Episode 49: Vote Like You're Hiring
Introduction: My Favorite Campaign Ad (00:15)
Interview (03:55)
Reflection (23:11)
Prayer (31:50)
Voting is a hiring decision.
This week, we welcome Sandra George, an HR professional with over 15 years of experience helping a range of different companies find the right people for the right jobs. Rick Barry talks with Sandra about what goes into making a hiring decision, and what we might get distracted by if we don't have people watching our backs.
A big thank-you to producer Lauren Larson for her work on this episode.
Who is on your committee?
Do you ever discuss politics, government and voting with anyone? If so, who?
Brainstorm a list of five devout Christians who would be able to critique your politics. (Be sure to make this a list of people who would think you go in the wrong direction, not people who think you don't go far enough!) Begin making a point to ask questions when you talk with them, instead of trying to explain yourself or change their mind.
Introduction
Rick: Back in 2007, 2008, during the Democratic presidential primaries, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson had some of my all-time favorite political campaign ads. They don't LOOK very good, especially by today's standards, and they were obviously put together quickly, but the concept was great. The idea was to show what it would be like if people had to apply to be president of the United States the same way they have to apply for other management jobs.
The first ad in the series showed a bunch of people sitting around a table with a big pile of resumes, talking about whose qualifications made sense and whose didn't. The second ad in the series was ostensibly a little moment from Governor Richardson's first interview for the job:
The ads were quick. They were funny. And they came after pundits and armchair pundits talking about president Bush's "likability” for eight years. It was the whole, "He seems like the kind of guy I could get a beer with," thing.
The thing that always stuck out to me about those ads, and the reason I still think about them now, is that they really drove home the fact that voting is a hiring decision. We the people are getting together and deciding, via committee, on who we want to hire to do a particular job.
This week, we're going to have a conversation I've been dying to have on this podcast for years: We're going to talk about what it's like to hire someone. What the most important things to think about are, and what we can get distracted by if we're not careful.
Our guest for this discussion is Sandra George. Sandra is an executive leader who's been providing talent acquisition, staffing plans and HR guidance to IT companies in the government contracting space for 15 years. That's all a fancy way of saying, she's a professional "person who's good at figuring out how to make a good hire."
I've had a lot of questions about what to prioritize when I'm voting. This conversation was a chance for me to ask those questions to someone with a lot of experience and expertise at matching the right person to the right job for a number of very different organizations.
Before we jump into my conversation with Sandra, I want to define terms really quickly: You're going to hear us use a few phrases over and over again throughout the interview. On one hand, we're gonna talk about "soft skills," "cultural fit" and "mission fit." These are all slightly different ways of talking about whether a candidates vision, goals and personality mesh well with the people they'd be working with. On the other hand, we're gonna talk about, "hard skills," "technical skills" or "technical fit." This is how skilled a candidate would be at doing the day-to-day tasks that the job would demand.
We're gonna jump right into my conversation with Sandra as I ask her whether she looks at cultural fit or technical fit first. After the conversation, we'll come back together and figure out together how the things Sandra talked about can help us live out our faith differently in the public square.
Interview
Sandra: For me, it's all together. For example, my first interaction with a candidate, they applied for the role, the algorithm on the applicant tracking system has presented the top 10 candidates. Their resumes or profiles are sent to the hiring manager, he or she makes the decision, and I will call that candidate. So right from the beginning, when I reach out to you as a candidate, your rapport is assessed right there. So, to me, they're going in tandem.
Rick: And I noticed you said that before you even reach out, you're looking at the resume and the hiring manager is looking at the resume. Resumes are mostly about the hard skills, right?
Sandra: Traditionally, the resume, yes, what you're going to glean are primarily hard skills. Now, intuitively, based on certain activities and certain organizations you can get more, but yes, that's pretty much the hard skills. On the paper, the role of the resume is to demonstrate you have those appropriate qualifications to get the interview.
Rick: Has there been a time when someone got the interview, but while you were interviewing them, it became clear that they had the skills but they might not be the right fit for the team? Someone who can do the job, but isn't the right cultural fit or the right mission fit? But then they got hired anyway?
Sandra: I'm smiling because there was a time I had to fill a very difficult technical role and there were very limited candidates available in the country. They didn't align with what the hiring team wanted culture-wise. But technically, it did. So after several weeks of not finding someone that met their criteria, they ultimately decided to interview the person that I was encouraging them to interview. Based on my experience with candidates and hiring managers, this would be a good person to chat with.
They ended up interviewing someone who they did not think was a cultural fit and he stayed several years and won numerous awards for the organization.
Rick: The inverse question I'm gonna ask is, was there a time when you hired someone and they fit in great, and they got along really well, but it turns out they were bad at the job? And everyone liked working with them, but they couldn't work well? What happens to the work that's being done when there's someone who everyone likes and isn't a drag on morale, but really can't keep up?
Sandra: I have worked at places where I have seen that. There was a technician who people liked, and they would have to go behind—they'd have to re-do his work, basically. Somebody has to cover for you. Somebody has to make excuses for you sometimes, because the product is not delivered on time. Or somebody else has to clean it up—it requires more testing if the code is not right, and the QA [quality assurance] process is longer because that person did not have the skills, but for some reason, they were brought into the organization. They went to their happy hours, and they had fun, and went to lunch with a lot of people, but they dragged the team down because other people are picking up their slack repetitively, and that's a problem.
Rick: Is it easier for a company or for a team to recover from a bad hire who is a bad hire because they didn't have the skills, or is it easier to recover from someone who has all the skills and does the work, but it was just a square peg in a round hole on your team?
Sandra: I don’t usually encounter that. I, honestly, have been very fortunate and thank you, Lord, for that.
Rick: Maybe we should be interviewing someone who's worse at their job than you? [laughs]
Sandra: And I'm not trying to say that I'm perfect! I'm reaching. I'm boiling it down to coachable. If you have an individual who, let's say, is on what we call a performance improvement plan, okay? You came through the interview process, we thought she could do the job, however, you've been on board 90 days and you're still not quite up to par. We will work with you. And because the company likes you and you're a cultural fit, we'll work with you over the 90 days or two months to see how far we can get. Yes, I think in that scenario, if a person is a cultural fit and they're willing to be coached, they can get closer to that 100%. If you're up there at 90%, my experience, is yes, we can work with it.
We can't work with somebody who's continually at 75%. Let's say, for example, whether you're remote or non-remote, you have to collaborate. So if there's an employee who does not like to work with teams—they say they like to work with teams during the interview process—but they're with the organization and you're like, "Wow, they want to be the lone wolf all the time,” that individual is more challenging to work with on a long-term basis.
Rick: You mentioned performance improvement plans. I always assumed that those were things large companies used as legal cover before they fired someone they wanted to fire. How often do those have a happy ending, as far as the staffer is concerned?
Sandra: They can. It depends. We’re all humans, and we bring ourself wherever we go. So I've worked in organizations where I've seen employees on a performance improvement plan, and they have a manager that sits down with them and specifically says the areas that they're deficient in and what the expectation is, and a reasonable time path for them to get to the expectation. And that's successful.
And then the employee's like, "Whew!” There's a sigh of relief. Then they're continuing to stay with the organization another couple of years. They may not be that “rock star,” but they're doing their job, and they're open to new challenges, and they've learned from that.
Now there's some places, some organizations I've worked in, that don't do performance improvement plans. There will just be a call. "Can you go ahead and call Harry? Today's his last day." [When that happens,] my first question is, "Why am I just hearing about that?" Sometimes I have a dialog with the hiring team, and sometimes I am told, “This is the direction. This is what I want to have happen.” Then I have to make the call—along with the person's manager! I try to say, "I need somebody who's in leadership. I need the manager in the meeting with me, so that I can answer the questions that the employee may have."
Rick: And leadership, I guess, is the next question that I have on this: How effective are things like performance improvement plans when the person who’s not really operating up to snuff is in a more senior position?
Sandra: Interesting question, yes.
Rick: Like, I don't know if I've ever heard of a CEO being put on a PIP or a CFO.
Sandra: [laughs] Correct. I have not encountered that. I imagine it would be an informal discussion that they may have had with someone higher up in the leadership [before] the action was taken.
Rick: Is it maybe an argument for hiring from within or hiring people who already have a track record for senior positions, rather than hiring someone in a senior position who's making a hard career shift?
Sandra: What do you mean by hard career shift?
Rick: There's the cliché of, "Oh, I'm gonna think about becoming a teacher once I retire.” And if that's the case, if someone's making that career shift, you might hire them to be a teacher—or a teacher's assistant. But they're probably not gonna jump right to being a principal or, like, a school district manager.
Sandra: Correct. There should be a lot of progression. You've demonstrated competency in one career field, yes, [but in] most cases [it’s] gonna take time to matriculate and demonstrate proficiency in another, regardless of what your passion is.
Rick: So, when you are interviewing someone or seeing them through the process, if they have an exceptional quality—they're exceptionally good at what they're doing, or they have the soft skills necessary for a client-facing position in spades, charming people—how do you keep yourself from getting so carried away seeing the possibilities from what they're good at, that you stop seeing potential rough spots or potential red flags? How do you keep your hopes and expectations in check and pace yourself when you see something special, and you're like, "I wanna run with this?”
Sandra: Great question! Yes. It will happen sometimes. It's not something that happens every week, but when that happens, you're like, "Oh my gosh, that candidate is just a rock star, knocked it totally out of the park." So from my perspective, I am usually part of a team, and that's the beauty. I keep coming back to that because it's so important. It's not just me making the decision. It's going to be the hiring manager, a lead, and (depending on who that employee will interface with) it would be somebody from two or three other departments. You may have anywhere from three to nine people, sometimes more! But generally it's gonna stop at five people that are gonna do the weigh-in.
And that's important because it works best when we can do a comparison. You talk to them, I talk to them, then in some organizations, that same day, or the very first thing in the morning, the hiring team gets together, and somebody from human resources will say, "All right, you interviewed Robin, let's talk about that." And then, everybody can say, "She did great, however this is what I noticed."
And then that way, if I was just really enthusiastic, I can hear that. I get to hear the dialog that you may have had about that Robin. That's not gonna come through necessarily in the applicant tracking system. They may not put in there, but we can all talk it through. And then, as a team, we can decide how important is that? Is that something that's gonna affect the quality of the work? Is it gonna affect the team? Is it gonna affect the client's perception of the work we do? And then we can make a decision. We're checking ourselves throughout the process.
Rick: And you're not just checking yourself here. You’re actually having other people keep you in check.
Sandra: Yeah, it's a team. It's not one or two people that make these decisions. It should not be, that's been my experience, for it to be successful.
Rick: Maybe the benefit of voluntarily operating by committee is that when other members of the committee are challenging you or pushing back on something, or just asking questions that you wouldn't ask of yourself, you're almost deputizing them to do that for you. It's not an attack, it's collaboration.
Sandra: Yeah, exactly. A successful team is going to feel that way. It's not an attack, it's a discussion.
Rick: When I was in high school, my school wanted to hire a new German teacher. And I was taking German, and I was the student representative on the committee interviewing the last two or three candidates. And I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't even really understand why I was there. I definitely didn't know how to contribute anything useful to it, because I had no idea of what it meant to review or hire a candidate. The only job I had had was teaching karate, and I had basically interviewed for that over the course of four years by taking karate myself and being good at it.
So, if I were to have an opportunity to get in a TARDIS [the time machine from the long-running TV show Doctor Who] and go back in time and give myself some advice on being a better member of that hiring committee, what advice would you give to someone who's being asked to help evaluate job applicants for the first time ever in their life? What are some common first-timer mistakes or things people don't think about?
Sandra: So, what I would do with this top student—
Rick: I was middle-of-the-pack for German class, actually. I was solid Bs.
Sandra: Bs in German? That's good! So what they're relying on you for: Obviously you know the language, there's some level of enthusiasm for it (or perceived enthusiasm for it!). I would expect you to be able to provide feedback on what a typical 15-year-old would experience in a classroom, or what you would like to experience. I want you to evaluate how that person answers your questions, how they deliver the material. Is it engaging? Are they able to go beyond the textbook to help make it more real to you? Can they draw on some life experiences? Can they draw on some other material that's out there that talks about German in the real world? That's important. As we know, when we go to school, we don't just wanna see something on the board or something on the screen. We wanna talk to people who have been there. [We want] some level of cultural immersion. Those are important. But most important in high school is how well they engage you. Is it gonna be boring, or are you gonna make it fun? I had a teacher who taught social studies in middle school and we just couldn't wait to get there. It was fun when we went to his class.
Rick: I'm sure every millennial has heard this advice from our parents or grandparents: They will send us a job ad and [we have to say,] "No, I have a Bachelor's degree. They're looking for a Master's degree and 10 years experience," or, "I'm entry-level at this. I'm looking for assistant jobs, this is a vice-president of communications job. This is not the right scope for me yet." And then we hear, "Oh, just apply anyway, what's the worst that could happen?"
I know what I think probably happens [if we apply]. My guess is … you're never even gonna see that resume.
Sandra: You're correct. Typically, the way it's set up with companies, the system, the applicant tracking system, will not put that resume in front of you. When I post a job, I may have 200 responses in four hours. How do you think I’m gonna read all of those resumes?
Rick: That's too many! That's way too many!
Sandra: And I may have 30 jobs. How am I going to read [those resumes]? How am I gonna get my work done? That's reality. That's what I deal with. That's what my colleagues deal with. That's one of the reasons you need an applicant tracking system. There's a whole multitude: You need it for compliance reporting, affirmative action reporting, government action reporting. But, yes, because I may say, "Oh my gosh, I always wanted to work at Rick's company. I'm not qualified, but, what the heck, I like their culture or I like their mission, let me go and apply."
So, out of 200 resumes, maybe 25 might be qualified. You wouldn't wanna spend your time looking at the rest. That's only one of your jobs, plus you have other stuff you have to do. That's just the recruiting part. You still have to do HR, you still have to onboard, you may still have to do other stuff, depending on the organization.
And oftentimes, it's not just up to the recruiter. When the candidate meets 75 or 85 percent of the criteria, it's up to the hiring manager. They get the opportunity to look at the resume and say, "Sandra, you sent me 10 resumes. I wanna see these five.” Or, “I wanna see these two."
Rick: You said that the applicant tracking system is usually the first line of defense to make sure this scenario doesn't even happen.
Sandra:: Oftentimes, correct, yes.
Rick: On the off chance that your first round of screening is done by, like, a college intern or something, and they let one slip through, how do you handle situations where this is probably a promising person, but they're not ready for this job?
Sandra: Sometimes, yes, I did get a resume. In this particular case, somebody else handed it to me. They did not go through the whole normal process, or else I might not even be talking to them. But I will give a courtesy call, sometimes I'm asked to give a courtesy call, "Hey, I know Harry's not a fit, but just give him a call and just let him know we got his resume and we'll keep him on file if the requirement changes," which is true.
And the individual was a great student, Eagle Scout, goodness knows they volunteered in tutoring, they did so much community outreach, just a real well rounded person on paper. I'll give them a call just and see what they're looking for, et cetera, but I know that they're not a fit. They don't have the qualifications for the role. What I will do is thank them for sending in their resume. If the requirements are downgraded, and you don't need five years, you only need two, because that's all Harry has, and he meets the other requirements such as the education, such as the technical tools or software, then I can call him back.
So I will politely thank them for their interest in the company, find out what they'd like to be doing, and just share with them, "Your resume looks good, however, based on the qualifications for our position, this is what we need, and would it be okay to reach back to you at a future point if we have a role that requires less experience?”
Rick: It strikes me that it would almost not be kind to Harry to put him in to the position he's not ready for.
Sandra: Correct.
Rick: Before we close out, we've mentioned a few times the ideas of cultural fit and soft skills that are necessary for a particular job, but regardless of company culture, are there any particular character traits that become red flags for you in a hire, or green flags for you, in a hire, regardless of who the client organization is? Traits that make someone universally a good team member, or universally a liability for team performance?
Sandra: When you're interviewing candidates, you wanna make sure that the person is not just articulate, not just the education requirements, but are they compassionate? Are they empathetic? And there's multiple ways to determine that.
Reflection
There are three points from that conversation that I want to pull out and think about a little more.
First, let's talk about hard skills (or technical fit) and soft skills (or cultural fit). Can someone do the job, and do we like them?
Sandra said that by the time she talks with a candidate, all the people who don't have the hard skills, who aren't a technical fit for the job, are already screened out. By the time she's reviewing a candidate, the automated system she set up has already eliminated people who definitely CAN'T do the job. But she also said that she still looks at both technical fit AND cultural fit.
When we vote, we tend to put a lot of emphasis on whether someone is the right "cultural fit." Whether the person we're hiring seems to fit in well with us. I'm talking about party affiliation. I'm talking about generation. I'm talking about how the things they say make us feel. Do we like hearing this person speak? Is this person saying the kinds of things I'd want to say, if I had a microphone?
We tend to assume that any candidates who make it to a general election must all basically be the same when it comes to technical fit, that they'd all basically be just as good at the job as one another. That the technical screening has already happened. The biggest differences, maybe the ONLY differences we CARE about, are closer to being what a hiring manager would call mission fit or cultural fit.
But that's not the case.
If we're hiring people into elected office, we have to remember that there's no first-round interview. There's no system that screens for competency. There are political parties, and there are primaries, but those aren't designed to screen for competency. They're designed to screen for culture. They're designed to figure out who can make the party's most active and enthusiastic members most excited.
The constitution gives we the people, the body politic, it gives us the responsibility of selecting capable people to serve in office. Even though Sandra doesn’t handle the first round screenings, even though she has the benefit of screening out anyone who would probably do a bad job before they would ever even talk with her, she STILL makes technical skill one of the things she screens for after people make it to an interview with l her.
For those of us who are voting on city council, who are hiring city council members, county executives, congressional members, we have to remember to filter for technical skills, too. We have to be willing to hire someone we may not like, who may have different goals from us, but who actually knows how to keep the organization running well, instead of someone we like who just isn't up for the gig.
An analogy I use a lot is driving: If one person knows how to drive stick and someone else doesn't, I'd rather let the person who knows how to drive stick drive the car, even if they say they're gonna drive somewhere I don't want to go. If a good driver is driving, then when we get there, someone else is still gonna be able to get behind the wheel and drive somewhere better. But if someone who doesn't know how to drive stick gets behind the wheel, even if they wanna go to the same place I do, they're gonna strip the gears and flood the engine. We probably won't end up actually getting there. And even if we DO get there, the car's gonna be broken down and busted by the time we do.
So, that's point one that I think we need to remember: When we vote, we should put at least as much emphasis on technical skills as we do on cultural fit, if not MORE.
The next thing that I just wanna pause and highlight is the exchange near the end where she mentioned that, for more senior positions, she generally sees people being hired from within, or at least from within the industry. The higher the position, the less likely it is that she's gonna hire someone who's making a career shift.
And, I'll be honest, this one's just a pet peeve, but a phrase I've always been frustrated by is when people say they want to run the government like a business. It's usually someone who's already had a pretty successful business career, who's looking to jump in to government at the state level, as a governor, or at the federal level. But government isn't a business. It's government. A few years ago on our blog, someone who had recently left working on Capitol Hill wrote an article for us with, just, my favorite title: "Run Congress Like a Congress."
Legislating and governing are very specific skills. It's possible that someone who's really good at lifting weights, or really good at selling coffee, or really good at being The Rock, or really good at prosecuting criminal cases, MIGHT also be really good at governing. But it's a crapshoot, and I'm not sure we should be comfortable being so cavalier with that kind of responsibility. Sandra was saying that for higher level positions, she wants to make sure the person she hires actually has a track record in the field. If we don't usually look for that when we vote, it's worth asking ourselves how we'd feel if we found out we were suddenly getting a new boss who had never worked in our industry before.
And lastly, maybe most importantly for Christians, I want to highlight how Sandra talked about hiring by committee. I was really struck by how...not-confrontational she made the whole process sound. Even when she was enthusiastic about someone who the rest of the team didn't think would be a good cultural fit, it wasn't a matter of her wanting to win or wanting them to acknowledge that she was right. It was a matter of them going back and forth together, and the rest of the team trusting that she had real concerns and real insight. She talked about how her hiring committees are always giving one another feedback, listening to each other about what they like and what they're concerned about, every step of the way. Not just so that she knows she's being heard, but so that she knows other people have a chance to keep her in check, too. To fill in her blind spots.
This is really, really hard to do when it comes to government and politics. Voting is constantly framed as a battle, and people who vote differently from us are framed as people we're trying to defeat. Maybe the single most important thing we can do in the church to demonstrate that our faith pushes us to think, speak and act differently in the public square, is to ask other Christians who don't share our politics to keep us in check. The more enthusiastic we are about a candidate, the more we need a different set of eyes checking our blind spots. The more we NEED to let Christians on the other side of the aisle challenge us, cool us down. Other Christians, Christians who don't like the same people we do, or the same parties that we do, or who are part of groups we don't know much about or understand—people who share our faith but not our politics, not our demographics, not our interests—are literally the only people we could ever trust to help us pull back when our politics go too far. The only people who can remind us to fix our eyes on Christ when we don't realize that we're looking at something else.
If we want to practice our faith, we can't just tolerate these people. We have to welcome them.
Prayer
Father,
You say that if anyone lacks wisdom, we should ask you for it and you give generously and you won't shame us for asking, and you'll give us wisdom. That's good news, because the responsibilities you've given to us in this country require more wisdom than any one of us could have.
We confess, father, that we often don't take the decisions we have to make seriously enough. We think about what we want, we think about our preferences, and we don't think about all the implications of our decision to hire someone into elected office. And when you try to speak to us through our brothers and sisters, when we are asked to think about these decisions in new ways, in ways that take parts of your word very seriously that we've maybe skimmed over before, we get angry. Or we get defensive. Or we think that if they don't already agree with us, they must not be wise. They must be mistaken, or bitter, or malicious.
We know that loving you, trusting you and knowing you well doesn't mean wanting the same things we want. And we admit right now that loving you means NOT wanting the same things we want more often than we want to admit.
Most of us are a year away from when we'll need to vote again, so in this down time, in this off season, start building up wisdom in us early. Help us realize our need for wisdom that challenges us. Bring us opportunities to hear wisdom that we wouldn't seek out for ourselves. And make us humble enough to hear it in good faith.
We don't want to make hiring decisions based on who will make us feel like we won, or who will put the people who disagree with us to shame. We want to make these hiring decisions based on who would serve best in these roles. Who would govern skillfully and healthfully, not just who would govern in a way that we'd find satisfying.
We pray these things in the name of Jesus, because he entrusts us with the honor of that name in this world until he returns, and we want that return to be greeted joyfully by as many people as possible.
Amen.