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A Right Recruiting Newsletter, 6/2008
If you are a manager or HR person who has been faced with a problem job, you know the frustrations involved in a seemingly unfillable position. A problem job never starts as a problem. It always starts as a series of specs that seem simple. Over time, the job becomes a problem because no one gets hired. Resumes are evaluated, people get interviewed, but months later, the job is still open. What looked like a simple task in November seems impossible in June. No one is good enough. No one is cheap enough. No one communicates well enough. Then, fingers started getting pointed. The recruiter or HR person is bad. The manager is impossible. Things can get ugly quick. Here’s how to solve the problem job.
From my perspective, the employment process starts with a job spec. In an earlier Newsletter, we explained the difference between a job description and a job specification. A job description is a description of what the person will actually do for you in the job. For example, they will design catheters; they will develop marketing plans for candy bars, etc. A job specification is different. It is a description of the type of experience the person should have that would allow them to do the duties in the job description. Many managers, when putting specs together, confuse the two and just duplicate the job description and turn it into a job specification. Taken to an extreme, this creates the following scenario.
A few years ago I had a client that was developing a revolutionary microprocessor-based surgical tool. They were looking for an engineer to do product design. Without going into specifics, the spec was basically for someone with 5 years experience designing a similar surgical tool. Of course, no one considered that my client was the only company in the country to be developing the aforementioned tool and it had not even been released to the market yet. By definition, they already employed the only people who met the job specification. Oops!
Usually, the problem behind the problem job is the specification. There are 5 variables to every job spec. When looked at individually, the specs in problem jobs seem reasonable. Taken as a group, however, they can be mighty limiting.
SALARY
The first variable is usually the one that is considered the immediate culprit, high on the list of usual suspects. Often, when a company has trouble filling a job, they often assume that they are not paying enough. This is not always true. Sometimes, raising the salary can cause deeper troubles down the road. It can attract a person for the wrong reason. Of course, if you pay someone enough money, you can fill any job. I call that “buying” someone. However, you may be getting someone overqualified who is taking the job for money, usually a short term solution. What’s worse, by overpaying, you may be attracting people not good enough to find jobs at their own level but who will back into your job because of money alone. In other words, you are getting someone else’s over-experienced failure. Raising salary is usually the default solution to a problem job. It shouldn’t be. A more thorough investigation is always necessary.
EXPERIENCE LEVEL
The second variable is the number of years of experience required. When replacing an employee with 10 years experience, a manager writes a default spec calling for 10 years experience in a candidate. What they miss is that the person with 10 years of experience may be leaving because the job got boring. What good does it do to write your specs so that you are replacing one person who got bored with someone else who, if they are any good, is likely to get bored as well? I think it wiser to base the spec on the years of experience the incumbent had when they began doing the job, not when they left the job. In other words, if the incumbent with 10 years of experience was promoted into the job 4 years ago, they had 6 years of experience at that time. Why not start looking at people with 7 years total experience instead of 10 or more years? Unless your incumbent was Superman, I doubt that he or she was the only person in the world with 6 years of experience capable of doing that work.
There is another angle to the experience variable to consider too, but it’s almost the opposite of the situation listed above. It’s candidate age. Here is an example. I had a client earlier this year that was looking for a Marketing Manager. It was an important job. The person would manage the entire marketing effort for a division of the company. The specs called for 5+ years experience. When I asked them if someone who was 26 or 27 years old could do the job, they said of course not. That’s when I had to point out that someone with 5-6 years experience is probably 27 years old. The job was quickly re-evaluated at the 12+ year level, with an appropriate salary level jump.
When determining an experience level, add 21 years to whatever level you are putting in the spec. If the person at that age might seem to young for the job, you need to re-examine your spec, salary or level of support for the new hire.
SPECIFICITY
How directly do your specs match the job description? Are the technical specs too tight? Are you requiring an impractical level of specificity in the candidates background, like the surgical tool client I mentioned above? How important is the specificity? We all want as direct a match as possible but why screen out people with 80% of the skills while holding out for 100% of the skills? In doing so, you may wait months, quarters or years for the perfect person, certainly long enough time to train someone who is a significant, but not total, skill set match.
Of course, within this variable exist controlling factors you need to evaluate. One, the level of internal support your group can provide in training. A great managerial tool is to have in place a group of mid-level professionals who believe that their key to promotion is to show their ability to bring new people up to speed quickly. Two, the level of enthusiasm the candidate has in being trained is true key to success. An eager candidate who wants to acquire the skill set you will be teaching is a tremendous asset. A candidate who acts like they are doing you a favor by doing your job can be doing you harm.
CULTURE/PERSONALITY
This is clearly the most subjective variable in the decision making process. It’s also the one most prone to abuse. The more inclusive your managerial style, the more likely you are to ask your team and other managers’ opinions of candidates. Often, this gives many uninvolved or partially involved people a hiring veto. People are people and everyone has their own agenda. As a manager, you need to do two things. One, make sure that you are asking the right people to be involved in the decision. You can be too inclusive and, in doing so, invite an opinion for the sake of an opinion. Human nature has shown me that people with no stake in anything always seem to appear wisest by telling you not to pursue a course of action. They can never be proved wrong because the opportunity costs of not doing something are usually invisible.
The second thing to do is to ask specific questions of your hiring team and not general thumbs up and thumbs down questions. That reinforces their inclusion but also reinforces that you make the final decision. You are the manager for a reason and it’s not to just count votes. Management is also leadership.
TIME
Time is often not considered as a variable but it is. Given time, any job, even one with the tightest specs, is fillable. If your need is casual and if the perfect person comes along you can hire them, there is no real need to settle for less. If your need is immediate, of course that’s a different story.
There are two dangers with casual needs though. The first is that casual needs often become immediate needs at some point. If your interviewing process has been so casual as to annoy both candidates and your recruiting support, you won’t find a lot of sympathy when you ask them to reconsider your job or turn up the heat on your hiring effort.
The second danger is one that most managers run across at some point in their careers. Requisitions can be pulled. We see this most often in publicly traded firms. A casual recruiting effort defined by narrow specs can remain unfilled for a few quarters. The company then has a weak quarter and all open req's get squashed, sometimes just when you need the job filled. The luxury of time in the hiring process can bring it’s own problems.
If you analyze your problem job using these 5 variables, you can often come to a solution. Obviously, the first datapoint to evaluate is time. Is there a pressing need to fill the job now and is it a big deal if I lose the req? If time is truly a luxury, you need to change nothing.
Of course, time is usually not an ally. Now let’s evaluate the people you’ve seen and the resumes you’ve reviewed. Have you seen anyone you have wanted to hire? If so, have they been interested or not? Probably not, or you would have hired them, I assume. Why have they lacked interest in the position? Salary or job content? If the people you want to hire or interview consistently want too much money you are not paying enough. Either pay more or hire someone with less experience. If the people you want to hire consistently take other jobs instead, your job is boring to them. Either look for someone with less experience or hire someone with partial skills who is eager to be trained. Remember, the market is always giving you signals. You just have to listen to them.
Have you interviewed people and still found no one who is good enough to hire. Why? Is it because of a lack of technical specificity? If so, do you need an exact match? If you do, than unfortunately there is only one answer. You have to buy someone. If your specs are so narrow that 20 people in the US truly fit the job, you need to find out who they are and make them an offer they can’t refuse. It’s as simple as that. If the only person with the skills to do your job is happily employed 500 miles away, you just have to buy them.
If you don’t have the resources to buy them, you have to adjust your specs. Sorry.
Are people not being hired because of cultural or personality mis-matches? Are you seeing people with the right skills but wrong personality? Oddly enough, that can be a good sign or a bad sign. The positive you can take from that is that the skills you seek do actually exist at an affordable price. Eventually the right person will appear. However, remember that a long list of unhired candidates due to personality may highlight a personality problem with the internal group you’ve built rather a problem with the external candidates you’ve interviewed. I’ve seen situations where managers who have shot down too many candidates get questioned by their bosses about why they can’t fill jobs in their own group. This can be awkward if you have the wrong answers. Look, if the people you eliminate keep getting hired in similar jobs by other firms, sooner or later some will ask you why you can’t make productive use of people because, clearly, others can.
The lesson I hope you take from this is that, with a little analysis, you can prevent the problem job from making you a problem manager. Rather than look for fault, seek solutions. And, as ever, please remember the Right Recruiting is hear to help all your employment needs. Thanks for reading this far. Jeff
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