It takes time to find the candidate whose beliefs and personal missions are consistent with those of the companyThe title of this chapter will strike many of you as heretical. Entrepreneurs may be wildly different in terms of their businesses, personalities, and strategies, but most of them like to move quickly, fly by the seat of their pants, and lust after expertise.
But if you apply these traits to recruiting, you will come up short because:
It takes time to find the candidate whose beliefs and personal missions are consistent with those of the company
Instinct may help you find people you like but not necessarily people who will deliver maximum value to the company
Expertise only guarantees that candidates possess the skill to do the job, not that they will do it well or for long
In the last chapter, I detailed how the entrepreneurial environment has changed and why a shift in recruiting consciousness is necessary. Here, I’ll suggest some specific actions you can take to facilitate this shift. First, though, I want to give you an example of how this shift can pay off in a big way—how it can help snag a candidate that you might never have had a chance of securing in the past.
A paradox is at work in today’s entrepreneurial enterprise. In the previous chapter, I discussed how a need for speed is crucial in a highly competitive environment, and how hiring employees with a shared sense of mission and values helps get things done faster. At the same time, moving slower in the recruiting process is equally important, since it takes time to find candidates who possess a shared mission and values.
Movable Ink was the next generation of email marketing companies, and their ability to tailor a message to a given target market faster and more effectively than other companies had made it one of the world’s hottest startups. I was brought in to help the company find a VP of talent.
Many of the Movable Ink candidates met the specs: They possessed exactly the right talent acquisition and industry experience necessary for the role, and they were strong leaders who grew and motivated their people. I identified a handful of candidates who were the best of the best, but all of them were doing well in top positions with great companies. Why would they want to leave?
I discussed the issue with Vivek Sharma, Movable Ink’s founder.
“It’s highly unlikely we can pry away any of these candidates by offering them money or perks or trying to convince them that Movable Ink is the best company on the face of the earth.”
“Then what can we do?”
“We can see if one of them views the world as you do.”
This may sound like a simple task, but in reality, it requires time and a structured process to discern a candidate who has compatible beliefs and goals. It’s not like you can interview a candidate and get a sense that she is the one. When you are searching for an intangible such as values, you need to take your time and create a plan to make this challenging determination.
Part of the time involves an entrepreneur exploring and articulating what his values are. When I asked Vivek to do this, he was perplexed for a moment. But by relying on a tried-and-true process, I was able to elicit the necessary information. We began talking about Movable Ink and the vision Vivek had for the company, how he believed in curiosity tethered to empathy and grit as the sources of innovation and the qualities his most successful team members valued.
Then, we began to assess the values of the candidates, again using a process that helped us identify mismatches as well as matches. We began to see how some of the candidates would never succeed or last at Movable Ink—one had a fixed mindset, another was too self-centered, a third was too closed off to her colleagues.
One candidate, however, was different. It wasn’t that she was more brilliant or more accomplished as a talent leader than the other candidates. It was simply that Louise Peddell’s beliefs and values mirrored Vivek’s. As we analyzed the values match, we saw that they both were servant leaders: curious, determined, and focused on their companies’ greater good. Though they weren’t clones from a personality standpoint, their values were aligned.
Vivek recognized this values fit, and wanted Louise for the job. We also conveyed to Louise how she and Vivek had this extraordinary simpatico vision and how this was a once-in-a-lifetime match: She resonated with what Vivek and Movable Ink were all about. This recognition prompted her to leave a terrific job that almost anyone else would wish for and join Movable Ink.
Yes, this recruiting effort took a bit more time and effort than other searches. And yes, the decision wasn’t made by an assessment of a candidate’s expertise and experience (though Louise had plenty of both) as much as by identifying the candidate who would thrive in Movable Ink’s culture and resonate to Vivek’s style of leadership. And yes, I’m sure going about the recruiting process this way may have made Vivek a little uncomfortable initially.
Vivek chose this slower, structured, values-focused process again when we partnered to secure other key leaders, including his Chief Marketing Officer, SVP Sales, Chief Financial Officer, VP Product and an independent board member.
I cannot state this principle enough: Recruitment is too critical a responsibility for leaders to delegate. So like Vivek, you have to make a commitment to recruiting the right way. I know, you’re incredibly busy and have too much on your plate. But as the founder and head of the company, you’re in the best position to assess whether a given individual possesses your values and fits your vision of what the company can become. Many entrepreneurs lack the time or impulse to communicate their vision or values. They keep it locked in their heads, so their HR people or whoever is doing the hiring isn’t aware of the entrepreneur’s vision of what the company might be or the types of people who might help achieve this vision.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you have to get involved with the nitty-gritty of the hiring process. Your HR people as well as an outside firm can handle many of the tasks. But you do need to be involved and play a key role, especially when the hire is someone who can have a significant impact on the company. You have to ensure a structured process is understood by all and implemented consistently. And you have to make sure a values assessment is part of the process.
Here is a sampling of the type of questions this process should answer:
If a candidate appears overly sensitive, does it seem like he will struggle in a straight talk culture?
Does a candidate for a managerial position have the capacity to mentor others and grow the company the way you want it grown?
Will someone who is a great individual contributor possess the agility to work well on teams; is her expertise matched by her willingness to collaborate?
While leaders can help answer these questions if they’re involved in hiring, they can’t do so if they fail to subscribe to the following principles:
Recruiting has become a leadership competency and leaders must strive to improve their abilities in this area.
These abilities require not only learning how to interview and assess candidates in terms of values but recognizing when a values match has been made.
Putting these principles into practice requires a recruiting consciousness. It’s no longer just a task but integral to the company’s sustainability. The leaders who recruit best become almost evangelical in their desire to bring in the right people for their companies. They see their companies as reflections of themselves, and they attempt to bring in the best people in order to help their companies become the best versions of themselves.
Leaders must also recruit with great transparency and honesty. Jack Welch has said that truth, trust, and transparency are critical leadership tenets. This is as opposed to titles, false appearances, and covering up mistakes. Leaders who recruit superbly are people who are honest and open with candidates about what their companies represent, and in turn, they practice what they preach. They communicate what they value and make sure that the company’s practices reflect these values. In this way, they create alignment. They avoid the cognitive dissonance that exists in many organizations—where leaders say one thing but actually value other things. (For instance: Saying we are all about creating win-win situations with our partners but shortchanging vendors routinely.)
This dissonance will sabotage the recruiting process. Not only will good people leave when they realize a leader has deceived them, but in this age of transparency, social media and other digital sources will communicate quickly what the company’s real values are (as opposed to what a leader says they are).
Perhaps more than anything else, leaders who recruit well are proactive in the process. They dig in early to find candidates and dig in deeper over time to find the right ones. They don’t sift through resumes searching for nuggets. They are well aware of a conclusion drawn by Lazlo Bock in his book, Work Rules. Bock, Google’s head of People Operations, believes that resumes as a recruiting tool are a thing of the past. Instead, Google is much more interested in other approaches to determine if a given candidate is a good fit for their company.
One of their recruiting strategies is to target what they refer to as passive job-seekers—individuals who already have excellent jobs and aren’t looking to change companies. Google knows, however, that some of the best potential hires aren’t actively seeking to be hired by Google, but if they were, they’d be ideal matches. As a result, Google identifies these potential hires, keeps track of them, and when they are ready to make a move, Google is ready for them.
It’s fascinating that Google, a company that spends a significant amount of money on recruiting, spends relatively little on training. That’s because once they make a good match—once they find a candidate whose beliefs and work style align with Google’s culture—these candidates adapt and learn quickly on their own.
Most of you don’t run entrepreneurial businesses anywhere close to the size of Google—at least yet. But if you aspire to grow your business, you should take a cue from Google and target happily employed people. Have lunch with them. Find out more about them. If they seem like a good match, let them know you’re interested when they become interested. Because of high job liquidity, some of them are likely to be looking for a job sooner rather than later, even though they may not know it yet.
Go beyond this and become a talent facilitator. Get out there and make introductions, even if there is no direct benefit for you. If a fellow entrepreneur contacts you looking to hire someone, make suggestions of who they might consider. Bring a diverse group of people in your field together for lunches, coffee, workshops. Attend conferences and breakout sessions where you’re likely to meet new people. Participate in social media forums. All this will accomplish two goals: help you broaden your talent circle and create reciprocity (you help others find people they need and they in turn will help you).
I’ve done these things my entire career, and it has given me access to a broader range of talent and encouraged others to assist me when I’m searching for a particular executive. Mary Lou Song was one of eBay’s first five employees hired, and helped build a $40 billion business. She is widely credited with creating the public relations, community, and product strategies that helped grow their membership into the millions. When she was at eBay, the company went through such massive growth that it catalyzed her own professional growth. I first met Mary Lou in New York City when she was leading the product team at a Gerson Lehrman Group company. Some time later, I remembered how impressed I had been by Mary Lou’s values-driven approach, how she hungered to take on challenges and make a difference, and how growth and contribution resonated so strongly with a couple of entrepreneur friends who were also in San Francisco. I introduced her to two entrepreneur friends, Rick Teed and Butch Haze, precisely because they too shared these values. Together, they’ve created a new direct response video company that promises to disrupt the entire advertising technology industry.
Or rather, you don’t have to recruit stars to create tremendous growth and profitability. The mistake many entrepreneurs make is thinking that to take the company to the next level, they need to go out there and find the best marketer, money guy, software designer, and engineer for the next ten years. They possess the George Steinbrenner/ New York Yankee mentality: Buy lots of superstar free agents.
Better, instead, to follow the lead of Theo Epstein, formerly of the Boston Red Sox and now of the Chicago Cubs: Develop talent to fit the culture you build. If you recruit people who possess the basic competencies required to do the job and who are aligned with your vision and values, you can grow them and they will in turn grow the business. You can always train and develop them to become better leaders and managers, programmers, and salespeople. If they are in synch with your culture—if their beliefs about work and goals for their careers are well-suited to your company—then they will do everything they can to improve their skills and reach stretch goals. They may not be superstars when they arrive at your doorstep, but they will become super-performers precisely because your company feels like home to them. As my mentor Keith Cunningham says, “You only have to get the anchor one inch off the bottom of the ocean floor for the ship to move forward.”
In an April 6, 2015 Harvard Business Review article, Daniel Freedman wrote about the myth of recruiting stars. Based on a number of studies, Freedman concluded that recruiting top talent and paying them accordingly wasn’t worth it; that people who delivered outstanding results at one company often couldn’t replicate that performance at their next employer; and that outstanding performance usually happened when an individual’s work preferences and requirements were well-suited to the employer.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore talent. It does mean that for that talent to blossom, a match must be made between the individual’s preferences and values and those of the company.
The good news, then, is that even if you’re a cash-strapped startup who can’t afford to pay superstar salaries, you can still recruit an outstanding performer who will accept reasonable compensation. But you have to be thoughtful, strategic, and structured as you go about the process of finding this individual. I’ll provide you with more specific steps to achieve this goal in chapters 5 through 8, but keep the following overarching principles in mind:
The great Greek Stoic Epictetus said “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Too often, leaders fail to clarify in their own minds what their business represents. Entrepreneurs are often so focused on the daily challenges—on satisfying an unsatisfied customer, on fixing problematic software—that they don’t reflect on their long-term goal and how they intend to achieve it. This reflection, though, yields a great recruiting pitch. What you’re selling job candidates is an opportunity to learn, to grow, to be part of something that reflects who they are and who they want to be. When you know what your company represents and where it’s going, you can offer candidates the opportunity to join an enterprise that seems tailor-made for them. This can entice even the best people out of great jobs, since you’re offering them a chance to become a better version of themselves. If you doubt this statement, consider that we’ve recruited top engineering candidates from companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber who often receive four additional job offers within a six-week span. This translates to 500 percent negative unemployment. Yet they leave their jobs if the new offer resonates with them on a deeper level.
I’m not suggesting you should paint a false picture of your company or its prospects. Recognize, though, that to paraphrase the Army’s ad slogan, you’re not just selling a job, you’re selling an adventure. When Sir Ernest Shackleton was recruiting sailors for his Antarctic expedition, he created the following ad:
Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.
Despite the forbidding tone and content of his ad, Shackleton found plenty of recruits. That’s because his “hook” was honor and recognition and the unstated prospect of great adventure. For some men, this was their raison d’être. They were willing to give up the comfort of warm homes and safe jobs for the chance to fulfill a larger purpose.
But as leader-recruiters, you need to convey this purpose clearly and with motivation. By describing the values the company espouses and the vision you have for it in compelling terms, you allow job candidates to envision whether this is a place they want to be. If it is, they will be willing to go on an adventure with you, even if you’re not offering the highest salary or the greatest working conditions.
This is the most challenging principle to which you must adhere and so I’m going to keep reminding you to remind yourself throughout the book. If you’re running a restaurant, you want to hire the chef who can cook the best. If you’re in charge of a sales-driven organization, you are trying to hire salespeople who are great at convincing customers to buy. If you’re a tech startup, you want brilliant software designers.
Competence is important, and you may make some hires primarily for a given individual’s expertise. But for jobs of significance—especially managerial and leadership roles—focus on an individual’s values and fit with the culture. You can train people so they increase their level of expertise, but you can’t train them to have the values you require. Therefore, when you look at all the candidates out there, be flexible about knowledge and skills and inflexible when it comes to values.
Let’s say you have interviewed a number of candidates for a top position with your company, and you’ve winnowed the list down to two people, both of whom have roughly equal amounts of expertise and experience. You know both of them can handle the job from a task standpoint, but each of the candidates has a distinct personality. Tom is highly confident and not shy about describing his past achievements. At times, he can even be somewhat arrogant, but you understand that he has a lot to be arrogant about.
Alice, on the other hand, is much more restrained when talking about herself. Though she’s quietly confident, she has to be pushed to relate her successes. During the interview, Alice deflects compliments and points to the contributions of others that helped her company achieve objectives; she talks a lot about the importance of her team.
Tom is clearly a take-charge, decisive manager who is good at telling people what to do and getting things done quickly. Alice’s managerial style is less decisive but more reliant on creating synergies among her people; she works more slowly and is more interested in soliciting input from others before making a decision.
Who would you hire? In the old work paradigm, most people would choose Tom. In a command-and-control hierarchy, Tom’s approach works best. As a factory foreman, a COO, or an IT executive, Tom would demand respect and accountability and get things done efficiently.
In the new work paradigm, Alice is a better choice. Obviously, your hiring decisions depend on many factors, and it may be that an assertive, decisive candidate is a better choice for your company than a more egalitarian, less assertive one. My point is simply that in today’s world, entrepreneurs need staff who are able to work well with others, who can sacrifice their personal agendas for group goals, and who want their organizations to grow and achieve greatness.
So much of entrepreneurial success these days is dependent on collaboration. It’s also dependent on managerial agility. In a liquid workplace, managers must be able to work with an ever-changing cast of characters; they must be able to get new people up to speed quickly, to integrate them seamlessly into teams. People with huge egos often lack this agility as well as the collaborative impulse.
As a general rule, humility is a much better trait to seek in employees than hubris. Of course, people can fake humility and hide hubris, so it’s not always easy to differentiate candidates based on these two factors. A better differentiator involves masks versus blind spots. People who wear masks are trying consciously to hide something from others . . . or themselves. They lack the ability to be vulnerable because this would make it possible for others to see who they really are—and for various reasons, they don’t want others to see their true personae. These people are likely to be drama llamas, creating all sorts of workplace stress as the tension between who they really are and how they present themselves roils within. People who have blind spots, on the other hand, don’t realize what they are hiding from themselves (i.e., that they don’t like confrontation) but are capable of being open, vulnerable, and compassionate. They are innocently ignorant, and if they are sufficiently humble, they come to be aware of their growth opportunities, and with this awareness, they start addressing this hidden potential, learning and improving their capabilities while expanding their capacity.
Here is a list of Mask versus Blind Spot traits to help you identify both types:
MASK
Hiding something, protecting ego
Pretends to know it all, have all the answers
Causes of failure are all external faults, others to blame
Strategy was wrong
Things outside of their control are to blame
Victims of circumstance
Job hopping
Strong motivation to work driven by survival, need for money, scarcity mindset
Entitled self-interest
Uses hubris and pomposity to hide lack of self-confidence
BLIND SPOTS
Innocent deficit of knowledge, data, or insight
Prefer working with good people to the prestige of working for a hot company
Not afraid to be vulnerable
Self-admit gaps of knowledge
Open, perhaps even eager to learn
Strong emotional need to work driven by becoming something more, achieving great things, making life better for others
Compassionate interest in others
Humility
Guided by truth, wisdom, and not afraid to admit lack of experience
Targeting this latter group of traits can give you a recruiting competitive edge. Other companies are still focused on people with technical chops and don’t mind that they’ve moved from job to job, that they’re arrogant, and that they exhibit a scarcity mindset. If you can focus on finding people who are honest about their shortcomings, who display empathy, and who are avid learners, you will find that you have a lot of potentially great job candidates from which to choose.
Be assured that there are plenty of people like this available to entrepreneurs. As a society, we are still obsessed with the best and the brightest. Malcolm Gladwell, in his now-famous article in The New Yorker titled “The Talent Myth,” made a convincing case that the McKinsey Consulting Group and Enron had overvalued “smart people”; that just because someone did well at a prestigious school or had a high IQ didn’t mean that he would deliver great performance. Gladwell cited companies like Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble as consistently successful companies that avoided paying through the nose for Ivy League talent, instead creating organizational structure, culture, and strategy that created positive results over the long term.
Most entrepreneurs don’t have access to a lot of Harvard MBA job applicants. People who worked for a top consulting firm generally want their next position to be at either hot tech companies like Google or major corporations like Johnson & Johnson. In the past, this may have seemed like a disadvantage. Today, though, the people with the qualities you seek—vulnerability, a love of learning, compassion—are available in an ever-widening pool.
Given that you’re going to be interviewing a lot of promising people, you need to develop an approach that will help you find the individuals who are right for you and your company. This means moving away from the standard operating procedure, in which you ask people to describe their accomplishments and recount how they developed their expertise, while you try to ascertain if they have the skills they claim.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs—and if you have been involved in the hiring process—you probably ask candidates questions like:
What would you say is your most significant achievement?
Can you give me an example of when you used your knowledge and skills to meet a challenging work goal?
What would you say is the most important thing you’ve learned in your career, and how did you apply this learning to help your company?
There’s nothing wrong with these questions, but they don’t go sufficiently deep to assess candidates’ values. Therefore, consider these two tactics during interviews: paying attention to what motivated people and why they made the decisions they did.
Think of all the possible work motivations an individual might have: a corner office (and other perks), salary, title, prestige (working for a top company), maximizing her talent, helping a company grow and prosper, making a difference, changing the world. Most people have multiple motivations, but you need to ascertain the primary one. Motivations exist on a continuum, with the ones on the left being the “basest” (i.e., having a corner office) and the ones on the right being the most noble (changing the world).
In a liquid job marketplace, people with primarily base motivations are apt to leave your company at the drop of a hat—or a better offer. Therefore, dig deep when discussing what motivated them to take a given action. For instance: “I see that you left Company X when things were going great; why did you decide to leave and join company Y?” Ideally, the answer to this question will be something like, “I thought Company Y was moving in a direction that was better suited to my own goals and work styles.” As opposed to: “They offered me a lot more money.” Just as important, motivations reveal values. Are you motivated by the opportunity to change a marketplace by bringing out a revolutionary new product? Or are you motivated by all the money you can make by doing so? Obviously, motivation is a more complex issue than these two simple alternatives represent, but by digging down and determining what drives an individual, you can assess how her values fit with your company.
In addition, capitalize on the transparency offered by social media by ascertaining if the motivation cited by a candidate matches up with reality. For instance, someone may have told you how much he believes in working in a culture aligned with his values, but when you check his posts on Facebook, you discover a rant about how his former employer didn’t give him a good bonus which is why he left the company. On the other hand, you might also discover that a candidate posted something on LinkedIn that confirms exactly what he told you about why he took a specific action.
The second tactic: Talk to candidates about significant decisions they’ve made. Why did they decide to go into advertising? Why did they take off a year to work for a charitable cause? Why did they initiate a program at a former employer to facilitate information flow across all functions and levels?
Big decisions offer entrepreneurs insights into what makes people tick. Do you want to hire someone who chose a career because he thought it was a glamorous profession? Or do you think someone will fit better in your company if she chose the profession because she thought it gave her the best opportunity to make her mark and grow as a person and a professional?
I recognize that investigating decisions and motivations may not be top of mind issues for entrepreneurs looking to hire people. Entrepreneurs are often pragmatic—they have an opening, and they want to find the most qualified person. As a result, they direct the selection process so that the focus is on competencies and accomplishments. Who can do the job best today? But consider that you no longer have to limit yourself to this pragmatic mindset. In today’s marketplace, people often change jobs every five years (or less). There are also many more candidates than in the past who have gone through training programs or received education that makes them qualified (from a competency standpoint) to do the jobs you need to fill. With this larger pool of qualified candidates to choose from, you don’t have to settle for the merely qualified; you can look beyond present capabilities to future contributions. Who is the candidate who will help take the company where you want it to go? Who possesses the values that are congruent with your beliefs? By focusing on decisions and motivations, you can answer these questions in ways that will benefit your company.
Entrepreneurial leaders are their companies’ values custodians and amplifiers. This may seem like a minor responsibility compared with profit and loss and introducing new products and services, but here’s why it’s major: If you allow values to weaken and disappear, all your recruiting efforts will be for naught. All the great people you worked so hard to bring into the company through a slower, structured process will flee.
Here’s a cautionary tale that illustrates this point—a tale that I observed firsthand. After we sold HotJobs to Yahoo for $486 million, I was asked to fly out and meet Yahoo’s Head of HR in their Sunnyvale headquarters. We had a three and a half hour meeting with twenty-one other people. We sat around the most beautiful conference room table I had ever seen—it was carved from a two hundred-year-old sequoia.
As we sat there and discussed the business, I heard many stories about elaborate parties that people would fly to from around the country as well as about Yahoo’s culture of harmony. What I didn’t hear about was exciting initiatives, innovative approaches to problems, and effective plans to help the company grow in a changing environment. Once upon a time, Yahoo’s culture was one of great industriousness and diligence. They worked with zeal and creativity, and they were especially astute in their acquisition strategy. But over time, the company had become fat and lazy—they were victims of the stock option syndrome. Many executives had become paper millionaires very quickly and at a young age. It was up to the leadership to maintain the original values that had put them on the map, and the leadership let the company down.
A few months after the meeting at the sequoia table, I departed the company, recognizing that my own core values and those of Yahoo would clash—that I would never be able to learn, grow, and thrive in their culture.
Yahoo could have become Google. Instead, it became a shadow of its former self, selling to Verizon for far less than it might have received years earlier. The saddest part of the story is that it didn’t have to happen. Yahoo lost a lot of good people besides myself—people who once had resonated to the original values of Yahoo’s founders but found themselves working for a company with which they no longer had much in common. The great American writer Will Durant said, “A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.” This is too often true in business.
The following graphic is one I would urge every leader who wants to maintain core values to put on the office wall:
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As you can see, the upper two quadrants on the y-axis (or “why” axis) represent people who possess the Core Values that match those of the organization. In the lower two quadrants, people lack these values. In the upper right and lower right quadrants, these individuals are adept and Get Stuff Done (GSD).
The most successful entrepreneurs understand (consciously or not) that if they hire people in the upper two quadrants (who possess the Core Values), they will be bringing in people who will thrive and Take Stuff to the Next Level (TSNL): (1) Even those in the upper left quadrant who may not be great at implementing and generating results at the moment (they lack some technical chops to Get Stuff Done) can be trained to become better at execution; they can be developed into leaders. (2) On the other hand, people who lack the right values can’t be trained to be empathetic or to work collaboratively; it’s either in you or it’s not; they often get blocked from moving up by the defenders of the company’s Core Values. (3) As tempting as it may be to recruit individuals in the lower right quad-rant—they may tempt you with their high level of skills and track record for generating results—they poison the values well. They will create conflicts both internally (with team members) and externally (with clients/customers, vendors, and others).
Therefore, take your role as values custodian seriously. It requires a bit more work, thought, and structure to fulfill this role, but it’s worth it.