Recent job openings at the Atlantic say it is looking for people that: “Obsess over beautiful, functional design” or how about “ Passion for the future of digital media”. I could go on but you get the idea they think these ads will help them attract “obsessive, passionate” employees… It thinks that is the key to success. But it is a big lie, one that companies struggle with internally.
I ran a very large organization with over 42,000 employees and while I would argue that the energy in our company came from those 10% that came to work everyday intent on excelling, the reality is that a company of any size has an average or hopefully slightly above average workforce compared to its competition.
So seeking “obsessive, passionate” employees is mostly a kubuki dance where interviewers ask questions like “what is your greatest weakness” and potential hires respond “I simply get so buried in my work I fail to develop other avenues of interest”. Or I am constantly accused of being a “workaholic” by my friends. Everyone learns the buzzwords and appropriate responses.
Furthermore, the truth is that the average company cannot support to many super performers. First, most companies have lots of “jobs” that super performers simply do not want. Instead, the person that wants to come to work everyday, do the same thing, and go home does a better job than the super performer in many jobs. Often the employer does not want them being to creative. Often jobs require people do the same thing over and over again in the same way.
Most super performers I have known expect in exchange for their efforts, you will promote them regularly and pay them well. A fair request but to take advantage of their efforts, you need the right jobs for them, otherwise you will have frustrated overpaid employees who are bored and searching for a new job.
Every company likes to brag that its people are better, but there is little evidence that is true. As CEO of this large company, I asked my HR a simple question. “How come you claim you are hiring the best people in the marketplace, but when we terminate someone, the response is they were bad performers? What are we doing as a company to turn the best people in the marketplace into “poor performers”?” You get the idea.
Bottom line like most companies my HR department was doing your basic job ad placing, resume screening, skills testing, and background checking. But if you are doing what everyone else is doing, how does that make you better. If you think hiring better “job description writers” is the key, then your company has a problem.
I challenged my HR department that frequently used ads to hire people, why they thought the best people in the marketplace were “looking for jobs”. I added I hope we are compensating our “best people” enough, so they are not looking for jobs. In other words, if other companies are like us, then in most cases we are trying to hire the best of the worst and not the best of the best. I suggested we find a new way of finding candidates when we wanted a “top performer” and that way would mean finding people who were not looking for jobs to switch jobs.
I do think some companies have better employee tools, training, better incentives, and better management than others. These external factors can elevate human performance and that can be reflected in a company’s work force. For example, I once went to the head of my information systems department and asked him to design a computer system that would help an employee with strong interpersonal skills to do the “technical” part of their jobs better. Why? I was finding at these entry level jobs, that employees with both strong interpersonal and technical skills were being promoted so quickly, that over time the department was largely left with people who either had interpersonal or technical skills, not both. So a good thing (rapid promotions) was creating a bad thing, poor customer service.
As mentioned, this was a customer service area and so in my mind, I thought interpersonal skills were absolutely necessary and so I would surround these “people” people with better tools and a few technical experts (who did not answer phone calls initially) to help them with stuff they could not figure out on their own. I wanted our customers to have a “good experience” with our company. It was not a matter of pay, it was simply the “best” people (those with both interpersonal and technical skills) got bored talking to customers all day answering the same questions.
On the other hand, the “people” oriented people seemed happy to just chit chat with customers and the customers loved them (provided they did get their questions answered properly).
Like all “populations”, employees tend to fall on a bell curve when it comes to their individual performance results. But a well run company can shift the curve towards overall higher performance by rewarding the right behaviors and creating an environment where higher performance is more likely to occur. You are not changing the people, you are simply helping them perform better.
Part of that management approach means not trying to force a “square” employee into a “round” hole job. Instead design company work flows around the team of people you have and leverage their strengths so the sum of their efforts is better than the individuals would have done alone. The other benefit of good “team” design is that it recognizes for many people “work” serves a social function and a good design enables that.
Getting back to the subject at hand. While companies try to project an image that they think will attract the “best employees”, I believe such efforts are largely “fluff”. Employees are not dumb and the real company becomes apparent pretty quickly after the employee starts if it is not already known in the marketplace. Appealing job descriptions and other fluff increases the chance that a company will make a poor hire.
Companies should be honest with themselves as should employees, the goal is not to hire the person or get hired, the goal should be to find a job match, one where both the company and employee are happy with their decision, honesty by both parties goes a long way towards making this happen.
