WorkPuzzle

Are Your Job Ads Too Classified?

Did you know that 90% of the job ads posted today persist in describing the requirements of experience, skills, and education for each position as the only criteria? This would seem to be a logical system for attracting well-qualified candidates.

However, I am personally aware of several cases of individuals who have shied away from applying for those opportunities where the prerequisites are so selectively detailed. These were extremely talented candidates with many of the characteristics that would make them great employees in any field.

So why didn’t these candidates apply? Because, based on the ad content, they believed the company was more interested in experience and skill level than talent, drive and desire.

There are multiple layers behind why the “traditional” way doesn't work. You have probably heard me say that this method doesn't speak to the person. For example, “skills” do not tap a person’s curiosity, awareness or attentiveness or how they work in a group or leadership situation.

Finding more about who they are, what they are interested in, and how they view a beneficial working relationship will give you the relevant information needed to identify the successful employee. 

 Lou Adler, a widely read author in recruiting circles, recently wrote:

"Earlier this year, I saw an ad for Facebook’s VP of Human Resources. It listed a bunch of experience requirements interlaced with some generic responsibilities and hyperbole.

To me this is backwards. It’s far better to define the job before defining the person. If a person has successfully accomplished something similar, he or she has exactly the level of skills, experience and academics required.

The worked required to be done determines the skills needed, the skills needed don't define the work required.  80-90% of the people who get promoted internally into these same spots don’t have the experience, skills and academics listed as required for someone hired from the outside.

What they do have is something far better – a track record of performance that indicates they can take on a bigger role in the company.

It seems obvious that if a company wants to hire people who are both competent and motivated to do the work required, they need to start by defining the work required.

Yet somehow this basic concept is lost when a new job opens up. Instead of defining the job, managers focus on defining the person. The end result is not a job description at all, but a person description.

This limits the selection pool to a narrow group of people just like the people the company has hired in the past. By default, this precludes expanding the company’s diversity hiring program or raising the company’s overall talent level.

For The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, I asked one of the top labor attorney’s in the country, David Goldstein from Littler Mendelson, to review the idea of using performance objectives to define the job, rather than skills. Here are a few of his comments (you’ll find his full report in the book):

 ‘A properly prepared performance profile ...and focusing on “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria may open the door to more minority, military, and disabled candidates who have a less “traditional” mix of experiences, thereby supporting affirmative action or diversity efforts.’

Hiring a more diverse and talented workforce starts by defining the work required for success, not the skills, experiences and academics needed to do the work.

This is not rocket science, just commonsense, but apparently commonsense is not one of the skills required for hiring people."

Lou’s article and book are extremely valuable tools in today’s competitive hiring environment. I am excited by the fact that most of our clients use this hiring method and apply the philosophy it evokes.

Perhaps it may be easier to practice these principles when it comes to independent contractors such as real estate agents, but it is also the right thing to do. 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Cognitive Ease—The Secret to Great Interviewing—Part 2

Earlier this week, I suggested that most people show up to an interview experiencing “cognitive strain.”  Unless you can help a person migrate to a place of cognitive ease, they’ll have a difficult time hearing and engaging most of what you’re trying to communicate.  If you didn't read the first article in this discussion, you may want to catch up before trying to digest today’s topic.

How do you get someone from a state of cognitive strain to a place of cognitive ease?  Daniel Kahneman spends several chapters in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, addressing this topic.

Part of the answer to the question can be summed up in this diagram:

The items listed on the right side are the feelings we want the candidate to have when they leave the interview.  These traits are the natural results of feeling cognitive ease.

Some of the causes that produce cognitive ease are listed on the left side.  As you might suspect, if you can become proficient at influencing the items on the left (by the way, this is not a complete list—there are many more elements), candidates will start experiencing something remarkable at your interviews.

As I mentioned earlier, Kahneman spends several chapters explaining and citing research for these causes.  Not all of these would relate to interviewing (although a surprising number do apply), so we’ll just explore “related experience” today.  If you have an interest in learning more, you can delve into this topic by picking up a copy of his book.

Here is a simple question that Dr. Kahneman often asks his audiences:

“How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?

The number of people who detect what was wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the Moses illusion.  Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did.

The idea of animals going into the ark sets up a biblical context, and Moses is not abnormal in that context.  You did not positively expect him, but the mention of his name is not surprising. It also helps that Moses and Noah have the same vowel sound and number of syllables.

As with triads that produce cognitive ease, you unconsciously detect associative coherence between Moses and ‘ark’ and so quickly accept the question.”

By default, the human mind wants to maintain (or get to) a state of System 1 thinking.  One of the ways it maintains this state is to look for related experiences.  When you heard just a few words (animals and ark), it quickly pulled a story from memory that allowed you to answer the question without leaving a state of cognitive ease.

The error you made (and we all make) illustrates how quickly the mind retrieves, depends upon, and desires related experiences. 

Let’s suppose I ask a different question:  How many chickens did Eric take to the marina? 

Of course, you quickly get frozen with this question.  Who’s Eric?  Why does he have chickens?  Is he taking the chickens to a boat, or is there a restaurant near the marina? And, so on.   Your mind does not even consider the first part of the question—how many chickens are there?   

In the first question, none of the background mattered because the “related experience” filled in the context.

Side note:  The relationship between related experience and cognitive ease is leveraged frequently by companies such as Geico during their marketing campaigns.  Next time you see or hear a Geico commercial, see if you can detect it.

What does this have to do with interviewing?

A “related experience” is one of the best pathways to get a candidate to a state of cognitive ease during an interview.

The point is not to deceive anyone in the interview process (we make the assumption that you’re offering the person something that will be advantageous for his or her career), but instead allow them to feel good about you and your organization and trust the things you’re communicating.

How do you find related experiences?  Here are two sources you can use immediately:

Pop culture.  How many times have you been in a meeting and someone says…"this is like the TV show Survivor.  Someone is going to get voted off the island."  This is a related experience.  Find two or three references in pop culture that would relate to the points you commonly make during and interview.

The candidate’s own experiences.  If you spend time (the first 20 to 30 minutes of the interview) drawing out and listening to the candidate’s story, you’ll have plenty of material to draw upon to find related experiences.  Restating the candidate’s own experiences and then relating it to the realities of working in your office is very powerful.

If you can master the concepts of related experience and cognitive ease, you will take your interview skills to a whole new level.   You’ll not only reap the rewards of hiring more agents, but you’ll also experience some cognitive ease for yourself!

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Cognitive Ease: The Secret to Great Interviewing

Think of yourself sitting in a canoe in a swift flowing river.  You’re paddling desperately with the intention of making it 100 yards upstream. 

To get there, you’ll need to focus on the task, apply some paddling skill, and consistently exert yourself.   Because you’ll be fighting against the current, you’ll experience some frustration and probably arrive out of breath and needing to rest.

In a figurative sense, this is how most people feel when they go to an interview.  The fast-flowing current is called “cognitive strain,” and it’s a silent factor that works against you in every interview.

In the next couple of WorkPuzzles, we’ll teach you how to alleviate cognitive strain and start conducting your interviews in the calm water of “cognitive ease.”

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist who recently published his best selling manifesto called Thinking, Fast and Slow.

If you didn’t catch the previous discussions on this topic, I’d recommend reading the first blog in this series.  It will give you some background for today’s WorkPuzzle.

In his book, Kahneman introduces his readers to the concept of “cognitive ease.”  In simple terms, it is the natural desire a person has to make decisions and judgments using “System 1” thinking.

As you may remember, System 1 is the fast, intuitive, and automatic way of making decisions and judgments.   System 2 is the slower way of thinking that requires more conscious judgments and critical analysis.

Dr. Kahneman defines cognitive ease in this way:

“Whenever you are conscious, and perhaps even when you are not, multiple computations are going on in your brain, which maintain and update current answers to some key questions:

Is anything new going on? Is there a threat? Are things going well? Should my attention be redirected? Is more effort needed for this task?

You can think of a cockpit, with a set of dials that indicate the current values of each of these essential variables. The assessments are carried out automatically by System 1 and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2.

One of the dials measures cognitive ease, and its range is between “easy” and “strained.” 

Easy is a sign that things are going well—no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort. 

Strained indicates that a problem exists, which will require increased mobilization of System 2.

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. 

When you feel cognitive strain, you are more likely to be more vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make few errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.”

With these definitions as a background, would you rather have someone be experiencing “cognitive ease” or “cognitive strain” during an interview?

Obviously, you’d want the person to be experiencing cognitive ease.  If candidates are suspicious, uncomfortable, and lacking the creativity to imagine themselves in a new career, your interviews are not going to come to life.  It's very difficult to build a relationship with individuals who remain in this state.

Here’s something you may not have considered:  Every candidate you interview (especially if the person is a “new to real estate” candidate) is experiencing cognitive strain when they arrive at your office.

There are very few exceptions to this rule.  Interviews are stressful.  Being in a new environment, meeting new people, receiving a bunch of new information, and having the perception you’re being evaluated puts people squarely in System 2 thinking. 

One of the secrets of successful interviewing is helping a person migrate from a state of cognitive strain to a place of cognitive ease during the 45 minutes you spend with the candidate. If the candidate remains in a state of cognitive strain (and most people do), the person will not have the ability to truly hear and engage most of what you’re trying to communicate.

How do you do this?  Daniel Kahneman has some great insight on this topic based on the research that he and others of have done.  It’s fascinating stuff, and we’ll cover it during our next WorkPuzzle discussion.  

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.