Episode 100

Tom Applegarth on Effective Hiring Strategies, Balancing Forced Ranking, Fairness, and AI in Modern Hiring

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show with Tom. Tom, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

TOM: Thank you. It's good to be here.

TIM: It's a delight and pleasure to have you with us. And I think what would be a great place to start would be to hear a little bit more about Tom. Who are we speaking to today?

TOM: Sure. So I've been in HR my entire career for 30-plus years. I graduated in the U.S. at Brigham Young University, and my first job out of college was with BP Amoco in Chicago. So you know, but since then I've been with a number of different companies, been the head of recruiting of a company that was about three billion in revenue, and head of business units from an HR perspective that were a billion plus in revenue. I was the chief people officer of a company called Potter Electric, and now I work for a preferred CFO, and we do outsourced HR, finance, accounting, and payroll work for companies and do a fair amount of recruiting for companies as well.

TIM: That's a great intro. And you mentioned your longevity in this space of more than three decades, which means to me, you must have seen a lot. What I'd love to get is a picture of what you think has not changed at all in three decades and what has changed the most.

TOM: Well, certainly technology is what's changed the most. You know, when I started with BP Emico in 1990, so graduated from school, came to 1990, I sat down at my desk, and I had a dummy terminal associated with their mainframe computer system, which could really only do email that could only be sent to other BP Emico employees. And I was like, I went to my boss. I was like, well, where's my PC? And he was like, yeah, you know, we really don't use those much. We can get it, you know; I got a budget for it and everything. I'm like, well, you need to get me one real quick, or I'm going to have to bring in mine from home. And I didn't have a laptop back then. It was, you know, a desktop computer. But he got me one in pretty short order, and you know, and, and it's only gotten better from there. So technology is what's probably changed the most. I think that. The fundamental interests of employees have probably not changed much at all. You know, I think everybody's still, you know, I mean, there's definitely nuances, but I think people still want to be challenged and engaged at work. They want a work environment where they like the people that they work with, and they want to be able to make a difference. And, you know, not every employee wants that, but most employees do. And that really hasn't changed a lot.

TIM: What about the process itself? Because I feel like a typical hiring process may be changing now with AI, but has been, job ads, applying CV, CV screen, a bunch of interviews, and reference checks offer. I feel like that's been the process for a long time. Has that changed much?

TOM: Yeah, I think, I mean, I do think there's AI screening up front that obviously didn't exist 30 years ago. And so, getting your resume in front of a human may be a little more challenging. But I think that one thing that hasn't changed at all. It is, and I think it is still a great strategy for anybody looking for a job today is, you know, if you know there's an open job and it's posted or whatever, for sure, apply for it. But then if you can get on LinkedIn or some other social media and find somebody who you either know or somebody, you know, who knows somebody who works at that company, because what hasn't changed is anytime. That an employee, and it doesn't really matter the level of the employee. Certainly, you know, if the CEO comes and says, Hey, you know, so-and-so has applied for a position. Can you make sure you talk to them? That's probably going to get a little more attention, but if any employee in the company. calls, you know, me or anybody who worked for me and is like, Hey, my friend applied for that job, whatever it might be, you know, a software engineer job or whatever. You know, have you seen their resume, and could you talk to them? We're going to talk to that person. You know, we're going to go through, and maybe, maybe they would have never, we would have never seen it. You know, at some of the big companies I was at, you know, you put up a job posting, and you're literally getting thousands of resumes. It's not possible to even look at them all. And so. You know, but if somebody came by and said, Hey, you know, my friend applied for the job, well, we would for sure talk to him.

TIM: So the power of networks has always been essential, and I feel like maybe they are going to become even more important. If the typical company now is getting inundated with applications, often augmented using ChatGPT or what have you, they tend to start to look a lot the same. So if anything now, I feel like the referral might become even more important somehow.

TOM: Absolutely. No, I think the power hasn't changed a lot in 30 years and is maybe even more important now, but networking and. And, and, and making sure you're talking to the decision-makers who are making a hiring decision is really important. And it's hard to do that any other way than networking.

TIM: And I feel like this is something that also is almost genuine and ungameable in the sense that nobody is going to go out of their way to recommend someone that they don't really know or can't vouch for because that's like your social capital that is really valuable. If I were to recommend someone for a job and they were a complete numpty, that would reflect badly on me. So I feel like there's always going to be some genuineness to it on gamability, unlike in this kind of AI world where everything's automated and gamed and what have you. So maybe that will stand the test of time. What do you think?

TOM: I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I, and, and that's why a lot of companies have become much more prevalent over time and are probably more important now. Is it really companies tapping into their employees saying, Who do you know that should come to work for us? And that's, that's a much, much better way to get candidates than just posting it up on the job boards and, you know, getting the thousands of resumes that you may get through the job boards.

TIM: One of the difficulties with this is then going to be questions around fairness, because at least in the current scenario, in theory, anyone can apply to any job, which is the best thing and the worst thing about the system. Because of this openness, it's not necessarily a pure boys club or old mates club. You can apply to any role you want. But then there's just so much spam because people then apply it to any role they want, no matter how qualified or not they may be. And so I do have concerns that if we're like, Oh, this whole online inbound funnel is pretty much dead. Let's just try to focus on leveraging our employees networks, which will solve that problem. Might then just end up hiring more people that you already know and people that are similar to you. And I don't know,

TOM: Yep. No, I, I, I think for sure, in spite of what the president of the United States is now talking about, I think that it is very valuable for companies to manage diversity and to actively seek to, because I think it makes organizations better, you know, if everybody comes from the same neighborhood and the same school, you know, your creativity and your ability to understand the broader world is so much less than if you had people from six continents that all grew up in different environments and you're, you know, I mean, it's just, it's just much better to have a diverse workforce. And so I think that's, I think that's actively something that HR organizations need to manage is, you know, that balance. And there are definitely times in my career where we're like, you know, hey, we've got. A bunch of people from the same part of the United States who graduated from the same university are on this leadership team. What are we going to do to bring in different points of view and actively go out and internally and externally look at? Let's get a more diverse leadership team and workforce to make sure that we are making better decisions than we will if we're all. Right out of the same neighborhood and same schools,

TIM: I personally feel like the CV screening step has not helped us in having a, let's say, fairer, more diverse set of candidates come through because there have been some really interesting studies where some universities and other organizations have applied CVs. The only difference is the names on the CVs. And so through this experiment, they're able to show pretty clearly that there was, in different markets, different discrimination against people from different backgrounds in Australia. For example, if you apply to a job with a Chinese first and last name, you have one-third the chance of a callback relative to an Anglo-Saxon first and last name. That's controlling for every other factor you would otherwise expect, skills, experience, etc. And so that is terrible. I wonder if by removing the human from this screening step, replacing it with AI, which in theory could be more objective and more consistent, we could start to hack away at some of those fairness issues. What do you think?

TOM: Maybe you know, the, the, the, you know, I, I think there's a big concern about whether AI is, you know, helping the process be more fair and more diverse or less. And so. You know, it all depends. I'm sure that you can develop it over time to help be more fair. I don't think you're ever going to take the human out of it. And I think that's why companies need to have processes and policies. To try and make it as fair as possible and why I think it's always good You know, I mean, the study that you cited obviously wasn't in China, right? Where if they're interviewing in China, it's probably just the opposite, and in fact, in China, they're much less diverse than they are in Europe or in the United States for sure. But I think that that's why companies really need to—you never, I mean, you can't take the human completely out of it because ultimately a manager needs to choose who's going to be on their team. But there can definitely be processes that prevent a manager from just selecting everybody that they. You know, you know, and associate with and grew up in the same place as them and look, look the same way they do, which is a natural human bias for a lot of people, you know, that, that when they interview people, you know, a lot of people are more comfortable with people that are more similar to them than dissimilar to them. So I think it's a natural human bias, but there are definitely ways that organizations can. Change that and tilt that and prevent that. And you know, to some extent, just say to some managers—and I've done this a lot in my career, you know, and, and, and it's always good to get the recruiting function on your side, because there are a lot of managers I've recruited for over the last years that never saw a candidate. That would just be the same as everybody else on their team. So they never really, you know, I mean, I was screening out people who, you know, hey, you, you might be a great candidate, but you're going to do nothing to help the diversity of this team, and the team needs to be more diverse, and therefore. You know, unless you're just quantum leaps better than any other candidate, the tie is going to go to the more diverse candidate. And, you know, that's, you know, then you give the manager three or four people to choose from. They just all happen to be, you know, adding to the diversity of the team as opposed to, you know, making the team less diverse.

TIM: Yeah. And then I guess we get into territory of, how do you measure diversity? Because I feel like in the last few years, it's been maybe a little bit simplified to say it's just going to come down to the ethnicity and the sex or gender of the candidate. But people are maybe a bit more complex than that; they could break people down by any other number of dimensions. And I personally feel like hiring and the way it's done is almost inherently. In favor of or against certain types of candidates, I would have thought very handsome extroverts perform in an interview on average better than a crumbling introvert who really doesn't want to be put in that kind of environment, especially if it's like a panel interview, one versus three or four, as opposed to one-on-one, other kinds of almost like inherent aspects of hiring itself. That are always just going to favor certain types of characters.

TOM: No, I think that's true. And I do think that that's why, you know, interviewing is. part of the process, but it should never be the only part of the process, right? There are probably skills assessments that should be done. You know, there may be other types of personality tests or IQ tests, or other things, none of which should ever knock a candidate out of consideration. But I think you want to look at the totality of, you know, many different factors, and then, and then I think reference checks are way underrated. You know, I mean, I think talking to people that that candidate has worked with in the past. You can tell, and especially with you know, doing a video call these days, you know, it's, it's made reference checking even better, where you can tell when somebody is giving, no, this really was the best person, you know, one of the best people I've ever worked with, as opposed to, you know, yeah, they're great, you know, they're fine, you know, and, and, and, and then, yeah. I never give candidates a choice; well, I do, you know, give me your references. But I also always want anybody who you reported to in the last five years, unless of course you've been at the same company for the last five years, and you know, this is a secret process, and you don't want your employer to know. I understand that. But if you've left the company, I want to talk to your former boss because you can choose, you know, pick and choose only positive references; other than that, I want to talk to your boss, and when somebody won't give me their boss's name and contact information, at least what they know, maybe it's been, you know, three or four years, then they're like, I'm not even sure they're at the company. That's fine. Just give me their name. And, you know, nine times out of ten, I can track them down on LinkedIn, but that's fine; just give me their name, and probably way more than half of the time, those people will talk to me, and way more than half of the time, I think I'm getting the straight scoop because I always tell them, of course, nothing's ever going to get back to the candidate; you can be totally honest with me, you know, and, and, and that may be one of the best predictors. is talking to somebody's, you know, boss from a year or two ago.

TIM: This is great. I'd love to delve in more here because I had always been in the camp of being very dismissive of reference checks. I've never done them for anyone I've ever hired, for better or for worse. And in my head, I viewed it as basically when I'd seen them done. It looks like a tick-and-flick kind of process where you're going through the motions. Yeah, ask all these questions, fill in a form, and that's it. It didn't really feel like it was part of the evaluation process. And what I also couldn't wrap my head around was typically it's done at the end where you've already had your interviews, your skills assessments, you've done it at a It's like I already want to offer them the job. Is speaking to someone that they used to work with really going to dissuade me from that? So where's the real value from you? Is it? Do you ever change your hiring decision based on the reference check?

TOM: Yeah, I have, you know, not, not a huge percentage of the time, probably, you know, but, you know, 10 or 15 percent of the time, and, and yeah, we, I, we usually do it after, after at least some portion of the interviews, but definitely you don't want to wait until the end and it's already totally baked. But, but, you know, I mean, I've had some people who really got uneasy and wouldn't give me their bosses, you know, their, their former boss. And, you know, I decided to go ahead and track them down anyways. And, you know, they were fired for something really, really bad. And, you know, hey, they were a fine employee until they, you know, we found out they were sexually harassing somebody or something like that. I mean. And then the other thing I always do as well is really confirm whether or not the person is, if they're saying they're currently at a job. I verify that, and I've caught, you know, a handful of people over 30 years. So not a lot, but a handful of people who. Went through the interviewing process and told everybody, you know, yeah, you know, that they're currently employed and what they're currently doing just to find out that they've been fired a few months before, you know, and so there's, you know, you avoid some big problems. It's, you know, you're probably not going to. Narrow down from, you know, 20 candidates to one through reference checking, but once you get down to, you know, one or two or three people left or, or definitely before you make a job offer, I think it's always good to do a reference check. And, you know, the vast majority of the time, it's not going to change the decision. But every once in a while, it does.

TIM: And is there also an element of the information not necessarily being used to convert a yes to a no or no to a yes? But useful information for onboarding to understand, like the strengths and weaknesses, how they operate, and where they might likely fall down, like you then almost transmitting that data to the hiring manager.

TOM: Absolutely. Yep. I think you get some good information there as well. And then, you know, you'll learn some watchouts, you know, because that's another way to tell whether or not you're getting a really good reference is if they only tell you the positive and they have nothing, you know, when you're like, okay, well, what could this person improve on? And you're not getting much. You're like, all right, this isn't probably that valuable of a reference. If you get somebody who's given you, Hey, I think they're great. And from what you've told me about the job, I think they are very well qualified, but. Here are some of the developmental needs of that person from the, you know, two or three years that I worked with them. You know, that's when, you know, it's really valuable, and, you know, most of the time we're still going to hire that candidate, but at least you have some watchouts of maybe what you need to do to make sure you help that person onboard and be successful.

TIM: You mentioned being able to do these reference checks of a video now almost gives you an extra level of information because you get a sense of how authentic or how deep the references are as opposed to, Yeah, this person I can barely remember from two years ago has asked me for a reference, and I'm just going through the motions.

TOM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the visual part of communication is huge. And so, you know, back when we didn't have video and everything was a phone call, certainly less valuable than it is today, where you can really judge the, you know, the quality and the objectivity that you're getting from a reference through a lot of the visual cues that you pick up over a video.

TIM: What I've noticed recently, having been asked for references for a few of our engineers over the past year, is the tendency to be set now as like a SAS product form to fill in. We don't actually speak to anyone. So it was structured in a certain way, which I liked and didn't like. I didn't like it because it's just a lot of work, being given all this homework to do filling in this like 12-question form. I can see how it's structured to make it easier for them to consume, but then. You'd lose that whole data point you're talking about, which is the actual conversation, the back and forth. So yeah, you'd still want to do them as a video call or even a

TOM: I, I, I think so. I think so. I mean, I've not been a big fan of, you know, just having somebody fill out something. I think you're losing a lot of the value. You know, I think a lot of the value is either the hiring manager or the HR person that's helping them recruit, you know, really. Getting as much information as they can get out of that reference. And then also making an assessment of, no, this was just their best friend. Who's not doing anything other than giving them a big thumbs up as opposed to, no, this was, you know, their boss or somebody else who's really given me balanced feedback, you know, pros and cons of that, that. really helps me determine, you know, wow, have we gone through the whole rest of the selection process and we've made a big mistake, so we need to rethink this or no, I think our assessment process is accurate, you know, but there are some watch out points, and let's, let's tailor the onboarding plan to those watch out points.

TIM: I imagine you might have had a scenario where you'd gotten a reference check on a candidate that was quite negative and was changing your perception of them. How do you then transmit that or not to the candidate themselves? Because it's almost like they could justify having the right of reply to the things that the referral might have mentioned. And if you don't discuss it with them, you never know, but then you also can't breach the confidentiality kind of issue. How do you deal with that kind of scenario?

TOM: Yeah. So right, wrong, or indifferent. I never viewed the. process as trying to be totally fair to the candidate. I really, I've really kind of looked at the process of, you know, we have to make a business decision, and we're trying to get the best players on the team and then have the best team. And so, you know, and especially in the US, there's probably nuances in, in, in other countries, depending on their laws, but, you know, it's very easy for a candidate in the US. To, you know, go, go file with the government, what does a discrimination claim, you know, of some kind and almost everybody, whether it's age, race, sex, you know, sexual preference, or whatever, almost everybody. Maybe that's not quite true, but a huge percentage of the applicants could. You know, go file a discrimination charge with the government relatively easily. And then, you know, usually it doesn't end up costing the company money, but it always costs the company time because somebody then has to deal with the government, has to write a response, and has to sometimes meet with them. And it's just as big a time suck. So regardless of the reason why. We've never decided to hire somebody else rather than, you know, the only answer I ever give candidates is, well, we found somebody who we thought was a better match for the job, you know, and then if they want some detail, you know, sometimes depending on how persistent they are, because usually, people aren't calling me asking me for feedback. If they do that, I'll give them a little more. If they shoot me an email and say, you know, or, you know, we, we told them, hey, we decided to hire another candidate, shoot an email back, why? Well, the email back to them is, well, we just thought, we thought you were, you were fine, but we had another candidate who we thought was just a little better. And then, you know, if they really want a phone conversation, I'll talk to them. But I'm not ever laying the total cards out on the table, especially in the U.S. Because I just don't want to give them some reason to go file a discrimination charge with the government. And now I'm spending hours and hours and hours, you know, justifying our decision. And so, you know, the laws in the U.S. have kind of made managers kind of tilt in that direction.

TIM: That's a really interesting lens on the, yeah, most common complaint of candidates, which is, I didn't get any feedback. I got ghosted. I got that. So then in your market, there's just almost a very good reason for that. Reticence to really provide the straight dope because you don't want it to backfire on you.

TOM: Yeah, yeah. And I don't, I don't think there's ever a good excuse for ghosting them. But, but there's good reasons not to just totally be totally transparent, you know, about why you made the decision you made. Because it just can give them ammunition for a charge with the government and, and the only, you know, the three parties, the applicant. And the government is both more than happy to spend lots of time, you know, diving into great levels of detail about the company's decision. So the only non-willing participant is usually the company that's like, We made a decision, we've moved on, we really don't want to readdress it at this point.

TIM: And I'm fascinated to learn more about this because this is not a process we have in Australia. I'm not sure if it really exists much in Europe. So what happens as a candidate is you feel like you've been discriminated against for whatever reason. You feel like you should have gotten the job, and it's gone to someone else. And so then there's a particular government department you can file some kind of claim with, and that doesn't go into a black hole. They actually action it.

TOM: They do, yeah. So, so they, they will go to the what we call the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and, and, and it's not a small agency. I mean, they've got thousands of people that work for this agency, and, depending on their workload, they'll pay more attention or not, but what they always do is they have the applicant write up why they feel they were discriminated against. And then the company has to respond to that, and then depending on their workload and depending on, you know, what they think about those two documents, the government may take more of an interest, and then you may be in interviews, and they may want to come meet you and that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that applicants can do is they can go find an attorney to take it up. And if, you know, and so there, you know, the, there's a little higher bar because an attorney, unless they're really, really hungry, is usually not going to spend a lot of their time on it because they're usually doing it on a contingency basis, which means typically that they'll get one third or, or, or so of whatever. They settle with the company, but, you know, if the applicant—and usually this is where it pays to be a smaller company because those attorneys are much less likely to go after a small company than they are, you know, BP Amoco or Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company—when I worked for those two companies, they'd get a lot of these all the time, and if the government wasn't pursuing it, a private attorney would be because, you know, they know there's deep pockets. You know, they know that those large companies sometimes will settle it just for nuisance value, which, you know, is fine, but it's always a big. a big production, and it doesn't usually end up in a lot of money that the company needs to pay, but often ends up in a lot of time that managers need to spend defending their decisions.

TIM: In your experience, is it the case of candidates chancing their arm, at least going down the attorney route and thinking, I can make some easy money here? Or do you feel like they genuinely feel as though they've been discriminated against?

TOM: Yeah, I think it's, I think it's more often that they generally, genuinely feel that they're discriminated against, which is why I personally, you know, tried to take in the role of, hey, I don't, I don't want to ghost him. I don't want to make him angry. And I, and if they really want feedback and, you know, are really persistent rather than just sending me an email, you know, all right, if you really want to meet, I'll talk to you and I'll give you some feedback. But my goal there is not to necessarily give you all the straight feedback. My goal is to give you feedback that's not going to make you angry. You know, that's going to help you get focused on what you really should be focused on, which is what's my next step to find another job, you know, and so I often, when I get somebody who's really persistent and maybe is, you know, starting to think that maybe they were discriminated against, I'll often just help be, you know, all right, let me give you the feedback. We hired somebody else. Here's kind of the skill set that they had that we didn't think you had. But more importantly, they Let me help you find another job, and I'll often introduce them to, you know, three or four people where I think they might be a good fit. And why don't you talk to them, and I'll introduce you to them and really get them focused on what they really should be focused on, which is, hey, let me go find a job that's going to fit. This one didn't work out.

TIM: Yeah, that's a great way to help them reframe. And must surely dampen the flames of their spirits. Their anger is a lot if you're actually going out of your way to help them solve their fundamental problem, which is getting the next job they want. So that's a Such an interesting way to approach it. What one thing I'd love to throw at you on this theme is what I've noticed with our products with our skills assessment product is there's a feature where the company can either turn. The results are on or off. So when the candidate gets to the end of a test, either they see Thanks for taking the test and nothing else, or they see Thanks for taking the test. He's exactly where you scored. Here's your score in this skill and this skill. And this skill, what I've noticed, is. When they turn the results on and give that transparency to candidates, candidates can see exactly where they did well and where they didn't go well. And they know it's objectively graded the rate of complaints and whatever is almost zero because the candidates go I took this test. I scored 30%. I generally trust the test isn't broken. I've had it explained to me. Therefore, that kind of quells them. What about almost the polar opposite approach? It's like full transparency. Here are the 10 things we were scoring you on. You scored 60 percent in the job process. The candidate we chose scored 80%. You were lower in these areas, higher in these areas. Could that almost have the same effect, do you think?

TOM: Maybe you know, again in the U.S. Oftentimes the tests themselves have been legally challenged as having some type of inherent bias. And so, companies are really, I mean, it's It's really legally dangerous to just use the results of the test, right? I mean, you know, you need to have a test that is really almost bulletproof, you know, and is directly tied in with what the job's going to be. I mean, so, so a test you could get for a software engineer, you could give them a. Programming test. And, you know, you need to program this, and this is what we're trying to do. And you have X amount of time to do it in. And that I think would be really, really easy. And, you know, very legally defensible. And, you know, you could publish that on the opposite end of this spectrum would be a personality test. You know that I think personality tests are often good. But they can't be, yeah, here's the score. And that's the reason that we hired somebody. Because it's, at least in the U.S., it just wouldn't be legally defensible. You know, there's just, and, and so, and so I, I think that unless it's a direct kind of, this is what your job's going to be. We're going to have you take a test that is basically going to be, you know, directly relevant to your job that I think you could have totally full transparency. Everything else is going to have some subjectivity to it. And I think that all the other tests are good. You know, an IQ test is kind of another one that is legally risky in the U.S. just because it's just not directly tied to the job and can be discriminatory. You know, in certain, I mean, there are certain races in the U.S. that generally are scoring lower on IQ tests than others. And it's more the product of their education that they weren't able to have as good of an education because they were lower on the socioeconomic scale than others. And so, I think that IQ tests are again kind of a good one data point to put into the broader spectrum, but you can't just say, No, we're screening out everybody who scored below X point on an IQ test. At least in the US that's going to get you into legal trouble real quick, even though absent, you know, in a, in a, in a country where maybe they, they don't have the legal framework that we have in the US, you know. If you've done a bunch of studies and you know that, hey, anybody who scores below a certain point just can't be in that particular job, you know, I think it may not be a bad idea. But it's going to get you into legal trouble in the U.S.

TIM: And I would have assumed the bulk of people's complaints. The kind of origin of their complaints would have been the interview process and feeling like the interviewer was unfair to them, or maybe asking them some questions that were somehow in the wrong kind of zone, or they just got a bad vibe from the human interactions with the process rather than some kind of online aspect of hiring. Is that a fair assumption?

TOM: To some extent, although there's a lot of court cases and a lot of companies that have lost a lot of money when they used a test to screen out candidates. But, but I think that I think that training interviewers, you know, just assuming that because somebody is a manager and because they've been interviewing for years and years and years, it's a bad assumption to assume that they're a good interviewer and that they aren't going to do things that make an applicant angry or ask totally inappropriate questions. And so I'm a big believer in. We ought to, we ought to train interviewers, and I'm a big believer in, well, don't just show up to the interview and ask whatever pops into your mind, you know? No, we're going to, we should have a structure, and we should really think about ahead of time what are the questions that we're going to ask, what do we think is going to help us, and, you know, really make a good decision. And if you have four people interviewing and they're all doing one-on-one interviews, the structure is even more important because otherwise the interviewers have a tendency to all ask the same questions. And you're like, well, that's not really a productive use of the applicant's time or our time. So, so I, I think that planning for the interviewing process is important.

TIM: And also because then presumably that would make it easier to compare candidates performance if they've gone through a consistent set of interviews asking the same types of things. Then yeah, you have more of an apples-to-apples comparison.

TOM: Absolutely. Yep. I agree.

TIM: What do you think of a boot camp-style hiring strategy? Where I guess this might be more applicable for more junior roles where you've got, like, a high volume of the same role coming in again and again. Where you hire a whole bunch of candidates almost like in batches to start at the same time for the same role. If you've ever seen something like that work, do you have any thoughts on that approach?

TOM: Yeah. So, one approach that I think is really successful. Especially in the U.S., but even over in Europe, is that kind of, that kind of environment where you're hiring people straight out of university. So, and, and, and what's even better is when you hire them maybe a year or two before they graduate from university, and you bring them in for an internship. And you can bring in. A lot of them and give them meaningful work and meaningful projects that will help you assess whether or not they're going to be a great employee. And so I think that is a great A way to hire entry-level talent is to bring in people even before they graduate, give them meaningful projects, bring in way more than you think you're going to hire, and then you can hire the cream of the crop the next year of the people that spent two or three months with you or worked for you part-time during the year or whatever, but you know, that's a pretty good selection process when they've done meaningful projects for you and they did a great, great job doing it.

TIM: Yeah, and that's, I feel like one of the inherent problems with hiring in general is even if you have a long process that's, I don't know, six interviews, let's say six one-hour interviews, that's still not even a full workday to evaluate the candidate. It's still such a tiny sample size. So if you have that two- or three-month internship, surely by that point you must know. Whether or not they're going to be the right person for the job. So that helps a lot. I would have thought

TOM: Absolutely. No, I think it's a really great way. So if you're hiring entry-level people and people straight out of university, they can do that job. I'm a big proponent of, you know, planning ahead and figuring out, you know, how many you think you're going to have in a year. And you're not going to be exact. Sometimes you're going to have a few too many. Sometimes you're going to have a little too few. But, you know, starting that pipeline early so that you can have them do a project or an internship of some kind before they graduate is really important. It's hard to beat your ability to assess candidates in that environment.

TIM: One thing I often think about is hiring accuracy. And hiring success and the fact that maybe we don't have a particularly clear measure of that. Like, you could say I don't know if someone stays in the job for more than a year, then that's like a tick that's successful. You could say they stay in the company for a long time. It's successful. There's some kind of ambiguity because there are many reasons people might end up leaving. It could be some redundancies. It could be they got a promotion in another company, which seems almost like a success in some ways to me. Do you have any sense of hiring accuracy or measuring hiring success?

TOM: I mean, I do think that it is probably hard to ever have a great score where, you know, 90 percent of the people that you hire are successful. Certainly, you know, anytime that you have to terminate an employee, you know that it wasn't successful, right? Especially if you have to terminate them in their first year or two. Then, then that was a bad hire. But I worked for a company called Belden. I worked for them for 13 years. They're about two and a half billion in sales, and they make wire and cable and connectors and switches and routers for the industrial environment. And the CEO, who was CEO the entire 13 years I was there, was there before I got there, and he was still CEO when I left, but he was a big proponent, and I agree with him that we should give a performance review every year, and it should be a forced ranking. And, you know, we, and that's really the way that you can understand who are the top employees. And so we were very strict. We were like, Oh, you have to identify who's the top 15%. Who's the, you know, next next group? Who's average? The average was like, you know, 70 percent of the population, but really, you know, who are the top 15 percent and who are the bottom 15%? And for the bottom 15%, that doesn't mean we're going to go fire them. It just means that, you know, they need to get some real hard messages, and absent a forced ranking system, I've never worked with a group of managers who are really willing to identify people that are below average. You almost never get them. And when you do, when they do identify somebody who's below average, it's like, and we need to fire them tomorrow. You know, I mean, if you don't have a forced ranking process, managers are going to say everybody is above average or average, and they're going to say that. Most of the time, they're going to say 40 to 50 percent of the employees are well above average. And you're like, well, how can that be true? But whatever. You know, and so I think the force ranking process is really beneficial because it makes the manager talk to the bottom 15 percent and help them understand why they're in the bottom 15 percent. And then, and then it also, the other part of that was we'd use that metric because it was a real hard metric. Why would we use that metric and say, all right, of the people that we hired last year and in the last two years, how many of them are in the top 15%? And it was a really good indication of whether we, you know, and how many were in the bottom 15%, you know, even though we didn't, nobody wanted to fire them; they were forced to put some people in the bottom 15%. Well, it helped us really gauge how our recruiting process is going and how many of our new hires are ending up in the bottom 15%. And how many are ending up in the top 15 percent, and how do we change? And so it made that measurement process much easier than it has been in companies. I've been in other companies where I've tried to convince them to do a forced ranking process and. Nobody wants to do it. And at Belden, nobody wanted to do it except for the CEO. And so it really didn't matter what everybody else wanted to do. No, we're doing it because, you know, it's not a democracy.

TIM: It's funny; I was talking about this very topic with a friend recently who works at a big tech company here in Sydney, and they recently introduced this kind of force ranking system. We're having a debate over it for me. I felt like it intuitively was a good idea. He was like, No, I don't know what happens if all your team is great, then you're forced to put people down in this bottom quintile, which then also impacted, I think, their performance payments and all these kinds of things. So it had some actual impact in your experience; why would managers always be so reluctant to want to engage in this? Is it because it's just too awkward a conversation? Not that many people like to have these difficult chats with their team. Is

TOM: Yeah. Yeah, a very small percentage of managers, in my experience, want to have a difficult conversation with an employee where they're telling them that they're really, they're not, I mean, managers are fine firing somebody who is just. Totally not performing. Right. But most of the time, most managers aren't having a lot of difficult conversations with that person prior to them making the decision that they just want to fire them. I mean, most of the time when managers want to fire an employee and they're coming and talking to me or somebody on my team, it's like, yeah, we just need to fire them. Well, okay. Well, what kind of feedback have you been given? Well, I've been telling them, Okay, well, let's look at their last performance appraisal. Wow, they were above average like six months ago; what happened? You know, I mean, that's a very, very common conversation. And so, I don't think you can do a forced ranking system with a small population. So you can't, you know, most managers might have five or six people reporting to them. Well, you can't make them tell you who the bottom 15 percent of the top are; you have to go up to their manager and the manager's manager. And you have to have a population of at least 40 or 50 people, you know, all right now when you get to a population of 40 or 50 or bigger now. You can, as a group, and so the difficult conversations that happen. Nobody ever likes those kinds of meetings, but I think they're very productive where you get, you know, the director or whatever. And there are six managers to talk about the 40 or 50 people that report to those six managers. And now as a group, the director and their managers, let's talk about who are the top 15 percent and who are the bottom 15 percent. And there's going to be lots of different opinions, and the director, a good one, is going to be, you know, asking lots of questions like, Well, why and what do they do, and how do you measure that? And what are the metrics? And let's talk about that. And that meeting probably will take, you know, a couple of hours or more, but, and that's the other reason why organizations don't like to do it because nobody likes that meeting. It's not a fun meeting, but it helps you as an organization. Really, truly identify who are the top 15 percent and who are the bottom 15 percent, and then allow yourself to really reward the top 15 percent and give a very difficult message to the bottom 15 percent. And oftentimes that message, the bottom 15 percent, might be, and often is, their manager having a discussion with the employee saying, Well, you know, our process, because we're very open about the process. And I didn't think you were in the bottom 15%, but we as a group put you in the bottom 15 percent, and let me help you understand why, you know, and be, you know, transparent about, well, here's the perceptions. Here are the metrics. Here are the reasons. Now, you know, I might not agree with it totally. You might not agree with it totally. But perception is reality, you know, and most of life is subjective. You know not everything can be totally objective. And so those are perceptions that you need to deal with, and let's put together a plan on how we're going to make sure that that group doesn't 15 percent next year. That's what we're trying to do here. How, what, what is the plan? be If you could ask our next guest any question about hiring, what question would that be? I think it would be, you know, what, what have you found to be the most successful selection process that you've used in your career?

TIM: Yep. Simple, important. I will level that at our next guest at some point next week. Tom, it's been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. We've covered a lot of different ground that we haven't chatted about yet on the show. So I was really grateful for that. And thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights with our audience.

TOM: Thank you very much, Tim.