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matthieusabourin · 8 years ago

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Who by Geoff Smart & randy Street reading summary for recruiting A players

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468922240&sr=1-1&keywords=the+a+method+who

I liked it because the process is clearly defined & reproducible, gather a lot of data from a long experience, and got a great reputation. I will not go deeper into giving my opinion. It tried to pull out of the book, most of the process, so it can be easily understood & tried in the field.

1 The problem

Who > Why how what. Current recruiting process are not adapted to get A players. You are who you hire. process is an A underlined with Sell. scorecard, source, select, sell.

2 Scorecard

should be composed as following:

Mission

The why. meaningful target. the essence of the job, the core purpose. why the role exists. Writ it in meaningful language, to make it actionable. Make it accurate to select a specialist profile not a generalist for a challenge to solve right now.

Outcomes

The how, the actionable. results, defining what must get done. You may list three to eight mission statements by order of importance. These are as clear as possible. It's not about describing daily activities, it about what must be done/delivered.

Competencies

The what, the tools required to reach the set goals. Two different types of competencies are identified here. The critical competencies, relates to the hard/core skills required by the candidate to execute the mission, but also cultural skills, that must match company/team culture & values, to be aligned with global vision & strategy. Hereunder a list of critical skills as example:efficiency,honesty,organization& planning, aggressiveness, intelligence, analytical skills, attention to detail, ability to hire A players, adaptability, strategic thinking, creativity, listening skills, communication, teamwork, persuasion... Set it up by your own knowledge of what is required for the job.

Hint: A scorecard is an easy input to build up a strategy, setting up KPI's, objectives, and so make the mission easier to track & follow. you can set expectations with new hires, monitor progress over time, objectify annual review system, rate your team for talent management.

3 Source

Referrals, recruiters, researchers. Conclusion, use your network is far more efficient than the rest. As hiring is a critical mission, always ask for, when you meet somebody new, who's the best talented people you know, that may fit my company?

4 Select

And the different steps in interviewing are: who interview, Focused interview, Reference interview, Skill-Will Bull's-Eye.

Screening interview

Objective is eliminating quickly & massively B&C players:

What are your career goals?

what you're really good at?

What your are not good at or not interested?

Who were your Five last bosses & how much will they rate your performance on 1-10 scale WHEN we talk to them. Conclude with candidate open questions.

Get data, accelerate or reduce the pace of the 30min phone interview. Reflect on top of it.

Interview tip: keep being curious. Ask what? How? tell me more? To dig further.

Who interview

Look for patterns to confirm strengths & weaknesses.

What were you hired to do?

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

What were some low points during that job?

Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:

What was you boss name, and how do you spell it? What was it like working with him? What will he/she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas of improvement?

Why did you leave the job?

3 hours interview, splitting candidate history chronologically. At the end questions & career goals for the candidate.

Interview tip: interrupting the candidate is OK, by matching emotionally :), to get a clearer vision about what value mean for the candidate, challenge against the 3P's, performance over Past year, over the Plan, over the Peers. Push or pull? Did the candidate leave because he was forced to? do not hire a more than 20% pushed candidate. get empathic, & not rely on abstract beliefs to get true insights.

look for inconsistencies in body language. Do the interview in tandem.

Focused interview

Objective is to get a more granular confirmation about the candidate strengths & weakness, & can bring other colleagues opinion in the balance. 45 min interview to review outcomes & competencies.

The purpose of this interview is to talk about ____ (fill with specific outcome or competency such as the person's experience selling to customer, building & leading team, creating strategic plans, acting agressively...)

What are your biggest accomplishments in this area during your career?

What are your insights into your biggest mistakes and lessons learned in this area?

Interview tip: Focus interview can be a confirmation about culture matching. The previous interviews may be conducted by the global team on the whole day. From preparing to who, to lunch, to focus, to debrief & conclusion.

Reference interview

get the right references, from the insights you get, peers, bosses, colleagues etc... Ask the candidate to set up the call. Make enough ref calls (7?) last 3 bosses, 2 peers/customers, 2 subordinates.

In what context did you work with the person?

What were the person's biggest areas for improvement back then?

How would you rate his/her overall performance in that job on a 1-10 scales? What about his or her performance causes you to give that rating?

The person mentioned that he/she struggled with ____ in that job. Can you tell me more about that?

Interview tip: just like the other interviews, for scaling, 6=2, 7 is average, & you look for 8 to 10. For last question ,reuse something you get during the who interview. use the mention the candidate said, "you might say" this from him. Read between the lines. Nobody wants to provide bad reference. So check out what & HOW people are speaking. look for enthusiasm :)

The skill-will bull's-eye

In a nutshell, select phase aims to gather data to decide if somebody's skills (what they can do), and will (what they want to do) match your scorecard. Review all the skills of the candidate. If you believe at more than 90% that he's able to achieve one of the outcome, rate an A, if no go for B or C. Repeat for each outcome.

Review motivations & competencies. Is there more than 90% that the candidate will demonstrate such competency, rate him a A or lower. Repeat for each competency. You'll have a bull-eye picture, with the skill circle then the scorecard inside, then the will, if the candidate has 90% or greater chances of success to match, you'll have this picture.

Red Flags during select phase to consider:

candidate does not mention past failures

exaggerates answers

takes credit for the work of others

speaks poorly of past bosses

cannot explain job moves

is more interested in compensation sand benefits than in the job itself

tries too hard to look like an expert

is self-absorbed

people most important to candidate are not supportive of change

Boasting people. Too much ego would be destructive.

Sell

Fourth & final phase of the method. How to seal the deal and make a candidate become an employee. Use empathy, to sell your company to the candidate.

Check out 5F's of selling:

Fit; our vision & your strengths: we're aligned.

Family; make the change as easy as possible for you & your family.

Freedom; make your own decisions, no micromanagement.

Fortune; sounds like company stability. if you reach objectives, you'll get compensations for that over the next years.

Fun; work environment & personal relationships.

5 times to sell the position/company to the candidate:

When you source

When you interview

The time between your offer and the candidate acceptance

The time between the candidate's acceptance and his or her first day

The new hire's first one hundred days on the job

Big hint about selling, is persistence. You should never give up until you get the A player accepting offer & working for you. Identify in the 5F's what matters for the candidate the most & build up a strategy to get him on board, without giving up.

Your greatest opportunity

From interviewing hundreds of CEO, first success business factor is about talent management (52%).

How to apply method A in your company in 10 steps:

Make people a top priority

Follow the A method by yourself. Lead by example.

Build support within your team

Cast a clear vision about the goals induced by the method.

Train team on best practices

Remove barriers

Implement new policies to support the change

Reward the ones who use the method & gain results through it

Remove managers who are not on board

Celebrate wins & plan for more change

legal traps to avoid

relevance: stick to the fact of the scorecard & being honest when discarding a candidate Standardization: Use the same process to avoid unfairness Use nondiscriminatory language Avoid asking illegal questions, check with legal team

Bonus question, What types of CEOS make money for investors?

Depends ;-) but from 313 CEO interviews & tracked results, openness to feedback, possess great listening skills, and treat people with respect are the main soft skills. They are easy to work with. Second dominant profile that emerged are the ones who move quickly, act aggressively, work hard, demonstrate persistence, and set hight standards and hold people accountable to them. This second profile was 100% successful. The conclusion of this is that, having emotional intelligence is good, but it cannot prevent from getting things done. Make things happen is critical in success.

Beyond hiring

Most managers tend to use voodoo method to hire. They base their actions and decisions on how well someone is performing in their current role rather than evaluating what they will need to success in a future role. Chasing the Who is more important than the What.

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matthieusabourin · 10 years ago

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Review from scrumday 2015

Some words for a quick introduction…

As you may know, agile (http://agilemanifesto.org/) are core values about how to better develop software at the very beginning, but are more wide principles that apply to any modern company these days that want to produce goods for customer needs.

SCRUM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development) ) is a framework, a methodology, developed on this core values. 90 sec visual presentation about scrum here: https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/p7novk9lc6?popover=true

I can testify from past experience with customers or from the scrum master certification I acquired past year, how different and how interesting this world led by software needs at the very beginning is. And how much we can benefit to reach our goals in term of delivering faster, keep customer quality on top, getting more engagement & motivation from our teams, & how we can adapt & evolve in this continuously and speeding up environment.

Notes from workshops & meetings I followed

Feedback Workshop:

It’s about how giving feedback can be used as a powerful tool for enhancing team cohesion. Fact: positive feedbacks are not happening very often… when you marry, when you get retired, when you die… Won’t you like have more feedbacks as a gift to change things in life that could be profitable for you & your mates? This workshop was about the recipe to follow up as a tool.

#1 get an introduction phase

#2 Define symptoms of the issue

#3 Categorize the origin of the issue (environmental, behavioral, competencies, believes, identity, systemic)

#4 pick up the right technique to provide the feedback to your target. (DESC, ROTI, 3+1…)

#5 Examples, or how to express what occurred factually.

#6 Provide clear expectations, goals to reach, what to enhance, define KPI…

Last word, don’t accept feedbacks from negative or not skilled sources.

Some slides here:

http://fr.slideshare.net/brunosbille/le-feedback-un-outil-redoutable-pour-nourrir-la-cohesion-dequipe

Management 3.0

Nice introduction, on the subject.

3 fundamentals principles are:

#1 Engage people & their interactions.

#2 Enable people to enhance the system.

#3 Customer satisfaction is key for all the stakeholders.

Some notes from what I heard during the meeting:

Management 2.0 was putting human value at the center of the organization, but in a pyramidal organization. Mgmt 3.0 is much more holocratic. Mgmt 2.0 with good direction as putting human value in top priority was doing it with the wrong tools, just like one to one & feedback 360°. One to one is top down micromanagement that can’t scale, & 360° don’t allow fruitful exchanges and avoid complexity.

As an image, 3.0 manager is a gardener who helps plants to develop & grow. He helps teams, individuals to align constraints with company objectives, develop competencies of people, empower teams, energize people, help organizational structure to grow, participate into improving anything.

For instance about energize people, & keep them motivated here some tools/techniques:

Use personal mapping to create link between people, reward people without promises at the beginning, keep small & continuous ones rather that big one, reward in public, reward behaviors not results, reward between peers not against hierarchy.

Some Reward tools: Kudo box, or kudo wall, celebrate events, hall of fame.

Daniel Pink is a good author about what truly motivate us (mastery, autonomy, purpose), and management 3.0 is fully applying these values. Management 1.0 was about basic needs, to get a job, a salary. 2.0 was carrot & stick style. Or punish/reward (exterior). 3.0 is interior motivator (mastery, autonomy, purpose).

Still in tools, delegation poker game, related to scrum poker, to define complexity, is something helping into defining how much group of people & manager can decide together how much delegation is needed for any task.

To conclude, manager is identified as acting onto the system, not anymore on rules or on people themselves. He helps people into finding the right motivator, explicating the goal of the company, and align them.

You can find some slides related to this topic defended by Jurgen Appello (father of management 3.0). http://fr.slideshare.net/jurgenappelo/management-30-in-50-minutes?related=1

SCRUM SHU HA RI:

A cool introduction about scum as agile framework, but also asking about agile purpose. Does using agile methodology was the goal, or are we expecting to become agile in our way of working independently from the method.

SHU HA RI means follow the example, detach, be fluent. Start by using the tool, mastering it, then tweak it, and then drop it as you mastered not only the tool but the domain.

Agile is a good domain to apply this metaphor. You need to fail fast to understand not how to use a framework, but to become agile in your way of working or thinking.

For instance, some people using scrum continues to use V cycle in sprints. Which is not agile at all. Going agile would much more rely onto think for instance that testing has not be done in a sequential fashion once code is produced. It has to happen at the same pace, same time. User stories that are too heavy demonstrate that there’s still needs into how to develop code in an efficient fashion.

Specification by example is not part of SCRUM but demonstrate agility in the approach of coding; You write tests before start to code. At the same time you specify your feature. So you can deeply focus in a customer centric view, by defining different uses cases, having exhaustive specs, sharing a common understanding of the value of the feature, and be sure that output will clearly demonstrate functionality is working since the very beginning. Acceptance test driven development is a method that is using this way off thinking.

Some citations about KANBAN (produce in a continuous fashion per feature, by putting them into Next, analysis, development, acceptance, done columns), innovation games, & lean were also part of this discussion.

LEAN: IDEAS -> go to design -> PRODUCT -> go to measure -> DATA -> go to learn -> IDEAS.

Some other core values for scrum were about, deliver iteratively, let team auto-org, get feedback, have fun, keep focused onto unique tasking.

Here the slides presented during the scrumday:

http://fr.slideshare.net/agiletourbeirut/scrum-shuhari-41744773?qid=ed2732eb-8c67-4402-b1da-a76201d80b14&v=default&b=&from_search=1

Immunology for change

I attended to a workshop about immunology for change. Somebody has already written a very nice review about it:

http://blog.xebia.fr/2015/04/15/scrumday-2015-retour-sur-la-conference-immunotherapie-pour-le-changement/

Debate about NO ESTIMATE technique

Or the art of stopping trying to figure out, how much time, resource , effort will be needed to deliver a product or a feature. In Scrum methodology, you are supposed to split each feature in sets of user stories. Each user story define a functional need for a stakeholder of a product. As it can be complicated, and not that much useful to track information, some guys are arguing that it would not make sense to chop & quote every piece of the job to be done like in a sequential & very predictive (taylorism style) environment.

I attended and mostly listen to a lot of testimonials from the field about how hard it could be to be paid for the correct value you were providing to customer in an agile software environment.

People were saying that budget & costs shouldn’t be correlated from the number of hours spend onsite. (Looks like what is the difference between service & man/days in a famous company that I used to know ;-)). How to valorize the job done or the product rather than time spent? How to measure customer business value? How as a customer I can measure my return on investment & being satisfied about the money I spent? Sharing a vision, a goal with customer & defining measurable BV KPI could be an option to pay consequently to the return on investment. It’s extremely collaborative vision of producing value that is not only cash for both customer & supplier. That could be a way, but it needs us to reset our mindset…

I also participated to a debate about brainstorming on the real importance of framework in agile. Or what are the good directions to follow rather than dumbly apply a method as a recipe.

Some notes: Using tool definitively helps enhancing skills about the art of being agile. From experience feedback, scrum is really a nice & quick & easy one to follow up to acquire some good agile ways of being. Keep teams motivated without goal or strategic vision is difficult. Against predictive method like waterfall model, a product hast a customer, not a project. Scrum from trenches is a good customer feedback & list of recipes to reuse from using SCRUM. Not a how to, but nice examples to better masteries the framework. After that, I got an interesting discussion with a scrum coach, who explained to me how they sell agile services. They try to define a global shared objective to reach, agreed for a milestone or time period.

From this, each sprint has a subset of features to be cleared, and they engaged to produce them. They are paid each sprint for this engagement to be respected. So they clearly split 2 points. Global objective, with a global cost. And define payments gates criteria on specific features that are commonly defined & delivered in the field. For instance, if they target 4 sprints necessary to reach the global goal, but only 2 were enough, they pay only for 2. If global goal is reached only after 6 sprints, they can accept to pay 4, and get what they have for 4 sprints, or, Accept to pay extra fees. As responsibility of delivering is shared, and time is not the resource that is object of value in the field, each party is much more focusing onto paying or get paid for customer real business value. Not less not more. And when it is for product that are not on the shelf, in a complex & varying environment, as software is, that’s making much more sense.

Keynote by Mary Poppendieck about scaling agile organizations

Topic was about how to make an agile system to grow up, and a lot of thoughts about social relationships.

Extracted from the summary:

Scaling is fundamentally a complexity problem, so you should look for ways to reduce and deal with complexity. Second, scaling is a cooperation problem, and understanding what promotes and what destroys cooperation is essential for growing organizations.

Finally, scaling is an organizational problem, and there’s no shortage of models to study for patterns of how to scale organizations. There’s the lean model, the military model, and several unicorn models. These models confirm the fact that scale is possible, and are full of ideas for you to experiment. But they won’t tell you which approach is best for you – you have to figure that out for yourself.

All this under the angle of Marry Poppendieck point of view around Agile & Lean dogmas. Was very inspirational, and first time I saw a standing ovation in a tech domain event. 

More graphical notes about this awesome keynote here: https://twitter.com/claudeaubry/status/585346111788953602

Some final words to conclude

This conference was a good place to have feedbacks, sharing thoughts, discussions, inspirational speech about agile & the way our companies are working these days. Compare what is done in software industry to ourselves is a chance these days, because we are slowly but surely moving to it. Software is eating the world, right?

The main point was coming back again and again in everything. All the people & organizations, customers & suppliers, big companies or little ones, all of them were looking for a sense, a vision, a purpose that is going further than their own individuality. I can see nowadays, with all the uncertainty we are going through, how much this can apply to all of us. You need core values, key fundamentals, strategic vision, to drive the engagement of people and how structures are organized. Software development is done in a complex & always changing path, so do we, and it’s easy to get lost. So I would ask to myself the following question: What are our core values that can keep customer satisfaction always be on top, and an unbreakable determination within our ranks to serve it?

Hopes this report will give some hints & ask for interesting questions. Hereunder, some other links to continue to investigate:

http://girlzinweb.com/2015/04/10/compterendu-scrumday-2015/

https://twitter.com/ScrumDayFr

List of books I promised to myself to read:

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions

Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Specification by Example: How Successful Teams Deliver the Right Software

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

Scrum and XP from the Trenches

The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions

#scrum #agile #management #lean

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