The War on Talent: Finding and Keeping Good People, by Barton Goldsmith

A successful business today must maintain a competitive advantage in at least one of three areas—technology, capital or people. Since few entrepreneurial businesses can rely on technological or financial superiority, their best chance of building a sustainable competitive advantage is with respect to people. By adopting an objective system for selecting the right people and understanding what motivates them to stay, entrepreneurial businesses can find and retain awesome performers. They can build a greater lifetime value for their members and become more profitable organizations.

The Right Personality for the Job

People are almost always hired based on appearance and skills. They quit or are fired usually because of personality. In entrepreneurial businesses in particular, the majority of positions require people who are strong in soft skills rather than in hard skill sets. This makes it essential to understand the behavioral requirements of each position to match it with the personalities of the applicants or incumbents.

In many positions, such as support staff and bookkeepers, it is essential that the job be done by the book. The best personality for such a position is one that is accommodating, accepting and agreeable. The employee must be comfortable performing repetitive tasks at a rather steady, methodical pace. They must be fairly calm and patient. They must also be detail-oriented and produce high quality work. These people are implementers rather than innovators. In addition, a person who deals with the public, must be warm and friendly to make each and every person feel special, but they must not take that friendliness too far. Bookkeepers, on the other hand, need not be highly sociable, warm, friendly or persuasive. They may be rather introspective, shy, quiet and analytical.

Business development reps need to be a bit more results-oriented than bookkeepers. Dealing with pressure and performing under stress tend to be their strong points. Instead of being particularly accommodating, they should be a little more self-confident, perhaps a bit aggressive about making things happen. They do need the same level of warmth as a salesperson, but instead of being calm, patient, methodical and relaxed, they must be more intense and driving. They also need the ability to think independently and on their feet because they don’t have a set of rules to follow.

Managers need a personality similar to a business development rep, but they need to be more dominant and less sociable, which makes them even more results-oriented. These people are leadership personalities who want to be empowered.

Understanding the personality requirements of various positions helps select the right candidates. Appreciating and respecting personality differences also makes it easier to work with people.

Promoting with Competence

What happens if a successful salesperson is promoted to the position of business development rep? Their success or failure may be determined by a combination of skill sets, experience and the number of people in their network. But, much more importantly, they will succeed or fail based on their behavioral attributes because a successful salesperson’s personality is quite different from a business development rep’s.

Leaders of organizations tend to assume everyone wants to be empowered and get to the top. They fail to understand how people can stand to accept the role of bookeeper for the rest of their lives. The truth is bookkeepers enjoy that type of work when they have the right personality to be a bookkeeper. They want empowerment, but only in their area of expertise. Asking them to take on responsibilities they may not be comfortable with is often a disservice to them and the organization. These people appreciate security and stability. They flourish in a family atmosphere. They enjoy working for an organization where they understand the rules. Their motivators are opposite to those of a business development rep or a manager. Therefore, hiring a bookkeeper means filling the position for the long haul.

Creating Behavioral Job Descriptions

Job descriptions would be far more accurate if they included behavioral requirements. These can be determined by measuring the job with behavioral instruments such as those produced by the Goldsmith Innovation/Implementation Index (G3I). The G3I asks questions about their reaction to typical work scenarios, and determines the personalities that will be successful in the position.

Increasing the Size of the Funnel

Another challenge executives face in the current economy is that there are often more positions than qualified applicants. Knowing that behavioral characteristics, not hard skills or industry experience, determine job success, it becomes possible to increase the size of the funnel. If a business requires a college degree, industry experience or computer literacy, they may lose qualified candidates. By hiring for personality, more people can be filtered into the organization. While it is easy to train people in the necessary skills, it is next to impossible to change their personalities.

Effective Interviewing

Hiring decisions must become more objective. This means not just a behavioral job description, but also an objective interviewing process. Most interviewers decide subconsciously in the first few seconds if they like the candidate or not. And, the main reason they dislike people is because they’re different from them. The key is to turn that "stupid switch" off and be responsive to the candidate rather than reactive.

Interviewers look at three things in a candidate: appearance, skills and personality. Appearance is easy to appraise, highly subjective and easily changeable. But its impact on job success is usually very low. Skill sets can be assessed objectively by giving tests or by contacting former employers. Skills are more easily upgraded, and their impact on performance is anywhere from low to high depending on the position. Personality is the most difficult to appraise in the traditional sense, and appraisal has always been subjective. Further, personality is stable and difficult to change yet its impact on performance is very high. This means the one factor that has the greatest impact on the majority of jobs is also the most difficult to measure unless it can be done objectively.

Interview questions must be designed to determine personality characteristics. Behavioral instruments are available to make the task simple and easy. "We have used G3I for many years in our hiring process," says Mark Poncher, CEO of Oliver Systems "We administer it to candidates to ensure that they have the correct selling abilities and service profile. With management candidates we use it to appraise leadership skills. The test tells us whether they are a good fit for the position or the business environment in general. It also determines training needs and how best to coach the new employee."

Retaining Good People

Once good people are on board, the next challenge is keeping them. "Our turn-over rate for jobs such as mediabuyers, account executives and call center reps has been higher in the last two years than ever in the past," says Katie Williams, President/CEO of Williams Worldwide Television. "The unemployment rate for our region is below 3 percent and economic forecasters tell us that there is no solution in sight." The investment an organization makes in getting an individual "up to speed" is tremendous. When someone leaves, retraining a newemployee represents a financial loss and replacing them as a team member wastes time and energy, which also impacts the bottom line.

Matching employees’ behavioral profiles to positions is the first step. "We have not hired anyone in the last 10 years without using the G3I," says Patrick Cunningham, President of Infinite Axis, "If you fill a customer contact position with a person who is introverted and likes to work alone, chances are they will not last. Hiring based on personality profiles has improved our morale and job satisfaction."

Knowing about behavioral differences makes it clear that the Golden Rule, "do onto others as you would have them do onto you," is not effective. People must be treated differently depending on their personalities, the way they want to be treated, not the way the CEO or the supervisor wants to be treated. Only behavioral assessment makes it possible to know who wants to be treated in what manner. Once an individual’s inherent motivational needs are understood, it becomes easy to provide them with what they need to feel good about them.

Recognizing and Motivating Individuals

Employees typically won’t leave for more money when they feel safe, productive and comfortable. It’s not enough to bring people into an organization, train them, get them working at full speed and then leave them alone. Instead, leaders must take the responsibility to build up and motivate new team members. Make them feel cared about and respected. Handshakes and ‘thank-you for working here and doing a great job’ are as motivating as an employee-of-the-month award, a small bonus or a promotion.

The biggest mistake is not recognizing and publicly acknowledging a good employee’s performance. The second biggest mistake is not acknowledging that performance in private. The third biggest mistake is not acknowledging it at all.

Emotional Involvement

The emotional aspect of retention is often overlooked in financial institutions. Employees must give their heart, not just their time. Here are some ways of inspiring them to do so:

-Reward employees with simple little things like movie tickets or pizza days.

-The CEO should go to lunch with as many employees as possible at least once a year.

-Inspire team spirit. There is no better feeling than being on a great team.

-Treat every employee as a resource. Solicit ideas from them on ways to make your company a better place to work.

-Make the organization family-oriented (e.g., daycare on the premises, shift sharing, flextime, telecommuting and insurance for unmarried and same-sex couples).

-Give employees the free time necessary to create a pleasant life. Share the vision. Allow for some level of ownership, even if it’s phantom stock. (People are easily lured away by the high tech industry, not only because of signing bonuses and equity, but because "dotcoms" share the dream and promise employees a piece of the action).

-Invest in an "audiotape-of-the-month" program. The subject matter can be anything from family financial planning to team building to getting along with difficult people. Employees feel cared about, grow personally and become more effective professionally.

Many great resources are available to organizations that wish to improve their retention. But individual assessment is imperative. Companies must first see where they are and fix any problems, before they can move ahead. Or as Yogi Berra said, "If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up somewhere else."

Building a Great Team

Finding and keeping good people is not about hard skills and money, it’s about personality and emotional satisfaction. By replacing their subjective selection and promotion process with an objective one and giving employees recognition and respect, Companies can build a great team that will boost the bottom line and move the organization forward into the future.