van Allen - Hire the right people and win big

Hire the Right People and Win Big

Van Allen

Published by Screaming Weasel Productions

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Copyright 2016 Van Allen

Hire the Right People and Win Big

Screaming Weasel Productions

www.VanAllenFiction.com

Copyright Van Allen 2016

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Cataloguing Information:

Allen, Van

Hire the Right People and Win Big/VanAllen

BUS037020 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Careers/ Job Hunting

BUS030000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / HumanResources & Personnel Management

LAW013000 LAW / Civil Rights

LAW054000 LAW / Labor & Employment

PSY021000 PSYCHOLOGY / Industrial &Organizational Psychology

Hire the Right People and Win Big

OR

How to Avoid Hiring the Wrong People Most ofthe Time

The goal of an organizational selectionprocess is to add people to the organization (fill positions) whowill benefit the organization. Likewise, a secondary goal must beto keep out any people who will harm the organization. Anothercomponent of this involves assessing and differentiating applicantsbased on how much they can help (assessing qualifications andfuture potential). Any selection process also needs to be reliableand fair.

When you select an employee, you are simplyoffering a prediction that this person selected will be successfulas an employee and they will help your company. Furthermore, in anycase where we need to identify current employees that are nothelping the organization, there must be a valid mechanism in placefor identifying and then removing these employees. So, why do weget this wrong so often?

One of the main problems is that people arereally poor judges of future potential. Another problem is thatpeople are not very good at measuring human production. This isobvious from all sorts of human events such as housing markets,sports betting, marriage failure rates, book best sellers, moviebox office results, stock market performance, social media apps,probes launched to Mars, and even TV shows. The more complex thesystem or environment, the more difficult it is to accuratelyestimate true value, production, and future performance and themore likely we all are to overestimate our own powers of predictionand forecasting. Somehow, corporate gatekeepers are not as good atbeing gatekeepers as we would all like to believe they are.

Can any of us be really sure of what theoutcome will be in Afghanistan in 10 years or even of what collegefootball team will win the National Championship this year or evenwho will be the Republican frontrunner on the ticket for 2016? Doyou have any idea of what creature in an ecosystem is the mostvital to that system? Do you have any idea of how complicated it isto predict the next pandemic outbreak? Do you know what actor isworth the biggest bang for the buck in Hollywood? No, youdon't.

Mostly we take a guess and if we are honest,in the end we will admit that we did not know as much as we thoughtwe knew. Translation: we are not as smart as we think we are or assmart as we like to tell people we are.

Look at football. Football organizationsselect their coaches and players using all sorts of predictivemeasures from sports money-ball systems, freakanomics, andpsychological profiles to Wonderlic tests. By the way, Wonderlicalso says it will help you select employees. But mainlydecision-makers rightfully like to look at a candidates previouswork history. How did Ryan Leaf, Vince Young, and Eric Crouch do incollege? So, what happened? Past performance does not accuratelyand reliably predict future performance. What happened to JohnnyFootball?!? Did you guess right and pick the New England Patriotsto win the 2015 NFL Super Bowl? I didnt. I selected the DallasCowboys; I mean they havent won a Super Bowl since 1995 and theyare my favorite team and come ontheyre overdue! Why do I keeppredicting wrong about this? My prediction is unreliable, biased,tainted, contaminated with my own internal desires and not at allbased on external realities.

A football team is an incredibly complexorganization. Coaches and players are added to produce success.Once new personnel are added, you need some way of knowing thevalue of the new additions. What amount of success or failure canbe attributed to these new personnel?

Some coaches and quarterbacks are known forwinning only if you give them a winning team. Some coaches andquarterbacks always seem to find a way to lose even if you givethem a winning team. Some coaches and quarterbacks always seem totake the worst teams and make them into winners. We can be carefulto place the right people in the right places for success. Perhapssuccessful performance in some candidates is easy to see. The teamwas ranked #135 before the coach or player arrived and now it isranked #23 after two years. It is critically important to know whatamount of the organizational successes or failures were due to theselections the organization made.

Look at CEOs, executives, and other worksettings. People are innately programmed to focus on what they havein common with applicants because people basically like to feelconnected somehow with the people around them. Its easy to pickthis person over that person because you both share the samebackground, race, gender, religion, sexual preference, politics,went to the same school, or maybe the person is really pretty ortall and dreamy. It is incredibly difficult to pick the person whois an exact opposite in contrast to yourself, especially if youthink that you are all that with cheese on it.

These connected feelings, the desire to hiresimilar people to ones self, creep into almost every selectionprocess, every performance measure, and every other personneldecision from whom to lay off and who to give a raise to, and thisdrive for connectedness routinely has almost nothing at all to dowith future business success. After all, we are trying to run awinning business, not a social club, a Bible study, or a fancy teaparty.

My own graduate research on executives andCEOs showed that the highest correlated factors with being selectedas a CEO or executive were in this order: previous CEO orexecutive, white, male, and between six feet and six feet and fourinches. None of these factors were highly correlated with businesssuccess. Does that surprise anyone? Under no circumstance would weexpect success in outcomes when we make frivolous, unreliabledecisions such as basing the whole matter on looks or astrologicalsigns or the university from which the person graduated. We mightactually have better results predicting future potential if webased it on the applicants choice of car they drive (Hummer versusminivan), the way their home is organized (neat or sloppy), theirability or skill at playing poker, a flip of a coin, a dart thrownat a spinning wheel, or even based on their ability to play Rock,Paper, Scissors. One randomly controlled guesstimate of futurepotential is probably not any more accurate than most others.

And what is the best way to predict andaccount for the drive and determination of the underdog? We allknow that down-on-her-luck applicant that comes in with a chip onher shoulder, ready to show the world what she can do, who outperforms people with significantly more talent and gifts than shehad. We all know those exceptional sleepers. We also know plenty ofcollege superstars who turned out to be flaming failures outside ofcollege. How can any corporate system account for sleepers andflaming failures waiting to happen?