In last weeks edition I described some of the challenges, chronicled in a recent Time Magazine article, on the healthcare.gov website's initial issues. It’s a compelling story, that when dissected, leaves us all with reminders of the differences between how projects can go wrong and what can be done to right them.

I previously listed three ingredients (principles) that when missing in any worthy endeavor will lead to failure; but conversely, when done well can lead to a successful execution. I also promised to draw parallels to HiringCenter successes.

Last weeks edition described the first and most important principle:

Metric Driven Leadership to Oversee and Drive the Effort 

The second ingredient is:

A Central Dashboard to Monitor, Measure and Improve each Important Metric.

Quoting again from the Time magazine article:

“One of the things that shocked Burt and Park's team most (the healthcare.com rescue team)–'among many jaw-dropping aspects of what we found,' as one put it–'was that the people running healthcare.gov had no "dashboard," no quick way for engineers to measure what was going on at the website, such as how many people were using it, what the response times were for various click-throughs and where traffic was getting tied up.' So late into the night of Oct. 18, Burt and the others spent about five hours coding and putting up a dashboard.”

Can you imagine this? You have developed one of the largest scaled projects known to developed countries, a system that will draw incredible scrutiny, and you have no way to monitor, measure or improve anything.  No idea what is wrong or how to fix it.

One of the first things we did, at Tidemark, as we were developing HiringCenter, was to create a dashboard. This allowed our clients (and us) to constantly monitor progress among the many tasks that must be performed with each candidate within the massive pipeline.

Those of our clients who practice ingredient one (metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort), seem to naturally utilize principle two exemplified by the HiringCenter Dashboard. Conversely those who don’t have ingredient one typically abandon the Dashboard. You can probably guess what results appear when these essential pieces are lacking. Sooner or later someone says… “this isn’t working."  

Which brings us to the third ingredient:

 A Sense of Urgency

 According to TIME, one of the technology consultants (Abbott) who had worked on the rescue site said:

“To this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the healthcare.gov launch. Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients. Beyond that, Abbott recalls, "there was a total lack of urgency" despite the fact that the website was becoming a national joke and crippling the Obama presidency."

TIME then goes on to describe the rescue teams mentality:

"We need to stay focused on the most urgent issues, The stand-up culture–identify problem, solve problem, try again–was typical of the rescue squad's ethic."

What was the eventual result of the rescue squads overhaul of the website?

“On Sunday, Dec. 1, Zients issued a public report card showing the website's turnaround. A series of hardware upgrades had dramatically increased capacity; the system was now able to handle at least 50,000 simultaneous users and probably more. There had been more than 400 bug fixes. Uptimes had gone from an abysmal 43% at the beginning of November to 95%. And Kim and her team had knocked the error rate from 6% down to 0.5%. Average response time–once a ridiculous eight seconds per page–was down to 0.343 seconds.”

Impressive isn’t it?

Assessing the issues, solutions and steps involved in this example, we at Tidemark have considered requiring new to HiringCenter clients to agree to use only the  "best practices" established by us over the last 9 years and screen out those who don’t agree. So far we haven’t done this. What do you think? Would this be helpful?

For those of you who practice the principals listed above throughout every facet of HiringCenter we thank you. You make us look good, and it is our hope that we improve the efficiency, predictability and reliability of your new agent recruiting.

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. 

The key ingredients to HiringCenter success are no different than those responsible for rescuing the HealthCare.gov website; ingredients the recent administration had sorely lacked and had to discover the hard way.

Time magazine sets up the scene:

“Last Oct. 17—more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House press secretary Jay Carney was going through what one senior Obama aide calls 'probably the most painful press briefing we’ve ever seen.' Pressed repeatedly on when the site would be fixed, the best he could say was that 'they are making improvements every day.'

“They” were, in fact, not making improvements, except by chance, much as you or I might reboot or otherwise play with our computer; a shot in the dark fix. Yet barely six weeks later, HealthCare.gov was working well and on its way to performing even better.

This is the story of a team of unknown—except in elite technology circles—coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspects (Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn’t work) this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.”

The remainder of this article describes the drama associated with this technology crisis and boiled down the ultimate rescue to principles essential to execution success; principles that coincidentally guide every one of our clients in their HiringCenter results.

Principle I:  Metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort   

"In the meetings prior to the launch, President Obama always would end each session by saying, 'I want to remind the team that this only works if the technology works.' The problem, of course, was that no one in the meetings had any idea whether the technology worked, nor did the President and his chief of staff have the inclination to dig in and find out. The President may have had the right instinct when he repeatedly reminded his team about the technology. But in the end he was as aloof from the people and facts he needed to avoid this catastrophe as he was from the people who ended up fixing it.”

The Blaze website summarizes the Time article this way:

 “When it became clear that the website had major flaws and needed working, the Obama administration rushed to assemble a team to fix it. This involved bringing in some of the brightest tech minds from the private sector.

However, as the team slowly came together, they found that the website’s problems were bigger than they initially imagined.

Mike Abbott , for example, is known in the tech industry for being the man who developed Twitter’s technology into what it is today. He was shocked by what he found when he was brought on to rescue healthcare.gov.

'Abbott could not find … leadership. He says that to this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the Healthare.gov launch,' Time reported. 'Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients.'"

According to additional comments from "Time": “Jeff Zients isn't a techie himself. He's a business executive, one of those people for whom control–achieved by lists, schedules, deadlines and incessant focus on his targeted data points–seems to be everything.

This story thus far resonates with everything we at Tidemark have come to understand about HiringCenter results: Our best performing clients ensure that those responsible for the oversite of each piece of the HiringCenter process is someone with a proven history of measurement and execution. Everyone involved knows who is in charge, and who oversees each metric in the process. Do you?

In the next edition I will share more of this interesting story and the final two principles that drive success. 

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. 

If you are a Tidemark client and user of HiringCenter, you've experienced the occasional interview that can't end fast enough. The candidate who is scheduled for an hour of your valuable time and then turns out to be a dud. 

During a recent checkup meeting with some of our newer clients at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Georgia, a manager shared a disturbing (but funny) story about one of her first candidate interviews.

The candidate showed up "high on something," sweating profusely, bragging that she was "in the sexual prime" of her life, and asked if she could have "some of your candies," only to sweep the entire platter into her large purse. At this point in the interview the dazed manager began looking around her office attempting to locate the hidden cameras, certain that Alan Funt would spring out at anytime.  

After hearing this brief narrative, I think many of us considered such an interview to be a waste of time and had some real doubts about the success of recruiting in general.

However, CEO Dan Foresman stood up and said, "Recruiting is like shrimp fishing." Over the next several minutes he had us all captivated by his incredible expertise when it comes to shrimp fishing, and also its relationship to this type of "early in the pipeline" recruiting. 

My recollection of Dan's tale was as follows. Dan was once a captain of a shrimp boat. In the winter shrimp fishing is basically throwing down the nets and hauling them in predominantly with shrimp. This is because shrimp don't mind cold water, whereas catfish and crab don't like it. Bringing up only shrimp in your nets is a great feeling and is similar to experienced agent and new licensee recruiting:  you know what you have in the net. 

When using services such as HiringCenter for recruiting you don't know exactly what you're going to get. This is more like summer shrimp fishing. As Dan explains it: "When that net comes up… It's not full of just great shrimp. Oh no! It comes up with mostly everything else you can imagine.  You sort through catfish, crab, trash and everything else you can imagine. In fact, the crab bite your ankles, the catfish sting your hand, the trash smells, but it must be done to get to the shrimp." 

Although that sounds like a lot of unpleasant work at times, the shrimp fisherman chooses to fish for both the winter and summer season. The fisherman realizes that he has made an investment in his boat, nets, crew, etc. so the more shrimp the more success.

The analogy is painfully clear. Nothing worth acquiring is obtained without a screening or selection process. Whether its gold, silver, diamonds, shrimp or agents, you have to be able to sort through the whole to find what you really want. 

Back to recruiting: Dan and most of our clients tell us that even when they are "winter" recruiting for experienced agents, the conversion rate is 20% or 1 in 5. With new-to-Real Estate- HiringCenter recruiting our clients average 20-25% on conversion from interview to hire. So what actually might feel like summer shrimp fishing, where there might be a few crab and catfish, in the end the odds of landing shrimp who stay on your boat is really no different. 

The bottom line is someone has invested in the boat, the license to fish, the nets, the fuel and the sonar equipment. With HiringCenter, the captains have even invested in deck hands further up stream to sort through much of the debris before you even see the net.

This sorting is done by Tidemark and your own Recruiting Coordinator.  What they want you, as a manager, to understand is that sorting through a few "catfish and crab" is time consuming but ultimately successful.

To increase the hires in every season is a reasonable outcome for their investment. Do you have 2 or 3 hours a month to do that sorting? 

We realize that some managers in certain seasons will get more catfish than shrimp, but as long as the net gain of excellent candidates are coming in the door somewhere, it should give us all hope for our own "big catch." 

By the end of our time with BHHS Georgia, and Dan's great analogy, every one of their excellent group of managers understood this message. They also understood that after all, "summer shrimp fishing" is what they ask their agents to do every day of the year.

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. 

Ben has written extensively on the topic of the aging Real Estate Agent demographic and its threat to derail the future of the traditional Real Estate model.

We have heard similar conversations about this topic repeated among many of our clients and it was a "hot topic" at recent conferences.

So is there any validity in the theory? I did some poking around to find hard data to verify or discount this trend. 

In a recent survey by Imprev (A Real Estate marketing firm) it turns out that finding younger talent is on the minds of most thought leaders in the industry. 

"Although recruiting is a perennial issue, leaders of the nation's major brokerages who were surveyed about the issues that concern them most put an even finer point on it, citing "recruiting younger agents" as their top business challenge; it was selected by 70 percent of respondents. "Recruiting top talent" is the second-most crucial business challenge, specified by 65 percent.

"The real estate business is aging out," said Renwick Congdon, chief executive officer of Imprev, the real estate marketing software firm that works with 150,000 agents and brokers nationwide. "Broker-owners and other top real estate executives are under pressure to find new talent."

And another supporting piece –

National Association of Realtors data show that a mere 6 percent of its membership is under the age of 34 — and that in the past 15 years, the percentage of members in their 40s has dropped by one-third. Additionally, more than 40 percent of all Realtors are older than 60 and one in four is 65 or older.

Based on the factors discussed in the above paragraph it should come as no surprise to learn the following:

Recruiting is a pervasive topic: When asked the open-ended question, "What is your firm's single biggest challenge today?" nearly 40 percent of the written answers cite recruiting. Profitability garners the second spot, cited by 14 percent of the executives, with 13 percent mentioning technology.

The good news is that the majority of you who read this blog already address this vital challenge and as a result are hopefully ahead of your competitor.

And in finding solutions to this challenge, you are providing the next generation and your consumers (both current and future) an incredible gift.

• Offering the younger talent, an alternative to being underemployed in a possible job with no future.
• For the consumer – More diversity, which can potentially lead to a better match in the style and knowledge of the agent they choose.

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.