ShrinkSo I’m now a licensed by Thomas International to deliver, read, interpret and generally use to my advantage their Personal Profile Analysis reports. I’ve finished the training, searched my soul and bared my flaws and frustrations in front of a “support group” (read:class) of like minded HR professionals…

Oh, hang on a minute, I’m not an HR professional, I don’t even like HR professionals so what was I doing there?

Simple really, learning about a great tool that’ll help with recruitment decisions in the future and has changed the way I think about job adverts entirely.

If you look at a selection of ads for technical staff on the likes of CWJobs, you’ll find they read very much like the spec for a PC:

1 x Intel Xeon Quad Core knowledge of the .Net Framework
8GB SQL
160GB ASP.NET (with an 800MB css/ajax cache)
Dual HD eyes
102 key driving licence (UK) and mouse must be included

I’m afraid that ads like this are completely missing the point. When was the last time you found yourself saying “Dave’s a brilliant team-worker, it’s down to his great C# I think” or “Andy’s a good motivatior, he can use the WITH PIVOT function in SQL Server 2005 without even looking on Google”. My guess is, you never have.

When you’re putting together a team, you’re not hiring a collection of skills, you’re hiring a collection of individuals. Each of the team has unique personalities, needs and desires that require fulfilment and unique skills and values that they can bring to the table. If you’re going to get the best out of your people, whatever working practices you adopt, you’re going to have to treat them as individuals and help them gel together as a team. There’s no point in hiring that top drawer architect if he’s going to completely turn the team on it’s head. This doesn’t just apply for new hires either, internally sourced project teams should be put together with the same care and attention. Cherry picking the best techies from your wider talent pool and expecting them to deliver rarely works.

There are some lessons here:

  1. Hire for attitudinal fit, train for skills gaps. I’m not saying hire a Luddite plumber as an architect for a .NET project, just don’t write someone off if they don’t tick all your technical boxes. It’s immeasurably more difficult to train to mitigate for ill-fitting personalities than it is to teach a time-served techie to cut some HTML5.
  2. When interviewing, don’t allow technical matters to dominate the interview. Most candidates can talk the talk and there are a number of coding tests that will be able to establish whether your candidate can walk the walk (the best of which, as far as I’m concerned, is Codility). A very good alternative, of course, is asking the candidate to write code with pen and paper during the interview, but that’s a bit mean.
  3. Use a psychometric tool. Whatever your preference, be it the Thomas PPA,  Belbin, Meyers-Briggs or something else. At a recent seminar at Entrepreneur Country, an industry commentator made the case that talent recruitment/retention exercises were some 75% more likely to be successful by using a psychometric tool in combination with a CV and an interview than simply by the use of a CV an interview alone. His advice on the choice of tool – “you get what you pay for”.
  4. Don’t rush recruitment. It doesn’t matter how pressing the need (after all, when we need staff, we always need them “asap“), taking your time will pay off in the long run. Google gives every candidate up to a dozen interviews in different forms. I’m not suggesting we’ve all got the time, patience or resource for that but finding the right balance between that and a quick chat on the mobile whilst you nip out of the office for a cigarette is desirable.
  5. When you’re writing job advertisements, don’t just focus on skills. Figure out what you really need from a person first and try and attract the person and the skills. Many of the psychometric offerings will give you a method for doing this, I happen to think that the job profiling tools offered by Thomas are particularly good.

The last lesson I took from the Entrepreneur Country event:

“If you think that hiring the right staff is time consuming and expensive, wait and see what hiring the wrong staff is like”