Why Hiring Good People Is No Longer Enough

"Geez, if it's not one thing, then it's another thing," rue today's human-resource managers. No sooner do they finish playing designated executioners (begrudgingly) in the corporate downsizings of recent years than they are confronted with a tight market for skilled labor, the likes of which hasn't been seen in decades.

Good people cost more than ever and selection has become more challenging than a 500 piece 3-D puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle that determine who's right for the job are now both bigger and harder to assess.

Simply put, hiring mistakes are more immediately obvious and more expensive to fix. Mediocrity is hard to fire. Which is why respected CEOs and business managers are now placing much more emphasis on hiring core employees with the interpersonal skills that match the organization's culture.

In many cases, outsourcing non-core positions so that the human resource professionals are not bothered with the hassles of finding, filtering and filling positions with high turnover, high benefit expense or low value. Core employees, due to their vital contribution to the vision, deserve well-considered focus and effort.

Don't Settle for the "Near Fit"

"Greatness starts with superb people," according to leadership gurus Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman. Their book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration examines The Manhattan Project, the Walt Disney Studio and five other remarkable collaborations. The Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, and the Walt Disney Studio, in the hope of finding out how their collective magic is made, lead their analysis to 15 "take-home lessons," the ingredients of excellence that are essential for developing "Great Groups."

"Recruiting the most talented people possible is the first task," Bennis and Biederman say. "They are the ones who spot the gaps in what we know. They discover and solve problems." These people are the best of the best because "leaders of Great Groups love talent" and "are confident enough to recruit people better than themselves.

In Great Groups the right person has the right job. Truly gifted people are never interchangeable."

If the concept of the Great Group were enlarged to include a modern corporation, chances are a key candidate would be General Electric. GE's phenomenal growth over the now 16-year tenure of Chairman Jack Welch owes much to Welch's determination to hire only the best. At a 1997 meeting with his top executives, for example, Welch is reported to have insisted that any "C-level performers" be shown a pink slip and the nearest exit. GE, he said, is an A+.

In the recent flood of books about Bill Gates and the corporate juggernaut he built, none fails to mention the role of recruiting in the company's rise to unrivalled prominence.

In The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition, for example, author Randall E. Stross claims that Microsoft "has pursued the best more successfully than other companies, and has visibly reaped the rewards more dramatically than others, too."

Gates prefers an open slot to a "near-fit." Stross quotes Gates from a company video on hiring: "if you have somebody who's mediocre, we're really in big trouble," because the less-than-ideal employee is hard to dismiss. "Thus," Stross concludes, "Gates admonished his recruiters not to settle for second best or a "near fit," even if a continuing vacancy creates hardship."

Insist on a "Values Match"

As the collaborations described in Organizing Genius demonstrate, there's nothing new in requiring an exact fit between a key job candidate and job opening.

But the very fact that this ideal is often described as exceptional suggests that it is still not widely practiced. Evidence suggests that the definition of "perfect fit" is being expanded beyond the range of attributes and experience listed on a resume.

Increasingly, organizations are also focusing on what we call the "soft skills or characteristics" how likely candidates are to fit into the corporate culture.

Precisely what are these soft skills? GE's Welch recently enumerated several of them when he said, according to the Washington Post, "We would not knowingly hire anyone in our company that wasn't 'boundaryless,' that wasn't open to an idea from anywhere, that wasn't excited about a learning environment." Welch said, the Post article went on, "GE is quite willing to toss out managers who don't sign on to the culture, even if they produce good results. We take people with great results and ask them to move on to other companies because they don't have our values." It is this insistence on a "values match" over and above a talents and responsibilities match, that is gaining endorsement and prominence.

Among those leading the charge is Stanford Business School professor Jerry I. Porras, co-author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, a 1994 book that characterizes 18 exemplary U.S. firms. Porras' efforts to help organizations formulate visions that lead to superior performance are built on a strong selection foundation.

Creating "alignment" is essential, he says. It results from determining "the five or six key behaviors we need in our people to realize our envisioned future. For example, everyone in the Disney organization must strive always to be pleasant to customers in order for customers to have the magical experience the company envisions."

Deborah Thomas, Human Resource Director for Norrell Corporation, recently named one of "America's Most Admired Companies" by Fortune magazine, would probably agree with Porras' hard advice--soft skills have simply become that critical. Continual rapid change in organizations has altered the mix of critical skills that key managers and employees need.

"Because organizations are less hierarchical, newly matrixed, and more global, employees must be able to work effectively in teams that bring together diverse people, skills and talents. Human resource managers can no longer afford to make significant fixed investment in people until they've proven themselves in the workplace," Thomas says.

Tips on Recruiting Strategy

Advice for anyone with a hand in hiring decisions: assess your candidates "cultural fit" before you make them employees. Author Stross lists in The Microsoft Way several means by which Microsoft does this:

- Look all the time. Microsoft recruiters assume the good candidates are not out looking for a job--they attract unsolicited offers. This mindset implies a recruiting strategy unbounded by staffing levels or conventional methods.

- Favor potential over experience. Stross says Gates and his recruiters "aren't overly concerned about relevant experience," yet are instead biased "toward intelligence or smartness over anything else, even in many cases, experience."

- Outsource entry-level and non-core hiring. Consider what IBM and other m