Is there anything more broken in HR than recruiting ?


I am not an HR expert – can’t even make a stretch claim to be one . Few months ago , I was convinced that performance appraisals were the most broken part of the HR realm . I wrote a few posts on my views on talent management and several readers joined the discussion . Eventually my conclusion became “Performance appraisals are evil , but the winner of the most broken HR process is recruitment”.

In hindsight , this is quite simple and something I should have known a long time ago . Guess I took it for granted somehow and didn’t realize the scale of bad consequences it has on a company .

Here are half a dozen random thoughts

1. Who owns the hiring process ? A line manager or HR ?

This should be a rhetorical question , and the problem is that it is anything but . If the hiring manager is not actively involved , HR in most cases cannot be effective . But HR is hardly empowered in any organization I know of in pushing back when hiring reqs are thrown over the wall mechanically . If you throw the req over the wall and wait for action – better not expect to find candidates you would like to work with .

If I am a candidate looking for a job – I will have amber lights flashing in my mind all the time if I don’t see the hiring manager actively involved in the process . I know from experience that it is a sure shot sign of a poor experience for me on the job , should I get it . My instinct is to walk away when I am in this situation – I learned it the hard way.

2. Can you read the hiring req with a straight face to a colleague ?

I recently read the job posting for an entry level admin job that pays $10 an hour with no benefits . If I didn’t read the title – I would have thought they are hiring a head of HR in a 1000 person company . This req was from a very successful manager who would fight tooth and nail to remove features from products because most customers don’t need it .

Some managers hire for talent – not for a given job opening . This is a double edged sword . On one hand – it is really hard to find good people and hence it makes sense to hire them when you find them and then figure out a meaningful job for them . On the other hand – these candidates need work that is worth their while (and lower patience levels to sit around) and you as manager might have other pressing issues once the hiring is done . So think very carefully about next steps if this is the route you take

3. Is salary such a taboo topic ?

I don’t know it for a fact – but I often have wondered if HR bosses give recruiters a KPI on how much money they can negotiate down for a given candidate .

Candidates get dragged through a lengthy interview process and then they get a shock when they hear the offer is a complete low ball . While money is not everything – for most candidates it is a deal breaker . Why not ask candidates if they are comfortable with a range you can afford ?

4. What about retention ?

Hiring is one half of the problem – the other half is retention . Hiring is a costly process for the company – and it involves the risk of screwing over someone else’s life and career .

Yet , with maybe one exception – I have hardly seen long term incentives for managers to retain their best talent .

5. Will they join if they really knew you and the team ?

One of the things I am very particular about is to tell potential candidates about everything that I think can go wrong for them when working in my team , and only then explain the good stuff . I also insist that they talk to everyone else currently in my team to make sure they are fully comfortable in taking forward the process . It is also important that everyone (or most people) in the team feel comfortable with their potential new colleague .

About 3 out of 4 times , people choose to not join when I do this . For many of them – I was able to find them other jobs that I thought would fit them well . But almost without exception – they are happy to still help me and work with me when I need a hand with something . And the few who choose to work with me – these are folks I can go to ANY battle with .

This didn’t come naturally to me – I learned it over time that hiring fewer right people is always better than hiring a lot of people who may or may not be right for you . A big reason for bad hiring process is the inflexible corporate budgeting policies that mandate across the board hiring freezes , not allowing managers enough freedom to handle their budgets and so on . I will go on a limb to say that impact on hiring is perhaps the biggest evil of planning and budgeting in companies .

6. The best time to plant a shade tree was a few years ago , second best is today

Everyone tells candidates to build a network . But what about managers looking to hire people ? Just like sales people need a pipeline , so do hiring managers

The worst solution is putting up job reqs at random and saving every CV that comes from applicants . That does not make a qualified pipeline . You need to get out and know the up and coming players outside your team – internal and external to your company, and win their trust . At executive levels – this is common practice . But this is usually not the case for non executive jobs .

For some weird reason – companies tend to put a higher bar for internal candidates . I have fought this almost all my career – and I think treating your internal candidates as sub par is one of the biggest hiring mistakes one can make .

There are many jobs where similar jobs in a different industry might be just as good . One of the best project managers I know of was a nurse before she shifted to IT . I never had the chance to meet the manager who hired her , but he surely saw the potential despite it not being a conventional hire . World needs more of such managers

Enterprise and UX – is it the classic “dog chasing its tail” ?


My pal Jon Reed posted a 2 part series on the topic of User Experience for enterprise software. Part one is http://diginomica.com/2014/02/13/enterprise-user-experience-overhyped/ and Part two is http://diginomica.com/2014/02/14/enterprise-consumer-grade-ui-part-2/ . You should read both – in fact you should read pretty much everything Jon posts. If it is not worth reading, Jon would not post it.

Since mid 90s – I have been fighting the good fight on UI and at some point after that, I have been fighting the fight on UX too. And I have not won that battle other than for short periods in time. This is true for packaged software as well as custom development projects I have worked on. However, solutions I helped create in late 90s are still used by customers in some shape – which honestly amazes me. If they went by the social media wisdom on UI and UX – there should be no such solution alive, and customers should be chasing me with an axe in their hands 🙂

All that said, I readily admit that my own first hand experience should not dictate anything given I have not worked with a statistically significant number of projects. And while I appreciate good design, I know that I am not a good designer. So what follows is strictly my personal opinion at this point in time. My opinion on UI and UX have changed with time – and it probably will change again.

Design philosophies have changed over time. When I started – the idea was that you offer every possibility to the user in an application – and let the users choose what they want to do. Now that pendulum has swung the other way – make it as lean as possible, and don’t give the user more than the absolute minimum required. There is one thing that I find fascinating in this swing – users of enterprise software are pretty smart people who can think for themselves and use most software. These are people who have figured out the deepest functionality in Excel and Access that most people would not know it even existed. They don’t need dumbing down – they just want things straightforward.

How big of a deal is UI in the overall UX? It is not everything – but it is significant. But of all things that change in technology – UI takes the cake when it comes to speed of evolution. Roughly every two years – there is some new UI thingy that is the “best ever”. Underlying technology changes just about as fast too – remember flex, silverlight etc? We barely knew them by the time they got obsolete. HTML5 is the new cool kid – but for how long ? Will we ever see an end to HTML vs native ? This is the dog chasing its tail scenario – you cannot catch up and take a lead for very long.

Stellar UX always comes at a cost. Either the vendor will charge for it – or a customer will pay contractors or internal IT to do that. So where exactly will we draw the line on how far we chase the ultimate UX at any given point in time ?

There is an additional aspect of UX that one needs to consider – not everything about UX can be controlled. I have one of the better global data plans available in US – and I can’t even get email in some parts of the country. And this is a crippling problem when I travel abroad. And I am talking about email – nothing fancy one would think. What about OS updates on mobile devices? I have not had a single upgrade where some app I use daily would not get screwed up. So how exactly does one fix something one has no control over?

Lets fast forward into prediction territory. IT moves to and from Suite to best of breed and again to suite with time . Now the swing is to best of breed – which means users will again have more than one app to deal with for a given business process. Even if every app has stellar UX when taken in isolation, all of them daisy chained together will have limited consistency. And by the time people get to know the new experience, world would have moved on to a new paradigm. Such is life in the wonderland of enterprise software.

So that was my long winded way of answering Jon Reed’s original question on whether UX in enterprise is over hyped. The short answer is – yes it is, and needlessly so. Good UX is a must to get work done without trouble. But when people move beyond “good enough” – they tend to approach the “diminishing returns” area very quickly. No one wins there – not vendors, not customers, nor spectators.

 

What about those company values ?


Couple of days ago, I had a nice long chat with an old friend who worked with me more than ten years ago. One of the topics that came up in the conversation was how some companies don’t seem to have a set of core values to guide the actions of their employees. It is not as if such companies don’t have a defined value system – the problem is that employees don’t seem follow it. They just end up as slogans on a wall or a website or a T shirt.

When I joined IBM many years ago – it was drilled into me that there are three things that will guide me through my time there

1. Dedication to every client’s success

2. Innovation that matters – for our company, and for the world

3. Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

In its abstract sense, this did not mean much at all to me. It took a few years and a lot of conversations with others living this value system that I figured what it really meant. I also learned through the process that having slogans mean very little unless someone takes time to explain and reinforce it with employees. There were plenty of other colleagues who did not have the chance to hear their leaders explain this to them with real life examples, and consequently never gave it a second thought.

Here are some of the nuances I learned over time that might be useful to others. I don’t think they are specific to IBM – it should work for many, if not all companies. But then again – my views are skewed for my experience. Take it with a grain – or a pound – of salt 🙂

Client vs Customer

The first time I was allowed to lead a sales pursuit independently, Dave Lubowe, the partner who managed the account, told me on the way to the meeting “Vijay, I need you to know that we don’t have customers. We only have clients”. I asked him if it was just a difference in semantics , and he told me that it was not. He explained that “customer” implied that we are in the midst of a transaction – something that is very short term, and we will probably not have to worry about this person or company a whole lot later. Whereas a client is someone who we serve for a very long time, and for whom we try to be a trusted adviser.

I got the rough idea from that snippet of conversation, but it took me many more years to understand fully why it is such an important distinction. It takes a lot of time to win someone’s confidence and it takes very little lose it. And without building that relationship, meaningful business does not happen at all. As everyone figures out eventually, it is easier to keep a client than win a new one – there is a quantitative reason for this. But even more important is the qualitative reason. I have not had a client who has not vouched for me as a reference with another client or prospect . In fact many of them have volunteered to be my reference when I switched employers. They know I will do the same for them – but neither I nor them expect any commercial favors from each other when we do business. We just know that we will be transparent with each other and that it will pay off for both sides over time.

Some innovations matter, and most don’t

While I am a big proponent of the concept of innovation, I am not a big fan of the word “innovation” any more. Due to its over use, I visibly cringe and occasionally completely tune out when people talk to me about innovation. Many of you might know that I am dead opposed to vendors describing their work as “innovation” . I use the word vendor only in a loose sense – to mean people building and selling it. It might be the IT department in a company building something for the finance people.

The sole judge of innovation is the people using it. When a client says it is innovative – then the vendor can advertise it as innovative. Till then it is just “potentially” innovative – and I would rather not see it being mentioned. Everything a vendor does should ideally be innovative in some degree – so harping on it is like me saying in every conversation that “did you know I was breathing throughout the day”. It is implied – and when you explicitly make a big deal out of it at every turn , it stops being authentic. Of course that is just my personal view of the world. I do respect the fact that others might view it differently and act according to their convictions. I have no problems with that at all.

Lets say we are in fact trying really hard to be innovative – building something potentially innovative. How do we go about it? Do we light as many fires(technical term being POC – as in Proof of Concept)  as we can in the name of failing fast ?  Do we designate some teams as “innovation teams” ? Do we let such teams run around crazy defying good and bad processes in the name of innovation? When do we stop and course correct ? or can motion be taken as the KPI for progress?

My point is – failing fast is good only if we fail responsibly. To begin with, lighting random fires in the hope of one or two catching on is seldom a scalable way to let innovation happen. Hope is not a strategy. It just spreads everyone thin. By failing responsibly, we should do micro and macro corrections along the way of each fire we light. Put out the ones that don’t belong using objective criteria and join forces with the ones that seem to show potential. And if there is no customer in the “innovation process” – just stop it at that point. At a minimum, everyone owes it to others to make sure that innovation in a company does not result in massive chaos. Some chaos is unavoidable, and some glass needs to be broken – but when it crosses over into massive chaos – its time to take a breath and realign.

Trust comes with the ability to question

The hallmark of a good team is a culture of trust and loyalty. However, it is easy to misinterpret what this means in day to day life. If the team members are not allowed to provide input in making a decision, then it is hard to expect them to trust the leader in the direction they have to take. And when they feel the team is losing direction – they should feel comfortable questioning the leaders. Goes without saying that this should happen with respect in both directions.

We are all unique, like every one else 🙂 

Thomas Watson apparently had “Respect for the individual”  as a core value for IBM in the past, and then at some point it didn’t make its way to the current three core values of IBM. I was told by an old time IBMer that the rationale was that respect for the individual was implied in everything else and hence did not need to be explicitly mentioned. In my opinion – this should have remained as an explicit value statement. Not only for IBM – but for every company.

The lowest unit in a team is the individual. There is of course the politically correct thing of ” there is no I in TEAM”. What we should not forget is that teams are a point in time concept. We are all individuals with things that make us unique.  When individuals do not get respect and dignity, it is hard for them to be a productive member of the team.

I had a recent conversation with a dear friend on the issue of titles at work. There are many managers who coach their employees to not chase fancy titles. What senior managers don’t always realize is that unlike them who already have the title and hence don’t worry about it as much, the employee is a few steps removed and hence genuinely worries whether the company cares for the individual. Not everyone is capable of the higher responsibilities, and maybe they are ready to take on the bigger responsibility but there is no business justification at that point in time. Most people are reasonable and if you explain clearly what the situation it, they will get it.

When I was in my early career stage – I used to hate managers telling me “just keep doing what you are doing and you will do great”. I always thought that was a cop out. Doing the same thing over and over just makes you good at what you do today – how exactly does it makes you ready for next level is not clear in such a response. Managers owe it to their employees to show a clear path on what is needed for them to progress. If they cannot do that – they owe it to their employees to tell them why they cannot help, and hence it is better for the employee to work for another manager or even another company.