How To Achieve Success in HR

First of all let’s define success.

In my opinion, success is achieving what you set out to achieve. The question now is, how do you achieve what you want? There is any number of answers to this question and many books have been written on the subject.

However, I think the answer, at least most of the time is, “Sponsorship”. In other words you need someone who has the power to grant you access to your desires. This does not mean that they are a Genie and simply grant your wish. Rather, they open doors, provide support, grant access, etc. that assist you in gaining your objective.

I know in my case I cannot make it alone. Among other things, I need the support of my clients, a favorable reaction from my prospects, a referral from a colleague, support from my mentors, and helpful feedback from those who want me to succeed. Granted, I often need to earn that support but regardless of my capabilities, someone who has more support than I will most likely be more successful.

What do you think?

by Michael Salisbury from the Human Resource Alliance (HRA) www.hralliance.biz

Does Recruiting Belong In HR?

What you say!!! Recruiting obviously belongs to the Human Resource function. Maybe, maybe not.

There may be benefits to moving the staffing function from HR to Marketing. Although this idea may not be appropriate for all organizations, it might be beneficial for a consumer based business that recruits from people who are potential customers.

If the business wants to expand its brand and become more integrated with its clientele, why not integrate the marketing of the product together with the marketing of the firm? Anyone who has recruited will tell you that it is a sales activity. Not only is a recruiter trying to sell the prospect on the opportunity but the company is being sold to the candidate.

Imagine the benefits and the value proposition that could be gained by this approach. Now, if I could only find a buyer who I can sell this idea to. Oh, I forgot! I am in HR not sales, pity...

What do you think?

By Michael L. Salisbury www.hralliance.biz

 

California Sales Agreement Requirements

Effective January 1, 2013 employers in California are required to satisfy new regulations associated with Sales Commission Agreements. To be in compliance, employers need to issue agreements with their commission sales representatives that meet the following provisions.

 

Sales Commission Provisions Due to California Law AB 1836

•        Employee must be given a signed copy.

•         Employer must obtain a signed receipt from employee.

•        Clear description of manner of calculating commissions.

•         If based on revenue, is it amount invoiced or amount collected?

•         If based on “profit” on a sale, how is the amount of profit determined; i.e., what charges will be applied against revenue to determine profit?

•        Agreement should define when commission is earned:

ü  Upon “booking” of sale

ü  Upon delivery of product

ü  Upon receipt of payment

•         Agreement should state that only those commissions that have been earned by date of termination will be paid

•        Chargebacks must be in contract if they will be taken.

•         Chargebacks may only be for returns or cancellations relating to sales made by the employee.

•        Agreement should explain how draws will be applied to commissions:

ü   Will draws be forgiven if not met?

ü   Will draws be carried forward?

 

•        Meal and rest break requirements, where applicable (inside salespeople are not exempt from meal and rest break law).

•         Employment at will language.

•         Reference to employee handbook or employer policies.

 Submitted by Michael Salisbury from HRA www.hralliance.biz

 

If You Must Interview, Use The Most Important Question

During my career in HR I was responsible for many interviews and even taught supervisors how to interview. However, I have learned that most people cannot predict very well how one is going to perform, based on an interview. However, I do have one piece of advice, which unfortunately is not fool proof. However, it is what I consider to be the most important interview question of all time.

The question is, “If hired, what are you going to contribute to the company and how are you going to do it?

One drawback with this question is that few positions within an organization allow an employee to make a contribution. In my experience, most jobs are designed to conduct a series of tasks, which are determined by an established process that is not readily subject to change. However, if your firm is willing to think out of the box or the position is intended to make things faster, better, and cheaper, then this is the most important question you can ask.

Furthermore, to gain the most from this question, you should prepare the candidate for this question.  In fact, as part of scheduling the interview, the candidate can be told that this question will be discussed.

Unless you gain satisfaction from trying to surprise candidates and seeing how well they respond under pressure, you may prefer to give the interviewee the opportunity time to develop a legitimate reason for hiring them. Who knows, you might learn that someone has an idea and an approach that is highly beneficial for the company plus they are willing to work to make it happen. Isn’t that the kind of person you’re organization is looking for? If not, then I don’t think any question you ask will make a difference.

From Michael Salisbury with the HRA at www.hralliance.biz  Follow myblog: http://hralliance.blogspot.com/

Why Interviews Don't Work

The author (Brad Hall) decimates the theory behind interviews (which I support by the way) and a solution is offered.

 

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The data are overwhelming -- job interviews are a terrible predictor of success. Yet virtually every person reading this article will insist, "That may be true for others, but it's not true for me." You're wrong. You don't know how to interview job candidates either.

Myth 1: We Know Whether We Are Good at Interviewing

A person's belief that he can accurately assess another person is not at all correlated to his actual ability to do so. It seems that we don't let our competence affect our confidence.

Myth 2: Smart People Are Great at Interviewing

Medical school professors are some of the smartest people in society. Yet a study found no correlation between medical school interview scores and success in medical school. The relationship was actually negative, but nonsignificant. One wonders what the professors' reaction was to these data; they are scientists after all. Did they blame themselves?

Myth 3: A Structured Approach Will Improve Selection Accuracy

On my first job at a consulting firm, I was assigned to coordinate the new consultant hiring process. We decided to organize a Saturday session where 10 candidates were each assessed in five competency areas (e.g., quantitative, analytical) by five interviewers, round-robin style.

At the end of the day, we held an interviewer's roundtable to select candidates. As we reviewed the first candidate, the "quantitative skills" interviewer said, "She has no quantitative skills at all!" Another said, "She has a master's degree in math from MIT!" The interviewer replied, "She does? Well ... she has no quantitative skills at all!" And so it went.

Myth 4: Experience Creates Great Interviewers

Being an interview skeptic, I recently advised two sales executives to conduct an outsourced assessment for a new sales director candidate. Both were highly offended. Each said that he had interviewed hundreds of candidates in his career and could accurately differentiate good and poor candidates.

We went ahead as usual. I screened several candidates and recommended a man named Harris. The first executive interviewed Harris and said that he would definitely succeed in the role. The second said Harris would definitely fail. I met with the executives together and said, "There is a truth here. Harris will either fail or not fail. That means one of you is wrong." Both insisted it was not him.

 

 

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on judgments and decision-making.

As a young soldier, Kahneman participated in a high potential assessment exercise where a team of assessors observed and rated a group of soldiers in a physical exercise to determine leadership potential. The assessment process was rigorous.

Every few months the assessment team received a new round of performance ratings that made it possible to correlate simulation ratings with actual performance. Kahneman writes, "The story was always the same. Our ability to predict performance was negligible. Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much."

Their evidence made it clear that their leadership assessment did not work. It should have been scrapped, but it was not. It should have reduced the confidence of the assessors to make accurate decisions, but it did not. They just kept using it.

It is possible to greatly improve the success of new hires by focusing on three areas: 1. technical/professional skill assessment; 2. leadership behavior; and 3. on-boarding.

Technical/professional skills. Technical interviewing skills can be learned, and interviews should be conducted by an in-house panel interview. Panels provide a quality check on the assessment. Use a structured interview where questions are determined up front. For example, "Tell me how you would design a wireless network with the following parameters ..."

Make the technical interview your first step. If the candidate does not have the basic skills for the job, eliminate him or her immediately.

Leadership behavior. Behavior is more difficult to accurately assess than technical skills. But leadership behaviors can be effectively assessed by an expert through a 3- to 4-hour interview.

Some might say that cultural fit must be assessed by an internal manager. But if internal managers can do that so well, then why do several managers come up with different fit assessments? It's because culture is not operationalized. An external firm will help you operationalize your culture and then assess for fit.

For front-line and middle-manager assessments consider Development Dimensions International, Personnel Decisions, Inc. or SHL. For executive selection try ghSmart, Hay Group or Korn Ferry International(KFY_). The experts will assess: leadership style, teamwork, political saavy, influence skills, etc.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts(KKR_) is the private equity industry pioneer, and its executives are some of the smartest people on Wall Street. Certainly they should know how to assess managers. But KKR knows its limitations and uses ghSmart to assess its new executives. The ghSmart process is a four-hour behavioral interview plus rigorous reference checks. The company provides a 50-page summary report with verbatim quotes.

It is critical to note that the external firm provides relevant data for the manager to make an informed decision. Hiring decisions must never be outsourced. This is similar to strategy consulting. Information collection may be outsourced, but the choice of a strategy is not.

On-boarding. Too often the right person was selected, but fails because of an inability to be integrated into the system of the organization. The "system" is how things get done.  A key part of on-boarding is pre-hire stakeholder interviews. On-boarding begins before the hiring decision. To prepare each stakeholder, present the technical and leadership behavior data before their interview. It is possible that the interviewer may find new data to reject the candidate, but the purpose of these interviews is buy-in more than assessment.

Typical employment interviews are not effective predictors of future job performance. Let's lower our pride and admit that we are the problem. We can do better.

Presented by Michael Salisbury www.hralliance.biz

On the job training

Occasionally I will share a personal business experience that gives me an opportunity to think things through. This is one of those occasions.

One of my clients has a difficult vacancy to fill, from many perspectives, not the least of which is a very tight recruiting budget. However, we were fortunate and able to identify a candidate who met all the criteria, within the limited budget.

 Unfortunately, as we learned later, the interview with the hiring manager did not go well and the candidate developed a story that he did not want the job because of where it was located. Of course, this matter was vetted in the selection process so I knew it was not the reason for their objection and I told the client that the proffered reason was a red herring. Nevertheless, the client was upset because they felt the recruiter had wasted time and money bringing in a prospect that did not what to work where the business was located.

Upon further review, it became apparent that the problem was not the location of the business but, how the hiring manager had handled the interview with the candidate. However, we had only one clear example of the hiring manager’s missteps. So my challenge was to adjust the client’s position about the recruiter and convince the client that the problem lie somewhere else, without throwing the hiring manager under the bus. And to do so, with out appearing to be self-serving.

It is too early to tell if I accomplished my objectives.  However, this experience is a good illustration of how the wrong information delivered at the right time can make things much worse than they need to be. It also illustrates how important it is to be able to persuade and communicate effectively under pressure. Valuable skills that I continue to improve upon.

By Michael Salisbury www.hralliance.biz

Considerations for Evaulating the HR Function

The following piece was initially suggested by a fellow HR practitioner who was questioning the approach we take in evaluating the HR function. Some good food for thought.

 

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on 7/30/12 where they identified and ranked the Top Chief Financial Officers of major companies. Their ranking was reported to have been “ ...created using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis”.

WSJ’s initial candidate pool for finance was drawn from the S & P 500 for companies with a market cap of $5 billion or more and in their jobs for at least three years. These companies were reviewed for financial performance and interviews were conducted with financial recruiters and analysts to determine who should be in the final list.

Could we do something like this for the chief human resource officers (CHRO) of a similar group of companies? The author of the article states, "My bias is to say that we could not", for the following reasons:

The CFO operates in a field that is dominated by performance data, which may not be the sole result of the CFO”s job, but he does compile and report it, and therefore has a sense of ownership/responsibility for it. The CFO is also the focal person for reviewing a company’s financial results.

 

However, those of us in the HR field deal with what is primarily a set of intangibles that may be crucial to achieving and maintaining an effective organization, but are rarely measured or visible to the outside world, unless there is a terrific calamity.

While it is true, turnover can be measured, safety and health data is quantitative, attitude surveys can give us data on employee views, recruitment data and success rates for job placements can be measured but is this data considerd as of core importance to the organization?

Maybe, the author continues, we can take another tack and identify what functions, activities, or behaviors should be measured in order to get a handle on what is important to the business so that the effctiveness or even the contribution of the HR functon can be evaluated. For starters, the author suggest the following ideas:

1.    The level of meaningful participation in corporate planning

2.  The degree to which contributions are made to the development of new business strategies

3.    How effective is HR in responding to the board on a variety of topics related to the function such as:

     a) social and economic trends that will affect the character and qualities of human assets

     b) how well executive management team operates, achieves objectives, and is prepared for and

          resolves problems 

     c) How well does the firm's reward and recognition program foster and support the organization's

         mission, goals and objectives?

4.  Does HR help the CEO and other members of management spot new and developing talent?

5.   Are there systems and processes for capturing hard and soft data regarding the building of talent for

     management continuity and succession?

6.  Are the HR functions required by the corporation are effective and up to date?

7.   Is the HR function open to new ideas and is it creating cost effective solutions to new issues and

     competitive pressures?

8.  Is there some form of HR Philosophy to help guide managers in discharging their responsibilities to the

     employees?

9.  Does HR demonstrate the courage and the wisdom to tacfully respond where management is taking

     unethical positions, violating the rights of employees, or taking positions that are in conflict with the

     social policies or cultures of the countries within which the company operates?

10.  Does HR effectively represent the organization in various public forums where the interests of the

      enterprise directly or indirectly may be affected by official and unofficial outside bodies?

11. Does HR take a long but balanced view of corporate practices, plans and policies that affect company

     costs and are relevant to will being of all parties.

 

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and this old saw is the issue for HR. Therefore, it would be interesting to sharpen this list and make it as complete as possible. Then each of these criteria could be evaluated as to whether it can reflect some form of quantitative measurement. On the other hand maybe relevant scales could be developed illustrating performance targets. However, the question remains, would the results have as much stature as the evaluation of the CFOs?