Lou Adler's Spiral of Doom Catch-22 via LinkedIn

Over the last month or two, I've been asked to describe my staffing spiral of doom. I'll even call it the staffing spiral of doom, catch 22. And it's a catch 22 because when I describe it, you'll see you want to get out of it, but you'll have some excuse of why you can't get out of it. And that's What a Catch 22. It's based on Joseph Heller's book Catch 22. I won't tell you the plot line, but you should read it. It's actually pretty interesting, pretty cool. But it became part of our lexicon, this idea of catch 22. And the way I like to start out by having people think about it is I like everyone to just think about some of the hiring challenges you have. And if I had you all put a list down, if I get everyone who's listening to watching this, get a list of problems they have. They tend to be some with your hiring manager, that person's not engaged. They're not wedded to the idea of hiring great people. We have boring jobs. We don't pay people enough. People don't want to relocate. We have too many wrecks to handle. There's so many problems we have in sourcing, and each one is a very legitimate problem. But when you think about them all collectively at least, even within your company, there's one common solution or one common. Maybe not solution isn't the best word, but one common problem that really summarizes all of them. You have a bad strategy. Now, when you think about it, there's two fundamental strategies, probably more than two altogether. But I look at two fundamental strategies. One is a talent surplus strategies where you have more than enough people and all you're trying to do is weed out the weak ones. The other one is a talent scarcity strategy is where you don't have enough good people and quickly easy to tell. You post an ad. If you get a lot of good people, you can use a surplus model. If you post an ad and you don't get any good people, you can't use that strategy anymore. That means you don't have enough good people responding to your ad. I mean, it's so obvious. And yet people post an ad and they still post the same boring ads and wonder why they're not getting more people. So let me kind of define both of those strategies and I and I'm going to contend solving the strategy problem will solve 90% of your other problems. So let's go with the Talent surplus strategy first. The assumption behind it is we have an excess supply of talent, not an excess supply of candidates. Getting 500 people to respond or 50 people to respond to your ad, if none of them are good, it's not a good idea to keep on doing that. If in that 500 or 50 you have plenty of candidates to choose from. Perfectly fine strategy to go with a surplus of talent or a surplus of talent model. But down deep, what you're really trying to do is fill a seat with the best person amongst good people. That's not common unless you got a huge employer brand and people. Everybody wants to work at your company or the economy is terrible and people still want to work at your company. Let's go through the details of what that really means down below the strategy level, into the tactics. We tend to post job descriptions. Job descriptions are kind of boring. They list skills, duties, responsibilities and are not very attractive. They're written to people who are desperate or needy. And with our surveys, we've discovered at least the members on LinkedIn. And these are surveys of about 5,000 people, fully employed people. Only 17% are both needy and active. And even the best of those 17% who are needy and active aren't looking for lateral transfers. They're still looking for good jobs. So if you post lateral transfers, you're only getting the ones who are needy and active and aren't looking for a good job. Now, if you got plenty of good people, that's okay. But then you say, okay, let's find as many people as we can as possible. We'll weed out the weakest ones. We'll screen on skills and dollars, go say, hey, we can cherry pick. We got plenty of good people. And during this. Actually, this concept of posting job descriptions came around during the Depression, the depression of 1929-1935, where everyone was out of work. It works when you have a supply of great people, doesn't work when you don't. In the process of screening out people, we also eliminate the high potential people. Let's remember high potential people are those who have less experience. That's what makes them high potential. When you think about it, the high potential people have half as, not half. They have less experience than people who are average. Made them high potential because they got promoted faster. I mean, I know we kind of ignore that, but that's the reality. You can't be high potential people and have plenty of experience because you got promoted more quickly than everyone else. So you don't have as much experience as everyone else. But you just perform a heck of a lot better than everyone else. So that's a pretty cool group. Why would you want to eliminate that pool? Makes no sense to me. Now, unfortunately, in our surplus model, we also work with a lot of disengaged managers. Not everybody, but many people get into management, didn't get into management because they were great at hiring great people. They didn't realize that talent was important. Which in my mind already says, hey, if you promote people or promote managers who don't think talent's important, you obviously have a surplus model. And then we have this random voting system. Some people do it well, some people we train, but we vote odd the highest. The person with the most power wins the voting contest. Then we close on compensation. And what I find most companies do is they forget the strategy and they try to improve some of those processes below the strategy, well, let's have better interviewing. Let's buy these new tools. Let's train our managers to do this. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work because the strategy is bad. It might work in a short period of time, but over time. It doesn't work over extended periods of time. Now I go to the surplus model or the, excuse me, the scarcity model. In this case, we're targeting the 83% of passive candidates and the best active candidates who want a career move or a better job. The strategy behind this is we want to maximize quality of hire. We have a restraint. However, the restraint being is we don't have enough good people. Not an insignificant restraint. So we can't use a surplus model. When you don't have enough good people, you have to use a scarcity model, which is a different strategy. That strategy consists of we're going to target the best people, which in my mind is the top half of the top half, the top 25%, at least at the top of our funnel. We're going to not write traditional job descriptions that offer lateral transfers. We're going to write new age job descriptions that focus on compelling messages that are career oriented. They describe the impact, the challenge, and, and they get people excited and they're targeted to that audience. Mechanical engineers, software developers, sales reps, marketing people, directors, managers, call center operators. We go after the best people with great advertising. For any job that I'll call a professional job, we're probably going to add. Not probably. We'll need to add an exploratory conversation to the process. Not send people to the apply button, send people to. Let's chat now with either the recruiter and and possibly the hiring manager. If not both. We do need the full engagement of hiring managers. And if you have a talent scarcity approach, meaning everybody in a company realizes that talent is number one. Managers need to be fully engaged in that concept and they're measured on the people they hire. So if your managers aren't measured on the people they hire, obviously you don't believe talent is number one. And if managers aren't promoted based on the people they hire, you obviously don't believe talent is number one. It's number two or number three. So if you go back to the scarcity that talent is number one. Managers won't get promoted unless they're fully engaged. And if managers want to continue to get promoted, they have to become fully engaged. I tend to use a concept called performance based hiring to do my assessments which is designed to go after the best of the best. It's a fully integrated process, consists of two basic questions and what I call the hiring formula for success, which I won't get into the details here, but the fundamental thing is we don't close on compensation, we close on career opportunity and we start presenting that career opportunity at the beginning in our job descriptions and it's a full court press. Our job postings are attractive even though great candidates passive aren't going to look at them. They will look at them if they decide to engage with you. I will have all that branding and cool information on my company page. I will have the hiring manager's profile ready and available so that the candidate can look at it, the prospect can look at it. I want that candidate before they even get think about engaging with us. Hey, we are going after the best people. We got the best managers, we got the best advertising, we got the best company and our job's tied to the company strategy and mission. That is a talent scarcity model. And if you want to start hiring great people, you got to do two things. You got to start thinking about what is our talent scarcity approach. And number two, you got to stop thinking surplus of candidates and they're both equally as difficult. Stop doing the bad stuff, start doing the good stuff. You do that, you'll start hiring great people every time. Good luck hiring great people.