018: Jim Jubelirer - How to Make Smart Hires and Never Look at a Resume Again!

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Hello and welcome again to the Business Podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. I've got a fellow coach on the phone with me today, Jim Jubalier, who is also Gazelles coach and got quite a rich background. He's been an executive coach at Duke. He's done work in leadership development. He has a rich management background and has done work with Peter diamandis in the abundance360 so we're talking today we're going to extend a topic that we've hit a couple times in the past. I'm sure we'll hit many times again in the future. And that's People. Many entrepreneurs tell us that people is one of their hardest things. They would love their business except for having to deal with people. And that's because people are our most powerful and most challenging resource in a company. So we're coming at People today and many of you know we're looking at the fundamental question of getting the right people on the bus, in the right seats, doing the right kinds of things, and so getting them on in the first place. The principal thing that we've talked about before is top grading. Today we're going to talk about extending and applying top grading with software tools and then the assessments that give you an objective third party kind of or third perspective on something, as well as how to interview powerfully to make the whole thing. So those are three areas. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Why thanks Bill. Thanks for having me on.

Awesome. So the first thing you and I have both, so we're going to share some different examples, but you and I have both found some software tools to expand and implement the ideas of top grading or integrate it more fully with the company's recruiting platform. And you were talking to me about this hireology tool. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure, Bill. I have a keynote talk and a workshop called why you suck at hiring and what you can do about it. And in that talk, we talk about some of the things that you've already covered in your podcast, which is the top grading tells us that only one in four people turn out to be a top performer. 75% of the people you hire don't really, you know, move the needle in terms of culture and performance. And there are a lot of reasons why companies don't do a good job in hiring. And we won't go into too much detail on that. But like you said, it's a very common complaint amongst growth companies. So we're looking to solve a real problem that everybody has.

Well, I was meeting with one of our entrepreneurs this morning and he had a very. I mean, this is so fresh for me because we're there. I've been working with this guy for three years. We've grown the company several fold in that time frame. And one bad hire nearly took him out this year. One person who was off the values and not onboarded well. And the cost is enormous. Of getting it wrong.

Correct. The cost of getting it wrong is enormous. And we know that if it's a frontline worker, it can be as much as four times their salary. But if it's a C suite or an executive level person, it can be as much as 15 times their salary. And when you really get into the numbers and you see what the cost is, it quickly leads you to what Jim Collins calls a catalytic mechanism, meaning if you can fix this problem, it has a disproportionate impact on your overall results. So we're quite keen on bringing in to our clients what we think are the best tools in the business.

Yeah. So topgrading says let's do a number of things to really create an a player culture, to hire the best people that we could possibly afford and to dramatically improve the process of getting a good hire. The platform that I've used that looks an awful lot like hireology is from a friend of mine's company. It's called hiremojo. And I think it's a combination of what we think of as an applicant tracking system, which I think you've got a similar thing in. So we craft a job, we craft a screener set of questionnaires, we craft a job ad and then we go place it and the software helps take us through that. Is that that how higher allergy works as well?

Absolutely. If I told you, you could hire a players and do it more efficiently and more effectively without ever reading their resume. Would you believe me, would. But when we go through the process that we'll be talking about today, you'll see you don't have to read resumes anymore. So the short version of it is that busy entrepreneurs are afraid to cast a wide net to get top talent because it takes so much time to screen and assess and winnow through. And we want to flip that. We actually want to integrate with all the job boards and all the other places that job hunters are seeking and collect as many applications and cover letters as possible and then run people through what hireology calls the SmartRank survey. And that's a simple survey. That's not the detailed assessment that comes later. It's a simple survey that just really gets at whether this person is worth taking a look at.

Nice.

If they have a good cover letter and they answer the right questions on the application and they score well on the SmartRank survey, you can move them to a phone screen. And at this point, you still haven't looked at people do look at the resumes just because it's a habit. They don't really need to because the data in the Smart Rank survey and the COVID letter gives you enough information about whether to move them forward.

So in hiremojo, what you do is you create a kind of a questionnaire that asks about their background and the particular kinds of things that you actually care about that would go against our top grading job scorecard. Help us evaluate how much experience and what they learned. And so you craft questions there and then you give them scores and ranks through it, and then that gives you a dynamic score. I find when creating a job thing like that, one of the first things that you've got to do is go in and evaluate whether you've scored it right. So you design it with some thought. But then, you know, it doesn't always you look at the people. You have to look at the people that are getting through and the people that are getting rejected. As you develop an initial job screener like that, and sometimes you see need to tweak the scoring on it a little bit. Do you find the same thing?

Absolutely. There's a lot of testing and measuring that's involved with this, but once you have it dialed in, you can really trust your process and save yourself a lot of time. But before we go further, I want to mention just a couple points. One is that the stuff that we're talking about right now, my clients are using to Find everybody from frontline food service restaurant workers to medical doctors. So this is not about any particular industry, job type or job level.

Yes.

And the other part is that it works in a wide variety of organizations, but we tend to, I tend to spend more of my time in companies that either a never even had HR. So as you move into that 50 person size, you bring in a dedicated HR person or bigger company. They have HR, but they don't have a dedicated talent management recruiter type person.

Right.

When you hit 200, 400, whatever the number is, you tend to have a talent acquisition person full time in house. And so one of the strategic decisions that every company has to make as they grow is make versus buy across a whole bunch of different areas. And HR is one of those. You're going to outsource to a recruiter, you're going to do it the crappy way where you suck at hiring. Are you going to invest internally? These are not easy or straightforward decisions and we're really driving towards efficiency, effectiveness and leveraging resources and people.

Right. So Daniel Marcos also talks about this. In the stages of growth that what your department, what your function, the tools look like at each stage vary greatly. I know that a lot of people start talking to us after they start to go over 50 people and that tends to be somewhere 40, 50 people, the leadership starts to feel like, geez, we need to enshrine some better habits around here and things are getting weirder and our relationship with our staff is changing. So that's one of the places that the inflection points and the other one starts as they go over 100 and see further growth. And I think you're right, it goes from maybe some outside services and so on. And then at around 100 people they start saying we want some more in house management of the recruiting and the HR function.

All of that is true. But what's also true is as an executive coach, I'm working with someone now who's interviewing for a senior position in one of the country's largest corporations. And it's amazing how bad they suck at hiring. And they have a whole office building full of people working on talent management. So what I'm talking about are basic success principles that can really be applied anywhere. But we're particularly focused on the kind of people, kind of companies you and I serve.

Yeah, well, and that tends to be a big range. I mean I've been dealing in the last year alone with companies from 45 people all the way to just 1000. So that's a Big range in our approach, in each of it. And yet the universal principles of taking a candidate through using appropriate tools, good processes in hiring and onboarding are universal. They just show up a little bit differently. The second piece that we talked about, so we've got some scoring and screening going on and then we're getting into assessment tools. So how do we know beyond our interviewing that and our first thing that we've got, what can we use besides our own opinion about. So what are the assessment tools that you use?

Yeah, excellent question, Bill, and thank you for asking. So what we're talking about is a multi step process. Different companies and different platforms do them differently. So for instance, if you think about trying to get into Harvard, you have to give them your SAT scores and your essay. You got to put a ton of effort in just for them to even see your application. Companies don't act that way. Although if you're Google and you're getting 1,000 applicants for every open position, you can make people jump through more hoops. Our clients can't. So they want the front door to be as friendly as possible and they want to deploy some of these more intensive, time consuming steps like completing assessment somewhere in the middle or towards the end of the interview process. So the tools I use, the main tool that I use is called Caliper and it's a third party tool. It's been validated by millions of users. There are 30 different job, seven different job families and 30 different specific jobs that have been validated in terms of what the key competencies are that are needed to be successful in those jobs. And then a battery of questions to assess a candidate's competencies in those areas. So what you get back is a score. If you were to run a blind test where you ran half your people only through Caliper and half through a standard interview process, and then you hired whoever rose to the top on each, you would find that people that came in because of high assessment scores only will turn out to be better performers than the people who merely interviewed. Well, and I know we're going to talk about interviewing in a moment. Yeah, so it turns out we are not very good interviewers. And having a good assessment or algorithm to assess a person is critical for a couple reasons. One is does a better job. Second is it doesn't take you any time, you just click a button. They get the assessment, they fill it out, you get the report when it's done. You can read the details of the report. But before you even read the report, Bill, a number of the steps that we're talking about follow a winnowing process. And what I mean by that is if their score is 100, you're definitely reading their report. If their score is a zero, well, you might scan it to see, whoa, what happened here. But anybody who's low scoring, you can pretty reliably move to the inactive or reject column. So we only look at the caliper scores of people who score 80 and above. Every time we've looked at the people below 80 because we thought, well, maybe they look good or their resume looked good, we find that in the end they don't shake out.

Yeah, well, I so just to point to a couple of different things, I think the there are a lot of validated assessment tools out there and they all have sort of we have different favorites. I know many of the other coaches will use disc, very, very popular. And there's a lot of validity to disc. I haven't used it as much, but I just want to acknowledge that it's out there and that there is a good application for it. The two others that I've used that have a little bit different approach. One that's more similar is predictive index PI. It's often referred to is one that I've been gotten some use especially for sales roles, but as well for some management service roles and administration. But the one that I like to use the most overall is not quite so objective or definitive, but more exploratory and that is Strengths Finder. So I'll use Strengths Finder, their 20 minute thing, just to look at the top five strengths and give me another kind of place to talk with people with senior folks. I'll pay the additional amount and see the full 35 for which shows me their bottom strengths or as you and I commonly refer to them, their weaknesses. And it's nice to get a picture of somebody. And I think all of these tools, your caliper, disc, strengths finder, all of them are designed to give us a different picture to people than we go around presenting ourselves.

So let me tell you what nerds do, Bill. I don't know if you want to reveal it too publicly on your podcast, but I'm an executive coach at Duke and earlier in my career I worked for a company called Cambria Consulting. And those people all were at a previous firm called hey McBurr and David McClellan, which was David McClellan's firm, who kind of started this whole field. So what our kind of nerds do when they're sitting around the water cooler is Debate the strengths and weaknesses of each of these different assessment tools.

Right.

And I love it. And the short version of that story is they all have their strengths and weaknesses. You might like one, I might like another. They're all. If they're a major tool that has a big company that's been around for a while, they're all good, they're all validated, they work. And your clients, people listening to this podcast should be using them. Even matter which one.

Yes.

Something specifically on strengths finders. That might be something I would do more as part of the onboarding where I, as the hiring manager, I'm going to share my strengths and have the new, new hire. I would learn about their strengths. That would be a great conversation to have in the first week or two. I may or may not include that in the hiring process itself. Mm.

Mm. Yeah. So it really is about the application, how you use it. I'm using it more to give me a different way to probe into the resume and the person in front of me. And the strengths finder creates a very positive way of doing that. Nobody resists that inquiry. But then I end up with something to look a little bit different than maybe they go out. You know, when you're interviewing, as you and I know, and probably everyone that we talk to, everybody is like a self starter, team player, communicator, whatever, except it's all nonsense. Right. Because we also know that we're really, you know, like, I'm terrible at operations. You let me start something, you let me turn something around. I'm awesome, but once it gets going, like, get me out of there, any kind of routine is an issue for me. So I'm a different animal. But most people interviewing can't speak to what they're not good at. We're so trained to like not being able to say, listen, I'm awesome at this, but don't put me in that. So I think these assessment tools give us a way to get in on that. Right.

Yeah. We'll be spending more time on how we break the logjam on the interviewing side. But on the assessment side, the key points for your audience are that these tools exist, they work well, they save you a ton of time, and they really help you both winnow down the people who maybe you like, but upon further insight, don't measure up. Or I have a number of examples now, Bill. Of people that the hiring manager didn't like. But the high. Working closely with the company, I've taught them, you know, create the process and then trust the process. Whereas previously, they might have canned the person after a crappy interview, now they go through the whole process. And we have a case study just two weeks ago of someone who would not have made it out of the interview round. But the hiring manager knew she had to finish the process, and they scored very well on Caliper and the reference checks. And when the hiring manager reflected on her own bias as well as on the candidate strengths as identified by the assessment, she changed her opinion and the person's on board and is a superstar.

Fantastic. Yeah. Makes a huge difference.

So it can help us make better decisions.

Right, so let's talk about interviewing then, before we run out of time here. So in the interviewing, what's important in your perspective and practice? Where do we go beyond just deep interviewing?

There's a couple of key points to make. And the first point to make, Bill, is bias. Just how bad our biases are. And I have a whole teaching that comes from the behavioral sciences research done at Duke and elsewhere on why we're biased, the ways in which we're biased, and how that shows up in the interviewing process. And the simple way to say it is we tend to hire people who look like us and like what we like. And so we're really missing out on a lot of differences. If you look at companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, they have all invested millions of dollars in bias training, training their people how to avoid bias, not just in selection, but in all aspects of decision making. And I have links to all of that training that's made publicly available that they're making publicly available. So first of all is we're biased. And second of all, when we're interviewing, we tend to get distracted. If the person looks nice, we like them better. If they're an introvert and they don't answer questions easily, we get nervous, we go off track. So the second point is having a structured interview guide is essential. And a set of questions. Top grading and hierology both recommend tandem interviewing. You know, two people on the interviewing side talking to each candidate and then at the end agreeing upon what their scores ought to be. And the third part is each interview has to end with a score. It's not just your memory and it's not just your notes. Hireology has a place where you enter a series, where you answer a series of questions about how well you thought the person did in the interview. And so that score goes into that overall dynamic scoring that helps you assess each candidate.

Interesting. Yeah.

The final point is most people try to do too much in a single Interview. And what we found works best is we split the interviewing into three discrete steps. Step one, phone screen, 30 minutes, high level. Just enough to get a sense of whether it's worth bringing them in. There's an important point to make, Bill, about that phone screen, which is another place where companies get bogged down is either the company thinks or the hiring manager thinks. They have to personally do every step in the process. And what we're doing is moving the phone screen to a lower cost, more available resource. You know, someone in hr or sometimes it's the office manager, or it could almost be anybody that's trained in how to do the phone screen. They plus the SmartRank survey data can do a very good job in telling people who needs to come in for the in person interviews. Then when they come in, we like to split it into two. First is achievements. What have you done? And that's the kind of stuff you typically ask in an interview. But the second interview, and it's best done at a separate time, is what hirology calls achievements, I'm sorry, elements of success or what you and I might call competencies, which is more of the who are you as a person. And so we have that second interview after we have the caliper data back and we know more about what the person is like. So that second interview becomes very important. And we only take the step of the second interview with the finalists, you know, the people that have really checked the box in all the boxes up till that point. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I totally get it. And I think that I like a similar thing. The one thing that I would say that's probably implied by your thing that I've had to reinforce people again and again is I like to give people a set of questions. Questions and a form to use to make sure that they hit it. So a lot of times clients will say, well, we told everyone to think about their skills and whether or not they fit this job and whether or not they fit this company in this industry. And I've done the same thing myself, but we didn't ask them. How do you know if they have our values or not? So do you have the value listed and do you ask any specific questions? So I find unless you give people like an interviewing worksheet, then you just get a lot of random and inconsistent sorts of things. Yeah, he'd fit around here. Yeah, she'd be a great fit for this company. I think she fits our culture. But it's based again on that subjective, like they dress like me or Talk like me kind of a thing and not tell me where in your life. Give me an example of where you're a team player or what team means to you or what, you know, like explain what that means and then give me an example. There's not a lot of that that goes on in determining a value fit for people.

Yeah, the key point about that, Bill, is that both as it relates to competencies and core values you can develop ahead of time. Very clear and specific questions that use a interviewing technique. This comes right from David McClellan in the 1950s called the Critical Incident Interview. Tell me a time when you had to overcome adversity and you didn't have any direction about what to do and they tell you a story. And it could be a simple story or a mind blowing story, but it's not saying, well, what do you think about teams? And they'll say, oh, I think teams are great. You're actually asking them to tell you examples from their own life. And it's very clear who has the right temperament and skills and experience to be a good fit for your company.

Yeah, it makes such a difference to have some structured prompts and things because many times we have hiring managers and peers and other people participating in interviewing process and we're just not all trained, especially in mid market companies, in effective interviewing techniques. So giving people some kind of a prompt or a structure can make a real difference there. Hey Jim, it looks like we're coming on time for our show. I think we should just recap. So we talked about having some kind of a software platform, an applicant tracking system that helps you shepherd your applicants through the process and hopefully gives you some additional tools. And we mentioned hireology and higher Mojo as examples. We'll put links to those in the show notes. We'll also put links to Jim and your website. In the show notes we talked about doing assessment checking. We mentioned some different assessment tools and the different approaches to those. So we'll put the links to those as well that people can look in and follow up and of course they can talk to you about that. And then we talked about the approach to the interviewing and the need to bring some design and thoughtfulness as well as some structure to that. So. So hopefully that gives people some places and ways to improve their hiring process and get that next hire a little bit better. And if you're on the verge of hiring now, remember nobody ever said they hired too slowly. Like everybody again and again, year after year, entrepreneurs and CEOs tell us hire slow fire fast. So be careful in bringing people on board that you don't make a mistake there.

Excellent.

Jim. Thanks for being on the show today and we'll put links out to you and to the others. Thanks again.

Thanks Bill.

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