Recruiting enters the sixth dimension

In business, no idea is real until it reappears, under an approved author’s byline, in the Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review.

Okay, I’m whining. But still. Nick Corcodilos and I have both written repeatedly about the fallacy of skill-to-task matching—the practice, common among internal recruiters, of carefully listing every skill a position might require, as if a perfect match between skills required and skills acquired does even a half-decent job of predicting a candidate’s performance once hired.

If you need convincing, two points should do the job, made over-and-over again in this space, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World (under the headline “hire people, not resumes”), and by Nick on www.asktheheadhunter.com. The first: Employees who are stretching are frequently superior to employees who are happy to do what they’ve been doing. (But not always—”pinball players,” who do a great job so they get to play again, are nothing to sneeze at either, assuming you’re the sort of business leader who sneezes at employees.)

Skill-to-task matching favors applicants who are coasting over those who are stretching. That’s the first point. The second:

Especially in knowledge work, but really, in just about every kind of position in the company, the best predictors of success for any employee are:

• Habit of success: Loving what success feels like, and knowing that’s needed to feel it again.

• Love of achievement: An employee who takes pride in producing something important will (I trust “Q.E.D.” is all the proof you’ll need for this one) work hard to produce results they can take pride in.

Not always recognized—employees who work well in teams consider helping their team succeed to be a worthwhile achievement—it’s part of the love of achievement, not separate from it.

• Intellectual integrity: Faced with reliable evidence, employees with intellectual integrity adjust their opinions, rather than insisting their “opinions” (the correct term is now “biases”) must still be right.

If you’re never convinced until you read it in HBR or the Wall Street Journal, check out David Wessel’s review of Peter Cappelli’s, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (“Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” WSJ, 5/30/2012 and well worth reading in spite of my regrettable need to say “I told you so”).

Cappelli blames the problem on the increased use of automated resume screening software, which he considers to be a response to the completely understandable desire to minimize cost while increasing the ability to wade through the very large piles of resumes that flood in for every open position in a time of underemployment.

Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running will respond, “No, it isn’t completely understandable! It’s assuming instead!” They’ll ask, that is, the most important question about any business function, which is how the six optimization parameters (fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) rank.

According to Cappelli, the top two are incremental cost and throughput. He’s almost certainly right that this is the fact. Understandable? Not so much.

This is how companies attract and select the people who will do the company’s work. What are the proper priorities for this, the most important responsibility business leaders have?

Excellence comes first—recognizing who will truly succeed the best in each position, even if that choice is unconventional.

Next, I’d put quality—the absence of defects. While skill-to-task-matching is a losing proposition, goodness of fit to what a position actually requires is not. Beyond that, conforming to the relevant laws and regulations, especially with respect to all forms of discrimination, really does matter.

Throughput, also known as capacity, comes third. Companies are faced with a flood of resumes for many open positions, and do need ways of coping with it. Not ways that reduce excellence or quality, though. Quite the opposite—companies need ways to spot the needles of great applicants in the haystack of all the rest.

That leaves cycle time (filling positions quickly), fixed cost (the cost of turning on the lights every day), and incremental cost (the cost of processing each applicant) to float — to be whatever they need to be so that companies make great hires.

Think recruiting would look as it does if companies were explicit about how the six dimensions rank in importance?

Not me. Not Nick, either. And, fortunately, it appears the world of mainstream business thinking might finally be coming around as well.

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If anyone from WSJ or HBR is reading this … call me. We should talk.