  Splosky’s most radical suggestion is complete transparency in pay.  Employees may share information any way so why pretend that salaries are secret?  Don’t let someone’s ‘level’ become code for salary and another numer to hide.

4.)  Tailor a System:  Creating a system that’s right for your market and company culture is important.  Some work environments are driven by efficiency, others by service, and others by sales.  It’s important to determine what drives your company and create a system that rewards the right combination of people and skills.

Read Splosky’s full article at Inc.com here.