Performance should be basis of hiring decisions

EDITOR’S NOTE: After six years as columnists for The Boulder County Business Report, Joe Rosse and Bob Levin will be taking a break to pursue professional opportunities. The Business Report wants to thank both Joe and Bob for a great partnership over the years. While they were columnists, Rosse and Levin wrote “High-Impact Hiring” (Jossey-Bass, 1997) and “Talent Flow,” their new book on retaining talent after the hire, which will appear this summer. This fall, Rosse, professor of Management at University of Colorado-Boulder, served as professor-in-residence at IBM-Boulder. This spring, Levin, managing director of the Center for Human Function & Work, will be a visiting research fellow in biological sciences at the University of Cambridge, conducting research on biological and psychological fundamentals of human work performance. Over the next few years Joe and Bob will be serving as directors of a new interdisciplinary work research center at CU.

Over the holidays, we saw two scenes in local stores reminding us of fundamental themes we have visited in writing “On Management” over the past six years.

One of us was shopping at a national store chain. Signs at the entrance encouraged people entering to apply for work, touting the positive aspects of working at the chain and the ease of applying for work. Indeed, high-tech kiosks near the store entrance made it easy and inviting to sit down and apply for work. Too inviting perhaps. After we’d finished shopping, we noticed two young women at one of the kiosks. As we strolled by it became evident that one of the women was coaching the other extensively on what to say and how to say it. We don’t know if we saw one new employee coaching a prospective employee on how to get a job, or two applicants collaborating on their individual applications. Undoubtedly, the two women knew each other, and undoubtedly the applicant sitting at the kiosk came across a lot better electronically than she would have in a face-to-face interview.

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During the holiday rush it’s understandable that retailers often resort to “warm-body hiring,” taking almost any applicant who comes in off the street. The hiring kiosk, though, indicated that this store really was engaged in a high-tech and expensive version of a more dangerous approach we have come to call “ritual hiring.”

Ritual hiring involves practices that seem to make hiring more rigorous, even though there are no fundamentals underneath the ritual that establish they actually work. The kiosk illustrates the hazards of rituals in hiring or management: First, they deceive you into a false reassurance that you’re doing things right, even though the reassurance is misplaced on a technology, a test or a truism that does not actually improve performance. Even more treacherously, rituals actually may work worse than what you would otherwise do, such as in this case where the automated kiosk opened new routes to being deceived by applicants.

Heading down the street to buy groceries, we next entered a national chain grocery store festooned with signs offering great careers and encouraging visitors to talk to a manager “NOW” about coming to work at the store.

In the greeting-card aisle, we had no reason to notice a young woman browsing aimlessly until a friend of hers walked up and said, “I’m so sorry I’ve made you wait all this time. I’ve never been so frustrated. I went to talk to the manager about a job, and they gave me all these forms to fill out, and I took all the time to fill out the forms, and then when I gave the forms to the manager he said he couldn’t talk to me, and I should come back next week.”

This outburst reminded us that managing the people side of your business requires the same commitment, quality and processes and systems as managing operations. Imagine if you got to the checkout of the same grocery store, your cart filled with items bought through enticing promotions, only to be told that you needed to fill out requisition forms that described the items in your cart, then come back next week to see if you could receive the goods.

These two stories are instructive for much more than recruiting in a tight labor market. They illustrate a basic principle that is as easy to neglect as it is fundamental: Performance should be the cornerstone and touchstone of every strategic and operational decision you make regarding the people side of your business. By focusing on what performance is required from your organization as a whole, and what performance is therefore required from every unit, position, and person, you create an atmosphere that compels quality in your decisions, actions, and processes about people.

The opportunity to explore areas of managing the human side of a business such as this has been one of the joys of writing and editing “On Management” over the past six years.

We want to thank Editor Jerry W. Lewis and the readership of The Boulder County Business Report for the opportunity to write about these topics, and doing so has helped us learn to write together in completing two books, on hiring for performance and on retaining good talent. Over that same time, the academic researcher of the pair has had the opportunity to work more extensively with private industry, and the businessperson is now going to spend time working to develop a new kind of research on work performance.

As we explore these new directions, we’re going to take a hiatus from On Management, and while we do, may your own work on managing the human side of your business bring you and the people you work with satisfaction and rewards.